Sentimental Tales (Russian Library) - Softcover

Zoshchenko, Mikhail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231183798 ISBN 13: 9780231183796

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Mikhail Zoshchenko’'s Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, who is anything but a model Soviet author: not only is he still attached to the era of the old regime, he is also, quite simply, not a very good writer. Shaped by Zoshchenko’'s masterful hand--s—he takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces—--Kolenkorov’'s prose is beautifully mangled, full of stylistic infelicities, overloaded flights of metaphor, tortured cliché, and misused bureaucratese, in the tradition of Gogol.

Yet beneath Kolenkorov’'s intrusive narration and sublime blathering, the stories are genuinely moving. They tell tales of unrequited love and amorous misadventures among down-on-their-luck musicians, provincial damsels, aspiring poets, and liberal aristocrats hopelessly out of place in the new Russia, against a backdrop of overcrowded apartments, scheming, and daydreaming. Zoshchenko’'s deadpan style and sly ventriloquy mask a biting critique of Soviet life—and perhaps life in general. An original perspective on Soviet society in the 1920s and simply uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era.

About this title

About the Author:

Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–-1958) was a leading Soviet satirist. His stories of the 1920s made him enormously popular with readers. In 1946 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. He never recovered from this trauma and died of heart failure in 1958.

Boris Dralyuk is the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016) and coeditor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).

Review:

The only thing harder than cracking jokes may be translating them. Perhaps this is why Mikhail Zoshchenko remains a lesser-known Russian writer among English-language readers, despite being one of the Soviet Union’s most beloved humorists, a satirist in the best traditions of Gogol. Boris Dralyuk’s new translation of Sentimental Tales, a collection of Zoshchenko’s stories from the 1920s, is a delight that brings the author’s wit to life (The Economist)

A book that would make Gogol guffaw. (Kirkus Reviews)

If you find Chekhov a bit tame and want a more bite to your fiction, then you need a dose of Zoshchenko, the premier Russian satirist of the twentieth century. . . . The translations, as we would expect of Dralyuk, are light and fluid, allowing the full bite of Zoshchenko’s voice to power through. Snap up this thin volume and enjoy. (Paul E. Richardson Russian Life)

Mikhail Zoshchenko masterfully exhibits a playful seriousness. . . . Juxtaposing joyful wit with the bleakness of Soviet Russia, Sentimental Tales is a potent antidote for Russian literature’s dour reputation. (Foreword Reviews)

Superb . . . a collection of six of Zoshchenko’s marvelous longer stories written between 1923 and 1929. (Bob Blaisdell Los Angeles Review of Books)

Boris Dralyuk is to be commended for a jaunty translation that keeps pace with the author’s whimsical self-amusement, tickling the reader in turn. (Benjamin Paloff Times Literary Supplement)

Zoshchenko's stories are vignettes and anecdotes: short, written in simple language, often paradoxical, and always very funny. (Alexandra Guzeva Russia Beyond)

Essential for all lovers of Russian literature in its many forms. Humorous, profound, multi-faceted and tragic, these Sentimental Tales will have you laughing and crying at the same time. (Karen Langley Shiny New Books)

Boris Dralyuk’s translation allows the reader to enjoy Zoschenko’s playfully evasive relationship with ‘truth’ that allowed him to briefly function as such an atypical Soviet author. . . . Zoschenko’s wry assessment of the workings of state bureaucracy and their impact on the individual calls to mind the surreality of Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg stories, recast in an age when the system has acquired new rulers but is largely unchanged nonetheless. (Peter Lowe Russian Art + Culture)

Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales are here to entertain the reader. (Tony's Reading List)

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0231183798
• ISBN 13: 9780231183796
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240