Summary Michel Sinyagin MM Zoshchenko
Mikhail Zoschenko
Michel Sinyagin
Michael Sinyagin was born in 1887. For the imperialist war, he did not fall due to the infringement of the hernia. He writes poems in the spirit of the symbolists, decadents and aesthetic, walking with a flower in his buttonhole and a stack in his hand. He lives near Pskov, in the estate “Calm,” in the company of his mother and aunt. The estate is soon selected, as the revolution begins, but the small house of Michel, his mother and aunt still remains.
Here, in Pskov, in 1919, he met Simochka M., whose father had died two years before, leaving six daughters in the arms of his mother, an energetic pock-marked widow. Simochka soon became pregnant with Michel (who seemed to be giving herself such seemingly innocent occupations as reading poems and running in the forest), and her mother visited Michel in the evening, demanding to marry her daughter. Simagin refused, and the widow jumped onto the windowsill, threatening the
Simochka asked him for forgiveness for the behavior of his mother, and they were married without any objections from Michel and his relatives. But my aunt was still unhappy with the haste and compulsion of marriage. Michel’s mother, a quiet, inconspicuous woman, died, and her aunt, energetic and hoping for an early return of the estate and in general old times, decides to go to Petersburg. Petersburg, people say, soon must move to Finland or even become a free city in the composition of some state of Northern Europe. On the way, her aunt is robbed, which she tells Michel of her letter.
Meanwhile, Michelle becomes a father. It takes him a short time, but soon he ceases to be interested in the family and decides to go to his aunt in St. Petersburg. She meets him
Isabella Efremovna was created “for an elegant life.” She dreams of leaving with Sinyagin, crossing the Persian border with him and then fleeing to Europe. She plays the guitar, sings romances, spends Michel’s money, and the latter all negligently performs his duties, to which he is deeply disgusted. But he is incapable of anything, he exists on the penniless salary and handouts of his aunt. Soon he was expelled from work, his aunt refuses to support him, and Isabella Efremovna is going to leave him. But here comes salvation: her aunt loses her mind, she is taken to a madhouse, and Sinyagin begins to live her property.
This continues for about a year, and her aunt goes deeper into insanity, but suddenly she is brought home recovered. Michelle tries not to let her into her room, so that she does not see the picture of the complete ruin that he made there. The aunt, however, penetrates into her room and at the sight of the devastation (for Michel managed to live with Isabella Efremovna almost everything) finally shifted her mind.
Isabella Efremovna anyway soon abandoned Michel, because he had no money left, but he could not serve and did not want to serve. So he began to beg, not feeling the depth of his fall, for “the millionaire does not realize that he is a millionaire, and the rat does not realize that she is a rat.” Asking for alms (the fear of such an end, as well as the image of a beggar, was always pursued by Zoshchenko), Sinyagin lives well and even allows himself to eat normally. To give himself an “intelligent look” he invariably carries a canvas bag with him.
But forty-two years old he suddenly realizes the whole horror of his life and decides to return to Pskov, to his wife, whom he had not remembered for six years.
His wife, thinking that he had disappeared in Petrograd, had long ago married another, the chief of the trust, an elderly and pale man. Seeing the desiccated, filthy, hungry Michel, who opens his own gate with tears, his wife began to sob and break her hands, and her second husband decided to take part in Michel. He is fed a hearty meal, and later finds a place in the management of cooperatives, where he works in the last months of his life.
And then he dies of pneumonia “in the hands of his friends and benefactors” – the first wife and her second husband. His grave is cleaned with fresh flowers. With this ironic phrase the author ends his tale about the fall of the intellectual.
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