Politics in the Bathhouse

...In 1933 the Literary Gazette reported that he was one of those writers "whose books sell so fast that there is always a shortage of them...

...The English text is sometimes too literal and yet still unfaithful to the true meaning of the Russian...

...He produced a satiric piece on Alexander Kerensky...

...Under duress, Zoshchenko resorted to Aesopian language-an old tradition among Russian writers...

...In 1946, in his own inimitable manner, he wrote "The Adventures of An Ape," which incensed the dictator of Soviet literary policy, Andrey Zhdanov, and led to the virtual end of Zoshchenko's literary career...

...He wrote some children's stories, a series on Lenin and another on the poet and artist Taras Shevchenko, the serf who became the national poet of the Ukraine...

...In his introduction Monas seems to disagree with Zhdanov about the significance of "The Adventures of An Ape," which he characterizes as a "curiously innocent little parable...

...But at the end of the 1920s and in the '30s, when all writers were harnessed to the "social command" of the Soviet planned economy, Zoshchenko was compelled to conform...

...At their compassionate best, Zoshchenko's heroes are Chaplinesque...

...He wrote on the "educational" effects of Soviet forced labor camps after a mass visit by writers under Gorky's leadership through the White Sea-Baltic Canal...

...It might have been helpful to the student of Soviet literature if the book had indicated the dates when the stories first appeared, and whether the version used is the one originally published or the one revised under pressure in the late '20s and '30s...

...Unfortunately, too, there is no word of the travesty perpetrated on Zoshchenko by the Soviet Government publishing house, which brought out a slanted selection of his works in 1960...

...Zoshchenko's Sentimental Tales, for example, was first published in 1927, slightly revised in 1928, underwent considerable rewriting in the 1929 edition-under pressure from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers-and more far-reaching political revision in the fourth edition, published in 1932...

...This is especially true of humor derived more from locution than situation...

...The Soviet reading public, at any rate, apparently recognized them as true to life, for during the first decade of the Soviet regime Zoshchenko's writings shared second place with Maxim Gorky's, and had a circulation of one million copies...

...Similarly, the stories in the collection A House of Cards, first published in 1923, were substantially revised and recast in the 1932, 1934 and 1936 editions...

...Reviewed by CHARLES MALAMUTH Senior Research Associate, School of International Relations, University of Southern California Next to poetry, humor is most difficult to translate...

...He also tried his hand at a play, Dangerous Connections, which carried the official line on the purge trials of the middle '30s to the verge of absurdity, "exposing" the "traitors" and "saboteurs" in important positions...

...Zoshchenko's best writing, his anecdotal, satirical short stories, is about ordinary human beings in Soviet life: in the overcrowded apartments and the dreary offices, in the streets and on the street-cars, in stores and restaurants, at the theater and the cinema, in public parks and gardens, in towns and villages...

...otherwise, they are stupidly brutish and primitive, like animated blocks of wood, as the Soviet illustrators of his stories drew them...

...He wrote for the Baltic Plant local factory paper on lack of discipline among its workers...

...Nor does Monas indicate that as a writer Zoshchenko, stifled by the atmosphere of Socialist Realism, died long before his demise in 1958...

...The objects of his wit and satire are standard human foibles, accentuated by Soviet conditions...

...For, to paraphrase Robert Frost, Zoshchenko's humor is what disappears in translation...

...Perhaps its author will now reach the larger audience he so clearly deserves...

...But it is not the only reason...

...Despite these defects, we are fortunate to have this representative volume of Zoshchenko's stories in English...

...It seems to me, however, that Zhdanov had good reason to take umbrage at the story, for, as Marc Slonim observes, here "the ape was patently given preference to the Soviet citizen.' Professor Monas also fails to mention certain facts in Zoshchenko's career that are essential to an understanding of both his literary art and his position in the Soviet Union...

...For example, no mention is made of the fact that Zoshchenko never recovered from Zhdanov's brutal blow against him in 1946...

...At other times the translator's efforts to match Zoshchenko's folksy idiom with slangy Americanese seem far off the mark...

...This is perhaps the basic reason why so much that was irrepressibly hilarious in Zoshchenko's Russian sounds flat in Monas' English rendition...

...Before long, though, he was back at his old m?©tier...

...He concocted the tale of a cook who became a Communist heroine...

...It was an act of courage on the part of Sidney Monas to have undertaken the task of translating Zoshchenko-and no doubt an exercise in frustration...

...The same fate befell Zoshchenko's other stories of the '20s...

...And all too often Zoshchenko's light touch is crushed by the translator's labored prose...

...In the case of the fiction of Mikhail Zoshchenko the translator's task is even more difficult because of the author's stylized locutions, a distinctive idiom which sounds folksy yet is inimitably Zoshchenkovite...

...From the beginning of his career Zoshchenko dismissed political ideology as relatively unimportant...