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Contents

Victoria Kazimirovna     1
A Metropolitan Deal     12
Confession     15
What Good Are Relatives?     17
The Aristocrat     20
The Bathhouse     23
The Patient     26
Poverty     29
The Overshoe     32
The Economy Campaign     35
The Actor     37
Rachis [Paris]     40
The Crisis      42
Kitten and People     45
The Electrician     47
The Receipt     49
M. P. Siniagin     52
A Weak Container     74
Bathhouse and People     78
A Romantic Tale      82
Poor Liza     88
An Amusing Adventure     93
Liaisons Dangereuses     101
Personal Life      105
My Professions      109
Love     118
On Pushkin's Anniversary     139
Houses and People     146
Rose-Marie     149
The Story of My Illness     153
A Happy Game     158
A Last Unpleasantness     162
An Instructive Story     166
Kocherga (The Poker)     169
The Photograph     173
The Adventures of An Ape     177
An Extraordinary Event     184
In the Bathhouse     190

Before the Sun Rises: A Novella     199

Description

Uproariously funny stories that give a behind-the-scenes look at daily life in the Soviet Union of Zoshchenko's time

Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958), expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946 and banned from the Russian press as a "literary tramp," "a brainless and pornographic scribbler," is one of the great satirists of the twentieth century. Candid, spontaneous, immediate, his on-the-spot sketches reveal the Chaplinesque world of the Soviet little man who never wins, victim of himself, of history, of nature, or of all three.