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. 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. 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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Preface to the Fourth Edition
1. Apollo and Tamara
2. People
3. A Terrible Night
4. What the Nightingale Sang
5. A Merry Adventure
6. Lilacs in Bloom
Notes

Mikhail Zoshchenko. Translated by Boris Dralyuk