Mikhail
Zoshchenko was born in Poltava, Ukraine, on 29th July, 1895.
He studied law at the University of Petersburg, but did not graduate.
During
the First World War Zoshchenko served in
the Russian
Army.
A supporter of the October Revolution,
Zoshchenko joined the Red Army and fought
against the Whites in the Civil
War.
In 1922
Zoshchenko joined the literary group, the Serapion
Brothers. Inspired by the work of Yevgeni
Zamyatin, the group took their name from the story by E. T. Hoffmann,
the Serapion Brothers, about an
individualist who vows to devote himself to a free, imaginative and
non-conformist art. Other members included Nickolai
Tikhonov, Mikhail Slonimski, Victor
Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov and Konstantin
Fedin. Russia's most important writer of the period, Maxim
Gorky, also sympathized with the group's views.
Zoshchenko's
early stories dealt with his experiences in the First
World War and the Russian Civil War.
He gradually developed a new style that relied heavily on humour.
This was reflected in his stories that appeared in Tales
(1923), Esteemed Citizens (1926),
What the Nightingale Sang (1927)
and Nervous People (1927).
Zoshchenko
satires were popular with the Russian people and he was one of the
country's most widely read writers in the 1920s. Although Zoshchenko
never directly attacked the Soviet system, he was not afraid to highlight
the problems of bureaucracy, corruption, poor housing and food shortages.
In the
1930s Zoshchenko came under increasing pressure to conform to the
idea of socialist realism. As a satirist,
Zoshchenko found this difficult, and attempts such as the Story
of one Life were not successful.
Zoshchenko
increasing got into trouble with the Soviet authorities. His autobiographical,
Before Sunrise, was banned in
1943 and three years later his literary career was brought to an end
when he was expelled from the Soviet Writers'
Union after the publication of The Adventures
of a Monkey in the literary
magazine, Zvezda. Mikhail Zoshchenko
died in Leningrad on 22nd July, 1958.
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