Keys to Happiness

Mikhail Zoshchenko is a writer, playwright, screenwriter, and translator. He experienced both incredible popularity and public humiliation, disgrace, poverty, and betrayal. He changed many professions: he was a carpenter, cobbler, police officer, criminal investigator, and screenwriter. But he forever remained a brilliant literateur with an excellent sense of style, a unique combination of irony and lyricism. In his works, he aimed to showcase the history of culture and human relationships, ridiculed philistines and commoners, and believed that a satirist should be a morally pure person. "Revived Youth" and "Before Sunrise" are completely unique prose works in which the author appears as someone looking into the eyes of his soul's pain and trying to overcome it with character strength— a desperate attempt, but beautiful in conception and remarkable in execution. Remembering his childhood, adolescence, and youth, encounters with famous writers and poets (Gorky, Esenin, Mayakovsky, and others), and reflecting on reason in history, Zoshchenko subject his past to intense scrutiny.