Devastation and Laughter : Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s-1930s) / Annie Gerin

List of IllustrationsTransliteration, Translations, Dates Acknowledgments Introduction: Devastation and Laughter 1: Anatoly Lunacharsky and the Power of Laughter 2: Soviet Satirical Print Culture, a Serious Affair 3: Laughter in the Ring, in the Street and on Stage: The Emergence of a "Satirical Scene" 4: Laughter on the Silver Screen: From Satire to Optimistic Comedy 5: The Strategies and Targets of Satire 6: The Rhetorics of Satire and Socialist Realism Conclusion Appendix: "On Laughter" (1931) Notes Bibliography Index

In Devastation and Laughter, Annie Gerin explores the use of satire in the visual arts, theatre, cinema, and the circus under Lenin and Stalin. Gerin traces the rise and decline of the genre and argues that the use of satire in official Soviet art and propaganda was neither marginal nor untheorized. The author sheds light on the texts written in the 1920s and 1930s by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, and the impact his writings had on satirists. While the Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism were necessarily forward-looking and utopian, satire afforded artists the means to examine critically past and present subjects, themes, and practice. Devastation and Laughter is the first work to bring Soviet theoretical writings on the use of satire to the attention of scholars outside of Russia. By introducing important bodies of work that have largely been overlooked in the fields of art history and film and theatre history, Annie Gerin provides a nuanced and alternative reading of early Soviet art.