Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture

by Lesley Milne

Overview

The end of the Cold War brought new opportunities to explore the long tradition and myriad uses of humour through over two centuries of Russian literature and culture. 'Reflective Laughter' is the first book devoted to an overview of this subject. Bringing together contributions from a number of distinguished scholars from Russia, Europe and North America, this volume ranges from the classics of nineteenth-century literature through to the intellectual and popular comedic culture, both state-sponsored and official, of the twentieth-century, taking in journalism, propaganda, scholarly discourse, jokes, films and television. In doing so, it explores how our understanding remains distorted by the polarization of the East and West during the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843311195
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	09/29/2004
Series:	Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lesley Milne is Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, Nottingham University, UK.

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Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture

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By Lesley Milne

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2004 Wimbledon Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-119-5

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Reflective laughter: Aspects of humour in Russian culture

LESLEY MILNE

In his book Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime, Howard Jacob-son makes reference to 'national expectations of comedy', as described by the Russian clown, Slava Polunin. These 'national expectations' are based on Polunin's own experience of audiences and are expressed in artistically sweeping generalisations. In England, for example, humour is declared to be 'intellectual. People like intricacy there.' In France it is 'the fate of the character'. In the USA it is 'the holiday that counts; there they go to the theatre simply to be distracted and to forget', while for the Russians 'compassion is all that matters'. These statements are, of course, all wide open to challenge as 'national characteristics'. It would, however, be true to say that they usefully enumerate a gamut of responses, all of which could be found, in addition to others, in all the 'national traditions' of Europe. They can certainly all be found in the Russian culture of humour in the last two centuries, which is the topic covered by the chapters in this volume. In the first chapter of Seriously Funny, Jacobson had already hinted at aspects of humour that present problems for its reception across different cultures, namely its complexity and its exclusivity, observing that 'nothing is more frequently denied the foreigner than a capacity to understand or make [comedy]'. It is therefore the aim of this book to breach that exclusivity and illuminate that complexity.

The time span of the articles is confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not because humour did not exist in Russia before then, but because it was only in the nineteenth century that it emerged into a culturally sophisticated literature of world stature. Russia did not have its Boccaccio, its Chaucer, its Rabelais or its Shakespeare. Russia was cut off from the European experience of the Renaissance and, until the time of Peter the Great, printing in Russia was a Church monopoly, which inhibited the emergence of a secular literature. What Russia had instead of Rabelais, as the scholars Likhachev and Panchenko pointed out, was a highly developed culture of the 'holy fool' {iurodivyi), whose actions or utterances appeared comically 'foolish' only to those who did not comprehend their inner spiritual significance. This particularity of the Russian historical experience survives in what Jacobson refers to as 'Russia's great tradition of clowns and fools and holy innocents and idiots savants and may underlie Polunin's assertion that for Russians 'compassion is what matters'.

Among the first examples of secular literature in Russia were the so-called 'satirical tales' of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. They gave expression to popular grievances and attitudes and, with their roots in the oral tradition, these tales marked the moment when Russian folklore took on permanent form for the first time. Humour and satire were practised by the writers of the eighteenth -century Russian Enlightenment: the verse satires of Dmitry Kantemir; the fables of Ivan Krylov, with their epigrams and proverbs; the classical comedies of Denis Fonvizin. The first masterpiece of Russian nineteenth-century theatre was a comedy, Aleksandr Griboedov's play in verse, Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), which has its antecedents in the classical French tradition of Molière. Although completed in 1825, it was not passed by the censorship for the stage, and was printed only in part in an almanac. It was, however, the period of literary salons, at which the play was read out by its author to 'all Moscow' and 'all Petersburg'. Written in verse, it is a cascade of aphorisms, and virtually every other line has entered the Russian language. Thus Griboedov's comedy and its reception can be said to exemplify the conditions in which intellectual humour thrives the world over: conviviality, an element of subversion, memorable formulation, and word -of-mouth transmission. The subversive factor of the play lies in the worldview embodied in its hero, Chatsky: he is full of wit, idealism and youthful energy, which are all undirected, except against the selfish banality of the world around him. Thus we have, at the outset, an illustration of a point made by Jacobson: 'Whenever we try to make an art that conforms to our inner world, it becomes protest'. This dictum may in fact provide a key to a specific feature of Russian culture through most of the past two centuries: a particularly acute awareness of the difference between the 'inner world' of the artist and the public world of literature as censored, sponsored, or controlled by the state.

