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Stalin's reign of terror was not all doom and gloom, much of it was (meant to be) funny! Tracing the development of official humour, satire, and comedy, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol do away with the idea that all humour in the USSR was subversive, instead exploring why laughter was a core component to the survival of the Soviet regime.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Stalinist World of Laughter: The Fate of the Comic in a Tragic Age
- 2: A Killer Wit: Laughter in Stalinist Official Discourse
- 3: The Funny War: Laughing at the Front in WWII
- 4: "One Might Think It Is a Ward in a Madhouse": Late Stalinism, the Early Cold War, and Caricature
- 5: The Gogols and the Shchedrins: Lessons in "Positive Satire"
- 6: The Soviet Bestiary: Genealogy of the Stalinist Fable
- 7: The Merry Adventures of Stalin's Peasants: Kolkhoz Commedia dell'arte
- 8: "A Total Racket": Vaudeville for the New People
- 9: Metalaughter: Populism and the Stalinist Musical Comedy
About the author
Evgeny Dobrenko is Professor of Russian Studies at Ca' Foscari University. He has previously held posts across the, then, Soviet Union, the USA, and the UK, including, among others, the Moscow and Odessa State Universities, Stanford, Amherst, and the University of California. Over his career he has authored, edited and co-edited some 20 books and more than 250 articles and essays on Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture, Stalinism, Socialist Realism, Soviet national literatures, Russian and Soviet film, critical theory, and Soviet cultural history.
Natalia Jonsson-Skradol has published over 20 articles on functions and uses of language in oppressive regimes. Her work has appeared in Slavic Review, Utopian Studies, Slavonic and East European Review, German Quarterly and in other academic publications. She has lived and worked in Israel, Germany, Austria, and the UK.
Summary
Stalin's reign of terror was not all doom and gloom, much of it was (meant to be) funny! Tracing the development of official humour, satire, and comedy, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol do away with the idea that all humour in the USSR was subversive, instead exploring why laughter was a core component to the survival of the Soviet regime.
Additional text
This new volume is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of how Stalin's regime understood, attempted to control, and ultimately wielded humour as a (usually blunt-force) tool to engineer utopia. The authors (Dobrenko,Skradol) place their study in direct opposition to the two principal claims that long permeated both émigré accounts and the historiography.
