Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2015 8) 1390-1395 ~ ~ ~ УДК 82.0 Transformation of M. Zoshchenko’s Plots in the Soviet Literature of the Thirties Aleksander I. Kuliapin* Altai State Pedagogical University 55 Molodezhnaia, Barnaul, 656031, Russia Received 23.01.2015, received in revised form 17.02.2015, accepted 28.04.2015 M. Zoshchenko’s stories of the twenties gave rise to a great number of imitations in mass fi ction. <...> Semioffi cial writers of the 1930s also often appealed to Zoshchenko’s stories, trying to transform them so that they match the ideological canons of the Stalin era. <...> Thus, M. Kol’tsov includes a variation on the theme of Zoshchenko’s “Podarok” (“Rasskaz o Podletse”) / “The Gift” (“The Story of the Scoundrel”) in his keynote speech on the problem of Soviet satire at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (1934). <...> At that the conceptual point of Zoshchenko’s story is reduced, a complete story turns into a rough draft for a newspaper feuilleton based on concrete material. <...> Another example of the Soviet-style deconstruction of Zoshchenko’s plot can be found in Kol’tsov’s essay “Three days in a taxi” (1934). “Slight experience” in testing for the Soviet citizens’ honesty is inspired by Zoshchenko’s story “Na Zhivtsa” (“Chestnaia grazhdanka”) / “With Whitebait” (“Honest Citizen”). <...> This serves the evidence of a signifi cant difference in the writers’ views on human nature of the Soviet era. <...> And since the writer was far enough from the Soviet ideology the semioffi cious criticism was given the task to minimize his impact on reading masses by any means. <...> According to a fi gurative expression of one of the critics of the late twenties, Zoshchenko is only able “to chime bad jokes and utter slander on his melancholic triangle” (Ol’shevets, 1994, 151). <...> These spells were apparently aimed not at the readers but mainly at the writer. <...> Transformation of M. Zoshchenko’s Plots in the Soviet Literature of the Thirties The model of Zoshchenko’s texts transformation However, the fi rst who worked at discrediting Zoshchenko was Zoshchenko himself. <...> In the 1930s, when he re-published his stories of the previous decade he quite often spoiled them, trying to adapt them to the realities of the Stalin era <...>