조셴코의 웃음: 단막희극에 나타난 ‘호모 소비에티쿠스’의 실패

This paper aims to analyze the social satire in the comedies of Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (Михаил Михайлович Зощенко, 1894-1958). Zoshchenko is one of the best-known satirists and humorists of modern Russian literature. He is well known for his bitingly satirical short stories, while his plays are relatively less known and less studied. Like in many of his short stories, in Zoshchenko’s plays, one important situation or a single goal motivates the entire plot structure. For example, in “Crime and Punishment,” Gorbushkin is summoned by the secret police and the rest of the characters, in their panic, strive to sell off all of his belongings before the inevitable confiscation. In “An Unfortunate Day,” a janitor steals from the cooperative where he works, which motivates other workers to steal. In “The Wedding,” the male protagonist is at his wedding and must find his bride, but he cannot remember her face because she is not wearing her hat and coat. In “The Roots of Capitalism,” a man and a woman suspect that the other person is trying to marry him or her for his or her living quarters. In his single-act plays from the 1930s and the early 1940s, while depicting the immoral, foolish and often absurd actions of his main characters, Zoshchenko subtly implies the problems of the Soviet society of his times. In “Crime and Punishment” the characters are all afraid of the unjust and tyrannical justice system; “An Unfortunate Day” implies the failure of the cooperative, while “The Wedding” suggests the failure of marriage as an institution; and “The Roots of Capitalism” clearly deals with the massive failure of the Soviet housing policy. With the imperfect and often harsh society in the backdrop, Zoshchenko’s characters turn out to be “small people” who are struggling to survive in a society that they themselves do not or cannot comprehend.