ANDREI SINIAVSKI
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their husbands and vice versa, and children-adult reversals . Rulers
are exceptional people , but jokes about them are also the result of
their relative proximity to us , expressed by such things as obligatory
cliches that have trickled down into our Soviet everyday life . Appar–
ently there were no jokes about Hitler in Russia: he was too alien ,
but there are as many as you might want about Lenin. Most of them
are intimately tied to subjects stuck in our teeth: the armored car,
the mausoleum, Lenin's celebrated simplicity and modesty .
In connection with all of this, I would like to say something
about Vassily Ivanovich Chapaev, the leading hero of the contem–
porary joke. Chapaev's fictional life passed through several stages
and changes. He is a legendary figure, whose soldiers' tales pre–
sented him as a folk hero in the manner of Stepan Razin (the Cossack
leader of a seventeenth-century lower class rebellion) and Ermak
Timofeevich (the legendary conqueror of Siberia). There is also the
artistically pale yet truthful documentary image of Chapaev as a
peasant guerrilla leader during the Civil War, the politically unedu–
cated but charismatic hero of Furmanov's novella. He is given a full–
blooded and heroic representation in a well-known film where he
embodies a mixture of fearlessness and illiteracy, military leadership
and peasant naivete , generosity, and capricious despotism . And
finally , in the last period of his life, he is the hero of the joke, which
appears to be a further development of the film image . The origin of
the Chapaev joke also seems to be related to the 1967 celebration
of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution and its flurry of
cliches. The Chapaev jokes first appeared at that time.
Appropriately , there arises a question regarding causality: was
it only the separation from the crowd's idol and illusions about the
past that resulted in the long and brilliant series? In some sense ,
Chapaev remains a positive character, perhaps the only one to do so
in the joke . Strange as it may seem, he persists as a folk hero,
although turned inside out, combining dumbness , courage, igno–
rance and simplemindedness with a down-to-earth intelligence. He
is reminiscent of the fairytale fool , but without his victorious halo,
playing strictly a buffoon's role . Comparing his image to that of
Lenin's in a parallel set of jokes, we immediately note our undeni–
able preference for Chapaev . In spite of his foolishness , his represen–
tation is marked by kindness , indulgent tolerance, and people's re–
assuring and teasing love for him. Probably this is so because
Chapaev's image is still dear to our hearts and our childhoods, and
his legendary personage is highly original and vividly picturesque .
As a result , he is the comic mask of our day, most abundant in rich
