Nervous people and Other Stories
New York: Pantheon Book, 1963. First American edition, first printing. Publisher's blue cloth, top edge stain red, in George Salter dust jacket ($5.95). Inked name, very mild shelf wear, still fine in near fine, lightly toned and rubbed, corner-clipped (price in-tact) dust jacket, in mylar cover. Item #241886
1920s SOVIET SATIRE IN SKAZ
Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) was arguably one of Russia's most popular humorists in the 1920s and early 1930s. Writing in a deliberately colloquial skaz, Zoshchenko fashioned a narrative voice rooted in oral storytelling. His heroes are the men and women in communal Soviet life, navigating the absurdities of the Soviet bureaucracy, privation, and the comic collapse of civility. Then, in 1946, alongside poet Anna Akhmatova, Zoshchenko became the target of Andrei Zhdanov's cultural crackdown under Stalin, his satire deemed incompatible with the central ideals of the Zhdanov doctrine. His exposure was thus curtailed.
Presented here in its first American edition––published just ten years after the policy's expiration––these stories introduced the English-speaking world with one of the Soviet period's sharpest comic observers.
Price: $75.00