Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko Born July 28 (August 9), 1894, St. Petersburg Date of death July 22, 1958, Sestroretsk — Russian writer of the Soviet period, a recognized classic of Russian literature.

Biography

Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was born on the Petrograd side, in house No. 4, apt. 1, on Bolshaya Raznochinnaya Street, is recorded in the metric register of the Church of the Holy Martyr Queen Alexandra (at the House of Charity for the Poverty of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna). Father — artist Mikhail Ivanovich Zoshchenko (from the Poltava nobles, 1857-1907). Mother — Elena Osipovna (Iosifovna) Zoshchenko (née Surina, Russian, noblewoman, 1875-1920), before her marriage she was an actress, published stories in the Kopeika newspaper.
During the construction of the Suvorov Museum in St. Petersburg, a mosaic painting on the facade of the building depicting the commander’s departure from the village of Konchanskoye was painted by the artist Mikhail Ivanovich Zoshchenko. There is a small detail in the painting: a small Christmas tree in the lower corner, laid out by the artist’s five-year-old son, the future famous writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko.

— From the book “My City St. Petersburg”
In the left corner of the picture there is a green Christmas tree. I made the bottom branch of this Christmas tree. It turned out crooked, but dad was pleased with my work.

In 1913, Zoshchenko graduated from the 8th gymnasium in St. Petersburg. He studied at the Faculty of Law of the Imperial St. Petersburg University for one year (he was expelled for non-payment). In the summer he worked as a controller at the Caucasian Railway.

On the front of the First World War and the Civil War.
During that war, warrant officers lived on average no more than twelve days.
On September 29, 1914, Mikhail Zoshchenko was enrolled in the Pavlovsk Military School as an enlisted cadet with the rights of a volunteer 1st category. On January 5, 1915, he was renamed to cadet non-commissioned officer. On February 1, 1915, he completed an accelerated four-month wartime course and was promoted to warrant officer and enrolled in the army infantry.

On February 5, 1915, he was sent to the headquarters of the Kyiv Military District, from where he was sent for replenishment to Vyatka and Kazan, to the 106th Infantry Reserve Battalion, as commander of the 6th March Company. Upon returning from a business trip on March 12, 1915, he arrived in the active army to staff the 16th Mingrelian Grenadier Regiment of His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Dmitry Konstantinovich of the Caucasian Grenadier Division, to which he was seconded until December 1915. Appointed to the position of junior officer of the machine gun team.
At the beginning of November 1915, during an attack on German trenches, he received a slight shrapnel wound in the leg.
On November 17, “for excellent actions against the enemy” he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislaus, 3rd degree with swords and bow. On December 22, 1915, he was appointed to the position of chief of a machine gun team and promoted to second lieutenant. On February 11, 1916, he was awarded the Order of St. Anne, 4th degree, with the inscription “For bravery.” On July 9 he was promoted to lieutenant.

On July 18 and 19, 1916, in the area of ​​the town of Smorgon, he twice sent reports to the battalion commander about suspicious dugouts located behind enemy trenches “at the very edge of the forest and … high from the ground,” believing “that these dugouts were for assault guns or mortars.” On the night of July 20, as a result of a gas attack carried out by the Germans from dugouts discovered by Zoshchenko, he was gassed and sent to the hospital.
On September 13, 1916 he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislaus, 2nd class with swords. In October, after treatment in the hospital, he was recognized as a first category patient, but refused to serve in the reserve regiment and on October 9 returned to the front to his regiment.
On November 9, he was awarded the Order of St. Anne, 3rd degree with swords and bow, and the next day he was appointed company commander. Promoted to staff captain. On November 11, he was appointed acting battalion commander. On November 17, he was sent to Vileika station to work at the courses of the temporary school of warrant officers.

In January 1917 he was nominated for captain and the Order of St. Vladimir, 4th degree.
Zoshchenko did not manage to receive either the rank or the order due to well-known events, but the awarding of the order was announced in the order, therefore it should be recognized as having taken place — he only did not receive the order in his hands. Zoshchenko himself considered himself awarded five orders for the First World War.

On February 9, 1917, Zoshchenko’s illness worsened (heart disease is the result of gas poisoning) and after hospitalization he was transferred to the reserve.

In the summer of 1917, Zoshchenko was appointed head of posts and telegraphs and commandant of the Petrograd post office. Soon he left his post and went to Arkhangelsk, where he held the position of adjutant of the Arkhangelsk squad. He refused the offer to emigrate to France.

