Zoshchenko paints two different caricatures of \u201cvillage idiots\u201d in his satirical stories \u201cThe Wedding\u201d and \u201cThe Earthquake\u201d. Volodka of \u201cThe Wedding\u201d 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, \u201ca bit hasty\u201d and that he \u201chad never really taken a good look at his bride\u201d. He sees his failures as merely minor errors, mistakes any smart, though confused, young fellow could have made, but her relatives think otherwise. They \u201cganged up and kicked him out on the staircase\u201d after having already \u201cpopped him on the head with a bottle\u201d. Both sides of the argument behave in an uncivilized fashion.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Earthquake\u201d, Snopkov the drunk sleeps through an earthquake, and then proceeds to wander \u201cIn nothing but his underpants\u201d. Zoshchenko inserts himself into this story at the very end: \u201cThe author is raising his voice energetically against drunkenness. The sting of this literary satire is aimed precisely against drinking and against alcohol\u201d. He, sarcastically, inserts this neat moral at the end of the story, offering a mockingly simple solution to a problem that one \u201cvillage idiot\u201d deals with. After discussing the classic characters and story lines, Zoshchenko has established a picture of old, rural Russia for the reader.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He offers an image of a more modern Russia as well, challenging our notion of progress. In \u201cPoverty\u201d, \u201celectrification\u201d simply serves to illuminate the narrator\u2019s 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 \u201cprogress\u201d only brings new problems. Using this language to look at our two \u201cvillage idiots\u201d, I could say that they are both living in a world before \u201celectrification\u201d\u2014a world whose problems are so old and so worn in that they are practically hidden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zoshchenko paints two different caricatures of \u201cvillage idiots\u201d in his satirical stories \u201cThe Wedding\u201d and \u201cThe Earthquake\u201d. Volodka of \u201cThe Wedding\u201d 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, \u201ca bit hasty\u201d and that he \u201chad never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russian-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/370"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}