| Mikhail Zoshchenko | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 10, 1895 Poltava, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) |
| Died | July 22, 1958 (aged 62) Leningrad, USSR |
Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Зо́щенко, Ukrainian: Михайло Михайлович Зощенко; August 10 [O.S. 29 July] 1895, Poltava,[1] Russian Empire – July 22, 1958, Leningrad, USSR) was a Soviet author and satirist.
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Zoshchenko was born in 1895, in Poltava,[1] but spent most of his life in St. Petersburg / Leningrad. His Ukrainian father was a mosaicist responsible for the exterior decoration of the Suvorov Museum in Saint Petersburg.[2] The future writer attended the Faculty of Law at the Saint Petersburg University, but did not graduate due to financial problems. During World War I Zoshchenko served in the army as a field officer, was wounded in action several times, and was heavily decorated.
He was associated with the Serapion Brothers and attained particular popularity in the 1920s as a satirist, but, after his denunciation in the Zhdanov decree of 1946, Zoshchenko lived in dire poverty. He was awarded his pension only a few months before he died.
Zoshchenko developed a simplified deadpan style of writing which simultaneously made him accessible to "the people" and mocked official demands for accessibility: "I write very compactly. My sentences are short. Accessible to the poor. Maybe that's the reason why I have so many readers."[4] Volkov compares this style to the nakedness of the Russian holy fool or yurodivy.
Zoshchenko wrote a series of children’s short stories about Lenin.