Most theories of laughter explore its social function, locating humor in the operations of social protest or reconciliation. My focus is on the role of humor and laughter within a given text, in the construction of literary identities. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler is particularly suited to my analysis, first, in depicting a complex narrative persona who must adapt to laughter without comprising his dual identity as a Sentimentalist and a Russian with a national agenda. The Letters exemplify the struggle to reconcile these personae’s sense of the ethic and social functions of laughter with the Sentimentalist aesthetic code. Moreover, unlike the sentimental tale, the travelogue is a genre with its own history of employing laughter as a marker of difference. Thus, Karamzin’s Letters vacillate between the Sentimentalist school’s resistance to laughter and the travelogue’s reliance on it. Through a series of episodes involving laughter, Karamzin works out a certain understanding of laughter’s functions for a traveler, a Sentimentalist, and a Russian.

Lyudmila Parts is Professor of Russian in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University (Montreal). She is the author of In Search of the True Russia. The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse (2018); The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic (2008) and the editor of Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century (with Ingrid Kleespies, 2021) and The Russian Twentieth Century Short Story: A Critical Companion (2009). Her research and teaching interests include post-Soviet culture, genre theory, and cultural representations of nationalism. She has published articles on Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstaya, Petrushevskaya, and Pelevin, on the provincial myth and national identity and, more recently, on the Russian travelogue.

Ivan Turgenev’s ambiguous representation of the supernatural in his novella “Klara Milich” (1883) has long puzzled readers and critics alike. This article proposes a reading of “Klara Milich” as a meta-literary, tragically self-parodic narrative and interprets its perplexing ghostly phenomena as the result of a stymied ambition to force amorphous reality into an ordered and intelligible mold. Just as civilization (as well as art) attempts to freeze and aestheticize reality, the story’s protagonist repeatedly indicates that he perceives Klara as more of a statue than a real woman. The article conducts a close reading of “Klara Milich” in order to show that, while amateur photographer Aratov—a parodic self-portrait of Turgenev—seeks to draw meaning out of the chaos of Klara’s life, his weak will, delicate psyche, and mechanical, dispassionate attempts to capture and reproduce reality cause him to fall short of this fundamentally artistic endeavor. The aesthetic rearrangement of chaotic reality as a means of coming to terms with it is, for the protagonist, no more than an uncritical recreation of its disorder, and yields only meaninglessness and destruction.

Eva Faraghi received her BA in Russian Studies and Music from McGill in 2017 and her MA from the University of Toronto in 2018. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her dissertation focuses on nightmare narratives in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

One of the most curious and fascinating cases in Russian culture of Napoleon veneration and the promotion of the idea of the Great Man is that of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who, among prominent Russian writers, was by far the most captivated by the personality, cult, and deeds of the French emperor, the nineteenth century’s Great Man. In his most enduring work of literary criticism, L. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, published in 1902, Merezhkovsky included several long sections devoted to the portrayal of Napoleon and the Napoleonic idea in War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. Over two decades later, after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, Merezhkovsky, in exile, devoted two books entirely to Napoleon, one focusing on Napoleon's personality, accomplishments, and historical significance (Napoleon the Man [Napoleon-Chelovek]); the other, the larger one, presenting a chronologically arranged biography (The Life of Napoleon [Zhizn' Napoleona]). They appeared together in book form in 1929. For a Russian writer, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, Merezhkovsky’s infatuation with Napoleon is unusual, if not strange. My goal here is not to illuminate Merezhkovsky’s ideas through his portrayal of Napoleon. His ideas have been well enough examined elsewhere. Nor is it even to show the centrality of the figure of Napoleon to Merezhkovsky’s thought in general or even at the time that he wrote his pieces on Napoleon. Rather, I hope to bring into sharper focus the exact nature of Merezhkovsky’s anomalous ideas about Napoleon in the few works of his in which they are found and to determine their place in the Russian cultural imaginary, first by examining Merezhkovsky’s confrontational engagement with the images of Napoleon of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s in L. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii> and then, in the two biographical works specifically devoted to Napoleon in the late 1920s, by presenting his mythic recreation of Napoleon as a reaction to the disillusionment he experienced over the main crises of the early twentieth century—World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular. If his early aim was to restore the image of Napoleon, the Great Man, so badly damaged by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by the 1920s it was to resurrect for the world a Napoleon of mythic and godlike proportions, in which Napoleon figured not only as Great Man, but perhaps the greatest man that would ever exist. It was, in effect, to create a monument to Napoleon aere perennius, a pamiatnik nerukotvornyi.

Gary Rosenshield is Emeritus Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently at work on a monograph exploring the engagement of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky, and Evgenii Tarle with the idea of the Great Man as in manifests itself in the image and life of Napoleon.

This article presents a hermeneutical reading of musical allusion in Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart (1925), focusing on the way in which the leitmotivic repetition of musical phrases in the text contributes not only to standard satirical and romantic interpretations of the novel, but offers a way forward in reconciling the seemingly insuperable tensions between free will and demonic determinism that are central to the work’s ethical problematic. The analysis centers on references to Verdi’s Aida, Tchaikovsky’s “Sérénade de Don Juan,” and Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s verse drama Don Juan.

David G. Molina is a joint PhD candidate in the Committe on Social Thought and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Russian and Soviet cinema and early twentieth-century poetry and prose.

