Zoshchenko, Mikhkhail Mikhailovich (1895 - 1958) Kirnarskii, Mark Abramovich (1893 - 1942), illustrator	Golubaia kniga., Leningrad, Sovetskii pisatel' 1935., 397, [3]. Hardcover, VERY GOOD., First printing	€1000,00

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8vo (20 cm). Original blue cloth boards; title embossed in dark blue to spine and title. With numerous illustrations (doodles) on end papers and in the text by Zoshchenko. Layout and design by famous Soviet graphic designer M. A. Kirnarskii (1879-1941). Corners scuffed; some soil to boards; front hinge tender; text age-toned. With very rare annotations by former owner, Gunnar Jarring (and owner signature of his wife, Agnes Jarring),a famous Swedish diplomat and scholar of Turkic languages. Part of the print run was issued with a dust jacket. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958) was one of the most significant Soviet writers of the 1920s and 30s, which were characterized by an intense search for a new Soviet literary language. Zoshchenko was particularly renown for his use of skaz, a form of narrative that mimics spontaneous oral or folk speech and often uses dialect. His first work was published in 1922 and Zoshchenko quickly garnered recognition for his distinctive comical narrators, which often resembled simpletons with primitive views and suspect morals. The present work is Zoshchenko's first longer work, a thematically unified set of philosophical novellas that makes light of human flaws and passions. The book was almost immediately subjected to harsh criticism. Moreover, after the infamous resolution of August 14, 1946 by the Central Committee, which condemned the writing of Anna Akhmatova and Zoshchenko for its lack of ideological content and supposed hostility toward Soviet culture, Zoshchenko's works, never published in large print runs, disappeared from the shelves of Soviet bookstores and libraries altogether, becoming subject to confiscation and destruction. Most copies were destroyed by special squads instructed by the censors to remove and destroy the books, often in overnight missions. As related to the cataloger by an eye-witness, a number of copies were saved by former police and Navy cadets who formed the squads. Though Zoshchenko was rehabilitated during Khrushchev's Thaw, his works were not published again until 1956 and continued to be viewed with suspicion by Soviet censors. Due to his extreme popularity in the 1930s and early 1940s, large numbers of his books were read to pieces by his admirers. The book was banned for circulation in public and academic libraries till 1954 (?). From the library of Gunnar Valfrid Jarring and Agnes Jarring. OCLC shows six copies in the US (Princeton, UNC Chapel Hill, NYPL, U of Penn, Johns Hopkins, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), one at Oxford and one in New Zealand.