When most people hear the words “Russian literature”, a cacophony of dour images are conjured up. These images usually involve coldness, unironically classical tragedy, and hefty, dense books that can be dutifully used as a doorstop. Occasionally, an oversized fur hat or two is tossed in for good measure. For instance, a popular American example of this generalization about Russian literature would be the jazz standard, “But Not For Me.” When George and Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, “I've found more clouds of gray / Than any Russian play could guarantee”, they knew many listeners would have this basic generalization in mind. However, Soviet and contemporary Russian literature is a bit more complex and layered than this generalization. Although tragedy and sadness are featured strongly in many notable works of Soviet and Russian literature, the usage of many types of humor (farce, gallows, absurdism etc.) are prominently displayed and relevant to them, as well. Satire, absurdism and humor are exceptionally important to the emotional layers of Soviet and contemporary Russian literature, because they were used as artistic weapons of subversion against the society and politics of their respective eras.
Nevertheless, many literary critics would counterargue that humor isn’t particularly demonstrated or applicable regarding the genre. Critic Maximilian J. Rudwin, wrote in his essay, "The Gloom and Glory of Russian Literature,” that,
“The foreign reader of Russian walks in the Valley of the Shadow. He is overwhelmed by a wealth of woe. He is steeped in doom. Russian literature is a faithful record of the history of Russia. In her literature, hapless and helpless, Russia has recorded her grief and sorrow…Russia’s fiction is the direct outcome of the sufferings of her people…Her literature is sadder and gloomier than that of any other land.” (Rudwin 390)
Scholar Helen Muchnic wrote, in a The Russian Review journal article “The Concept of Tragedy in Russian and Soviet Literature”, that a common characteristic of Russian and Soviet literature is that,
“society plays a villainous role. It is no longer sympathetically alarmed by what is happening to the hero. Petty, malicious and tyrannical, far from allaying the pain of tragedy, it intensifies it, and makes the beholder all the more sympathetic with the protagonist and the more ready to condemn his world.” (Muchnic 29).
What critics like Rudwin and Muchnic are ignoring, is that tragedy and sadness are not the literary totality of Soviet and contemporary Russian literature. Not only does it make the literature seem more one-dimensional than it is, it undermines the emotional layers of the stories and poems, themselves.
Those critics who consider Soviet and Russian literature to be based entirely on doom and gloom are erasing the fact that Russia has a countercultural history of absurdism and humor that influenced other literary movements. One notable example would be the Soviet avant-garde collective, OBERIU (an acronym meaning “The Association for Real Art”). OBERIU was founded in 1926 and lasted, in various forms, to 1930. The founders of OBERIU were the writers Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Igor Bakhterev, and Konstantin Vaginov. According to Graham Roberts, the author of The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction, “many of the artistic devices employed by members of the group prefigured those used by subsequent aesthetic movements, such as the Theatre of the Absurd.” (Roberts 1-2). One such performance put on by OBERIU was “Three Left Hours.” Roberts describes that:
[T]he performance was split into three parts. These were punctuated by bizarre slogans such as 'Poems Aren't Pies' and 'We Aren't Herring’ and followed by a 'dispute' which was led by Vvedensky. During the first 'hour', each group member read out some of his poetry. Each recital was staged differently: while Vaginov read his verse, for example, the ballerina Militsa Popova danced around him; Vvedensky preceded his recital by riding across the stage on a tricycle; Kharms read sitting on top of a cupboard; and Zabolotsky stood next to a large trunk, dressed in an old military jacket and soiled boots (Vaginov and Zabolotsky were apparently the most popular) (Roberts 7).
OBERIU wasn’t merely about tricycles and ballerinas for its own sake. According to Roberts, the manifesto of OBERIU was,
“an artistic avant-garde, profoundly and directly involved in the process of social change…it sought to square the circle between, on the one hand, experimentation in the arts and, on the other, the officially encouraged and increasingly strident calls from Soviet 'proletarian' groups for artists to appeal directly to a mass audience.” (Roberts 8).
OBERIU themselves wrote that, “as far as the arts are concerned the proletariat cannot be satisfied by the aesthetic method of the old schools, that its aesthetic principles go much deeper and undermine old art at its very roots” (Roberts 8).
