This collection is an important resource on the life and work of the Soviet Russian writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1894/5–1958) and on the history of Soviet Russian literature, ideology, and popular culture in the late 1930s. It comprises 43 items, including manuscripts, proofs, and draft notes in Russian, which represent Zoshchenko's own work and his work with the Children's Literature Press (Detizdat) in Leningrad, in 1939–1945, on three series of short stories: “Stories about Lenin” (Rasskazy o Lenine), “Stories for Children” (Rasskazy dlia detei), and “Smart Animals” (Umnye zhivotnye).

Formerly, the collection was part of the personal archive of Dora Borisovna Kolpakova, the legendary editor in chief, in the 1960s–1980s, of the Children's Literature Press (known as Detizdat, then Detgiz, then Detskaia literatura). A piece of Kolpakova's personal correspondence—a letter from the writer Leonid Panteleev—is found among the materials. It is possible that Kolpakova had taken special care to keep some materials separate from the general Detizdat archive in order to preserve the work of writers persecuted by the Bolshevik Party ideologues and Soviet authorities. Such was the case of Mikhail Zoshchenko, who was heavily criticized by the authorities and ostracized by his fellow Soviet writers for “petit bourgeois” bias. Such was also the case of Natal’ia Leonidovna Dilaktorskaia, Soviet Russian children’s writer, poet, and editor who worked on the first (1939) and second (1940, unpublished) editions of Zoshchenko’s “Stories about Lenin.” In the late 1930s, Dilaktorskaia served a sentence in a gulag, and her name as an author was virtually erased from the 1940 edition of the very popular collection of children’s literature “Stories in Pictures” (Rasskazy v kartinkakh).

Today, Zoshchenko’s “Stories about Lenin” may seem ironical and ambivalent—according to scholars, at least 6 of the tales, including “The Story of How Lenin Was Given a Fish,” made it into a popular genre of subversive Soviet anecdotes. However, as the collection materials show, the author himself took the work very seriously. As literary critic Benedikt Sarnov put it, “Everything done by Lenin is shown by the author as a miracle.” According to a legend related by another critic, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zoshchenko’s readers (and censors and critics) were equally serious: Stalin recognized himself in a rude and loud Bolshevik from the story “Lenin and a Guard” and developed a long-lasting grudge against Zoshchenko. The “priests” of the Soviet cult of Lenin disliked the “frivolous” illustrations by the Leningrad artist Nikolai Tyrsa used in the first edition of the collection, so for the second edition, Zoshchenko was compelled to request “official” imagery from the Lenin Museum in Moscow and painstakingly work on captions for these new illustrations.

In addition to reflecting the historical context and cultural meaning of Zoshchenko’s work, the collection’s materials allow a perspective on its technical aspects. They show Zoshchenko’s meticulous approach to his texts, which he reworked and even completely rewrote many times. One example of this is a published fragment of Zoshchenko’s “Smart Animals”—he often used previous editions of his work as a medium for work on new ones (in this way Zoshchenko often revisited his stories 10 or 20 years after their first publication).

Documents of the Zoshchenko collection open a window on various stages of Soviet literary production—writing, editorial work, and book production.

These materials, especially the drafts and edits of “Stories about Lenin,” complement three other—the world’s largest—Zoshchenko archives: fond 501 of the archives of the Pushkin House–Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom–IRLI RAN) in St. Petersburg, fond 601 of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow, and fond 256 of the manuscript division of the Gorky Institute of World Literature (IMLI RAN) in Moscow. The Blavatnik Archive is unique among these institutions in offering full digital access to the entire collection (the Pushkin House offers partial digital access here).