Senior Researcher of the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The authors of the book under review prove that the laughter as social and esthetic phenomenon not necessarily has antitotalitarian and democratic nature, not always aims at destroying the accepted norms or denies fear and liberate the person – as according to the opinion widely spread after the publication of M.M. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais. It is argued that the laughter under Stalinism becomes the means of totalitarian control and subjugation. This laughter is sanctioned and unfunny one; it is aimed at creation of image of “nation” and is based on archaic worldview of the yesterday’s peasants. That is why the laughter in socialistic realism resists liberalism and modernity and comes close to populism.
official culture; laughter; comic; Stalinism; soviet art; socialistic realism; populism