Abstract
I began working on this article in the winter of 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine shattered the fragile stability of Europe. Artur Solomonov's tragifarce How We Buried Josef Stalin (2019) speaks directly to this catastrophic time but also to the legacy of Stalinism in Russia. ‘A play about flexibility and immortality’, Solomonov's farce confronts its audience with the dilemma of Stalinism, which Putin's putrid regime continues to mobilize. Using irony, hyperbole and grotesque, it proposes a dramaturgical response to the question of why hostility to the world, isolationism and nationalistic aspirations are deeply ingrained in the collective psyche of Russian society. To Solomonov, the issue rests in the malleability of a Russian psyche that embraces an image of the tyrant and allows it to remain immortal; it also feeds Russian collective nostalgia, which prepared the ground for the rise of what Lev Gudkov called ‘recurring totalitarianism’.
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