Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was a Soviet author and satirist.
Zoshchenko was born in 1895, in St.Petersburg, Russia, according to his 1953 autobiography. His Ukrainian father was an artist and a mosaicist responsible for the exterior decoration of the Suvorov Museum in Saint Petersburg. The future writer attended the Faculty of Law at the Saint Petersburg University, but did not graduate due to financial problems. During World War I Zoshchenko served in the army as a field officer.
Zoshchenko developed a simplified deadpan style of writing which simultaneously made him accessible to „the people” and mocked official demands for accessibility: „I write very compactly. My sentences are short. Accessible to the poor. Maybe that's the reason why I have so many readers.”