The Amusing Disturbance of Soviet Laughter Dennis G
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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Russian Literature LXXIV (2013) I/II www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit INTRODUCTION: THE AMUSING DISTURBANCE OF SOVIET LAUGHTER DENNIS G. IOFFE, SERGUEI A. OUSHAKINE Abstract This paper by the guest editors serves as an introduction to the present special issue of Russian Literature, entitled “Totalitarian Laughter: Images – Sounds – Performers”. It provides an overview of the contributions, which discuss laughter, the comical, humour, irony, parody and related phenomena, and their roles in Soviet cultural life and politics. Keywords: Laughter; Soviet Cultural Life Throughout its history, socialist mass culture actively employed satire, hu- mor, and comedy to foster emotional bonds with its audience. Orchestrated by the state cultural industry, public laughter released social and political tension while maintaining a balance between ignoring and buttressing the institutions of power. In turn, late Soviet irony or the aesthetics of grotesque that evolved “from below” became instrumental in articulating a cultural distance from the values promoted by the socialist state. Despite the hetero- geneity of their impact and scope, these cultures of the comic invariably re- engaged the irrationality and ludicrousness of socialist life. Whether offi- cially approved or censored, totalitarian laughter relativized existing practices 0304-3479/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2013.10.001 2 Dennis G. Ioffe, Serguei A. Oushakine and norms and suggested alternative models for understanding and embody- ing discourses and values of “really existing” socialism. Despite their different content, these jokes of repression shared one common quality: they were made, not found. Moreover, since the early days of its existence, the Soviet government took the “problem of laughter” se- riously. By stimulating perennial intellectual debates about the nature of the comic under socialism and by creating a diverse economic infrastructure (press, radio, theater, cinema, etc.), it produced a material and ideological en- vironment broad enough to accommodate both official and non-official co- medic forms. It is as impossible to imagine the Soviet Union without anek- doty or the ironic art of the stagnation era as it is to imagine it without Sta- linist musicals. Jarring as it might be, the structural and semantic polyphony of Soviet comic practices was also somewhat predictable. As Slavoj Žižek argued over two decades ago, attempting to link laughter with its “liberating, anti- totalitarian force” can be rather misleading: the appeal to the possibility of ironic detachment (and social distancing) is nothing more than the intellec- tualized outcome of a “spaghetti structuralism”: “[I]n contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game.”1 Laughter, in other words, is always already totali- tarian now. And not just now. More than a decade before Žižek’s radical idea of “totalitarian laughter”, Hayden White stressed in his analysis of the European historiography of the 19th century that it was the genre of comedy that consistently structured historical narratives around the theme of recon- ciliation, pushing forward integrative structures and processes.2 Against this intellectual background, the history of comic genres in Soviet Russia can be seen as a paradigmatic example of cultural production that not only incorporated the laughter of alienation (ironic or otherwise) into Soviet culture but also managed to transcode (often inadvertently) potential dissent into reconciliation. This tendency started taking shape at the very inception of Soviet rule. As early as 1920, AnDWROLM /XQDþDUVNLM WKH ILUVW People’s Commissar of the Enlightenment, would take the time to write an article with the programmatic title “We will laugh”: We live in a hungry and cold country that was being torn into pieces only a short time ago. But I often hear laughter, I see smiling faces on the street. [...] This means that our strength (ɫɢɥɚ) has not been depleted; for laughter is a sign of strength. More: laughter is not just a sign of strength; it is strength itself. And it should be channeled in the right direction. [...] Laughter is a sign of victory.3 /XQDþDUVNLM ZDV UDWKHU RSWLPLVWLF DW WKH WLPH ,W ZRXOG WDNH TXLWH D while before Soviet laughter would be channeled properly: as in many other cul- The Amusing Disturbance of Soviet Laughter 3 tural domains of the new Soviet state, it was not very clear which direction was unquestionably “right”. In 1923, .UDVQDMD SHþDW¶ (The Red Press), a leading Bolshevik magazine, published Jakov Šafir’s article, ‘Why Are We Incapable of Laughing?’ LQ DQ RSHQ SROHPLF ZLWK /XQDþDUVNLM 2IIHULQJ D pragmatiFLQWHUSUHWDWLRQRI/XQDþDUVNLM¶VVXJJHVWLRQWKDWODXJKWHULVDVLJQRI strength, Šafir explained that “the most important reason we are unable to laugh is that our press [ɩɟɱɚɬɶ] has not yet discovered its own big theme, its own enemy, which would be worthy of its full attention”.4 This early Soviet attempt to triangulate laughter between strength and the enemy is crucial for understanding the constitutive negativity of Soviet comic genres; yet it would be inaccurate to limit these genres solely to the search for a worthy foe. Responding to Šafir’s article a few months later, Nikolaj Kryneckij high- lighted another important aspect of the production of “red laughter” in post- revolutionary Russia. Explaining the lack of laughter in the proletariat’s vocabulary of expressive means, Kryneckij wrote: War, revolution, hunger, struggle, the degradation of industry, un- employment – the fundamental breakdown [ɥɨɦɤɚ] of everything, hard conditions of existence all around – all that was not entirely conducive to laughter. Even when the worker was able to laugh, it was a brisk, short, harsh, revolutionary laughter. This type of laughter did not find its representation in the press yet, because new forms of laughter were lacking, while the old frames of feuilleton laughter did not fit any- more… We cannot – we have not – learned to write the “funny” [ɫɦɟɲɧɨ].5 The present special issue Totalitarian Laughter: Images – Sounds – Per- formers is an attempt to trace how the Soviet regime and the Soviet people learned to write and behave in a “funny” way. Some articles included in the issue were presented at the conference Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism, which took place at Princeton University on May 8- 9, 2009;6 other contributors joined the project at a later stage. The issue is structured as a collection of thematic clusters, each one emphasizing a par- ticular facet of comic genres under socialism. Along with commenting on each contribution individually, we would like to highlight a few common threads that run throughout the collection. 'UDJDQ.XMXQGåLü¶VHVVD\UHPLQGVXVRI0DU[¶VDVVHUWLRQLQThe 18th Brumaire that history is a repetition of genre. Following Marx – although not without a certain displacement – .XMXQGåLü SRLQWV RXW WKDW WKH ³VHFRQG coming of history as parody is one of the predominant traits of the Soviet revolution of 1917 and the aesthetic practices that it engendered”. Indeed, parody and the parodic emerge as key concepts in this collection. In some articles they are deployed directly, in others they come in disguise: for in- stance, as irony, stiob, or “the carnival mirror”. Yet in all such cases, there is 4 Dennis G. Ioffe, Serguei A. Oushakine a strong emphasis on the double structure – the dual origin, so to speak – of Soviet laughter. Parody by definition is parasitic, grafting itself onto an already existing narrative, visual, or political structure. Yet this secondary and derivative origin of parody should not obfuscate its effect. In her influential studies of irony and parody, Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of parodic irony that addresses “multiple discursive communities” which “cannot be reduced to any single component such as class or gender”.7 Using Bakhtinian genre- theory, Hutcheon suggests that a unique symbiotic (“social, choral”) relation- ship might emerge between the “ironist, the interpreter and the circumstances surrounding the discursive situation” within a cultural context that “allows irony to happen”.8 Thus, the enunciative context in which creative ironic trans-contextualization takes place often results in a “bitextual synthesis” and a “dialectic of autonomy”,9 mirroring the conceptual vocabulary of the Russian formalists in their efforts to theorize the genre. Russian formalists in general and Viktor Šklovskij in particular viewed parodic irony as one of the dominant forces at work in aesthetic transfor- mation. As a powerful tool for putting aesthetics’ “old wine” into new skins, parody was considered capable of breaking down the automatic perception with which we engage old forms via defamiliarization or estrangement (ostranenie). In part, this process was related to the substitution of “high” artistic forms with “lower” ones. According to Šklovskij, the initial impulse of ironic parodization is endowed with a major creative force.10 As Margaret Rose has suggested,11 Šklovskij’s vested interest in parody corresponds to his enduring fascination with contrast, difference, and discontinuity – devices that led him to make use of Broder Christiansen’s “perceptions of difference” (“Differenzempfindungen”).12 A miracle worker, parody resurrects our cognition of the everyday. This process is not only metaphysically Christian but