ANDREI SINIAVSKI
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sees for an interview: "Tell me about your apartment," says the
correspondent.
"I have one room," answers the worker. The party boss glares
at him from behind the correspondent's back, and the worker con–
tinues, "One room faces south, the second room faces the east, and
the third the west."
"How much do you earn?"
"A hundred rubles." The party man again glares at him. "A
hundred rubles ... a week," specifies the worker.
"Oh! That makes 400 a month! Not bad. And now the last
question: what kind of hobby do you have?"
"Fifteen centimeters," responds the worker, who does not under–
stand the Russian loan word
khobbi
(hobby) and instead associates its
sound with the obscene Russian word for the male sexual organ.
The party boss glares at him again, and the worker explains, "Fif–
teen centimeters in diameter."
In a closed society of the Soviet type, where the parameters of a
self-interested and complete existence are marked by all sorts of pro–
hibitions (especially verbal ones), the joke is the only emotional
outlet. More than that, it has actually developed into a model for liv–
ing and serves the function of the microcosm inside the macrocosm.
As such, it has become a kind of monad of the world order. The joke
is in the air, but not in the form of dust. Like a spore, which contains
everything that the soul needs in embryonic form, it is capable of
reproducing the organism as a whole at the first opportune moment .
Hence its readiness to provide universal formulas, explicating the
epoch, history, or the nation. I have in mind not only the genre's
propensity for final crowning formulations but also its desire to
represent itself as the incarnation of an exhaustive universal scheme
of things. This is its tendency to reconstitute "the joke inside the
joke": the genre as such becomes aware of itself as a nucleus and pro–
totype of a broader, all-encompassing joke, which can be equated
with the rest of the world or reality. The relationship is analogous to
a large Russian wooden doll with a small one inside it. Political jokes
from the thirties reflect such formulaic structures: "How is life?"
"Like in a streetcar: some are sitting [doing time in prison], others
are shaking." Or, in a game of charades, an old Jew on a train asks a
riddle: "The first syllable of my name is what Lenin promised, the
second is what Stalin delivered ." Two plainclothesmen hop down
from the top bunk of the sleeping compartment. "Follow us, com–
rade
Raikher,"
they say. In this case the old man's last name
