Slavic Review

Slavic Review INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY OF RUSSIAN, EURASIAN, AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES volume 70 number 2 • summer 2011 CONTRIBUTORS vi ABSTRACTS viii SOVIET JOCULARITY Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Special Section Guest Editor Laughter under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity 247 serguei alex. oushakine The Tramp in a Skirt: Laboring the Radiant Path 256 anna wexler katsnelson Mr. Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak’s Poem 279 yuri leving A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom 307 alexei yurchak ARTICLES “There Is Nothing Funny about It”: Laughing Law at Stalin’s Party Plenum 334 natalia skradol Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy 353 sarah j. young The Tale of Joseph and Zulaykha on the Volga Frontier: The Struggle for Gender, Religious, and National Identity in Imperial and Postrevolutionary Russia 373 agnès kefeli This content downloaded from 128.112.70.26 on Sat, 30 Nov 2013 12:19:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CONTRIBUTORS _________________________________________________________ Rachel F. Brenner is Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of modern Hebrew literature, Department of Hebrew Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications include Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (1997), In- extricably Bonded: Israeli Jewish and Arab Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003), and The Freedom to Write: The Woman-Artist and the World in Ruth Almog’s Fiction (2008, in Hebrew). Her current project focuses on Warsaw Polish writers’ diaristic responses to the Holocaust. Anna Wexler Katsnelson is assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University. Trained as an art historian, her interdisciplinary work focuses on the radical changes in Soviet visual culture between the 1920s and the 1940s, and she is currently completing a book-length manuscript on this subject. Agnès Kefeli is a lecturer in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. She has written articles on the relationship between Christianity and Islam in Russia from the sixteenth century to the present. With funding from the American Association of University Women, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, she has completed a book- length manuscript entitled “Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Apos- tasy, Conversion, and Literacy among Volga Tatars (1865–1917).” Yuri Leving is associate professor and chair of the Department of Rus- sian Studies, Dalhousie University. The author of Vokzal— Garazh— Angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma (2004), Vospitanie optikoi (2010), and Keys to The Gift: A Guide to V. Nabokov’s Novel (2011), Leving has also edited or coedited three other volumes. In addition, he has published more than sixty scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature, served as a commentator on the fi rst authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in fi ve volumes (1999–2001), and was the curator for the exhibition “Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955–2005” in Washington, D.C., celebrating the fi ftieth anniversary of the publication of Lolita. Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Behrman Associate Professor in the Hu- manities in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Prince- ton University. The author of The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Cornell University Press, 2009), he also coedited Travma: Punkty (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), a volume of essays on the social and theoretical implications of traumatic experience. His current projects include an anthology of key texts of the Russian formalists and constructivists and a fi eldwork-based study of postcolonialism in post- Soviet Eurasia. Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011) This content downloaded from 128.112.70.26 on Sat, 30 Nov 2013 12:19:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Natalia Skradol is a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Fo- rum of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She has published on fi lm theory, psychoanalysis, and totalitarian cultures in Life Writing, Film and Philoso- phy, Russian Review, Utopian Studies, Slavonic and East European Review, and other journals. Skradol is currently working on a book-length study of Stalinist humor, as well as on a comparative analysis of representations of the “New Man” in Germany and Russia. Sarah J. Young is a lecturer in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She previously held a Leverhulme early career research fellowship at the University of Notting- ham and an assistant professorship at the University of Toronto. The author of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Read- ing, Narrating, Scripting (2004), Young is also coeditor of Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds (2006). She is currently working on a book-length study of Russian labor camp narratives and on digital visualizations of Rus- sian literature. Alexei Yurchak is associate professor in the Department of Anthro- pology, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), which won the 2007 Vucinich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a book about the peculiar and secretive bio-politico-medical science that emerged in the Soviet Union around the project of continuously preserv- ing Vladimir Lenin’s body. This content downloaded from 128.112.70.26 on Sat, 30 Nov 2013 12:19:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions _________________________________________________ SOVIET JOCULARITY Laughter under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity Serguei Alex. Oushakine What do we need, comrades? We need the broad masses laughing as much as possible. We need laughter so badly, it is enough to make you weep. We need laughter. Thoughtful, serious laughter without the slightest grin. —Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass, A Meeting about Laughter, 1933 Laughter can be different. Yet, such terms as “ours” [nash] and “theirs” [ne nash]—trite as they are—have no diffi culty in fi nding their proper coun- terparts. “Our laughter” and “their laughter” are not mere abstractions. The two are separated by a gulf of different social reasoning [propastЈ raznogo sotsialЈnogo osmysleniia]. —Sergei Eisenstein, The Bolsheviks Are Laughing, 1930s In early 1953, the Leningrad Theatre of the Estrada and the Miniature—a restrained Soviet cousin of The Second City—presented its new show. The ti- tle of the show, borrowed from a poem by Nikolai Karamzin (1766 –1826), sheepishly conveyed the theater’s main concern: “SmeiatЈsia, pravo, ne greshno” (Laughing Is Not a Sin, Really). The dilemma that underlay this apologetic framing was dramatized in the show’s opening routine: an angry viewer stormed from the audience onto the stage and viciously interrogated a surprised actor: —What do you think you are doing? A comedy show? We’ve made such huge progress, we’ve achieved such colossal success, and you are laughing!? —Yes, but we are not focusing on the success, we are focusing on the shortcomings . —This is even worse! We have all these shortcomings to deal with, and you are having fun!1 The mounting tension was followed by comic relief: the angry viewer, quickly removing his wig and mask, revealed himself to be none other Epigraphs taken from Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass, “A Meeting about Laughter,” A Meeting about Laughter: Sketches, Interludes, and Theatrical Parodies, trans. and ed. John Freedman (New York, 1995), 167– 68; Sergei Eizenshtein, “BolЈsheviki smeiutsia. (Mysli o sovetskoi komedii),” Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 1969), 5:82, 83. 1. Elizaveta Uvarova, Arkadii Raikin (Moscow, 1986), 128. Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011) S5588.indb 247 5/2/11 1:00:55 PM This content downloaded from 128.112.70.26 on Sat, 30 Nov 2013 12:21:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 248 Slavic Review than the theater’s leading star, the immensely successful actor and stand- up comedian Arkadii Raikin (1911–1987). Famous for his understated sarcasm and his instantaneous trans- formations on stage, Raikin had created an impressive gallery of nega- tive—yet unmistakably Soviet—characters, including, as a 1960 article in Pravda noted, “bureaucrats, excessive risk avoiders [perestrakhovshchiki], idlers [tuneiadtsy], loafers [bezdelЈniki], philistines [obyvateli], and individu- als indifferent to the nation’s concerns.” 2 For more than half a century, Raikin’s sketches, plays, and fi lms defi ned the standards for Soviet humor and satire.3 His success seemed universal; he became a mandatory item on the program of the offi cial concerts in the Kremlin and performed his routines for every secretary general of the Communist Party, including Iosif Stalin. At the same time, his jokes became a part of contemporary folklore. Although he was no dissident, for many years he kept in his rep- ertoire a sketch written for him by the denounced Mikhail Zoshchenko. He also helped to develop and to popularize the literary talent of Mikhail Zhvanetskii, who would become a key satiric writer of the 1970s–1980s.4 In a sense, Raikin provides an ideal point of entry to this cluster on comic genres under socialism. As both a symbol and a symptom of Soviet laughter, Raikin personifi es the central themes discussed by the contributors to this volume and parallels each of their key fi gures. Like Grigo- rii Aleksandrov, Raikin enjoyed incredible offi cial success. Like Nikolai Lebedev, he suffered from political censorship and cultural pressure and learned how to get his message across without saying much. Like Sergei Kurekhin, he turned himself into a one-man-show, blurring the boundar- ies between different media and contradictory contexts.

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