Russian literature. A short introduction

illusion for long when reading Russian literature. In Chekhov’s plays, even characters prone to maudlin fits of self-pity display a talent for flights of black comedy (as when Uncle Vanya responds to a social banality about the nice weather with the words, ‘Nice weather to hang yourself in’). Here, humour is a weapon for exposing artificiality (as it also is in Dostoevsky’s novels, where lapses into absurdity threaten every carefully planned social event). But ridicule is often more universal than this, giving a sense of human existence as necessarily grotesque – as in the scene from Chekhov’s ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892) where one madman boasts of his fantasy service decorations to another invalided out of the civil service when he became wrongly convinced he was making mistakes and developed paranoia.

Black humour of this kind survived at even the darkest eras of history, such as the late 1930s. To be sure, in Socialist Realist texts, humour that was not of the unintentional sort was limited to crude jokes directed at a narrow range of social types (shirkers at work, women who used too much make-up, men who tried to lay down the law to their wives). In unofficial writing, though, a vivid and subtle feeling of the ridiculous survived, and pompous bureaucrats were its main targets (in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, comic vengeance is exacted on a whole crowd of such people). In texts of this kind, humour was a survival strategy, but it was also a manifestation of freedom, a means of transcending oppression, a gesture of indifference towards authority. The exhilirating carnival foolery celebrated by Bakhtin was only one form of challenging official puritanism. The humour of the ‘holy fools’, the popular saints of early modern Russia whose filthy habits and bizarre behaviour assailed ordinary proprieties, and thus called into question conventional ideas about goodness, also worked its way through into some later literary texts. Kostoglotov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, who is saddled with an absurd name (Boneswallower), and is, in every obvious way, decidedly unamiable – surly, brusque, unrepentantly naive – moved like some latterday, secularized version of the holy fool through 1950s Soviet society, saving no one but himself, yet at the same