Beaver, exhale! Notes on the Soviet joke and the sources of an anecdotic tradition. Mikhailin V.Yu.

“He comes to the Fleet Executive Committee of the Bloch-Twist...” “The wolf leaned back from the zone and decided to tie it up...” “Beasts go on a subbotnik, they look, the hare under the tree lies...” Why were the heroes of the Soviet joke so often so often became animals ? How zoomorphic cultural codes interacted with collective and individual memory, described social behavior and influenced it?

In his book, the philologist and anthropologist Vadim Mikhailin shows how the Soviet zoomorphic joke confront official discourse and its manipulative tasks. He destroyed the mechanisms of the formation of cultural myths and often undermined the efforts of state propaganda. Anecdotes about the Piglet-Fatalist, the alcoholic Cheburashka, the lecher of the fox and other living characters reflected the moods and fears of citizens, allowed, without saying anything directly, to actually talk about everything-and sensitively reacted to changes in society.

Vadim Mikhailin - Philologist, Anthropologist, Professor of the University of Saratov.