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Mikhail Zoshchenko's Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, who is anything but a model Soviet author: not only is he still attached to the era of the old regime, he is also, quite simply, not a very good writer. Shaped by Zoshchenko's masterful hands - he takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces - Kolenkorov's prose is beautifully mangled, full of stylistic infelicities, overloaded flights of metaphor, tortured cliché, and misused bureaucratese, in the tradition of Gogol.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Preface to the Fourth Edition
1. Apollo and Tamara
2. People
3. A Terrible Night
4. What the Nightingale Sang
5. A Merry Adventure
6. Lilacs in Bloom
Notes
About the author
Mikhail Zoshchenko. Translated by Boris Dralyuk
Summary
Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. An original perspective on Soviet life and uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era.
Additional text
Boris Dralyuk’s 2018 translation is truly a gift to the Englishspeaking world. This is first time they have been published together in a cohesive English-language collection. Boris Dralyuk’s translation faithfully recreates the paradoxes that make Sentimental Tales enigmatic, hilarious, and devastating.
Report
Zoshchenko is the wittiest and most perceptive of Soviet satirists. Boris Dralyuk is the first translator to succeed in bringing his wit into English. Comedy is largely a matter of timing and Dralyuk, like Zoshchenko himself, has an impeccable sense of rhythm. Robert Chandler, translator of Vasily Grossman, Andrei Platonov, Teffi, and many others