Later (under Soviet rule) he worked as a court secretary and an instructor in rabbit and chicken breeding in the Smolensk province.
At the beginning of 1919, despite the fact that he was exempt from military service for health reasons, he voluntarily entered the active part of the Red Army. Served as regimental adjutant of the 1st Model Regiment of the Village Poor.
In the winter of 1919, he took part in the battles near Narva and Yamburg with Bulak-Balakhovich’s detachment.

In April 1919, after a heart attack and treatment in a hospital, he was declared unfit for military service and demobilized. However, he becomes a telephone operator in the border guard.

Literary work
Having finally left military service, from 1920 to 1922 Zoshchenko changed many professions: he was a criminal investigation agent, a clerk at the Petrograd military port, a carpenter, a shoemaker, etc. At this time he attended the literary studio at the publishing house “World Literature”, which was headed by Korney Chukovsky .

Nikolai Chukovsky, who became closely acquainted with Zoshchenko during these years, gave him the following portrait:
“small, olive-skinned, with an officer’s bearing, with his head held high, with amazingly graceful small hands and feet”
— N. Chukovsky “About what I saw”
He made his debut in print in 1922. He belonged to the literary group “Serapion Brothers” (L. Lunts, Vs. Ivanov, V. Kaverin, K. Fedin, Mikh. Slonimsky, E. Polonskaya, N. Tikhonov, N. Nikitin, V. Posner). The “Serapion Brothers” shunned demagoguery and vain declarativeness, spoke about the need for art to be independent from politics, and tried to draw on the facts of life, rather than slogans, in depicting reality. Their position was conscious independence, which they contrasted with the formed ideological conjuncture in Soviet literature. Critics, wary of the “serapions,” believed that Zoshchenko was the “strongest” figure among them. Time will show the correctness of this conclusion.

In the works of the 1920s, mainly in the form of a story, Zoshchenko created a comic image of a hero-everyman with poor morals and a primitive view of the environment. The writer works with language, widely uses tale forms, and builds a characteristic image of the narrator. In the 1930s he worked more in large form: “Youth Restored”, “Blue Book”, etc. Begins work on the story “Before Sunrise”. His story “The History of One Reforging” was included in the book “The White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin” (1934).
In the 1920s and 1930s, Zoshchenko’s books were published and republished in huge numbers, the writer traveled around the country to give speeches, and his success was incredible.

On February 1, 1939, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On rewarding Soviet writers” was issued. By decree, the awarded writers were divided into three categories: the highest — the Order of Lenin (21 people: N. Aseev, F. Gladkov, V. Kataev, S. Marshak, S. Mikhalkov, P. Pavlenko, E. Petrov, N. Tikhonov, A. . Fadeev, M. Sholokhov, etc.), middle — Order of the Red Banner of Labor (V. Veresaev, Yu. German, V. Ivanov, S. Kirsanov, L. Leonov, A. Novikov-Priboy, K. Paustovsky, Yu. Tynyanov, O. Forsh, V. Shklovsky, etc.), the lowest — the Order of the Badge of Honor (P. Antokolsky, E. Dolmatovsky, V. Inber, V. Kamensky, L. Nikulin, M. Prishvin, A. Serafimovich, S. Sergeev-Tsensky, K. Simonov, A. Tolstoy (received the Order of Lenin earlier), V. Shishkov, etc.) — a total of 172 people. Zoshchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.

During the Great Patriotic War
Immediately after the start of the Great Patriotic War, Zoshchenko goes to the military registration and enlistment office and submits an application with a request to send him to the front, as having combat experience. Receives a refusal: “Not fit for military service.”
From the first days of the war, Zoshchenko joined the fire defense group (the main goal was to combat incendiary bombs) and with his son was on duty on the roof of the house during bombings.
He carries out the work necessary for the front, and as a writer, he writes anti-fascist feuilletons for publication in newspapers and on the radio. At the suggestion of the chief director of the Leningrad Comedy Theater N.P. Akimov, Zoshchenko and Schwartz began writing the play “Under the Linden Trees of Berlin” — a play about the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops was performed on the stage of the theater at a time when the Germans were blockading Leningrad.

In September 1941, Zoshchenko was ordered evacuated first to Moscow, and then to Alma-Ata. The weight of allowed luggage should not exceed 12 kg, and Zoshchenko packed 20 notebooks for the future book “Before Sunrise” into a suitcase. As a result, there was only four kilograms left for everything else.
In Almaty, Zoshchenko works in the script department of Mosfilm. By this time, he was writing a series of war stories, several anti-fascist feuilletons, as well as scripts for the films “Soldier’s Happiness” and “Fallen Leaves.”