The absurdism in OBERIU was not only to shake up the mandatory old school convention; they believed that audiences wanted to be vigorously shook up, as well. One writer and poet who believed in the OBERIU manifesto was Daniil Kharms. Kharms, a founder of OBERIU, used biting absurdist humor and symbolism to disrupt literary stylistic convention, and to address social commentary in his work. One such example of this in Kharms’s poem, “Old Ladies Are Flying.” In “Old Ladies Are Flying,” the absurdism is more in the vein of black comedy. The speaker states, “An old lady fell out of the window, because she was too curious” (Kharms 150). The window in the poem also seems to symbolize openness, freedom and connection. The old woman craves this connection in her curiosity.
“Old Ladies Are Flying” isn’t the only work of Russian literature where a window represents openness and freedom. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, when Margarita turns into a witch and flies out of the window, her point of view of the situation exclaims, “Invisible and free! Invisible and free!” (Bulgakov 234). It is hardly coincidental that Bulgakov and Kharms used the symbolism of freedom, because both of them were highly invested in the possibilities that artistic and creative liberties could achieve in life and society. However, things get absurdly worse as the “Old Ladies Are Flying” poem goes on. The next line of the poem states that, “She fell out of the window and was smashed to pieces” (Kharms 150). Metaphorically, either her flawed outlook on life, her personality, or the misfortune of her life itself, causes her to fall straight towards the ground, instead of reaching towards the light shining through the window, which is symbolic of emotional, spiritual, or intellectual enlightenment. As the poem proceeds, things spiral downwards in a ridiculously repetitive matter. The speaker states that
“Another old lady, stared down at the remains of one who was smashed, she stared at them, out of her excessive curiosity, and also fell out of the window, and smashed./ Then the third old lady fell out of the window, then the fourth did, then the fifth” (Kharms 150).
The old ladies have their literal downfall caused by morbid curiosity. Notice how the speaker describes the second old lady of having “excessive curiosity” and that old lady “stared down at the remains of one who was smashed.” Although the first old lady probably met her maker through a form of excessive naivety and a desire for freedom, the old ladies after her have their deaths caused by schadenfreude. This morbid curiosity causes them to fly out of windows faster than the encyclopedia salesmen on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In a way, despite being inanimate, the window reveals to the old ladies their true selves. It also reveals the true self of the speaker of the poem. The penultimate line of the poem “When the sixth old lady fell out of the window, I got bored watching them” (Kharms 150), implies that a violent death is so commonplace in Soviet Russia that it is considered mundane. However, the speaker is more invested in being entertained than in having any empathy for the old ladies. Notice how the speaker describes the dead bodies of the old ladies as being “smashed,” implying that the speaker sees their death in a detached matter, like the way one would describe a broken vase. Henceforth, the window is more an instrument towards the dignity of being the harbinger of the truth than the people themselves.
Another reason that absurdity, satire and humor is important to Soviet and contemporary Russian literature is that it can serve as a loophole around censorship. Censorship was a major part of Soviet Russia state politics. Strict censorship was especially omnipresent towards works of literature and the literary figures, themselves. According to Aleksandra Kudelina, in her seminar paper, “The Master & Margarita and Freedom of Censorship”,
“[T]he Communist Party passed a doctrine of the so called “Socialist Realism” which, in contrast to the “critical” Realism of the 19th century, was meant to shape from the Soviet society a community of obedient and similarly thinking people. In 1934, the Soviet Writers Union passed the bylaws which officially reaffirmed the instructive mission of literature by obligating the writers to educate the masses in the spirit of socialism... The system was urging the writers to depict “positive” characters and heroes of socialist construction. Control was emphatically converging into domination” (Kudelina 7).
Therefore, any literary work that didn’t toe the party line would be either censored, banned, or, in the worst-case scenario, the author would be severely punished. For instance, the previously mentioned Daniil Kharms was banned and arrested on a variety of bizarre grounds. In 1931, he was arrested for, essentially, being “too weird” to write for children’s stories. During his interrogation, Kharms confessed that he was creating “significant damage to the cause of forming the rising Soviet generation” by seducing it away from “contemporary concrete reality” (Cummings). In 1938, Kharms was arrested, again, for writing a poem about a man going out for cigarettes and disappearing (the term “disappearing” was a euphemism for imprisonment). In 1941, Kharms’s final arrest was for being a counterrevolutionary defeatist. He died of starvation in a prison psychiatric ward (Cummings).