After the Russian Revolution, the reception of Russian humour and satire became heavily politicised. In the field of humorous writing, the enhanced sensitivity to the 'protest' element led to a persistent requirement of all humour that it should be 'serious' in the sense that it could be interpreted as satirical in intent. First émigré, then Western scholarship in general, appreciated and interpreted Russian humour chiefly as a critique of 'the absurdities of the Soviet regime' or its antecedents. Satire was regarded as the higher form, and humour that did not aspire to, or could not be pressed into, this purpose was devalued as 'empty'. Meanwhile, from the point of view of the sponsoring state, a similar elevation of satire over humour occurred. In official Soviet culture, humour was co-opted into the great task of building socialism. Again it was valued only in its satirical function: as a corrective, 'scourging', 'lashing' or otherwise castigating 'relics of the bourgeois past', which were impeding the development of the new, healthy socialist society. This demand was then retrospectively directed at the pre-revolutionary literary legacy. These polarised perceptions meant that whole areas of humour became culturally invisible. With the ending of the Cold War, the way has opened for new approaches: the focus has become much less fixed, widening the range of points for study, and extending the probe beyond the political surface. The aim of the present collection is therefore to present a fresh overview of the role of humour and laughter in the formation of Russian culture and counter-culture.

The title Reflective Laughter has been chosen because of its multiplicity of meanings and combined applications. The word reflective, as a synonym for 'meditative', or 'thoughtful', suggests the engagement of the mind in crafting ironies and paradoxes. Indicating a mirror that gives back an image of an object, it encompasses the idea of parody. The concept of throwing back something that strikes or falls on the surface can refer to the way that art, in this case its comedic forms, reproduces an aspect of the world it inhabits. All these different meanings are operative, in various ways and to differing degrees, in the essays that make up this collection. The collection cannot be complete, for the comedic culture in Russian tradition offers an infinite number of topics and a book can only be so long. But the treatments of the theme on display here offer sample approaches and sample 'sites', allowing readers to fill in the gaps according to their taste and experience.

The book starts with the major authors of the Russian classic literary tradition of the nineteenth-century. In her essay on Pushkin's poetic drama 'The Covetous Knight' Valentina Vetlovskaia analyses the inherent ironies and paradoxes that permeate Pushkin's poem, which Pushkin himself styled a 'tragicomedy'. In Pushkin's poem we have the simultaneous operation of two logics, the comic and the tragic, with the reader recognising the 'gloomy comedy' in this portrait of a war-ring father and son, where 'neither has recognised in the other a trait they have already lost or not yet acquired'. Vetlovskaia demonstrates how Pushkin transposes the traditionally comic theme of 'the miser' into a plot and treatment that reach the heights of tragic grandeur, but still retain a comic essence in the process of unmasking vice. This unmasking occurs not in an explosion of laughter but as a result of intellectual reflection, illustrating Nietzsche's maxim that 'the cleverest authors provoke the least perceptible smiles'.

There is, however, another, very different, aspect of Pushkin's 'cleverness', to which attention should also be drawn. His comic range encompasses what could be called 'the open laugh' or 'the laugh outright', examples of which introduce an element vital to any study of humour, namely the bawdy and erotic. For sheer, unmediated, enjoyment of this aspect of Russian humour, readers are referred to Pushkin's ballad 'Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters', brilliantly translated by Ranjit Bolt in a form that retains the short lines of insistent and ingeniously rhyming couplets. The forty daughters are perfect specimens of enchanting womanhood in all but one respect:

One thing was missing ... 'Is that all?'
I hear you cry. 'Twas, oh, so small —
Scarcely a problem — nonetheless,
For all its negligibleness,
It was still missing ... How the Hell
Am I explicitly to tell
My readers what this one thing was?
I'm not sure if I can because
That pompous, pious, pea-brained dunce
The censor would explode at once ...
Between their legs - oh, dear dear dear!
No, even that is far too clear —
Much too indecent — let me see,
A little more obliquity —
Let's find a more circuitous route
To lead you deftly, gently to't —

