Search

Mikhail Zoshchenko spent his literary life playing discourses off against one another. In his early miniatures, the cacophony of peasant brogue, tradesmen's dialects, propaganda cliches and bureaucratese was controlled and masterful. In his longer works, the mixture of scientific style and mundane or satirical anecdote often seemed to take on a life of its own. Nowhere is this more true than in Before Sunrise. Written in 1943, this book explores the author's alleged cure for the debilitating melancholy of his youth in an idiosyncratic mixture of personal narratives and psychological discussion. Convoluted, repetitive and discordant, Before Sunrise tests the boundaries of literary genres as it probes the limits of the subject's psyche. Internal emotions and detached analysis, inward causes and outward effects, enclosed narratives and rambling discussion-a pattern of psychological boundary lines emerges as we step back from this work, a harmony in the cacophony. Although many readers have attempted to dissect the work, looking at the merits and meaning of its component parts, they often overlook the greater significance of the structure and patterns themselves. Upon an alternative, contextualized reading, Before Sunrise appears not to be about melancholy or even about self-understanding, but about consciousness and repression on many levels: personal, social, artistic and political.2