The politics of Soviet era Russia had an oddly complicated relationship with satire. In 1930, (which was the Stalinist era of Russia), there was the formation of the Commission for the Study of Satirical Genres in Art and Literature. It was headed by A.V. Lunacharskii, who was the first Soviet Commissar for Enlightenment (Waterlow 202). According to the journal article "Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union”,
“Lunacharskii believed the Revolution had to be defended against its banished but still undefeated class enemies, and that the weapon with which to ‘disinfect’ society of those remnants was laughter…Others believed, however, that in a socialist country class struggle had already ended, so there was no longer any need for the ‘weapon’ of satire…its continued existence could only cause harmful fractures within an ideal society…Advocating the abolition of satire, the critic V.I. Blium argued strongly that while there remained prerevolutionary elements in society to be fought, ‘ludic’ methods (satire) should be jettisoned in favour of more ‘serious’ or ‘realistic’ options, to be pursued in the press, trades unions, and social organizations. The increasingly censored author Mikhail Bulgakov summarized Blium’s influential views in a frustrated letter to the Soviet leadership thus: ‘ANY SATIRIST IN THE USSR IS TRYING TO UNDERMINE THE SOVIET SYSTEM’. Despite the capitals, Bulgakov was hardly exaggerating” (Waterlow 203).
It was during the Soviet era of heightened censorship that many writers used elements of absurdity and surrealism in their literature, as a possible loophole around state-controlled censorship. Although Bulgakov never published his iconic novel The Master and Margarita during his lifetime, the novel is a well-known example of this. Bulgakov’s novel satirizes many subjects, such as religion, atheism, literary pretensions, exclusive clubs, Soviet politics, and the occult. Even A.V. Lunacharskii was likely parodied, as the Prokhor Petrovich character. Both men were the heads of entertainment related Commissions, (Petrovich was the head of the Commission on Spectacles and Entertainment of the Lighter) and both men took their merriment adjacent jobs quite seriously. All these subjects were extremely taboo topics in Stalinist era Russia. For Soviet literary figures, this type of literature was written “for the drawer.” However, according to the Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes journal article, “The Evolution of The Master and Margarita: Text, Context, Intertext,” there is textual evidence that Bulgakov thought that he had a wildcard chance that he could get The Master and Margarita published at one moment in his life. “[I]t is an established fact that sometime in September-October 1937 Bulgakov decided to go ahead with finalizing the novel and to submit the final typescript to "the higher-ups" {naverkh) in the early spring” (Elbaum 65). Since the plot and tone of The Master and Margarita is aesthetically veiled in a fantastical surreal atmosphere, it seems that Bulgakov thought that he might get away with it by cleverly disguising his soviet satire as a twisted fairy tale. A reader could interpret The Master and Margarita as a straight up phantasmagorical fever dream, but one could also read between the lines of the story. For instance, when the Master tells Woland that he burned his cherished manuscript in the stove, Woland slyly replies, “that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn” (Bulgakov 287). Perhaps, for some readers, this scene could be interpreted as a convenient plot device of prestidigitation. For many Soviet intellectuals, however, Woland’s line became proverbial, for a few reasons. One reason was that even when manuscripts or texts were destroyed by the state, the ideas, concepts and memories of them could remain within people’s thoughts, dreams and memories. According to Lesley Milne in her book, Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture, the “credo that true art is imperishable mirrors Bulgakov’s faith in his own novel, which did indeed prove unpublishable in its time but was preserved for posterity” (Milne 87). Another example of a fantasy scene in The Master and Margarita serving as a loophole from censorship was the entirety of the chapter “Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream,” which was a “rendering of the operation of secret police within society, which also suggests the ‘theater’ of Stalin’s trumped up ‘show trials’ of the later thirties” (The Master and Margarita Notes 405).
