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63 Chapter Three The Anekdot and Stagnation Where there is a common sense, there will be a common nonsense. —Susan Stewart JOURNALIST Dmitrii Makarov repeated an apocryphal account in 1999 that the KGB had conducted an experiment in the 1970s to determine the speed at which anekdoty circulated. It reportedly found that a joke could discursively saturate a city the size of Moscow within six to eight hours.1 Makarov offers no evidence for this satisfying bit of apocrypha, but the mere existence of such legends indicates the lasting view of the importance of the anekdot. It is abundantly clear that a particular convergence of sociocultural and political circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s abetted its steady rise to prominence and ubiquity in the quotidian speech of Soviet city-dwellers. The genre’s storied heyday coincided with the years known in retrospect as the era of Stagnation.2 Looking back in 1990, scholar Miron Petrovskii coined a new term in declaring the unofficial culture of the recently bygone period “anekdot-centric,” and he wrote that the entire society had been composed of “potential anekdot tellers and listeners.”3 The genre was recognized as a leading verbal symptom of the age even (or especially) by those in the top echelons of political power. As he tried to “destagnate” both the economy and the Communist Party’s credibility, Mikhail Gorbachev was warned by a deputy, “If we don’t keep our promises, the people will go back to the bottle [v stakan] and the anekdot.”4 Gorbachev himself (a famous teetotaler) reportedly stated on television in 1989 that “anekdoty were always our salvation.”5 Yet the view of the anekdot as merely the latest symbolic opiate for a desperate and disillusioned population, or as a salvatory recourse in the absence of other expressive outlets, is overly focused on discursive negative space. It neglects the genre’s immanent appeal as a form of popular expression and entertainment and as the national pastime of an informed citizenry, and thus it amounts to a fundamentally incomplete insight. At its Resonant Dissonance 64 peak, the anekdot enjoyed the status of a carnivalesque genre-laureate in the organic hierarchy of popular discursive forms that had developed concomitantly with the state-prescribed ars poetica. The opiate view also neglects the crucial interactions of the anekdot with other cultural forms. An important reason for the genre’s storied fecundity was its capacity to outflank, mimic, debunk, deconstruct, and otherwise critically engage other genres and texts of all stripes and at all presumed points on the spectrum from resistance to complicity (or from unofficial to official). The anekdot was able to so function in large part because of the number and variety of contact points between its distinctive generic features and the constituent epochal features that defined the cultural moment and informed textual production therein. This chapter is a survey of those contact points and a continuation of my discussion of anekdot culture’s nuanced apprehension of the structuring logic of other strategies of representation. The putative KGB-confirmed speed with which the anekdot passed from person to person was matched by the genre’s appearance in and mobility among other forms of expression, including prose fiction, poetry, film, and songs.6 The genre’s brevity and formal malleability enhanced this tendency to itinerancy. In many respects, the anekdot is a genre-picaro. In its functions and contexts, it straddles several generic categories, including publitsistika (essayistic current-affairs journalism), small oral genres such as the toast and the rumor, and the language of the variety stage. Kurganov dubbed it a zhanr-brodiaga (wandering genre). Sounding ironically like an ideologue doing battle with a social ill, Kurganov also likened the anekdot to a “parasitic insect” that can only survive by feeding off of larger “organisms.” He went on to say, however, that the anekdot in fact does not so much feed off other genres, but feeds them, “enriches and refreshes” them,7 thus rescuing the concept of agency for a genre often considered “merely” responsive.8 The genre does both, of course—feeds off of and feeds—in a symbiosis that suggests an integral, even privileged, connection to the underlying symbolic reservoir of Soviet culture. Kurganov’s point also implicitly supports the view of the Stagnation era as a barren cultural desert, an environment in which mass culture was like a bland punch, unconsumable unless spiked with jiggers of irony. Yet while part of the status of the anekdot as a...

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