Like Australia’s Henry Lawson, Mikhail Zoshchenko is a master of a particular type of short story: the short short story or, as it is sometimes called, the vignette. (Or, less commonly, the anecdote.) This is style of writing that strips down the word count, but not necessarily the focus. For instance, Lawson’s “On the Edge of a Plain” is only around five-hundred words long yet is more densely packed with information than many stories five times its length. Likewise with Zoshchenko who can say more about life for the ordinary person under the crushing behemoth of early Soviet Union bureaucracy with his quick-paced, thinly paragraphed, conversational short-short vignettes than one would ever expect from a Russian writer. (Because, you see, Russian writers have this reputation for taking up nearly half a page just with the constant repetition of an entire Russian names.)
While the Soviet master and the Aussie master share a common talent for conveying a wealth of information through what they leave out, the similarity pretty much ends there, except for patriotic pride in both parties. Lawson’s tales are about tough, rugged individualists who become symbols for the creation of new country while Zoschchenko’s ironic detachment serves to underscore the frustration of living in a society whose entire purpose sometimes seems to be crushing the very last remnant of individuality out of the fabric holding together.
The Zoshchnenko story typically starts with a low-key, deadpan introduction, often going to the extra length to engage a conversational tone as exhibited by just a few random opening lines:
“A friend of mine, he’s a poet by the way, went abroad this year.”
“To start with, we wanted to tell you about an amusing little piece of bad luck.”
“This time let me tell you about a dramatic episode from the life of some people now dead.”
His secret to success as a writer of the short-short is to immediately create the sense that you are being addressed directly the way you would be a party, or the office or while standing in line. People are milling about and then suddenly a guy puts his hand on your shoulder and says, “Listen, you gotta hear this, it’s the funniest thing ever.” Zoshchenko is appealing to the spirit of community like any good writer approved by the Soviet regime would be expected to do, but he is doing so in a subtle way that recognizes your individuality. He writes in a way that seems as if he is telling it to directly to you and you alone. You are worthy of being let in on the personal anecdote he feels is worth sharing.
It is a tremendously valuable device for several reasons. Firstly, the mere informality of his openings immediately allows him to do away with constricting conventions of literature. Since you already know it’s about people you don’t know, he doesn’t feel compelled to provide any more biographical information than necessary. With that done with, he can throw the reader directly into the storyline. (Plot is far too complex a word to describe what goes on in most of his stories.) Also, since you have been deemed worthy of being told the story, there is also the immediate assumption that you will know what he’s talking about. That means he doesn’t have to say everything because you will be able to intuit the missing gaps. This approach is packed with subtle advantages for the writer (or reader) who doesn’t want to get bogged down in all the Dickensian backstory stuff.
The final advantage of the anecdotal approach to storytelling is that it provides a solid foundation for Zoshchenko’s primary literary weapon of choice: irony. Although pervasive now, irony was for a long time recognized as so difficult to pull off in prose that it became the domain of a few very special writers who excelled at it: O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Saki and, in long form fiction, Edith Wharton. To that list one can not only add Zoshchenko, but place him near the top. His irony is quite different from that of O. Henry, for instance, whose stock in trade was the ironic reversal. The best of Zoshchenko’s stories also end on a note of irony, but it is more subtle and as such may not be quite as revealing as the twist that concludes an O. Henry classic.