Bulgakov also parodied Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama, Faust, as way to lampoon the society of Soviet Russia. There are plenty of clues throughout The Master and Margarita that Bulgakov is parodying Faust though the lens of Soviet Russia. On the very first page of The Master and Margarita, Bulgarov makes the connection to Faust to his novel in a matter that is, explicitly, blunter than an overused, rusty hammer. In the epigraph of the novel, it states, “‘…who are you, then?’ ‘I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good’” (The Master and Margarita xxxi). According to Pevear and Volokhonsky’s notes, “The epigraph comes from the scene entitled, ‘Faust’s Study’, in the first part of the drama Faust. The question is asked by Faust; the answer comes from the demon Mephistopheles” (The Master and Margarita Notes 397). By putting this quote front and center on his novel (literally), Bulgarov is deliberately acknowledging that Faustian tropes will be a consistent thread in his novel. The theme of questioning the identity of a mysterious stranger from the Faust quote in the epigraph also parallels the strange first meeting between Professor Woland, journal editor Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, and poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who writes under the pseudonym of “Homeless”, at Patriarch’s Ponds. Berlioz thinks to himself, “he’s a most peculiar specimen…but excuse me, who is he then?” (Bulgakov 10). Woland’s very name alone is a pun on Faust. According to the notes, “[i]n his drama, Goethe once refers to the devil as ‘Junker Woland’” (The Master and Margarita Notes 403). While this curiosity about Woland’s identity is going on, he has an accessory with him that has an overt reference to Faust. It states that, “under his arm he carried a stick with a black knob shaped like a poodle’s head” (Bulgakov 6). The notes state that “In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles first gets to Faust by taking the form of a black poodle” (The Master and Margarita Notes 398). The irony of this is that Mephistopheles took the form of a black poodle to disguise himself as the devil. Woland practically flaunts an accessory that hints that he is the devil, but both men are so paranoid whether he is a “foreigner” or not, that neither of them figures this out. Berlioz’s and Homeless’s bumbling fixation on Woland’s “foreign” airs is a form of mockery at how “[f]oreigners aroused both curiosity and suspicion in Soviet Russia, representing both the glamour of ‘abroad’ and the possibility of espionage” (The Master and Margarita Notes 398).
Parodies can exaggerate the most distinct, core characteristics of their subject and give them a twist for the sake of drama. This certainly applies to the character of Woland. Woland’s actions are Bulgakov’s “what if…” scenario: the scenario being, “what would happen if Mephistopheles ended up in 20th century Russia?” In Bulgakov’s interpretation, he preys upon people’s desires. For instance, Mephistopheles promised Faust that he would give him the intellectual inside baseball of possessing infinite knowledge. He preyed upon the professorial nature of Faust’s individualistic and restless need for more wisdom. After spending a little time in 20th century Russia, Woland figured out that people want to be connected to power by association and by money. Notable examples of this are in the chapter, “Black Magic and Its Exposure”, when Woland and his cronies make money fall from the ceiling and place luxury items on a stage, sending the members of the audience into a frenzy. In Bulgakov’s Moscow, knowledge isn’t really tempting, but power is. Heck, in the environment of the Stalinist era of the secret police, knowledge could even be considered a dangerous thing to have. By bragging about knowing Jesus Christ personally, having breakfast with Immanuel Kant (who was long dead when the novel took place), accurately predicting accidental deaths by sunflower seed oil, putting on magic shows, and turning his assistant into a giant black cat, Woland is essentially claiming to everyone that he is baseball and the whole world is his own Yankee stadium. Woland’s own knowledge about these things are eerily omnipresent, which is highly reminiscent in nature of the secret police. Hence, the knowledge he does have is used for power plays over the people of Moscow. Power can be emotionally charged, as well. Even the Master is intrigued by Woland, because he has the power to deliver the him the much craved the promise of literary and artistic freedom. Margarita gets wrapped up with Woland’s powers, because she has a fiercely determined love for the Master. This is how Woland lures people into his manipulations, which is what Mephistopheles did to Faust, in a different matter.
The usage of humor in Russian literature as a vehicle for social and political commentary is not only a product of the Soviet era, because there are many examples of contemporary Russian literature having an embarrassment of riches regarding the abundance of political satire. Contemporary Russian political satire is demonstrated in Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra, Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. When Pelevin wrote Omon Ra, he was interested in satirizing the intense nationalism around the space race during the Cold War. In an interview with BOMB magazine, Pelevin stated that Omon Ra is,
“a novel about coming of age in a world that is absurd and scary. My part of the scary world was Russia, so I wrote a book where the space quest—a metaphor of the entire Soviet myth—became a background.” (Kropywiansky).