How the daughters were each furnished with that crucial 'one thing missing' is spun into a wonderfully absurd tale, wittily told in a parody of the ballad style. 'Tsar Nikita' shows the superabundance of comic poetic energy in Pushkin's 'juvenalia'. As might be expected, it was not published in its time, and, along with his bawdily blasphemous Gabrieliad (a parody of the Annunciation), caused trouble for Pushkin, who destroyed the manuscript. Both poems circulated, however, in numerous copies that were preserved in the private archives of his contemporaries. This is an example of the 'protest' of the 'inner world' of cheerful eroticism that flourishes beneath social veneers and defies the proprieties. The greater the constraints, of course, the greater the delight in defying them. It seems no coincidence that Pushkin's 'Tsar Nikita' was written during the Lenten period of fasting.

The second essay in this collection deals with Gogol, the nineteenth-century Russian master of mystification and the absurd. The paradox of Gogol's art was most famously defined by the author himself in chapter VII of Dead Souls as 'laughter through tears', a definition that was to become almost prescriptive for Russian humour in general (which had the effect of further inhibiting responsiveness to 'empty merriment'). Efim Kurganov, however, approaches from a new perspective, that of Gogol's oral narratives and anecdotes, accounts of which have survived in the reminiscences of contemporaries. Where Pushkin's 'private' humour was bawdy verse, Gogol's was the risqué or indecent tale. As Kurganov shows, other literary luminaries of the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature also took great pleasure in such anecdotes, in particular the scatological. This element of comic degradation reflects the persistence of the motif of excrement in the anthropology of laughter, demonstrated by the frequency of references to it in Jacobson's Seriously Funny. Smut and scatology are present in the great carnivals and festivals of regeneration, or the British tradition of Christmas pantomime, or the performance of a street-theatre puppet-booth, where the audience of adults and children guffaw and shriek with delight at the marvellous impropriety of it all. In these contexts, comic indecency is traditional and expected. The point about Gogol's anecdotes, however, is that they were always told in maximally inappropriate social situations. Efim Kurganov sees here a domestic arena in which the great verbal conjurer could practise his techniques of comic surprise. Where others who tried to tell similar tales would be halted mid-way through, or ostracised afterwards, Gogol always managed to narrate the anecdote to its punch-line, frequently escaping censure altogether. These acts of what Jacobson calls 'social sabotage' are seen by Kurganov as part of the Gogolian mission to expose the falsehoods of society, and also as showing a literary personality at play in social situations, using devices that reflect his literary techniques of ambushing the reader with the comically unexpected.

One of the most brilliant stars in the firmament of nineteenth-century Russian comic literature is the 'writer' 'Kozma Prutkov', invented by A.K. Tolstoi and his cousins, the brothers Aleksei and Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov. Between 1853 and 1863 they published, under this pseudonym, satirical, humorous and nonsense verse and prose. They also furnished Prutkov with a spoof biography, combining two incongruous métiers: Prutkov fancies himself a romantic poet, while being in essence a most loyally conformist civil servant, director of the assay office in the ministry of finance. Prutkov's complacent aphorisms and plodding verse turn banality into a high art form and are an enduring part of the Russian comic treasury. In her chapter on Prutkov's 'ancestry' Marietta Tourian defines her aim as a contribution to the debate as to which of Prutkov's creators was pre-eminent. She suggests that it was A.K. Tolstoi who played the role of initiator and instigator, although the Zhemchizhnikov brothers were the more prolific. In pursuing this precisely defined aim, however, she gives a larger picture, which is a depiction of a literary culture in which pranks, polemics and parodies flourished among the literary elite. This started in the second decade of the nineteenth century, with the literary circle 'Arzamas', of which Pushkin was a member and to which A. K. Tolstoi's uncle belonged. Parody, the aesthetics of nonsense, comic eroticism and bawdy all flourished in the 'group behaviour' of this environment. It is Marietta Tourian's argument that these traditions, cultivated by the uncle, were passed on to the nephew who subsequently became co-creator and prime animator of the splendid Prutkov. Thus the laughter of the literary elite in one generation was reflected in the 'group behaviour' of the next.

