Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958), 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.