He was then a sympathizer of the Union of the Russian People and wrote nationalistic and anti-Semitic poetry (later in his life he married a Jewish woman, Esther Brenner (1913-2009)).

His comedy Squaring the Circle (Kvadratura kruga, 1928) satirizes the effect of the housing shortage on two married couples who share a room.

(Vremya, vperyod!, 1932) describes workers' attempts to build the huge steel plant at Magnitogorsk in record time.

"The title...was taken from a poem by Mayakovsky, and its theme is the speeding up of time in the Soviet Union where the historical development of a century must be completed in ten years.

A White Sail Gleams (Beleyet parus odinoky, 1936) treats the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Potemkin uprising from the viewpoint of two Odessa schoolboys.

During the 1950s and 1960s Kataev edited the magazine Yunost (Youth), publishing some of the most promising literary talent of the young generation, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina.

During the second half of the 1960s, Kataev began moving away from official socialist realism, developing his own modernist style, "Mauvism" (from the French word mauvais, "bad").

In it, Kataev weaves scenes from the lives of his family, friends, and lovers, events of Soviet history, and memories of his travels in America into a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography, considered by some critics to be the summary work of his career.

Dodona Kiziria describes this work as "a tribute to the Russian writers who were forced to choose their path during the revolution and the civil war", adding that "in all of Soviet literature it would be difficult to find tragic images comparable to the two poets in this narrative (Bunin and Mayakovsky) who are compelled, finally and irrevocably, either to accept or reject the role offered to them by the new social order".

Returning home one day, a long time ago, I found an envelope with foreign stamps on it in my mail box.

Of the authors writing in Russian, only Nabokov could be considered a worthy rival in his ability to convey with almost cinematic precision the images of visually perceived reality.