The article focuses on what can be called “state laughter.” It analyzes theoretical aspects of laughter appropriated by the state and discusses its origin, nature, and functions, including the political, national, and religious dimensions. It argues that Stalinism not only instrumentalized and incorporated low culture, not only oriented itself at the horizon of expectations of yesterday’s peasants. It also raised the culture and aesthetics of a patriarchal society to the level of state policy, attributed to them ideological weight, aesthetic materiality and social acoustics—it medialized, institutionalized, utilized, historicized, and endlessly reproduced the features traditionally associated with low culture. In other words, Socialist Realism created the legitimizing political subject itself: “the popular masses.” In its radical character such a practice simply cannot be compared to medieval carnival. The article counters Bakhtin's claims that laughter was a tool for liberation by arguing that laughter in Stalinism was a channel and a legitimizing mechanism of violence, prohibitions, and limitations. It was a tool of intimidation. Power, repression, and authority, which gave voice to, and was sanctified by, ‘the carnival world view of’ the “popular” (that is, patriarchal) culture, the culture of yesterday’s semi-urbanized peasants, spoke to them, and for them, in the language of laughter. A regime that does not set itself off from “popular culture” but rather incorporates it and adapts itself to it becomes radically popular. Stalinism and Socialist Realist art were examples of such a model.

Evgeny Dobrenko is Professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author, editor and co-editor of twenty books, including Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics; A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond; Museum of the Revolution: Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History; Political Economy of Socialist Realism; Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories; The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture; Socialist Realist Canon; The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, and more than 300 articles and essays which have been translated into ten languages.

This paper revisits Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s 1913 theatrical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Devils (Besy), Nikolai Stavrogin, and its role in a persistent trend in Dostoevsky reception: the difficulty of reconciling the ecumenical promises of his religious thought and the particularity of his political views. Previous scholarship has examined the radical response to Stavrogin led by Maxim Gorky, who famously protested Stavrogin and questioned the social value of staging Dostoevsky more generally. Soviet critics, following Gorky’s lead, argued that Stavrogin was a misguided project, being too much under the influence of Dostoevsky’s dark satire of revolutionary socialists. By removing the revolutionary portion of the novel and focusing on Stavrogin’s personal tragedy, Nemirovich only created the impression that his adaptation was apolitical. While he did excise the revolutionary drama, he still included a key scene in which Ivan Shatov expounds Stavrogin’s “god-bearer thesis” in great detail, ameliorating its connection to a more stringent Orthodox belief. A close reading of Nemirovich’s published correspondence and the play’s script, held in the Moscow Art Theater’s archive, reveals how Nemirovich’s generally positive portrayal of both characters in this scene and selective editing led to a less conservative and religiously strict presentation of the god-bearer thesis. This paper offers a more complete intellectual-historical context for Nemirovich’s adaptation, which can be seen as a response to the contemporary trend in religious-philosophical circles for Dostoevsky’s religious apoliticism, prominent in the work of Viacheslav Ivanov and Sergei Bulgakov. Stavrogin was more than just an adaptation. By contextualizing the play in its historical moment, it becomes possible to revisit persistent issues in the reception of Dostoevsky’s art, religion, and politics and the temptation to separate them into isolated categories.

Lindsay Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. For the 2020–21 academic year, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Davis Center at Harvard University and an ACLS Fellowship for work on her book manuscript, which is dedicated to Dostoevsky’s afterlife in the political and religious worldviews of Symbolist, liberal, and religious-philosophical thinkers of the Silver Age.

The criticism of Dostoevsky’s last published short story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877), is at times so controversial that it leaves us with the impression that we are dealing not with a single story, but with several different ones. This seems to stem from the fact that the ridiculous man’s dream is routinely viewed as a simple binary opposition to rationalism rather than as an essentially different state of being. I argue that this approach is similar to interpreting the pictorial space of the icon as a binary opposition to the Renaissance linear perspective. Neither the dream nor the icon can be defined in linear three-dimensional terms and, therefore, cannot be treated as a simple inversion of linearity or rationalism. In my opinion, exploring Dostoevsky’s story through the visual art concept of perspective can help us avoid the practice of explicating the ridiculous man’s dream in three-dimensional terms, laying bare its transcendental essence and thus removing the controversy that surrounds the story.

Olga Stuchebrukhov is Associate Professor in the Department of German and Russian at UC Davis. She has published a variety of scholarly articles on different topics, from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, to Dickens, visual arts, and film. In 2006, she published a book, The Nation as Invisible Protagonist in Dickens and Dostoevsky: Uncovering Hidden Social Forces within the Text (Edwin Mellen Press).

