Not long ago in our communal apartment there was a fight. And not just any fight, but a full-out battle. On the corner of Glazova and Borova.
Zoshchenko satirical short stories are especially notable for their deadpan language. Information is delivered matter-of-factly, often in an almost journalistic style. One suspects this is partially a decision to replicate the Soviet-style stripping of individuality since much of the satire is directed toward the bureaucratic miseries imposed on everyday people by the system. The stripping down effect is imposed with a particularly extreme prejudice in the case of “Nervous People” which is very short and composed of tight, terse paragraphs often comprised of no more than a sentence or two.
What happened after that, I don’t know. I took a powder so as to stay out of trouble.
Zoschenko is also one of the masters of closing lines. Some authors have a real talent for pulling readers immediately into a story, but often have trouble closing the deal. Some really talented writers just rarely take a “shine” to writing ends as good as their beginnings; not so with Zoschenko, who can put you right there and take you right out on a high not. One need not even know the details of what came before this closer to know that it is a great one.
Fyodor Kulkov stared at the bureaucrat for a very long time and got totally worked up. Then he went to him, turned him round, and naturally gave him a slight smack in the mouth.
The title of this story gives actually covers a lot of ground in the case of Zoschenko’s subjects of fictional interrogation. One gets the very definite sense that this particular story and especially this moment of internally built-up frustration exploding boiling over in a minor explosion of violence might actually have taken place in real life if the author wasn’t able to sublimate that exasperation with bureaucratic stick spider web through the act of writing.
These days there’s no bribery. Before though, you couldn’t go anywhere without giving or taking something.
But now people’s morality has changed significantly for the better.
There really isn’t bribery these days.
Zoschenko manages to wring an amazing amount of power out of an economy of words. When one considers that most his stories clock in somewhere on the southern border of one-thousand words, it would seem impossibly wasteful to repeat some of them. The repetition of the assuring statement about the lack of bribery under the Soviet system, however, is precisely what lifts the underlying irony of the story to the next level. This excerpt is also an insight into how the reputation a writer establishes over a career can impact the way his fiction is approached. If this story were one of the first to be published, the opening might not immediately convey a sense of irony. Since Zoschenko became noted for his ironic humor, however, one doesn’t really even need the second iteration of the bribery assurance to make the point. Which is exactly the whole point of his putting it there.
