Mel'nichenko, M. Sovetskii anekdot: Ukazatel' siuzhetov (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 335 explaining key Soviet ideas in their political and historical context, while offering new readings of familiar texts that would refresh any course on Russian modernism. Her excellent chapter on We extends the view of Stites and others that Zamiatin’s novel parodies totalitarianism: Vaingurt suggests that the One State is not even functionally totalitarian. Not only is its flagship craft, the Integral, ludicrously basic and fundamentally unsound, the very bodies of its citizens are incipiently insubordinate, perpetually ‘on the brink of revolt’ (p. 97). In an original analogy, Vaingurt compares their superficial conformism to Maelzel’s chess player (a nineteenth-century automaton with a human concealed inside). Zamiatin’s novel, she argues, explores the fundamental human resistance to transformation; We is less a warning against change than a reminder that such change may prove impossible. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Mel´nichenko, M. Sovetskii anekdot: Ukazatel´ siuzhetov. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2014. 1104 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures. Bibliographical references. Index. RUR585.00. Despite its reputation for monolithic censorship and repression, citizens of the Soviet Union always exchanged jokes and ironic observations (bundled together under the term ‘anekdoty’) about the regime and their lives within it. Even under Stalin, when telling jokes deemed anti-Soviet could result in sentences of ten years or longer, the people continued to joke; by the 1960s and until the fall, ‘Heard the new anekdot?’ had evolved to become an informal greeting (p. 13). Mikhail Mel´nichenko’s large and comprehensive new book collects these jokes together in the first truly scholarly critical edition and traces their evolution as an important element of Russo-Soviet folk culture. The long introduction is by itself a major contribution to our understanding of Soviet joke culture in its developing historical context, providing a nuanced dissection of the kinds of sources that inform but also define how this oral tradition and its meaning have been apprehended. It is quickly apparent to anyone who has looked at more than a couple of published collections of Soviet anekdoty that these sborniki frequently copied from each other and lack any temporal anchorage, but Mel´nichenko is the first to carefully investigate the development of this incestuous genre, providing it with an authoritative genealogy that makes clear when (and/or in whose imagination) particular anekdoty originated (pp. 35–49). In fact, as Mel´nichenko demonstrates by careful source triangulation, a great deal of the anekdoty made famous in the published collections were clearly invented by Russian émigrés rather SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 336 than having any genuine, autonomous existence within Soviet society itself (pp. 20, 74). Some 2,000 examples fall into this category, although, given their proliferation after 1991, they might still claim a role in the (after)life of this folklore. To tell this story, the Ukazatel´ draws on a multitude of sources, ranging from diaries to criminal interrogation files, from NKVD reports on the ‘mood of the people’ to the artistic works and personal notes of Soviet artists. Ever-sensitive to the difficulties of such material, Mel´nichenko differentiates between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ dating, only allowing the former when the source is unquestionably from a particular time period. This is sound enough historical practice, of course, but to date has rarely been adhered to in the study of Soviet oral culture (a shortcoming which has sometimes led to severe distortions — p. 17). Jokes have largely been used by historians and other scholars of the USSR as a touch of creative seasoning, or as a neat encapsulation of a particular point or phenomenon. While there is much more that can be done with jokes as a source, now that we have Mel´nichenko’s book, scholars will at least be able to get a sense of whether the joke they choose really circulated at the time they are writing about and will be able to select their examples accordingly, rather than making do with witticisms left hanging, perplexingly untethered from time and place. More interestingly, Mel´nichenko argues for the importance of anekdoty as a clandestine channel of communication between Soviet citizens which operated beyond the official Soviet world and which therefore offers us a glimpse of how...