Andrey Belyi’s modernist masterpiece Petersburg is a novel of boundaries—between the self and the other, the body and the spirit, and fiction and reality. This paper explores how Belyi employs his anthoposophical beliefs, which play a large role in shaping the symbolism in the novel, to show a world in the process of transfiguration, each character traveling along a spectrum of physicality and ethereality. True to a philosophy of both/and rather than either/or, Belyi uses a variety of states of tangibility of flesh, material, and word to dissolve a system of polarities while paradoxically seeming to reinforce it. Forensic investigation into the origins of symbolism alone cannot elucidate the vortex of meaning that whirls both within and without the pages of Petersburg—one must also navigate the labyrinth of solid, semi-solid, and vaporous symbols in the novel to uncover how exactly to transcend the political, linguistic, and philosophical turmoil detailed on the page. Ultimately, using the materialization of language, Belyi advocates a transcendence of the word itself—a notion that is expressed by the very nature of the novel, which becomes a tool to aid the tangible reader as they navigate the seven spheres of theosophical existence.

Katherine Lane holds an M.A. in Slavic and East European Languages and Culture from The Ohio State University, where her research focused on visual and material culture, and an M.I. from Rutgers University with concentrations on art and area studies librarianship. She lives and works in Philadelphia.

This article places Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s French translations of Pushkin into the context of the transnational culture of the Russian interwar diaspora in Paris as well as Tsvetaeva’s and Nabokov’s own theories and practices of multilingual literary creation. For both authors, recasting Pushkin in French on the occasion of the 1937 centennial of his death served as a challenge to the official Russian Pushkin cult and as a repudiation of the existing French translations. Taking up the transposition of Russia’s most canonical poet into French mirrored Tsvetaeva’s and Nabokov’s own situation as Russian authors stranded in a Francophone environment and confronted with the need or temptation to reinvent themselves in a new language. The translational encounter with Pushkin offers a glimpse of what Tsvetaeva’s and Nabokov’s aborted careers as French authors might have looked like. Nabokov gives us an elegant “French” Pushkin of classical harmony and balance, while Tsvetaeva offers the disruptive spectacle of a “Russian” Pushkin in French amplified though the magnifying lens of her own poetic maximalism. Tsvetaeva saw her French translations as proof of Pushkin’s translatability, and, despite her difficulties in finding an audience, she continued to translate Russian poetry into French even after her return to the Soviet Union. By contrast, Nabokov’s doubts about his French translations as an adequate rendition of the Russian source text reinforced his belief in Pushkin’s untranslatability, ultimately leading him to create a version of Pushkin in English that foresakes any attempt at artistic equivalence.

Adrian Wanner is Liberal Arts Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Baudelaire in Russia (1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (2003), Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (2011) and The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among Russian Poets (2020). In addition he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry of his own translations into German verse.

Mayakovsky’s “Kofta fata” (“The Fop’s Blouse”) presents the well-known myth of mother-earth and father-sky together with a continuation of the myth in which a son castrates his father in order to sleep with his mother (or sister). The poem also pre - sents a ritual: ritual dressing, ritual location, and ritual actions, like throwing smiles as flowers onto the poet’s shirt. The Russian slang term for fellatio, minet, completes the ritual acts of the poem.

Katherine Lahti was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received advanced degrees from Wesleyan and Yale Universities. Her research tends to focus on the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the subject of her dissertation and eight articles about his work. Her recent book The Russian Revival of the Dithyramb: A Modernist Use of Antiquity is about an important trend in Russian culture during the Silver Age. She is also a linguist and edited the volume Ideophones: Between Grammar and Poetry. Her next book will be on ideophones in Russian poetry.

This article offers an archival reconstruction and analysis of Pavel Tchelitchew’s production of Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel at the Berlin State Opera in 1923. In this study in the relation between the literary and visual arts, I read Tchelitchew’s visual world by contextualizing the iconography of his surviving scenic and costume designs with cultural-historical analysis. In the early 1920s, Berlin became a transit zone for travelers between Russia and the West. The political and cultural environment of this so-called Russian Berlin facilitated deliberation for many Russian exiles about whether to emigrate permanently or to return to the Soviet Union. In staging The Golden Cockerel in Berlin, Tchelitchew tapped into the opera’s capacious interpretative possibilities and attempted to communicate a distinct message about the predicament of Russian exiles to his audiences while bridging the Silver Age aesthetic with a more radical avant-garde idiom. Tchelitchew approached The Golden Cockerel in an aesthetic I will describe as “fabulous dissent”; my aim is to decipher his staging as one driven by a distinctly exilic sensibility. I show how Tchelitchew’s staging of this opera links art and ideology and reflects a broader discourse beyond the stage about political and social anxieties concerning the interconnection of power and gender. I conclude by considering transpositions of The Golden Cockerel at the Bolshoi Theater in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.

