Word: kataev
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Dates: during 1929-1929
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...EMBEZZLERS-Valentine Kataev-Dial...
...Russians may not be essentially a jolly race, but somewhere about their bearded persons lurks a kind of laughing madness. If you thought them gloomy, morbid, humorless, you should have read Chekhov or Gogol's Dead Souls. Rather than go to the library for an old book, read Kataev's The Embezzlers...
Humor and passion do not go together. The revolutionary passion in Russia, cooling, is beginning to allow such fermentation as The Embezzlers. In an oblique manner Comrade Kataev makes fun of Soviet officialdom, hints that a hot time in the old town may still be had, and at government expense. But chiefly he reassures us that the Russian has not lost his old talent of being able to laugh at himself. The Embezzlers, neither Communist nor anti-Communist propaganda, is funny, and true to more than Russian life...