Ironic Humor
For the most part, Zoshchenko’s stories are very short; sketches, really, more than fully fleshed out narrative. They belong to a peculiarly Russian literary form known as skaz. And, again for the most part, the stories are comical presented through humorous narration. The narrator actually addresses the audience directly more often than not and this, too, serves the purpose of ironic detachment. This ironic humor which is so pervasive in turns serves a further purpose: to mask the serious point that any individual story is making. While these points hardly verge into the arena of tragedy, sometimes they do skirt the boundaries of melodrama and the comical nature succeeds in allowing some often dark motivations, actions and consequences to remain morally acceptable.
Insignificance
The characters in these stories are common folk often living under less than ideal conditions and struggling to get by, but not necessarily poor and suffering utter deprivation. The conflicts they face, therefore, lack the tragic implications of presenting a matter of life or death. These conflicts are often insignificant in the truest sense; people making a mountain from a molehill. And yet they are enormous problems relative to their own conditions of living. The point being that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, drama enters their lives in neither larger-than-life romantic adventures nor in a way that that puts their lives on the line. Significance is based for the most part on circumstances liable to change from day to day.
Fight the Power
The author eventually came up against the full force of Soviet repression when it was determined that his writing was not quite fully in support of Stalinist bureaucratic management. In fact, politics plays almost no role in his stories and he certainly can’t be accused of writing anti-Soviet polemics. However, much of his body of work are stories in which the powerless or disenfranchised go up against a small-scale bureaucratic power—whether it be landlords or acting troupes—and reveal the ghost in the machine. Zoshchenko is an example of the author who present a danger to a repressive authoritarian regime by writing stories that indict through allusion. Combined with the distancing effect of his ironic storytelling technique and it becomes clear why it took so long or the Soviet to catch on to just what an influential social critic he had become by the height of enormous popularity.
