Volume 27, Number 14 · September 25, 1980
Laughter in the Dark
By V.S. Pritchett
The History of a Town
by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, translated by I.P. Foote
Willem A. Meeuws (Oxford, England), 192 pp., £9
Shchedrin is known to English-speaking readers only by his great novel The Golovlyov Family, the most somber and pitiless instance of black comedy in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Now, in the first English translation of The History of a Town, we see the master of political satire, for which he was best known in his own time.[*] One sees at once that this book gave Zinoviev his model for The Yawning Heights, his uproarious fantasy written at the expense of communism under Stalin and Khrushchev a few years ago; the dissidents take pride in recovering the old Russian tradition. Zinoviev's fabulous lbansk (a double pun which means Ivan's town but also Fucktown)—derives plainly from Shchedrin's farcical history of Glupov or Stupid Town, in which for hundreds of years the bewildered and passive Russian peasants do what they can in a sluggish way to live with the violence and lunacy of their tyrants.
Review, 2161 words
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