This text represents an extraordinary example of late Russian literary development. It is populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of contemporary socialist and realist novels.

In 1994 Russian writer Victor Erofeyev proclaimed Leonid Dobychin "one of the main heroes of twentieth-century Russian literature." Obscure for many years, Dobychin is now celebrated as a modernist master. His short stories are hailed as a sort of Soviet version of Joyce's Dubliners-subtle and tightly constructed miniatures linked by recurring themes and full of ironic juxtaposition, context, allusion, and style.
For Dobychin early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland. He was not anti-Soviet but trans-Soviet, practicing realism but looking at reality from jarring angles. A typical...