Word: zoshchenko
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...Leningrad, ruled by Politburo Member Andrei Zhdanov, was waging an esthetic purge. Two outstanding literary figures, Poetess Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko (whom many Russians consider their best short story writer since Chekhov), were barred from all Soviet publications for "decadence" and "rotten lack of ideology." The literary magazine Leningrad was suspended and Zvezda condemned for ignoring "the vital foundation of the Soviet system, its political policy" and "spreading a spirit of obsequiousness to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West." With obsequious haste, the Leningrad writers' union voted to abandon "the theory of pure art" and, instead, "train...
...Inber's "Fragments from a Poem on Besieged Leningrad" are frankly wartime propaganda. But like the other pieces in the issue they are not doctrinaire, but literary blocks in the structure of Russian unity and heroism. Tikhonov's poem, "The Hunter," depicts movingly a type national hero, while Mikhail Zoshchenko's "The Scarecrow" is a bitter-satire on the Nazi mentally...