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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
For should we not always consider a work's starting point as a significant “lead” into our interpretation of the work's motivation? Thus…I would have the Decameron read, not as a series of hilarious stories, but as a series of hilarious stories told during a plague.
–Kenneth BurkeMikhail Zoshchenko spent his literary life playing discourses off against one another. In his early miniatures, the cacophony of peasant brogue, tradesmen's dialects, propaganda clichés and bureaucratese was controlled and masterful. In his longer works, the mixture of scientific style and mundane or satirical anecdote often seemed to take on a life of its own. Nowhere is this more true than in Before Sunrise.
1. Burke, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 27.Google Scholar
2. Looking at this work as a whole has not always been easy. The entire novel of Pered voskhhodom solntsa first came out in one volume in New York in 1973, thirty years after the first half appeared in the USSR and one year after the second half appeared separately in the journal Zvezda (March 1972) under the title Povest’ o razume, with no indication that it was part of a longer work. For a detailed discussion of the book's fate, see Hodge, Thomas P., “Freudian Elements in Zoshchenko's ‘Pered voskhodom solntsa’ (1943),” Slavonic and East European Review 67, no. 1 (January 1989): 3–8 Google Scholar. Oddly enough, Pedagogika Press in Moscow brought out the second half of the work in a separate volume with scant reference to the work as a whole ( Zoshchenko, Mikhail, Povest1 o razume [Moscow: Pedagogika, 1990]Google Scholar). Citations in the present paper come from a belated Soviet edition of the complete work, in Zoshchenko, M. M., Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1987), 3: 447–693 Google Scholar. Translations are my own. All subsequent references to this edition are included parenthetically in the text.
3. Kornei Chukovskii, “Zoshchenko,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965–69), 2: 549.
4. Wiren-Garcziriski, Vera von, “Mikhail Zoshchenko: avtor psikhologicheskikh povestei,” in Pered voskhodom solntsa (New York: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967 Google Scholar idem. “Zoscenko's Psychological Interests,” Slavic and East European Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 3–22. See also Hodge, “Freudian Elements.” The inexplicable 1990 edition of Povest'o razume ends with an equally inexplicable article by a psychiatrist, A.A. Puzyrei. He reads the book as straight psychoanalysis, developing graphs and primitive schema to illustrate Zoshchenko's argument and concluding that the work represents a good contrast to “academic,” lab-oriented psychology, which is out of touch with human experience ( “Drama neistselennogo razuma,” in Povest’ o razume, 149–83).
5. Hanson, K, “Guilt and Rebellion in Zoshchenko,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Rancour-Laferriere, D. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), 285–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Scatton, Linda, Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 211–43Google Scholar passim.
7. McLean, H, “Zoshchenko's Unfinished Novel, ‘Before Sunrise,'” in Brown, E. J., ed., Major Soviet Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 314.Google Scholar
8. Irene Masing-Delic, “Biology, Reason and Literature in Zoscenko's Pered voschodom solnca,” Russian Literature V\\\ (1980): 77–101. Kern, Gary, “After the Afterword,” in Zoshchenko, M., Before Sunrise, trans. Kern, Gary (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974 Google Scholar.
9. He excused the 1943 ban on the second half of the novel by saying, “Laughter is not what is needed now” ( Chudakova, Marietta, Poetika Mikhaila Zoshchenko [Moscow: Nauka, 1978], 168 Google Scholar). Yet he frequently defended the work as antifascist and a serious defense of Pavlov over Freud (see, for example, Chukovskii, Sobr. soch., 2: 550).
10. Chudakova relates that even in 1958, when Zoshchenko would tell these stories orally, his listeners would hear them not as literary constructions but as shocking lapses of morality and decorum (Chudakova, Poetika Zoshchenko, 177–78).
11. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Strachey, James (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), chap. 8.Google Scholar
12. In “The Young Woman's Story,” for example, he helps a woman who has had two miscarriages bring her third pregnancy to term by causing her to recall a forgotten, shameful earlier pregnancy from which the baby was stillborn. He concludes that by suppressing her sorrow she has caused her current problems and he admonishes her to “separate the past from the present” (630–31).
13. From “Euthanasia,” 1812, The Works of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1833), 9: 21.
14. Kern notes this structural symmetry as well, commenting on the presence of “an epilogue and an afterword to balance the prologue and foreword” (360).