Roman Utkin is Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. He studies twentieth-century and contemporary Russian literature and visual culture with a special interest in queer histories and poetics. His current book project examines the unique interwar diasporic community known as Russian Berlin. In 2020, he published an article called “Queer Vulnerability and Russian Poetry after the ‘Gay Propaganda’ Law” in The Russian Review as part of the thematic cluster “Illegal Queerness,” which he also edited.

The Bugulma Tales are a series of nine short stories written by Jaroslav Hašek in 1921, a few months after his ignominious return to Prague, the capital of the newly established democratic Czechoslovak Republic, from Russia. A famous prankster of pre-war Prague, Hašek had defected from the Czechoslovak Legions during the World War to join the Red Army, an act that earned the once-popular humorist the reputation of a traitor. At first eschewing requests for information about Soviet Russia, Hašek ultimately responded by publishing quasi-autobiographical stories fictionalizing his time in Russia in a politically-neutral Czech newspaper. I show, however, that Hašek employed just enough recognizable autobiographical material to expose his readers’ curiosity without in fact satisfying. The central character of the Bugulma Tales is named Gašek, the Russian transliteration of Hašek, but he deviates from his authorial model in several significant ways. Gašek’s main antagonist is a rival Red Army commander who displays some of the attributes commonly associated with Hašek, such as drunkenness and unpredictability. The Bugulma Tales were Hašek’s first major publication after his return from Russia and his last important work before he began his masterpiece, The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Švejk in the World War. Two recent English translations of these stories (2018, translated by Charles Kraszewski), and Behind the Lines (2012, translated by Mark Corner) suggest that at last they are being recognized as critical texts in Hašek’s oeuvre.

In my analysis of three exemplary stories from the series, “A Strategic Hitch,” “Potemkin Villages,” and “Before the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Eastern Council,” I first show the importance of improvisation as both a literary technique and a theme. Second, I argue the Bugulma Tales play with authorial representation. Third, I demonstrate how improvisation and authorial representation come together in the stories’ focus on competing forms of authority. In and around the conflict between Gašek and Jerochymov, Hašek weaves a critique of the Red Army as a disorganized and unprincipled institution. The critique, however, is so subtle as to confound readers no matter what their view of Hašek’s character: patriotic republican Czechs would not find an apology or repudiation of Bolshevism, while Czech communists would not find a ringing endorsement of life in Soviet Russia. Ultimately, readers who sought in these texts validation of their moral or political judgment of Hašek were destined for disappointment, as the notoriously enigmatic author uses the stories to reclaim authority for himself.

Abigail Weil (she/her) holds a Master’s from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her dissertation, Man is Indestructible: Legend and Legitimacy in the Worlds of Jaroslav Hašek, was the winner of the Radomír Luža Prize for outstanding work in the field of Austrian and/or Czechoslovak history in the 20th Century. Dr. Weil is a Lecturer in Czech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Language Center.

This article analyzes the dynamics of visual perception in Miron Białoszewski’s prose, with a focus on their philosophical underpinnings and their implications for understanding Białoszewski’s view of the human relation to the world. My initial claim is that Białoszewski’s explorations of visual perception are anchored in a two-world ontology, which distinguishes between the domain of the empirical (the world as it appears to us) and the domain of the extra-human (the world as it is in itself). Perceptual explorations of Białoszewski’s narrator, I argue, often undermine principles guiding habitual ways of seeing and thus disrupt the conceptual framework of experience. These playful experiments open up a possibility of reaching beyond conceptually determined limits of the empirical world—that is, a possibility of reaching toward the domain of the extra-human. Their goal, however, is not to represent the world as it is in itself but rather to foreground its meaningless nature. I argue that this strategy valorizes the domain of the empirical world by making it “artificially authentic.” Expressed in this way, Białoszewski’s model of the human relation to the world rejects the framework of realist epistemology, which is based on the idea that mind-independent reality can be represented; at the same time, it questions the philosophical principles of antirealism, which rejects the very idea of mind-independent reality and emphasizes the inability of human sense-making activities to transcend their own conceptual boundaries.

Łukasz Siciński is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington, where he teaches Polish language, culture, and cinema. His research concentrates on the philosophical aspects of literature and film, with a special focus on epistemology and ethics. He is currently working on a book investigating the epistemological dimension of rubbish in the works of Miron Białoszewski and Tadeusz Różewicz.