Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote funny things — and spoke of terrible ones. His subject was the little Soviet man, unable to defend himself against anyone, holding forth with absolute seriousness about utter nonsense.
He was born in Petersburg in 1894. The law faculty, then the First World War — an officer, gassed at the front. After the revolution he was, by turns, a cobbler, a policeman, a telephonist, an agent of the criminal investigation department.
The Aristocrat, The Bathhouse, Nervous People — first-person stories whose narrator has no idea how he looks from the outside. The comic effect springs from that blindness.
In 1946 came the Zhdanov decree: Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were expelled from the Union of Writers — a 'vulgarian' and 'scum'. He was reinstated in 1953 and died in 1958, still never rehabilitated in any real sense.