ABSTRACT
In the 1920s the popular Soviet writer Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko wrote a story called “The Woman Who Could Not Read.” The woman was married to a Soviet official and, although both had come to the city from the country, he had educated himself whereas she remained illiterate. He urged her to learn to read and write and even brought her home a primer. But she protested that studying was for young children and she put the primer away. That was until she discovered a scented envelope in her husband’s jacket, noticed the inordinate attention he was giving to his moustache, and contemplated returning to her peasant village. Ashamed to show the letter to anyone, she asked her husband to teach her to read. After months of studying syllables, words, and sentences, she was able to read the letter that was, as she had suspected, addressed to her husband by a woman. It said:
I am sending you the primer I had promised to get for you. I think that your wife will be able to master the art of reading and writing in two or three months. Do promise, dear man, to make her do it. Talk to her, explain to her how disgraceful it is, in fact, to be an illiterate peasant woman. Just now, preparing for our anniversary, we are liquidating illiteracy over the whole of the Union by every means, and yet somehow we tend to forget our own families. Please promise me to carry this through.