Omon Ra is filled with outrageous situations that repeatedly occur in the name for the Soviet myth; nationalism for the “Motherland.” The archetype of this nationalism is the figure of “The New Soviet Man.” According to the American Sociological Association conference paper, “Soviet New Man vs. Homo Sovieticus: Multiple Masculinities in Soviet Political Humor”,
“The New Soviet Man excelled at everything he set his efforts toward, particularly the realization and sustenance of communism. This archetype was presented in Soviet propaganda as an ideal towards which all Soviet men should strive” (Soviet New Man…1).
The striving to become “The New Soviet Man” is lampooned in Omon Ra, in situations ranging from the absurd (such as Omon wearing “special hydrocompensatory tampons” (Pelevin 137) up his nose and pedaling a moonwalking contraption in a metro tunnel) to the extremely destructive (the amputation procedures of the cosmonauts in training).
Since Pelevin was satirizing the metaphors of Soviet myths in Omon Ra, some of the more surreal situations are inspired by actual historical and political figures in Soviet history. This places Omon Ra under the umbrella of political satire. For example, in one scene, Omon sees a,
“very old husky, her eyes were completely red, but what startled me was not her eyes but the small light green uniform top covering her upper body, with the shoulder patches of major-general and two Orders of Lenin on the breast. ‘Meet Comrade Laika,’ said the mission chief catching my stare. ‘She's the first Soviet cosmonaut. By the way, her parents are our colleagues. Worked in the Organs in the North.’ Mission chief produced a small flask of cognac…’She's quite vigorous, isn't she?’ the mission chief said with a smile” (Pelevin 94).
What makes this scene surreal is that Laika, the space dog, had quickly died on November 3, 1957, soon after the launch of Sputnik 2 (George). However, in the bizarrely warped perspective of Soviet space race era propaganda, Laika is not only vigorously alive, old and eerily anthropomorphic; the dog is living her best life, while drinking cognac. This scene is probably making fun of the fact that, “[d]uring and after the flight, the Soviet Union kept up the fiction that Laika survived for several days… Soviet broadcasts claimed that Laika was alive until November 12. The New York Times even reported that she might be saved” (George). Within the Soviet mythos, even Soviet dogs are denied being perceived as anything but mighty, dutiful to the Soviet stat,e and infallible. Notice how even Laika’s parents are working for the space program. Another example in Omon Ra that is inspired by an actual political situation, intertwined with the nationalist archetype of the “The New Soviet Man”, is Pelevin’s literary reworking of the 1973 meeting between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. During this meeting, Brezhnev encouraged Kissinger to go on a boar hunt halfway up a tree (UPI). In Pelevin’s black humor tinged rewriting of the meeting, (which could, perhaps, be considered political fan fiction), the meeting between Kissinger and Brezhnev is centered around a diplomatic bear hunt, for the sake of negotiating a nuclear arms limitation treaty. Amidst this meeting, is Marat Popadya, whose unusual job is to dress up in a bear suit and move around very, very slowly while high ranking party officials shoot at him for sport. After being stabbed by Kissinger, a metal is later attached to Marat’s fake fur. This scene shows that, even with the ridiculous lengths that Popadya goes through to prove himself as “The New Soviet Man,” in death he can’t escape the absurdity of its existence.
In Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, the political satire is centered on the theme of the cult of personality. In The Slynx, the cult of personality is centered on Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, the Greatest Murza, Long May He Live. Kuzmich begins his public announcements with hilarious hyperbolic declarations, such as, “I am Fyodor Kuzmich, Glory to Me, the Greatest Murza, Long May I Live, a Seckletary and Academishun and Hero and Captain of the High Seas” (Tolstaya 67) and claims that all books are written by him. In Day of the Oprichnik, the cult of personality is centered around Her Highness (with her sycophantic court members) and the Oprichniks themselves. In old Russian, the word oprichnik means "a special one" (Doerry and Schepp). The caricaturization of the bombastic and ubiquitous nature of their images and personalities in the elaborate absurdist world building of the novels strongly resembles the cult of personality surrounding Soviet era leaders like Lenin, Stalin, etc. However, they are parodying and linking the Soviet past to comment on contemporary Russia. In interviews with Tolstaya and Sorokin, they have both stated that this was intentional. Sorokin said that Day of the Oprichnik is “a book about the present. Unfortunately, the only way one can describe it is by using the tools of satire. We still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible.” (Doerry and Schepp). In an interview with the New York Times, Tolstaya stated that,
“It always comes down to patterns…when they invented fingerprinting, criminals tried to remove their prints by burning them or cutting them off. Yet they always grew back. If there is a pattern, it will come back -- maybe in Russia more than anywhere else, because it has collapsed so many times” (Bohlen).
