CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW To many readers of his short stories, Mikhail Zoshchenko is a wonderfully simple, funny writer. Zoshchenko, it would seem, is an artist without the slightest need of a doctoral thesis about him. But humour itself is a funny thing. Or rather, with Zoshchenko it is frequently no laughing matter, since his stories often leave us feeling sad rather than happy. We may start to wonder why they do this. In attempting to respond, we are likely to pose further questions: how far does Zoshchenko himself share the views and sympathise with the fate of the characters and narrators of his stories? Maybe we are being invited to cry rather than laugh; or to laugh with rather than at the characters. These questions may be summed up as ‘what is Zoshchenko’s own relation to his stories’ characters and narrators?’ This is the most important question to ask of Zoshchenko’s short stories, but the hardest to answer. As a consequence, Zoshchenko’s readers have tended to supply different responses from his critics, and the critics themselves have occupied a broad span of positions. The difficulty of defining Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator, supplying a general account of his many stories, and of furthering our understanding of the place of Zoshchenko’s short stories within his work as a whole, has also led many critics to unify and simplify Zoshchenko’s artistic achievement. Too often, in the search for a coherent set of deeper concerns underpinning the work, critics have been willing to dismiss their comic nature as a superficial level of the Zoshchenko short story. In a similar way, there has been a tendency to see Zoshchenko’s use of a character-narrator as an incidental aspect of Zoshchen-ko’s form, as an ironic mask to be torn away to reveal the author’s true face. Nevertheless, we must strive not to forget their most distinctive and attractive feature: their humour. The failure to value the stories’ humour is linked to the failure to value their narrative form because the humour is overwhelmingly produced by Zoshchenko’s use of and relation to a character- narrator. That is to say, it is generated by his use of a skaz narrator. Critics treating the question of Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator have tended to see the writer as similar or as precisely opposite to his narrator. How- ever, no one has explored with any rigour the idea that Zoshchenko has a mixed relation of sympathy and antipathy for his narrator. To describe the author– narrator relation in this way would enable us to account for contradictions 2 CHAPTER I running throughout Zoshchenko’s short stories. It would also go some way towards explaining their profound tragi-comic power. This humour, and the narrative form that generates it, is inextricable from Zoshchenko’s world-view, and constitutes the pinnacle of his artistic achievement. Yet Zoshchenko did not invent the skaz narrative form that he employed. In order to understand Zoshchenko’s use of the skaz narrative form, we must first investigate its nature, definitions of it and its history in general. This book is an attempt to further knowledge with regard to both skaz and Zoshchenko. I con- sider that my development of Bakhtin’s definition of skaz as a double-voiced form, and my relating of it to debates about irony, parody and authorial in- tention, represent an advance in our understanding of the skaz form. This sharpened definition of skaz enables me better to describe the combination of sincerity and parody in Zoshchenko’s skaz in particular, and in his short stories of the 1920s in general. These mixed motives are made especially clear when related to the context of 1920s journalism, where Zoshchenko found sources for the language and mentality of his characters and the forms of his stories. By reproducing letters that, I contend, served as his sources, and examining Zoshchenko’s reworking of them into stories, I believe I have made an original contribution to our appreciation of Zoshchenko’s art. First, we must investigate how the critics’ approach to or avoidance of the question of skaz has influenced their views of Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator. Needless to say, in doing this I shall be attentive to the critics’ genuine achievements in furthering our appreciation of Zoshchenko and his art. Anatolii Starkov is a good example of a critic who argues that Zoshchenko’s own position is opposite to that of his narrator. Starkov’s interpretation is grounded in a definition of skaz as the satirical use of irony, and an under- standing of irony as antiphrasis. In particular, Starkov characterises Zoshchenko as using ‘the irony of plot’ (s['etnaq ironiq) to comment on his charac-ters.1 Similarly, Starkov argues that the narrator’s inadequate or distorted understanding of a significant question discredits him:2 The greater issue, one relevant at that time (the fight against bribery, bureaucracy, and remnants of the former way of life, as well as the creation of Soviet aviation and other issues) is brought into the story in a deliberately distorted, sometimes curious interpretation by the character. The result is that it is not the issue itself that is discredited, but the character. His distorted perception of the new reality is 1. The term s['etnaq ironiq was first used with regard to Zoshchenko by Anna Beskina in her ‘Litso i maska Mikhaila Zoshchenko’, Literaturnyi kritik, Nº 1 (1935), pp. 107–31 and Nº 2 (1935), pp. 59–91. 