Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the translation
- Introduction
- 1 Iskander's transparent allegory: Rabbits and Boa Constrictors
- 2 Beyond picaresque: Erofeev's Moscow–Petushki
- 3 Satire and the autobiographical mode: Limonov's It's Me, Eddie
- 4 The family chronicle revisited: Dovlatov's Ours
- 5 Dystopia redux: Voinovich and Moscow 2042
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the translation
- Introduction
- 1 Iskander's transparent allegory: Rabbits and Boa Constrictors
- 2 Beyond picaresque: Erofeev's Moscow–Petushki
- 3 Satire and the autobiographical mode: Limonov's It's Me, Eddie
- 4 The family chronicle revisited: Dovlatov's Ours
- 5 Dystopia redux: Voinovich and Moscow 2042
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Summary
Marina (with bitterness): I study satire.
Miloserdov's son: Russian or foreign?
Marina: Ours.
Miloserdov's son: Nineteenth century?
Marina: No, contemporary.
Miloserdov's son: You have a marvelous profession. You study something that doesn't exist.
(From the film Garage by El′dar Riazanov)It is fitting to begin an examination of satire with a paradox and Russian literary history presents a fine one: although major works that might be classified as satire according to traditional genre definitions are rather rare in twentieth-century Russian literature, the satirical impulse permeates and reticulates throughout Russian prose of the modern period. Satire — understood as a manner of writing, a mode rather than a genre — offers critical and persuasive force that is central to much of contemporary Russian literature. In arguing for perceiving satire as a modality rather than a form, we lay the groundwork for a critical structure far more inclusive than that endorsed by Riazanov's character (quoted above). He is certainly right in noting that no contemporary writers have donned the mantles of Gogol′ or Saltykov-Shchedrin, but he ignores the satirical and ironic spirit that in fact characterizes much of contemporary Russian writing.
Satirists of the post-Stalin era trace their lineage not only to nineteenth-century classics like Gogol′ and Saltykov-Shchedrin, but to writers of the so-called “Golden Age” of Soviet satire that developed in the relatively liberal decade following the Revolution.
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- Information
- Contemporary Russian SatireA Genre Study, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996