The Monkey, “Adventures of a Monkey”
The title character in this story is not just a symbol, but the symbol that pretty much brought his career to an end. The monkey is able to take advantage of a fascist army bombing to escape from the zoo. His “adventures” are comprised of being a free monkey in the Soviet Union’s social paradise. After being exposed to this, he freely decides to return to zoo to live. The allegory here was more than obvious to Soviet leaders.
Soviet Bureaucracy
The most persistent symbol to be found throughout the body of Zoshchenko’s short stories is the Soviet bureaucracy. The systemic inefficiency of a state-run, nation-wide bureaucracy became the central symbolism of everything wrong with communism, but its real potency lies in it is freedom from ideology. Transplant the stories to any society where its people’s contentedness is wedged within the churning gears of bureaucracy and they would be just as symbolically true.
“The Dictaphone”
The now-obsolete voice recording devices is hailed as a great example of why American inventors are so admired. When it is revealed for the first time to Russians, things quickly devolve into a shouting match to scream obscenities into the microphone. The Dictaphone becomes a satirical symbol of 20th century capitalism’s race to invent things to sell to people who have no use for them and along the way helps to prove that the author really was free from any ideology as he claimed. Every political philosophy could be targeted for satire.
The Bathhouse
Of the author’s most famous stories is titled “The Bathhouse” and they are featured in a number of other stories. The bathhouse is a significant symbol in the stories in a way that likely won’t be obvious to American readers or modern readers. Zoshchenko is a writer of the common people; he wrote for them and he wrote about them. The bathhouse was a communal area that many people could relate to and also a place where he got many of his ideas.
“The Bottle”
In one of the author’s briefest sketches, he manages to criticize an entire system. A man breaks a bottle on the sidewalk and walks away instead of sweeping up his mess. An observer seated across the street watches as more and more people walk right over the broken shards without making any attempt to clean away the danger. It is an indictment of the basic underlying ideology of socialism working for the common good just as powerful as other stories indict socialist bureaucracy.