2. There are many stories where the narrator’s speech achieves the opposite of what he him- self intended. “Speech about Bribery”, “Americans”, “Advanced Man”, “Domestic Bliss”, “The Agitator”, “A Man without Prejudice” are but a few examples. INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW 3 transposed onto the reader’s usual, normal perception of it, so that the character denounces himself.3 The critic here employs two approaches that crop up frequently in dis- cussions of skaz and Zoshchenko’s narrator. The first is the idea of a reader with a normal understanding of events who, he contends, corrects the narrator’s ab-normal views. The effect is to discredit the narrator’s understanding of the issue and not the issue itself. This notion is almost invariably accompanied by a view of an implicit norm language, from which all skaz is a deviation, and therefore parodic. The second is the very idea of a choice between trusting the narrator or the issue. Starkov immediately concentrates on the untrustworthy way in which the narrator evaluates, and takes this as meaning that the narrator, rather than the issue, is being satirised. In fact, we are far freer than Starkov thinks. Zoshchen- ko’s skaz leaves it to us to choose whether to place our trust in the issue, what might also be called the generalisation, or to trust the narrator. Starkov bases his conclusion upon a notion of how an author makes his own point of view known when employing a character-narrator, i.e. when employing skaz. Indeed, at certain points, the critic argues that Zoshchenko has an am- bivalent attitude to his narrator, but his resolution of the questions of skaz and irony leads him to banish all such ambiguity in his readings of the stories and in his conclusions. Starkov’s conception of skaz is as a deviation from a norm, and its meaning can only be established by reference to an implicit norm. Yet the history of skaz, as we shall see, shows us that not all skaz exists in contrast to a norm. Some of it is part of a deliberate attempt to redefine the norm. It would be ridiculous to judge a serious attempt to redefine literary genre and style, such as Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, as a satire on the genre and style that it employs from the point of view of the literary norm.4 This understanding of skaz as a deviation from normal attitudes or the norm language leads to seeing all skaz as a form of parody employed to ridicule the language of the narrator, or as a form of irony used to ridicule his outlook and imply the opposite. 3. Anatolii Starkov, Iumor Zoshchenko (Moscow, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), p. 35. See also idem, Mikhail Zoshchenko: sud'ba khudozhnika (Moscow, Sovetskii pisatel', 1990). 4. V.D. Levin in particular stresses that certain deviations from the literary norm are attempts to redefine it. However, he too is unwilling to use the term skaz for such serious works of literature. This, it seems to me, is a further indication of the pervasive influence of the definition of skaz as solely a form of parody. See V.D. Levin, ‘“Neklassicheskie” tipy povestvovaniia nachala XX veka v istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka’, Slavica Hiero-solymitana, Nº 5–6 (1981), pp. 245–75. 4 CHAPTER I This view unites critics of different political persuasions. Thus, during the Cold War it was held by both Soviet critics such as Starkov, in part writing to ensure that Zoshchenko could be further printed and studied, and Western critics, such as Mikhail Kreps, trying to appeal to the imagination of readers re- ceptive to the image of Soviet writers as conscience and victim of an oppressive society. Despite appearing irreconcilable, these stances share the common goal of presenting Zoshchenko as a satirist consistently ridiculing the vice or stupid- ity of his character-narrator. Though their political imperatives are different, critics such as Starkov and Kreps agree on the importance of determining a writer’s politics and derive Zoshchenko’s own position by reversing that of his narrator.5 Such a view of Zoshchenko as parodying or satirising his narrator need not be informed by political imperatives.