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141 INTRODUCTION First epigraph is from Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev, Malaia zemlia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi literatury, 1979), 22. Second epigraph is from Mary Douglas, “Jokes,” in Rethinking Popular Culture : Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 293. 1. In what follows, I use the transliterated Russian word “anekdot” in most cases, although for stylistic reasons I often substitute “Russian joke” or “Soviet joke,” or simply “joke” when the context makes it clear that I am referring to the Russo-Soviet genre. When discussing the connotations of the etymological ancestors and counterparts of the word “anekdot” in classical and Western European culture, or in a general international context, I use the English “anecdote.” 2. All translations from Russian-language sources, including anekdoty, are mine. 3. The corpus on which this study is based (numbering between two and three thousand anekdoty) includes (1) anekdoty collected orally by me in Moscow and St. Petersburg and among native Russians in the United States between 1992 and 2008; (2) anekdoty published in book collections, periodicals, or on the Internet; and (3) anekdoty collected by other scholars who have either published them or shared them with me. Anekdoty from published sources are so indicated by endnote citations. 4. Douglas, “Jokes,” 291. 5. The scholar of the anekdot faces a problem shared by all analysts of contemporary urban folklore: the integrity of the material. From a scholarly perspective , many published Russian jokes are suspect, as they are undated, often taken (without attribution) from other sources, and sometimes composed from scratch by the joke-book “compiler.” Although I am not a folklorist, I am certainly aware of the need for authenticity and credibility in source texts, so in my choice of published anekdoty I have favored those found in multiple sources, in sources dating from the period I am discussing, or that I recall hearing orally but did not transcribe. Notes 142 Notes to Pages 5–8 6. On the Rzhevskii cycle, see Federica Visani, “Poruchik Rzhevskii: Rozhdenie prototeksta kak aktualizatsiia starogo siuzheta” (unpublished article , 2002). 7. On the Chukchi cycle, see Emil Draitser, Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 75–100. 8. On the Shtirlits cycle, see: A. F. Belousov, “Anekdoty o Shtirlitse,” Zhivaia starina 1 (1995): 16–18; and Mark Lipovetskii, “Prezident Shtirlits,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (2000): 73–76. 9. On Vinni-Pukh jokes, see Aleksandra Arkhipova, “‘Rolevaia struktura’ detskikh tsiklov anekdotov (na materiale anekdotov o Vinni-Pukhe i Piatachke, o Cheburashke i Krokodile Gene)” (B.A. thesis, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1999). 10. On the notion of a parallel culture in the Soviet Union, see Aleksei Dmitrievich Yurchak, “The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense and the Anekdot,” Public Culture 9 (1997): 161–88; and Boris Briker and Anatolii Vishevskii, “Iumor v populiarnoi kul’ture sovetskogo intelligenta 60-x–70-x godov,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 24 (1989): 147–70. 11. Among the most comprehensive examinations of the genre are Elena Shmeleva and Aleksei Shmelev, Russkii anekdot: Tekst i rechevoi zhanr (Moscow : Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002); Ol’ga Chirkova, Poetika sovremennogo narodnogo anekdota (Ph.D. dissertation, Volgograd University, 1997); and Viktor Khrul’, Anekdot kak forma massovoi kommunikatsii (Ph.D. dissertation, Moscow State University, 1993). 12. Ol’ga Smolitskaia, “‘Anekdoty o frantsuzakh’: K probleme sistematizatsii i strukturno-tipologicheskogo izucheniia anekdota,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 22 (1996): 386. 13. George Orwell, “Funny, But Not Vulgar,” in As I Please: 1943–1945, vol. 3 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 284. Orwell’s comment recalls the central premise of relief theories of humor, the best-known proponent of which is Sigmund Freud. See also Bruce Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005). 14. Arthur Asa Berger, “The Politics of Laughter,” in The Social Faces of Humour: Practices and Issues, ed. George E. C. Paton, Chris Powell, and Stephen Wagg (Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, Vt.: Arena/Ashgate, 1996), 27. 15. Zara Abdullaeva, “Popular Culture,” trans. Sergei Volynets and Dmitri N. Shalin, in Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness , ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 235. 16. Iurii Sokolov, “Vernyi anekdot,” Zhurnalist 4 (1991): 94–95. In the original Russian, Sokolov’s comment rhymes: “pro Emmu” . . . “pro Sistemu.” [18.221.174.248] Project MUSE (2024...

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