Shaped by Zoshchenko's masterful hands-he takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces-Kolenkorov's prose is beautifully mangled, full of stylistic infelicities, overloaded flights of metaphor, tortured cliché, and misused bureaucratese, in the tradition of Gogol.Yet beneath Kolenkorov's intrusive narration and sublime blathering, the stories are genuinely moving. The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, who is anything but a model Soviet author: not only is he still attached to the era of the old regime, he is also, quite simply, not a very good writer. Mikhail Zoshchenko's Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule.
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