Scenes from the Bathhouse

Fülszöveg

Our bathhouses are not so bad. You can wash yourself. Only we have trouble with the tickets. Last Saturday I went to a bathhouse, and they gave me two tickets. One for my linen, the other for my hat and coat. But where is a naked man going to put tickets? No pockets. Look around—all stomach and legs . . .
These uproariously funny stories of Russia's leading but outlawed humorist give a behind-the-scenes look at daily life in the Soviet Union—a country of housing shortages and consumers' goods shortages, of inefficiency and bad roads, of bureaucracy and red tape, whose heroes are often fools, knaves, charlatans, fakers, poseurs.
Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-T958), expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946 and banned from the Russian press as a "literary tramp," "a brainless and pornographic scribbler," is one of the great satirists of the twentieth century. Candid, spontaneous, immediate, his on-the-spot sketches reveal the Chaplinesque world of the Soviet little man who... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Our bathhouses are not so bad. You can wash yourself. Only we have trouble with the tickets. Last Saturday I went to a bathhouse, and they gave me two tickets. One for my linen, the other for my hat and coat. But where is a naked man going to put tickets? No pockets. Look around—all stomach and legs . . .
These uproariously funny stories of Russia's leading but outlawed humorist give a behind-the-scenes look at daily life in the Soviet Union—a country of housing shortages and consumers' goods shortages, of inefficiency and bad roads, of bureaucracy and red tape, whose heroes are often fools, knaves, charlatans, fakers, poseurs.
Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-T958), expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946 and banned from the Russian press as a "literary tramp," "a brainless and pornographic scribbler," is one of the great satirists of the twentieth century. Candid, spontaneous, immediate, his on-the-spot sketches reveal the Chaplinesque world of the Soviet little man who never wins, victim of himself, of history, of nature, or of all three.
Not everyone, certainly, Zoshchenko says, can live in the capitals. Some people, for example, simply live at the station stops. . . . It isn't fidelity or infidelity in marriage that counts, it's the availability of an apartment. . . . Couples set up housekeeping in bathrooms. . . . And bedroom tangles lead only to further bedroom tangles—if one has a bedroom, that is.
These are SCENES FROM THE BATHHOUSE. What kind of bathhouse? The usual kind. Where it costs ten kopecks to get in. Vissza