A TRAGIC TRICKSTER 151 the Trickster As the Underground Author 154 Rituals of Expenditure 167 “I Will Not Explain to You Who Were These Four…” 174
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——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— CHARMS OF THE CYNICAL REASON: THE TRICKSTER’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CULTURE — 1 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century Editorial Board: Anthony Anemone (The New School) Robert Bird (The University of Chicago) Eliot Borenstein (New York University) Angela Brintlinger (The Ohio State University) Karen Evans-Romaine (Ohio University) Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University) Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University) Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan) Simon Morrison (Princeton University) Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley) Joan Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin) Ludmila Parts (McGill University) Ethan Pollock (Brown University) Cathy Popkin (Columbia University) Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University) Boris Wolfson (Amherst College), Series Editor — 2 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— CHARMS OF THE CYNICAL REASON: THE TRICKSTER’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CULTURE Mark Lipovetsky Boston 2011 — 3 — A catalog data for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-45-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-618111-35-7 (digital) Effective June 20, 2016, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. Cover image and interior design by Adell Medovoy Author photo by N. Ustinova Published by Academic Studies Press in 2011 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— To the loving and unfading memory of Naum Lazarevich Leiderman (1939-2010), my dear father, a prominent literary scholar, and my ultimate professional mentor. His entire life was a challenge to cynicism. — 5 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— — 6 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 9 INTRODUCTION 11 1. AT THE HEART OF SOVIET CIVILIZATION 25 The Meaning of the Trickster Trope 27 TheTrickster’s Politics 37 The Trickster Trope and the Soviet Subjectivity 42 Cynical or Kynical? 48 2. KHULIO KHURENITO: THE TRICKSTER’S REVOLUTION 61 Modernizing the Trickster 65 The Method: Overidentification 76 Why Did Khurenito Decide to Die? 82 3. OSTAP BENDER: THE KING IS BORN 89 Ostap as Trickster 97 Social Schizophrenia 112 A Kynical King of the Cynics 118 4. BURATINO: THE UTOPIA OF A FREE MARIONETTE 125 Buratino as a Mediator 131 Buratino as an Artist 140 Buratino as a Cynic 145 5. VENICHKA: A TRAGIC TRICKSTER 151 The Trickster as the Underground Author 154 Rituals of Expenditure 167 “I Will Not Explain to You Who Were These Four…” 174 6. TRICKSTERS IN DISGUISE: THE TRICKSTER’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE SOVIET FILM OF THE 1960s–70s 193 “Reformed” Tricksters in the Comedies of the 70s–80s 195 — 7 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Gaidai’s Tricksters 197 Riazanov’s Detochkin 200 Daneliia’s Buzykin 203 The Art of Alibi: Stierlitz as the Soviet Intelligent 210 Who are you working for? 216 The Imperial Mediator 222 Stierlitz’s Afterlife 226 7. SPLITTING THE TRICKSTER: PELEVIN’S SHAPE-SHIFTERS 231 The Society of Shape-Shifters 233 Genealogy of the Heroine 239 A Fairytale about Shape-Shifters 244 The Trickster’s Magic/Politics: A Bifurcation Point 251 Cynic Versus Kynic 257 CONCLUSION 267 WORKS CITED 277 INDEX 289 — 8 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— ACKNOwleDgemeNTS This book would not be possible without generous help of my editors and co-translators Daniil Leiderman, Sean Owens, Josephine von Zitzewitz, and Math Trafton—my gratitude to these talented young colleagues is sincere, profound, and endless. I would also like to thank the Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie Publishing House and specifically its director Irina Prokhorova for the permission to use in chapters 5 and 7 materials previously published in my book Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v k russkoi kul’ture 1920-2000-kh godov (Moscow: NLO, 2008). I am very grateful to Konstantin Bogdanov, Alexander Etkind, Ilya Kukulin and Maria Maiofis, who read early versions of the book’s chapters and shared their excellent ideas and fruitful suggestions with me. Sergei Ushakin has organized a conference on totalitarian laughter in Princeton University, which gave me an exciting opportunity to test my tricksters against sharp minds of the conference’s participants. My gratitude also goes to Marina Balina, Elena