How did the idea of a neo-Decembrist liberal protest reverberate in the late Soviet social field as it circulated among the intelligentsia and their much wider readership? The present paper analyzes several texts about the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, produced between 1968 and 1975: Alexander Galich’s poem “Petersburg Romance,” Yuri Lotman’s essay “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” Natan Eidelman’s popular histories Lunin and Apostle Sergei, and Bulat Okudzhava’s historical fiction novel Poor Avrosimov. Galich and Lotman wrote texts for a narrow circle; Eidelman and Okudzhava wrote for many more people, by way of Soviet official venues like Molodaia gvardiia and the “Fiery Revolutionaries” series at Politizdat. This paper will argue that as the neo-Decembrist ideologeme made its way through Soviet mass media, its model of dissent also morphed away from a straightforward call to action. Instead, Soviet Decembrism became a part of the larger turn to the individual human personality—lichnostʹ—that had dominated the Soviet public sphere after Stalin’s death. The confluence of Soviet and liberal discourses on lichnostʹ both expanded the community that could hear the neo-Decembrist protest metaphor and also defanged this metaphor of its political charge.

Pavel Khazanov is Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of German, Russian and Eastern European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. His book project, A Russia That We Have Lost: The Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse examines how recollections of the imperial era have influenced the dominant political ideologies circulating in Russia’s late Soviet and contemporary public sphere.

This article examines the blatnaia pesnia, or the criminal, prison, and underground song of Arkadii Severnyi. The songs of Severnyi were disseminated through the unofficial and often illegal phenomenon of magnitizdat, recording in private homes and apartments on magnetic tape. Severnyi was known for his performance of blatnaia pesnia and drawing inspiration from the literary and musical heritage of “Old Odessa,” a mythologized world of thieves in which official hierarchies of power, imperial and Soviet, were inverted. “Old Odessa” was inhabited by such notorious characters as Isaak Babelʹ’s Benia Krik and Ilʹf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender and set to the soundtrack of the criminal songs of Leonid Utesov and early Soviet chanson. This article discusses the construction of the Arkadii Severnyi persona as an ambassador of “Old Odessa” and the sonic construction of this world, rooted in early twentieth-century understandings of marginal Jewishness and literary and legendary criminality. It places the unique musical approach of Severnyi in conversation with existing scholarship on Soviet bard song. Finally, the elements of blatnaia pesnia are juxtaposed with media discourse on the Soviet hooligan as the noisiest propagandists of the song genre. The public spaces of debauchery in sonic “Old Odessa” were brought to disturb the peace of the domestic Soviet world by hooligans who listened and performed blatnaia pesnia. In doing so they staked their own political claim in opposition to Soviet values.

Elizabeth Abosch is a PhD candidate in Russian and Soviet history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation explores the history of the criminal and urban song genres in the Soviet Union and the functions of song in Soviet society from 1920 to 1980.

This article examines the topic of return migration to Slovene lands in the Austrian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how it is brought to life in the relationship between the writer Ivan Tavčar (1851–1923) and his relative John Thatcher (formerly Janez Tavčar, 1878–1958), who emigrated to the United States. I first review return migration in several of Tavčar’s works and his views on the matter as a leading liberal politician and prominent figure in Slovenes’ nation-building project, noting as well how the theme of return is evidenced in his personal life. The next part of the article describes John Thatcher’s life in Gallup, New Mexico. Research into his life is based mainly on visits to his (and Tavčar’s) home village of Poljane nad Škofjo Loko and Gallup, interviews, migration records, and news reports. Thatcher, who became a wealthy businessman in Gallup, returned to Poljane a number of times before World War II and aided the village after the war. I propose that his most significant act of return was funding a large sculpture of Tavčar. The sculpture, by Jakob Savinšek (1922–1961), was placed on Tavčar’s estate of Visoko in 1957. The conclusion of the article argues that the sculpture honors both relatives and resolves their opposing views on migration from Slovene lands and in particular their native valley.

Timothy Pogačar is a member of the Russian program at Bowling Green SU and editor of the journal Slovene Studies. His current research interests include fiction in US Slavic-American newspapers and the effects of sound preferences in translated fiction.

Between 1967 and 1998, the Plovdiv Typewriter Works manufactured millions of inexpensive and reliable typewriters for both domestic and export markets. At its peak, the factory employed almost three thousand Bulgarians and sent writing machines to over forty-five countries, including the United States, The United Kingdom, Australia, and West Germany. Sold under the brand names “Maritsa” and “Hebros” in Bulgaria, and “Omega,” “Bundy,” “Lemair,” “Crown,” “Pacific,” and “Waverly” abroad, millions of machines flooded international markets in the 1970s and 1980s until its disastrous privatization and untimely demise in the 1990s. These Plovdiv-made typewriters serve as both potent physical remembrances of the socialist past and painful material reminders of the criminality that characterized Bulgaria’s transition toward capitalism after 1989. In the context of contemporary Plovdiv, a simple typewriter—a portable Maritsa discovered in a grandmother’s closet or a boxy electric Hebros kept in a city library—might become an agentic host for collective memories of loss, trauma, and injustice in contemporary Bulgaria—a kind of memento corrumpi or totem to remind people that corruption is unavoidable (just as the memento mori of antiquity reminded people of the inevitability of death). Through a detailed history and textual analysis of media discourses around the rise and fall of the Plovdiv Typewriter Works, the article explores how the ghosts of shady privatizations inhere in the material remains of Bulgaria’s industrial past.

Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member in the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of ten books including, most recently, Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions with Mitchell A. Orenstein (Oxford UP, 2021).