Zoshchenko

The editorial offices of the thick journal, Contemporary. I submitted to this journal five of my best short stories. And so I stopped in for an answer. Before me was one of their editors, the poet M. Kuzmin. He was exquisitely polite. Beyond what was necessary. Yet reading his face I could tell that he intended to inform me of something unpleasant. He furrows his brow. I help him out.

“I presume that my stories are not exactly up the journal’s alley?” I say.

He says, “You understand, we are a thick journal… and your stories… No, they are very funny, comical… But they are written… After all, this is…”

“They’re nonsense, is that what you want to say?” I ask. In my mind’s eye flares the notation on my gymnasium essay, “Nonsense.”

Kuzmin shrugged his shoulders.

“God forbid. I don’t mean to say that at all. The opposite. Your stories are very talented… But you yourself will agree, they are a bit exaggerated.”

“They are not exaggerated,” I say.

“Well, take the language…”

“The language is not exaggerated. It is the grammar of the street… of the people… I may, possibly, have overplayed it a bit, in order that it be satirical, so that it offered a critique…”

“Let’s not argue,” he says gently. “You give us your ordinary sort of story, long or short… And believe you me, we value your work very highly.”

“To hell with him,” I think. “I can get by without thick journals. They need something ‘ordinary.’ They need something more like the classics. That’s what impresses them. That’s easy. But I have no intention of writing for readers who no longer exist. The people have a different idea of what makes literature.”

– Mikhail Zoshchenko,
Before Sunrise (1943)