In April 1943, Zoshchenko came to Moscow and was a member of the editorial board of the Krokodil magazine.
In 1944-1946 he worked a lot for theaters. Two of his comedies were staged at the Leningrad Drama Theatre, one of which, “The Canvas Briefcase,” ran for 200 performances in a year.

«Before Sunrise»
While evacuated, Zoshchenko continues to work on the story “Before Sunrise” (working title: “The Keys of Happiness”). The writer admits that it was to her that he went throughout his entire creative life. He had been collecting materials for the future book since the mid-1930s, and the materials that Zoshchenko “evacuated” already contained a significant “background” for the book. The main idea of ​​the story can be expressed as follows: “The power of the mind is capable of defeating fear, despair and despondency.” As Zoshchenko himself said, This is the control of the highest level of the human psyche over the lower.

Zoshchenko penetrated into the depths of his memory, looked for that impulse that became the first impetus for the disease, looked for the cause of his troubles and misfortunes. By a certain point, he already believed that there was some sense in meticulously studying the “games of the body.” He believed that the secret of the illness that bothered him so much was about to be revealed to him. And after the secret becomes known to him, he will be able to overcome the illness that tormented him.
— Yu. V. Tomashevsky
“Before Sunrise” is an autobiographical and scientific story, a confessional story about how the author tried to overcome his melancholy and fear of life. He considered this fear to be his mental illness, and not at all a feature of his talent, and tried to overcome himself, to instill in himself a childish, cheerful worldview. To do this (as he believed, having read Pavlov and Freud) it was necessary to overcome childhood fears and overcome the dark memories of youth. And Zoshchenko, recalling his life, discovers that almost all of it consisted of dark and difficult, tragic and stinging impressions.

From the book, the reader learns about the writer’s life in very fine detail. All the short stories written for her are intended only to find the root cause of the illness that tormented the author. Zoshchenko is based on Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes, as well as on the psychoanalysis of S. Freud.
Beginning in August 1943, the magazine “October” managed to publish the first chapters of “Before Sunrise.” The magazine was strictly prohibited from continuing publication, and “clouds gathered over Zoshchenko.” The blow came three years later.
The story “Before Sunrise” was first published in full only in 1968 in the USA, in the author’s homeland — in 1987.

Last years

To award the medal “For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945”… to workers of science, technology, art and literature… who, with their valiant and selfless labor, ensured the victory of the Soviet Union over Germany in the Great Patriotic War.

— From the decree establishing the medal
In April 1946, Zoshchenko, along with other writers, was awarded the medal “For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” and three months later, after the Zvezda magazine reprinted his story for children “The Adventures of a Monkey” (published in 1945 year in “Murzilka”), it turned out that “Zoshchenko, who was entrenched in the rear, did nothing to help the Soviet people in the fight against the German invaders.” From now on, “his unworthy behavior during the war is well known.”

On August 14, 1946, the Decree of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” was issued, in which the editors of both magazines were severely criticized for “providing a literary platform for the writer Zoshchenko” — the magazine “Leningrad” was generally closed forever.
Zvezda’s grave mistake is to provide a literary platform to the writer Zoshchenko, whose works are alien to Soviet literature. The editors of Zvezda know that Zoshchenko has long specialized in writing empty, meaningless and vulgar things, in preaching rotten lack of ideas, vulgarity and apoliticality, designed to disorient our youth and poison their consciousness. Zoshchenko’s last published story, “The Adventures of a Monkey” (Zvezda, No. 5-6, 1946), is a vulgar lampoon of Soviet life and Soviet people. Zoshchenko portrays Soviet orders and Soviet people in an ugly caricature, slanderously presenting Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, stupid, with philistine tastes and morals. Zoshchenko’s maliciously hooligan portrayal of our reality is accompanied by anti-Soviet attacks.

Providing the pages of Zvezda to such vulgarities and scum of literature as Zoshchenko is all the more unacceptable since the editors of Zvezda are well aware of Zoshchenko’s physiognomy and his unworthy behavior during the war, when Zoshchenko, without helping the Soviet people in any way in their struggle against the German invaders, wrote such a disgusting thing as “Before Sunrise”, the assessment of which, like the assessment of the entire literary “creativity” of Zoshchenko, was given on the pages of the Bolshevik magazine.
— Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated August 14, 1946 No. 274
Following the resolution, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, A. Zhdanov, attacked Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. His report was replete with insults: “Zoshchenko, entrenched in the rear” (about evacuation during the war), “Zoshchenko turns his vile and low soul inside out” (about the story “Before Sunrise”), etc.

