Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1994, Russian writer Victor Erofeyev proclaimed Leonid Dobychin "one of the main heroes of twentieth-century Russian literature." Obscure for many years, Dobychin is now celebrated as a modernist master. His short stories are black-humored slices of life from the early days of the Soviet Union--subtle and tightly constructed miniatures linked by recurring themes and full of ironic juxtaposition, context, allusion, and style. For Dobychin early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland.