A summary of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s "A Tale of Reason"

Mikhail Zoshchenko’s autobiographical and nonfiction work, written in 1943, explores the nature of human phobias and the possibilities of overcoming them through consciousness. This book is a direct continuation of the author’s research into human psychoneurological health. It concludes the writer’s famous autobiographical trilogy, which also includes "Regained Youth" (1933) and "The Blue Book" (1935).

Searching for the causes of mental anxiety and the symbolism of dreams

The author recounts his years-long struggle with severe melancholy, depression, and inexplicable night terrors that haunted him since his youth. Beggars regularly visited him in his nightmares, evoking a sense of terror. Seeking to understand the nature of these experiences, the writer turns to his own memoirs and notebooks.

He first recalls an incident from when he was three, when his mother playfully handed him over to a beggar. Later, a dream about the elderly artist Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov brings the author back to that childhood episode. After his father’s death, his mother brought little Misha to Chistyakov to ask for a pension. The long wait in the hallway and the official’s coldness made the child feel like a beggar.

Analyzing the atmosphere of a bygone world, the author evokes scenes from pre-revolutionary life: bored crowds on Sestroretsky Beach, a refined drawing room with a decadent poet evicting a poor relative, and seasonal workers waiting hours to be paid by a wealthy landlord. The story of the poet Alexander Tinyakov (A. T-v) occupies a special place. Until 1912, he wrote refined poetry, but after the revolutionary events, he turned into a cynical beggar on Liteiny Prospekt, collecting money with the phrase, "Give a handout to the former poet."

The author gradually breaks down the image of the beggar into its elemental components. The beggar extends a hand that takes or takes away. In the unconscious, this very outstretched hand became a symbol of threat and deprivation. In reality, this fear manifested itself in an obsessive desire to lock all doors with bolts and hooks.

Childhood trauma and the formation of conditioned reflexes

Dream research yields new symbolic images. Tigers appear in the author’s rooms, exuding hot breath and emitting thunderous roars. Similar to the beggar, the tiger represents a predator that attacks, tears, and devours its prey.

Comparing the facts, the writer discovers four conditioned stimuli that shaped his psychoneurosis: water, a hand, a chest, and a blow (thunder or a gunshot). At the age of two, the author underwent emergency surgery without anesthesia due to the onset of blood poisoning. A 3-cm-long scar remained on his body. The surgeon’s hand, holding a gleaming knife, remained imprinted in his subconscious like the paw of a predatory beast.

The second source of trauma is related to feeding. His mother weaned him only at two years and two months, smearing his nipple with quinine, which led him to associate food with poison. These fears were compounded by a severe summer thunderstorm: a lightning strike killed a cow in the yard, and the mother fainted in fright and dropped the baby, injuring his arm. In the child’s sensitive psyche, the touch of his mother’s breast became inexorably associated with thunder and catastrophe.

Adult life recreated these infantile scenes. The mere touch of food triggered cramps and nausea, forcing him to take medication or refuse food altogether. The image of a woman, associated with a mother’s breast, triggered a defensive reflex: the author strove for love and simultaneously fled from it, expecting retribution in the form of a gunshot, illness, or death. Heart attacks in the regiment after a bombing raid or in Tuapse during a thunderstorm served as a neurotic defense, allowing him to flee a dangerous situation.

Physiology versus psychoanalysis

The author openly debates the teachings of Sigmund Freud, who reduced all neuroses to sexual desires and the Oedipus complex. The writer draws on Ivan Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes and higher nervous activity. The basis of childhood psychoneurosis lies in the instinct for self-preservation, in the fear of losing nourishment and dying, and not in erotic impulses.

Beyond the threshold of consciousness, the lower level of the brain thinks not in words, but in simple images. A child’s mental development elevated these primitive childhood fears into complex symbolism. The adult brain selected logical arguments after the fact, strengthening faulty temporary neural connections. Reaching their peak by 35–40 years, these arguments isolate a person from real life.

The healing method involves illuminating subconscious phobias with the light of reason and logic. By understanding the language of his own unconscious, the author broke the false, conventional connections between disasters and unharmed objects. After understanding the true causes, the fears subsided, and appetite, joy in life, and physical health returned.

The author applied his successful analysis experience to conversations with others. The power of conditioned reflexes is illustrated by stories from acquaintances:

• The young woman suffered from pathological complications during pregnancy until she realized their connection with the fear she experienced at the age of 17 about her hidden first pregnancy.
• A young man was cured of severe gastric neurosis when he remembered how, as an infant, he almost suffocated at his mother’s breast.
• A student who bruised her knee suddenly recovered from her limp when she realized the joint condition had been protecting her from romantic infatuation.
• A circus performer who fell into a net three times removed the net immediately after the performance and performed the act cleanly, breaking the connection between the dome and the failure.

Historical examples and medical misdiagnoses

In the wartime year of 1943, the author wrote his book to defend human consciousness from Nazi ideology, which glorified barbarism and the cult of the wild beast. Analyzing the bioclinical cases of great people, the author proves that their severe melancholy was caused not by mental work, but by unconscious functional disorders.

Edgar Allan Poe suffered traumas from childhood: he lost his parents at age two, nearly drowned in a pond at age five, and made two arduous ocean voyages. Due to a fear of water and an unconscious fear of women, the writer drowned his melancholy with alcohol.

Nikolai Gogol suffered from unexplained seizures from the age of five. His fear of women and secret flight from his mother were combined with a pathological fear of his bed — he preferred to nap in a chair. At the end of his life, Gogol starved himself to death, attributing his refusal to eat to stomach cramps and a fear of repeating his father’s fate.

Nikolai Nekrasov’s autopsy revealed a completely healthy liver, despite years of treatment for liver disease. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin had no brain tumors, despite severe seizures and eye pain. Honoré de Balzac died at age 50 from an asthma attack during his wedding, reacting defensively to his intimacy with Evelina Hanska.

Victory of consciousness over the fear of death, suffering and old age

Reason can overcome the primal terror of death. The unconscious mind fails to understand the essence of death, giving rise to absurd suicides or panicked flight. Examples of conscious fearlessness include the heroic deeds of soldiers, as well as the calm deaths of Mikhail Lomonosov, Alexander Suvorov, Leo Tolstoy, and Ilya Repin. A calm attitude is formed by the habit of seeing death as a natural end.

The author fully endorses Maxim Gorky’s idea from his personal letter about the need to eradicate suffering and ridicule professional sufferers. Suffering is the shame of the world, and it cannot be tolerated.

The problem of aging is also controllable. Interacting with vigorous elderly people, including Bernard Shaw and Philip Cohn, the author concludes that aging is accelerated by fears and withdrawal from activity. Freeing the brain from false anxieties preserves freshness of feeling and a clear mind until the end of life.

In the epilogue and afterword, dated October 1943, the author summarizes eight years of work on the book. Overcoming his neurosis restored his creative powers. To the sound of fireworks celebrating the crossing of the Dnieper, the writer paraphrases an ancient poem, asserting that the most beautiful things in the world are sunlight, art, and reason.