Baraban, Evgeny Dobrenko, Helena Goscilo, Caryl Emerson, Ilya Kalinin, Evgenii Kovalev, Catherine Nepomniashchy, Irina Sandomirskaya, Natalia Skradol (please forgive me if I’ve forgotten anybody), as well as to Laura Osterman, Artemi Romanov, and Rimgaila Salys, my colleagues at CU-Boulder, in conversations and e-mail exchanges with whom many ideas for this book were born and formulated for the first time. As usual, I enjoyed criticism most merciless from colleagues who also happen to be my family—Tatiana Mikhailova and again Daniil Leiderman. Support from the University of Colorado’s GCAH, SEED and LEAP grants made possible my research trips to Russia, during which I collected materials for the book. Last but not least, I wish to thank Boris Wolfson who has encouraged me to write this book and Igor Nemirovsky, who patiently waited for its completion and was very kind about my shortcomings. My father, Naum Leiderman, a prominent literary scholar, was teaching me this trade since I was thirteen years old. Many ideas for this — 9 — ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION ——————————————————— book were born in conversations with him and are inspired by his works and ground-breaking ideas. Most importantly, my feel of the Soviet past and its literature is mediated by his vision and perception. He passed away when the book was in the making. I want to believe that he would like this book and dedicate it to his memory. — 10 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— INTRODUCTION The need for this book arose once I became aware of the startling fact that, of the characters who acquired mass—today we would say cult— status in Soviet culture, the vast majority are manifestations of the ancient myth of the trickster. “Trickster” in the studies of myth and in this book as well does not simply mean “deceiver” or “rogue” (the definition of trickster according to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary), but rather “creative idiot,” to use Lewis Hyde’s expression (Hyde 7). This hero unites the qualities of characters who at first sight have little in common—the “selfish buffoon” and the “culture hero”;1 someone whose subversions and transgressions paradoxically amplify the culture-constructing effects of his (and most often it is a “he”) tricks. The list of mythological tricksters includes (to name just a few) Hermes, Prometheus, and Odysseus in Greek mythology; Anansi, Eshu, and Ogo-Yurugu in African folklore and myth; Coyote, Wakdjunkaga, the rabbit Manabozo, or Wiskodyak in North American Indian mythology; Loki of the Norse pantheon, and the Raven in Paleo-Asiatic folklore.2 The image of the Devil in European folklore, as reflected in the novellas and fabliaux of the Renaissance and such works of the age of modernity as by Alain-Réné Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707), Nikolai Gogol’s Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom (The Night Before Christmas, 1829–32) or Dostoevsky’s Brat’ia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1880), also belongs in this group. The trickster is also a typical comic protagonist in literature—it is enough to recollect Renard the Fox from the medieval Roman de Renard, Panurge from François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, Cervantes’s Sancho Panza, Beaumarchais’s Figaro, Gogol’s Khlestakov, 1 On the paradigmatic role of this combination of qualities for the trickster see: Carroll. See also: Meletinsky 1998: 172-176. 2 See Bascom, Basso, Boas, Brown, Gates, Hawley, Meletinsky 1973, Pelton. — 11 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s grifters in The Sting (dir. George Roy Hill, 1977), Steve Martin’s, Michael Caine’s and Glenne Headly’s characters in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (dir. Frank Oz, 1988), Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s Producers, Bart Simpson and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen), as well as such cultural personae as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, or Sacha Baron Cohen—to confirm this self-evident thesis. It is telling that in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno use Odysseus, an archetypal image of the trickster, for their characterization of the “instrumental reason” produced by modernity. They detect the prototype of the modern reason’s main principle—“the adaptation of the ratio to its contrary” (67)—in the trickster’s play with numerous, mutually annihilating, identities: “…the subject Odysseus denies his own identity, which makes him a subject, and himself alive by imitating the amorphous. […] He acknowledges himself to himself by denying himself under the name of Nobody;