Zoshchenko paints two different caricatures of “village idiots” in his satirical stories “The Wedding” and “The Earthquake”. Volodka of “The Wedding” fails to recognize his own wife, and proceeds to embrace a young woman who is not, in fact, his wife. He acknowledges that he was, indeed, “a bit hasty” and that he “had never really taken a good look at his bride”. He sees his failures as merely minor errors, mistakes any smart, though confused, young fellow could have made, but her relatives think otherwise. They “ganged up and kicked him out on the staircase” after having already “popped him on the head with a bottle”. Both sides of the argument behave in an uncivilized fashion.

In “The Earthquake”, Snopkov the drunk sleeps through an earthquake, and then proceeds to wander “In nothing but his underpants”. Zoshchenko inserts himself into this story at the very end: “The author is raising his voice energetically against drunkenness. The sting of this literary satire is aimed precisely against drinking and against alcohol”. He, sarcastically, inserts this neat moral at the end of the story, offering a mockingly simple solution to a problem that one “village idiot” deals with. After discussing the classic characters and story lines, Zoshchenko has established a picture of old, rural Russia for the reader.

He offers an image of a more modern Russia as well, challenging our notion of progress. In “Poverty”, “electrification” simply serves to illuminate the narrator’s problems and state of life, rather than ameliorate any issues that he might be dealing with. Zoshchenko establishes the past as more satisfying than the present / future because this “progress” only brings new problems. Using this language to look at our two “village idiots”, I could say that they are both living in a world before “electrification”—a world whose problems are so old and so worn in that they are practically hidden.