Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer

1995 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 538
Author(s):  
Michael Falchikov ◽  
Linda Hart Scatton
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Zoshchenko

Serapion Brothers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jekaterina Shulga
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Original Group ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Mikhail Zoshchenko ◽  
Viktor Shklovsky

The Serapion Brothers was a collective of writers who formed a group in Petrograd in 1921 under the leadership of Evgeny Zamyatin and Viktor Shklovsky. The group was named after Serapion—a hermit who believed highly in creativity—from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories The Serapion Brethren (1819–1821). The group members were united by their belief in freedom of creativity and the rejection of ideologically controlled literature, rather than through a devotion to a singular vision or artistic style; their individual writing styles differed widely. The emergence of the Serapion Brothers was enabled by the more liberal atmosphere of the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy period (NEP, 1921–1928). The group had its first meeting on 1 February 1921 at the House of Arts in Petrograd; the Serapions were united by their location as much as by their artistic inclinations. The original group included Nikolai Tikhonov, Veniamin Kaverin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Victor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Ilya Gruzdev, Mikhail Slonimsky, Lev Lunts, Vladimir Pozner, Nikolay Nikitin, and Konstantin Fedin.

Zoshchenko, Mikhail Michailovich (1894–1958)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ornella Discacciati
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Campaign ◽  
Mikhail Zoshchenko ◽  
Anna Akhmatova

Mikhail Zoshchenko was a Soviet writer of short stories and tales (sometimes autobiographical), as well as a feuilletonist, memoirist, and dramatist. He was a member of the Serapion Brothers writers’ collective. Zoshchenko was best known for his hilarious lampooning of Soviet bureaucracy and the rampant scam artists of the 1920s. In the 1930s, his works were increasingly subjected to censorship and criticism. Evacuated from Leningrad during World War Two, he spent part of the war in Alma Ata (Kazakhstan). In 1946 his career was dramatically curtailed by Communist Party statesman Andrei Zhdanov, who led a public campaign of criticism against Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Deprived of his membership in the Soviet Writers’ Union, and hence his right to earn a living as an author, Zoshchenko died in 1958.

Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer

1994 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 518
Author(s):  
Thomas Seifrid ◽  
Linda Hart Scatton
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Zoshchenko

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Soviet Prose ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 111-115
Author(s):  
Ronald Hingley
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Zoshchenko

Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s

Slavic Review ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Bekman Chadaga
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Light Bulb ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Mikhail Zoshchenko ◽  
Visual Power

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

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