The name of Dostoevsky returns us to the realm of the tragi-comic. Known for his 'cruel talent', he none the less had a genius for parody, irony, satire and buffoonery, although never without a tragic colouring. His forte is comic ugliness and comic dissonance, in which the comic and tragic co-exist and interact. The 'purest' example — if one may use such a word — of this intermix is to be found in Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, the supreme literary manifestation of Russia's great tradition of holy innocents. In her essay Natalia Ashimbaeva analyses the two levels of artistic interaction in the Prince's character: the sacred and the practical. The Prince is simultaneously both holy and ridiculous, embodying the principle of Dostoevskian poetics articulated by Bakhtin as the ability to reflect contradictory interrelationships 'in the cross-section of a single moment'.

Whereas there is an extensive literature on comedy in Dostoevsky, readers of Lev Tolstoi would be hard put to it to recall a profusion of comic moments in his works. Natasha's perception of the opera in Part VIII, Chapter IX of War and Peace might qualify, but the reader's smile at this defamiliarised perspective quickly vanishes. The humour is too ruthlessly subordinated to Tolstoi's moral purpose, which is to expose the grotesque falseness of this art form and the society that sustains it. Galina Galagan, however, takes a productively oblique approach, through Tolstoi's reading of a work of literature in which the humorous, ironic strain is dominant. We thus see the reflection of one author's laughter in the (at first sight very different) work of another, the reflection of one book in another author's path of development. The young Tolstoi enthusiastically reads Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, and then incorporates its devices into his own search for an authentic personal morality. The Sternian irony thus takes root on the ground of Tolstoi's own merciless self-analysis. Galagan shows us the moment when Tolstoi, terrified of appearing ridiculous, observes himself looking at himself in the mirror and perceives this itself as ridiculous. The reflective laughter here is ours as we recall our own experience of youth's obsession with its imagined physical imperfections. We also derive an ironic pleasure of self-recognition from the honesty with which youth's vanity is so mercilessly dissected. As Tolstoi said in his diary, 'We know about human weaknesses from ourselves and in order to illustrate them in a believable way it is necessary to express them in oneself Thus his self-irony generates the imaginative generosity of his art, which is always greater than the moral 'purpose' to which he subjugated it.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Notes on Transliteration; Notes on the Contributors; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Tragicomic Principles in Pushkin's Drama 'The Covetous Knight'; 3. Gogol as a Narrator of Anecdotes; 4. Antony Pogorelsky and A.K. Tolstoi: The Origins of Kozma Prutkov; 5. Comedy between the Poles of Humour and Tragedy, Beauty and Ugliness: Prince Myshkin as a Comic Character; 6. The Young Lev Tolstoi and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey: the Test of Irony; 7. Fashioning Life: Teffi and Women's Humour; 8. Two Facets of Comedic Space in Russian Literature of the Modern Period: How Foolishness and Buffoonery; 9. Jokers, Rogues and Innocents: Types of Comic Hero and Author from Bulgakov to Pelevin; 10. Escaping the Past?  Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twentyfirst Century: the Case of Zoshchenko; 11. Evengy Zamiatin: The Art of Irony; 12. Godless at the Machine Tool: Antireligious Humoristic Journals of the 1920s and 1930s; 13. The Singing Masses and the Laughing State in the Musical Comedy of the Stalinist 1930s; 14. The Theory and Practice of  'Scientific Parody' in Early Soviet Russia; 15. Laughing at the Hangman: Humourous Portraits of Stalin; 16. Varieties of Reflexivity in the Russo-Soviet Anekdot; 17. Humour and Satire on Post-Soviet Russian Television

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'Generally speaking, the only thing less funny than humour in translation is humour in translation as explained by a group of scholars. One should make an exception, however, for "Reflective Laughter"…a witty and informative overview [of] a broad and important topic.' —Justin Weir, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

'The diversity of the authors gives the book both representative breadth and a somewhat eclectic character.'  —Harley Balzer, Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs and Associate Faculty Member of the Department of History, Georgetown University