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Chapter Five Grotesque Characters What is comedy? It’s when the intention, the means, and the end are all distorted! When there’s a deviation from the norm! —Vasilii Shukshin, Till the Cock Crows Thrice But what is comedy without truth and malice! —Nikolai Gogol’, letter to Mikhail Pogodin, 20 February 1833 THE TITLE OF SHUKSHIN’S 1973 collection of short stories, his fourth and the last to be published during his lifetime, underscores an important feature of the mature writer’s presentation of his hero. Kharaktery (characters, types) marks, in name and content, the writer’s more demonstrative turn to typification in the last five years of his life, a change most pronounced in his experimental works. These works— the fairy tale Till the Cock Crows Thrice and “theater novellas” Energetic People (Energichnye liudi) and the unfinished And They Woke Up in the Morning (A poutru oni prosnulis’)—foreground and expand Shukshin’s dependence on types, but do so toward openly satiric ends. Here, as in the “fairy-tale novella” (povest’-skazka) Point of View (Tochka zreniia) and the cycle “Unexpected Stories” (“Vnezapnye rasskazy”) written prior to them, character names give way almost entirely to labels. In the case of Till the Cock Crows Thrice, Shukshin even uses stock types from Russian folklore and stereotyped caricatures of well-known heroes from nineteenth-century Russian literature. What previously in his short stories had been a more subtle delineation of characters into a recognizable gallery of contemporary types1 becomes in his later prose an open reliance on grotesque labels in the service of satire. Shukshin’s move toward satire both reflected and contributed to a growing culture of irony in the Soviet Union, which was partly due to a collapse of hopes and a loss of faith in the face of political reaction at the end of the 1960s2 and partly due to the rising popularity of comedy in general. The 1970s was a time of satire, popularized on television by the long-running programs Tavern of the Thirteen Chairs (Kabachok 13 stul’ev) and The World 87 of Laughter (Vokrug smekha), featured in newspaper humor columns such as the “Twelve Chairs Club” (“Klub 12 stul’ev”) in Literaturnaia gazeta, and marked by the growing popularity of the humor journal Krokodil (Crocodile ).3 Shukshin’s own turn toward satire is both an outgrowth of the lightly ironic and humorous nature of many of his stories and films and an indication of a change in the writer’s attitude toward his themes and Soviet society in general. As his attitude changed, so did his methods. Satire’s caustic blend of truth and malice replaced the light humor and carnival laughter that had heretofore surrounded the artist’s bright souls and oddballs. The folk storyteller was returning to the irreverent traditions of the skomorokhi with their set casts of satiric types. Folk buffoonery was giving way to grotesque mockery. Shukshin’s satirical works—routinely overlooked by critics and an undervalued part of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole—occupy an important place in post-Stalin Soviet literature, for in them, particularly in his novellas, Shukshin lampoons the mores and institutions of Soviet society in a way that would not be repeated in print and published in the Soviet Union until after the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of glasnost. In the best of his satirical works, Shukshin accomplished under censorship what Sergei Dovlatov, Evgenii Popov, Viacheslav P’etsukh, Vladimir Sorokin, and others would achieve only when there was almost no more censorship at all. This fact has still not been acknowledged in studies of the late and postSoviet period. Indeed, it seems as if Shukshin has suffered the fate of the American writer Sherwood Anderson, whose influence on American authors of the 1920s (especially Hemingway and Faulkner) was significant but not always properly acknowledged. As Anderson did in American literature, Shukshin prepared the thematic and stylistic ground in Soviet literature that others would later work to greater success.4 In his late prose, Shukshin proposed a new and unattractive hero: the grotesque Homo sovieticus of the Soviet 1970s as seen through the distorting lens of satire and in a variety of highly suggestive and often debased settings, from communal apartments to city drunk tanks. This grotesque hero can now be identified as the important forerunner of the nasty heroes whose appearance marked the end of Soviet fiction and the rebirth of Russian literature. SHUKSHIN...

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