INTRODUCTION

Reflective laughter: Aspects of humour in Russian culture

LESLEY MILNE

In his book Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime, Howard Jacob-son makes reference to 'national expectations of comedy', as described by the Russian clown, Slava Polunin. These 'national expectations' are based on Polunin's own experience of audiences and are expressed in artistically sweeping generalisations. In England, for example, humour is declared to be 'intellectual. People like intricacy there.' In France it is 'the fate of the character'. In the USA it is 'the holiday that counts; there they go to the theatre simply to be distracted and to forget', while for the Russians 'compassion is all that matters'. These statements are, of course, all wide open to challenge as 'national characteristics'. It would, however, be true to say that they usefully enumerate a gamut of responses, all of which could be found, in addition to others, in all the 'national traditions' of Europe. They can certainly all be found in the Russian culture of humour in the last two centuries, which is the topic covered by the chapters in this volume. In the first chapter of Seriously Funny, Jacobson had already hinted at aspects of humour that present problems for its reception across different cultures, namely its complexity and its exclusivity, observing that 'nothing is more frequently denied the foreigner than a capacity to understand or make [comedy]'. It is therefore the aim of this book to breach that exclusivity and illuminate that complexity.

The time span of the articles is confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not because humour did not exist in Russia before then, but because it was only in the nineteenth century that it emerged into a culturally sophisticated literature of world stature. Russia did not have its Boccaccio, its Chaucer, its Rabelais or its Shakespeare. Russia was cut off from the European experience of the Renaissance and, until the time of Peter the Great, printing in Russia was a Church monopoly, which inhibited the emergence of a secular literature. What Russia had instead of Rabelais, as the scholars Likhachev and Panchenko pointed out, was a highly developed culture of the 'holy fool' {iurodivyi), whose actions or utterances appeared comically 'foolish' only to those who did not comprehend their inner spiritual significance. This particularity of the Russian historical experience survives in what Jacobson refers to as 'Russia's great tradition of clowns and fools and holy innocents and idiots savants and may underlie Polunin's assertion that for Russians 'compassion is what matters'.

Among the first examples of secular literature in Russia were the so-called 'satirical tales' of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. They gave expression to popular grievances and attitudes and, with their roots in the oral tradition, these tales marked the moment when Russian folklore took on permanent form for the first time. Humour and satire were practised by the writers of the eighteenth -century Russian Enlightenment: the verse satires of Dmitry Kantemir; the fables of Ivan Krylov, with their epigrams and proverbs; the classical comedies of Denis Fonvizin. The first masterpiece of Russian nineteenth-century theatre was a comedy, Aleksandr Griboedov's play in verse, Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), which has its antecedents in the classical French tradition of Molière. Although completed in 1825, it was not passed by the censorship for the stage, and was printed only in part in an almanac. It was, however, the period of literary salons, at which the play was read out by its author to 'all Moscow' and 'all Petersburg'. Written in verse, it is a cascade of aphorisms, and virtually every other line has entered the Russian language. Thus Griboedov's comedy and its reception can be said to exemplify the conditions in which intellectual humour thrives the world over: conviviality, an element of subversion, memorable formulation, and word -of-mouth transmission. The subversive factor of the play lies in the worldview embodied in its hero, Chatsky: he is full of wit, idealism and youthful energy, which are all undirected, except against the selfish banality of the world around him. Thus we have, at the outset, an illustration of a point made by Jacobson: 'Whenever we try to make an art that conforms to our inner world, it becomes protest'. This dictum may in fact provide a key to a specific feature of Russian culture through most of the past two centuries: a particularly acute awareness of the difference between the 'inner world' of the artist and the public world of literature as censored, sponsored, or controlled by the state.

After the Russian Revolution, the reception of Russian humour and satire became heavily politicised. In the field of humorous writing, the enhanced sensitivity to the 'protest' element led to a persistent requirement of all humour that it should be 'serious' in the sense that it could be interpreted as satirical in intent. First émigré, then Western scholarship in general, appreciated and interpreted Russian humour chiefly as a critique of 'the absurdities of the Soviet regime' or its antecedents. Satire was regarded as the higher form, and humour that did not aspire to, or could not be pressed into, this purpose was devalued as 'empty'. Meanwhile, from the point of view of the sponsoring state, a similar elevation of satire over humour occurred. In official Soviet culture, humour was co-opted into the great task of building socialism. Again it was valued only in its satirical function: as a corrective, 'scourging',...