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Seriousness, Humor, and the Contradictions of Late Socialism

2025· book-chapter· en· W4415442723 on OpenAlexaff
Ann Komaromi

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicHumor Studies and Applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGulagEPICAdventureDissenting opinionSocialismNazismInsignificanceBureaucracy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This chapter examines the use of highly serious and lowly comedic elements in dissenting novels circulated in samizdat to argue that the combination of these features helped Soviet citizens confront the Stalinist legacy. The chapter juxtaposes Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novelization of the Gulag experience in terms of epic moral journey in The First Circle to Vladimir Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Chonkin, which farcically portrays Stalin-era life. Although Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the epic and the familiar could not meet on the same plane of representation, other dissenting novelists exploited this unlikely conjunction to express the reality of late Soviet life. Novels including Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House, Vasily Aksenov’s The Burn, and Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow Stations illustrate the use of contradictory elements to promote intellectual engagement and orient readers to alternative future possibilities for late socialism.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.983
Threshold uncertainty score0.602

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.240
Teacher spread0.221 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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