After the resolution and report of Zhdanov, Zoshchenko was expelled from the Writers’ Union and deprived of his livelihood. Not only did they stop publishing the writer, Zoshchenko was completely crossed out: his name was not mentioned in the press, even the publishers of the works he translated did not indicate the name of the translator. Almost all of the literary acquaintances ended their relationship with him.

In 1946-1953. Zoshchenko was forced to engage in translation work (found thanks to the support of employees of the State Publishing House of the Karelo-Finnish SSR) and earn extra money as a shoemaker, mastered in his youth. His translations included the books “From Karelia to the Carpathians” by Antti Timoien, “The Tale of the Collective Farm Carpenter Sago” by M. Tsagaraev, and two masterfully translated stories by the Finnish writer Maju Lassila — “For Matches” and “Resurrected from the Dead”.

After Stalin’s death, the question of Zoshchenko’s reinstatement in the Writers’ Union was raised; Simonov and Tvardovsky spoke out. Simonov was against the wording “restoration”. In his opinion, to restore means to admit that you were wrong. Therefore, Zoshchenko needs to be accepted anew, and not restored, counting only those works that Zoshchenko wrote after 1946, and everything that came before should be considered, as before, literary trash banned by the party. Simonov proposed to admit Zoshchenko to the Writers’ Union as a translator, and not as a writer.

In June 1953, Zoshchenko was readmitted to the Writers’ Union. The boycott ended briefly.
In May 1954, Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were invited to the Writer’s House, where a meeting was held with a group of students from England. The English students insisted that they be shown the graves of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, to which they were told that both writers would be presented to them alive.

At the meeting, one of the students asked a question: how did Zoshchenko and Akhmatova feel about the 1946 decree that was disastrous for them. The meaning of Zoshchenko’s answer was that he could not agree with insults directed at himself, he was a Russian officer with military decorations, he worked in literature with a clear conscience, his stories cannot be considered slander, the satire was directed against pre-revolutionary philistinism, and not against Soviet people. The British applauded him. Akhmatova answered the question coldly: “I agree with the party’s resolution.” Her son, Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, was imprisoned.

After this meeting, devastating articles appeared in the newspapers, reproaches fell on Zoshchenko: instead of changing, as the party ordered him to do, he still did not agree. Zoshchenko’s performance is criticized at writers’ meetings, and a new round of persecution begins.
At a meeting where the Moscow literary authorities specially arrived, a month after the meeting with the British, Zoshchenko was accused of daring to publicly declare disagreement with the resolution of the Central Committee. Simonov and Kochetov tried to persuade Zoshchenko to “repent.” The reasons for his hardness were not understood. This was seen as stubbornness and arrogance.

Transcript of Zoshchenko’s speech at this meeting:
I can say that my literary life and destiny in this situation are over. I have no choice. A satirist must be a morally pure person, but I am humiliated like the last son of a bitch… I have nothing in the future. Nothing. I’m not going to ask for anything. I don’t need your condescension—neither your Druzin, nor your abuse and shouting. I’m more than tired. I will accept any other fate than the one I have.

Articles soon appeared in the English press that the trip to the USSR dispels myths about the impossibility of free and relaxed discussion in this country, and attacks on Zoshchenko stopped. However, the writer’s strength was exhausted, depression became more and more frequent and lasting, Zoshchenko no longer had the desire to work.
Upon reaching retirement age, in mid-August 1955 (Zoshchenko’s official year of birth at that time was considered 1895), the writer submits an application for a pension to the Leningrad branch of the joint venture. However, only in July 1958, shortly before his death, after much hassle, Zoshchenko received a notice of the assignment of a personal pension of republican significance (1,200 rubles).
The writer spent the last years of his life at his dacha in Sestroretsk.

Death

In the spring of 1958, Zoshchenko became worse — he received nicotine poisoning, which resulted in a short-term spasm of cerebral vessels. Zoshchenko has difficulty speaking, he stops recognizing those around him.
On July 22, 1958 at 0:45 Zoshchenko died of acute heart failure. The authorities banned the writer’s funeral on the Literary Bridge of the Volkovsky Cemetery; Zoshchenko was buried in the city cemetery in Sestroretsk (site 10). According to an eyewitness, in life the gloomy Zoshchenko smiled in his coffin. Buried nearby are the writer’s wife Vera Vladimirovna (daughter of Colonel Kerbitsky, 1898-1981), son Valery (theater critic, 1921-1986), grandson Mikhail (captain 2nd rank, 1943-1996)