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Cover -- State Laughter: Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of Soviet Culture -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1: The Stalinist World of Laughter: The Fate of the Comic in a Tragic Age -- The Aesthetics of "Radical Populism": Political Dimensions -- "Russian Laughter" and the National Origins of the Stalinist "Popular Spirit" -- After the Carnival: "The Favorite Weapon" -- Victorious Laughter: The Origins of "Positive Satire" -- Harmonizing Laughter: A Dialectics of "Positive Satire" -- 2: A Killer Wit: Laughter in Stalinist Official Discourse -- The Beginning of the Plot -- Funny Activists -- A Funny Hunger Strike -- The Monster of Wit -- The Sense of an Ending -- 3: The Funny War: Laughing at the Front in World War Two -- Vasilii Terkin: The Typical and the Exceptional -- Vasilii Terkin: "Being" and "Just Being" -- Vasilii Terkin: All Is Well That Ends Well -- Erenburg's War, 1941-1945: A Question of Trust -- Erenburg's War, 1941-1945: Knowing What, and How Much -- Erenburg's War, 1941-1945: A Question of Perspective -- Erenburg's War, 1941-1945: Authenticity and (Self-)Parody -- Erenburg's War, 1941-1945: A Numbers Game -- 4: "One Might Think It Is a Ward in a Madhouse": Late Stalinism, the Early Cold War, and Caricature -- An Enemy in Pictures -- On the Typical -- Reflecting the Real Reality -- Hieroglyphics and Their Readers -- Scaling Down and the Logic of Wit -- An Enemy in Words -- Sardonic Realism: The Art of Verbal Caricature -- Adventures of Tropes: Political Trolling of the Pre-Internet Age -- From a "Negative Realism" to the "Realistic Grotesque" -- Modes of "Popular Democracy": Between Resentment and Bravado -- The Art of Double Entendre: Transference as a Satirical Device -- 5: The Gogols and the Shchedrins: Lessons in "Positive Satire" -- The Satire of the Impossible. Vaudevillian Satire: No Gogols or Shchedrins Here -- Menacing Laughter: Stalin the Satirist -- Menacing Laughter: The Nomenklatura Tragicomedy -- Criminal Laughter: Gogols and Shchedrins in the Age of Ostap Benders -- Nomenklatura Slapstick: The Soviet Kafkas -- The Comedies of Fear: 1939-1949-1953 -- Terror by Laughter -- 6: The Soviet Bestiary: Genealogy of the Stalinist Fable -- Demian Bednyi -- New Soviet Animals -- Funny Violence -- The Language of Truth -- Ivan Batrak -- Sergei Mikhalkov -- Zoomessing -- Tautology As a Device -- Boredom, Laughter, and the Norm -- The Moral of the Story -- 7: The Merry Adventures of Stalin's Peasants: Kolkhoz Commedia dell'arte -- "The Colonel Will Find It Funny": Constructing Soviet Humor -- The Kolkhoz Vaudeville: Strategies of Contamination -- "Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become Merrier": A Comedy of "Serious Content" -- A Soviet Vanity Fair: Matrimonial Problems of Socialism in the USSR -- "Maximum Indiscretion": Reluctant Lovers -- When "The Skirt Wouldn't Let the Trousers Have Their Way": The Soviet Amazons -- "Time to Merge": A Card-Carrying Pantalone -- "A Grandpa Walking Towards Communism": The Kolkhoz Lazzi -- 8: "A Total Racket": Vaudeville for the New People -- "You are Mistaking Me for Someone Else": Confusions -- "Am I a Soviet Person?": The "Both . . . And . . . " Principle -- "You Share the Flat Anyway": Space, Public and Private -- "Walk Around the World with a Light Step": Moving in Space And Time -- 9: Metalaughter: Populism and the Stalinist Musical Comedy -- "The Rest, As They Say, Just Endured It" -- Genuine Music for the "Broad Masses Of Workers" (Jazz) -- "Overcoming the Noise, Screeching and Grinding of the Orchestra" -- A True New Music (Song-Song) -- The Real New Music: The Classics (Opera as Operetta) -- Zhdanov and the Muses -- A True Soviet Classic (A Symphonic Oratorio). "You'd Need to Study Twenty Years to be Able to Sing Like That": Twenty Years Later -- Bibliography -- Index.
Stalin's reign of terror was not all doom and gloom, much of it was (meant to be) funny! Tracing the development of official humour, satire, and comedy, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol do away with the idea that all humour in the USSR was subversive, instead exploring why laughter was a core component to the survival of the Soviet regime.