Mikhail Zoshchenko was a household name in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until the crackdown on the arts after World War II. This is a full-length study in English of his career, and of his critical and political reception in a society where the purpose of art was service to the state. It places his longer works and the events leading up to his literary assassination in 1946 in the context of the short, riotous works that won him mass readership and a devoted following among contemporary writers who agreed with each other on little else. Dr Scatton identifies stylistic and thematic unities...