In the book of the famous literary critic, professor at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), a new reading of Zoshchenko's work is developing in the light of his autopsychoanalytic novel "Before Sunrise" and his contemporaries' memories of him. "Zoshchenkovsky character" appears as a kind of portrait of the author himself in, in the words of Gogol, "demoted form from generals to soldiers." Chapters devoted to the cross-cutting motives of Zoshchenkov's prose alternate with the analysis of famous stories in terms of these motives and against the background of the Russian and Western literary traditions.