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In this week’s edition of our Summer Reading Series, Phillip Lopate looks at the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko. During the 1920s, he was one of the most widely read authors in Russia, and his satirical short stories appeared in popular journals. But by the 1930s, he faced increasing pressure from Soviet authorities to conform to the state mandate of “socialist realism,” and in 1943 his autobiographical work Before Sunrise was banned.

Music: music from movie “Hanging Up” by David Hirschfeld, , track “conference call”