This concept of a repeated pattern quite noticeable regarding Benedikt’s father-in-law, Kudeyar Kudeyarich. After Kudeyarich sacks Fyodor Kuzmich, his reign and ego become just as bad as Kuzmich’s was.
The satirizing of the cult of personality is not only limited to political figures in Soviet and contemporary Russian literature, but also to the iconic author Alexander Pushkin. In Russian history, this worship and admiration for Pushkin is linked to nationalist culture. According to the book, Greetings, Pushkin! : Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard, the
“literary language is exemplified in canonical works, especially those of its first true master—the national bard. Acquiring this grocery list of literary artifacts proves that a given national culture is “great”—that is, autonomous, sovereign, steeped in tradition, and vital enough to renew itself for all time” (Brooks).
Henceforth, in this type of rhetoric, the talent of Pushkin, the national bard, is representative of the whole nation. This portrayal of Pushkin sees him as a dashing romantic figure who possessed an almost towering, godlike talent. Nikita Ivanich in The Slynx sees Pushkin this way. Nikita exclaims “[h]e knew everything! Pushkin is our be all and end all-the starry sky above and the law in our heart!” (Tolstaya 149-50). Nikita loves Pushkin so much that he affectionately carves a wooden statue of him. He views and creates his Pushkin stature as a literal icon. The religiosity that Nikita Ivanich feels towards the Pushkin statue is highlighted when he refers to the statue as “modest altar” (Tolstaya 149). Pushkin is portrayed as a symbol of boldness. The Pushkin statue is described as standing “there like a bush at night, a rebellious and angry spirit” (Tolstaya 164). The cult of Pushkin as a romantic figure of rebellion can curiously also veer into an extreme form of cultural nostalgia. For example, when one of the Oldener Stokers shouts “there’s some memory of our glorious past! With hope for the future! We’ll restore everything, everything, and we’ll start with the small things! It’s a whole layer of our history! Pushkin was here!” (Tolstaya 247), Pushkin is more than a writer to him. He is a symbol of a previous era (before the Blast), that the Oldeners are nostalgic and wishful for.
Another portrayal of Pushkin sees him as a sacred cow whose reputation is ripe for satire. This portrayal of Pushkin as source of literary lampoonery is seen in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The portrayal of Pushkin as a symbol of parody and kitsch is represented in the part of the novel when the actors read Pushkin’s poem “The Covetous Knight” in The Master and Margarita. By featuring the line, “As a young scapegoat awaits a tryst with some sly strumpet” (Bulgakov 164), Bulgakov making fun of some of the most ridiculous lines that Pushkin had ever written. The reading of the poem moves into a form of kitsch, because the intense sincerity of actors reading it have an unawareness of the absurdity of it (imagine saying the word “strumpet” with a straight face.) Bulgakov also satirizes the nature of Pushkin’s ubiquitous celebrity and hero worship of him by writing “Nikanor Ivanovich had been completely ignorant of the poet Pushkin’s works, but the man himself he knew perfectly well and several times a day used to say phrases like: ‘And who’s going to pay the rent—Pushkin?’’ (Bulgakov 164). When Bulgakov is making fun of kitsch, he is also making fun of a central style of Soviet era culture. According to the Dissent journal, Soviet kitsch “functions by offering a sanitized view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Stalinist kitsch banishes irony by taking seriously its pantomime of aesthetic representation” (Rabinbach). Therefore, making fun of the mannequin smile hollowness of kitsch in Russian literature is an act of challenging the cultural status quo.
In closing, satire, parody, and absurdism in Soviet and contemporary Russian literature is more than a form of amusement to tickle the reader. Although it has evolved and changed over the decades, humor in Soviet and Russian literature has an integral cultural and political history within it that critically shouldn’t be ignored. Soviet and Contemporary Russian humor in literature should be critically more recognized because it shines a light on the politics, censorship, history, and culture of Russia.
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