Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s–1930s) by Annie Gérin (review)

Reviewed by: Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s–1930s) by Annie Gérin Seth Graham Gérin, Annie. Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s–1930s). University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2021. xviii + 255 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback); $39.95 (e-book). While the main ‘protagonist’ of art historian Annie Gérin’s excellent study of satirical expression in Soviet visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s is People’s Commissar for Enlightenment (and humour theorist) Anatolii Lunacharskii, the author sets the tone of the book with reference to a very different figure, Nadezhda Mandeĺshtam, a prominent witness to the devastation mentioned in the book’s title, who recalled her alarm at the rapid displacement of Russia’s rich tradition of literary wit and humour by increasingly caustic, politicized state-sponsored satire from the 1920s onward. Although the best-known popular alternatives to that ‘official laughter’ — jokes and other short oral genres — have in recent decades been thoroughly studied, most of the visual materials analysed by Gérin have not, nor have the broader theoretical underpinnings of early-Soviet satire and Lunacharskii’s central role in developing them. Gérin describes how the young Soviet state, and Lunacharskii, came to understand satire as ‘a crucial weapon or tool in the struggle for acculturation that mobilized countless artists, theoreticians, and state workers’ (p. 21). This focus on ‘acculturation’ in addition to other, more commonly acknowledged aims of satire — ridicule, entertainment, social change — is one of the book’s most original points. The author uses a wealth of primary sources, including party decrees, debates in periodicals, letters, and of course the visual materials. With more than 80 colour and black-and-white illustrations, most of them from the extensive collection of the late historian and photographer David King (author of the classic The Commissar Vanishes), the book is a visual treat. Gérin’s expertise as an art historian gives her detailed analyses of the materials particular focus. After an Introduction that situates the particular view of laughter that informed early-Soviet satire in the familiar framework of humour theory (resistance, relief, incongruity), the author turns in chapter one to Lunacharskii’s theoretical work on laughter, contextualising it within the Marxist theory of art he was developing after his appointment as Commissar in 1917. Lunacharskii was particularly interested in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose influential [End Page 371] On Laughter (1899) was well-known in Russian translation. Gérin’s book also includes a translation of Lunacharskii’s important January 1931 speech, ‘On Laughter’, and is informed by his book-in-progress on satire, which was left unfinished upon his death in 1933, and the work of his Commission for the Study of Satirical Genres (1930–31). Chapter two highlights the crucial importance of print culture as a venue for visual propaganda. Here Gérin analyses Soviet illustrated satirical periodicals and posters, including Vladimir Maiakovskii’s work on the famous ROSTA windows and the cover images of the flagship of Soviet print satire, the newspaper Krokodil. Chapters three and four examine the cinema, theatre and the circus, art forms which, Gerin points out, differed from the others examined in the book insofar as they still partly relied on pre-revolutionary material and (in the case of cinema) a foreign cultural product. This fact made them a key site for debates about socialist vs. non-socialist culture, which of course interested Lunacharskii greatly. The third chapter includes a fascinating discussion of two particularly Soviet brands of ‘performed laughter’: the satirical living newspaper and the Blue Blouse traveling troupes. The title of chapter four, ‘Laughter on the Silver Screen: From Satire to Optimistic Comedy’, describes the well-studied trajectory of cinematic laughter from the 1920s to the heyday of Stalinist musical comedies of the 1930s. The author continues her examination of the development of Soviet artistic theories and priorities, and hones in on the debates over the enlightenment versus entertainment function of cinema, and over the respective value of high versus ‘low’ culture more generally. The films analysed...

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