The Galosh and Other Stories

In his prime, satirist Mikhail Zoschenko was more widely read in the Soviet Union than either Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920s and ’30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and the impenetrable new ideological language of the Soviet state. Written in the semi-educated talk of the man or woman on the street, these stories enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union — their gallows humor.

Housing block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who accidentally mentions his own affinity for kickbacks — in all of Zoschenko's characters, petty materialism is balanced with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project. Zoschenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire and an earthy empathy with a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition. Jeremy Hicks's translation of The Galosh brings together sixty five of Zoschenko's finest short stories — bringing the choice writings of perhaps Soviet Russia's most humorous and moving writer to American readers for the first time.

"You have all the qualities of a satirist, a very acute sense of irony accompanied by lyricism in an extremely original way. I don't know of such a combination anywhere else in literature." Maxim Gorky to Mikhail Zoschenko, September 15, 1930

"Satirist Zoschenko (1896 — 1958) began publishing his topical, colloquial short stories to wild popularity in Soviet newspapers beginning in 1923; many appear here in English for the first time, in Hicks's lively, masterful translation. The title story pursues a train passenger's dogged retrieval of his lost galosh through the numbing bureaucracy of the fledgling Soviet state. He triumphantly regains the galosh and cherishes it as a Soviet victory — despite losing the other in the shuffle. Zoschenko often employs a provincial narrator and candidly nave tone to underscore the corruption, venality and backsliding rampant in the state's transformation to communism. In the 1924 story 'Electrification,' named for the fashionable slogan of Soviet modernization, electricity brings dazzling enlightenment to one apartment house, but reveals such shabbiness and costly need of repairs that the landlady cuts it off. In 'Nervous People' (1925), communal housing engenders full-scale battles among the touchy, paranoid residents, while the repeated and arbitrary renaming of a cruise steamer in 'An Incident on the Volga' (1934 — 1935) digs at whimsical political name-changing. Hicks offers 65 short, slyly edifying stories in all, with a substantive introduction that details the literary and historical context." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Satirist Zoschenko (1896 -1958) began publishing his topical, colloquial short stories to wild popularity in Soviet newspapers beginning in 1923; many appear here in English for the first time, in Hicks's lively, masterful translation. The title story pursues a train passenger's dogged retrieval of his lost galosh through the numbing bureaucracy of the fledgling Soviet state. He triumphantly regains the galosh and cherishes it as a Soviet victory -despite losing the other in the shuffle. Zoschenko often employs a provincial narrator and candidly naï ve tone to underscore the corruption, venality and backsliding rampant in the state's transformation to communism. In the 1924 story 'Electrification,' named for the fashionable slogan of Soviet modernization, electricity brings dazzling enlightenment to one apartment house, but reveals such shabbiness and costly need of repairs that the landlady cuts it off. In 'Nervous People' (1925), communal housing engenders full-scale battles among the touchy, paranoid residents, while the repeated and arbitrary renaming of a cruise steamer in 'An Incident on the Volga' (1934 -1935) digs at whimsical political name-changing. Hicks offers 65 short, slyly edifying stories in all, with a substantive introduction that details the literary and historical context." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Written from the trenches of everyday life under a totalitarian regime, these stories read like war dispatches, yet with the skewed humor and manic invention of...Irish writer Flann O'Brien." Los Angeles Times

"Zoshchenko brought out the latent comedy of people's adaptation to new ways." New Yorker

Mikhail Zoschenko (1895-1958) was born in Poltava, but lived nearly all of his life in St. Petersburg, Russia. He fought in World War I, where he was wounded and gassed, causing him chronic health problems. He published his first collection of short stories in 1921 and was greeted with enormous popular success. He worked as a writer and translator of fiction, essays, screenplays, and drama until his death.