“Solomon” and Consciousness

Although Soviet writers have been repeatedly exhorted to employ the “weapon” of satire, the range of its “permissible” subjects steadily shrank over the years. The New Economic Policy of 1921-25, with its tolerance of a relatively pluralistic economic structure and literary and artistic diversity, was also a glorious period of Soviet satire, when prominent political figures, such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and even Lenin, did not escape the irreverent attention of writers and caricaturists. Until the early 1930s masters like Ilf and Petrov (The Little Golden Calf, 1928, and The Twelve Chairs, 1931) as well as the incomparable Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose acrid yet affectionate sketches chronicle the absu...