The Galosh: And Other Stories

Housing block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who accidentally mentions his own affinity for kickbacks—in all of Zoschenko’s characters, petty materialism is balanced with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project. Zoschenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire and an earthy empathy with a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition.

Jeremy Hick’s translation of The Galosh brings together sixty five of Zoschenko’s finest short stories—bringing the choice writings of perhaps Soviet Russia’s most humorous and moving writer to American readers for the first time.