15. Chukovskii, Sobr. soch., 2: 549. McLean writes, “These stories represent a tour de force of narrative art,” citing their “extraordinary compression” as an outstanding feature (McLean, “Zoshchenko's Unfinished Novel,” 315). Hodge seconds this judgment, saying, “the ‘stories’ in Pered voskhodom solntsa represent perhaps the high point of Zoshchenko's narrative style” ( “Freudian Elements,” 8).
16. Foucault, M., Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Sheridan, Alan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 44–45.Google Scholar
17. Hodge gives an excellent summary of abreaction, “the process of seeking out and re-living the troubling memory,” as Zoshchenko applies it ( “Freudian Elements,” 14–15). However, I disagree with his conclusion that “the curative function of abreaction, catharsis, is abundantly evident in Pered voskhodom solntsa.” The surface account may make claims to this effect but the formal nature of the storytelling belies them. Although Hodge claims it has opened, we still see the boy's “closed heart” in the narrator's inability to embrace growth, change or the emotions of others.
18. Chukovskii wrote of the following conversation with Zoshchenko: “'Kornei Ivanovich, I've completely healed myself!’ he once said to me with an air of triumph…. ‘I've become an optimist, I've finally laid open my heart!'” (Chukovskii, Sobr. soch., 2: 547).
19. Hanson's discussion leads to the same conclusion, if by a different route. She feels the gulf between the pathos of the illness and the dryness of the cure to be too great to be believable ( “Guilt and Rebellion,” 299).
20. Chudakova notes that readers who were accustomed to the complex interweaving of registers in his early stories could not accept the extreme simplicity of Zoshchenko's language in this book. “Thus ‘his own’ voice, which readers had awaited for so long, came out as the ultimate ‘alien’ voice [kak slovo naibolee ‘chuzhoej’ (Chudakova, Poetika Zoshchenko, 174).
21. Ruthrof, H., The Reader's Construction of Narrative (London: Routledge, 1981), 103.Google Scholar
22. Ruthrof explains that after about fifty years (that is, right about when Zoshchenko was writing this novel) the boundary situation story reached its most extreme manifestation, divested of all but the bare existential moment, and then became passe. He identifies the “metastory” as its primary replacement, which “focuses anew on narrative as unrestricted ‘ludus, ’ on telling as conversational free play, and on the multiple, heterogeneous artistic-aesthetic concerns of literariness itself as its loose ideological commitment” (Ruthrof, Reader's Construction, 108). Before Sunrise takes the impulse toward metastory in a different direction, using the storytelling possibilities of psychoanalytic discourse as his model, but it is interesting that Zoshchenko did move independently toward metastory at the same time as writers in the west.
23. Luplow, C., Isaac Babel's ‘Red Cavalry’ (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), 109.Google Scholar
24. In an illuminating passage from his recollections about Zoshchenko, Chukovskii mentions the other writer's assertion that one cannot write real literature with a closed heart. Since he has been cured of that, Zoshchenko claims, he has been writing “nice” (dobrye) stories. “I knew those ‘nice’ stories,” thinks Chukovskii, “and he would have done better not to write them” (Chukovskii, Sobr. soch., 2: 547).
25. Mandel'stam, Zamiatin and other writers whom Zoshchenko had known well but who had fallen from favor do not figure in his literary reminiscences.
26. White, Hayden, “Michel Foucault,” in Structuralism and Since, ed. Sturrock, John (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 94 Google Scholar. See Foucault, M., The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970.Google Scholar
27. Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, trans. Riviere, Joan, eel. Stiachey, James (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), 46.Google Scholar
28. The best discussion of Zoshchenko's use of ostranenie is A. Zholkovsky's “Lev Tolstoi i Mikhail Zoshchenko kak zazerkal'e russkoi revoliutsii,” Voprosy lileratury 4 (1990): 54–76.Google Scholar
29. In a letter of 10 September 1943 he wrote, “I would almost prefer not to publish the book at all. It is so intimate and revealing that I do not feel right about it. After all, the author is still alive. And people will be digging around in my amorous affairs and all … I secretly hope they do not publish the rest of it… . It is one thing to write such a thing and another to imagine someone reading it. And grinning” (from Moldavskii, Dm, “Prevyshavshii obychnuiu mem,” Zvezda 12 [1987]: 182 Google Scholar, as cited in Starkov, A., Mikhail Zoshchenko [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990], 208).Google Scholar
