364
PARTISAN REVIEW
possibilities, which has gathered around itself a multiplicity of plots.
The image participates in a broader aesthetic game than the actual
Chapaev did, and it does not matter that the fictional image has
been radically revised.
I won't quote any Chapaev jokes, since they are so well known,
but will refer to a model which, in fact, is no longer about Chapaev
and is a typical example of the joke inside the joke. Recently the
Soviet government decided to ascertain the most popular joke of our
time. All existing jokes were gathered and recorded, and the list was
fed into a computer. In a few hours, the machine gave its answer,
which was a universal computer superjoke: "Vassily Ivanovich
Chapaev is walking on Red Square and meets Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin, who asks Chapaev, 'Say, Abram, so it's time to emigrate to
Israel already?'"
It used to be that historical songs and legends were composed
immediately after important events. For a time, the
chastushka,
a
short street ditty, usually a quatrain, that appeared originally in the
late nineteenth century, was a response to this general need. Now
the joke has taken on that role completely and is the only contem–
porary folk genre in Soviet Russia. The only other literary form that
could compete with the joke is the underworld song, but it is declin–
ing as a genre. The joke, however, is alive and well. God grant it
good health.
During the last quarter century, it has shown a greater interest
in history than before. Both recent and more remote facts and
historical personages have come to life in the joke: Stalin's death, the
Lenin cult, Khrushchev, Brezhnev , the more remote yet Russian in–
terpretations of Gomulka,
Dub~ek,
Husak, Moshe Dayan, Nehru,
Nixon, and President Svoboda. (In the joke, "President Svoboda is a
perceived necessity"; the name Svoboda means freedom in Russian,
only the stress in Czech falls on a different syllable. Under the im–
pact of the Czech stress, all of the stresses in the joke are misplaced
in reference to a stock motif, that of the Soviet leaders' uncultured
speech. Philosophically, the joke parodies Engels' definition of
freedom.) There are responses in the form of jokes to the Soviet hi–
jacking case, Jewish emigration, dissidents,
samizdat,
and the role of
Sakharo'1 in Russian history. Concurrently the joke is penetrating
contemporary Russian literature more and more. It is enough to
name Galich,
Chonkin
(Vladimir Voinovich), the novella
Moscow to
the End of the Line
(Venedikt Erofeev), "Buddha's Smile," which is a
chapter from Solzhenitsyn's
First Circle,
Aksyonov, and Zinoviev.
Sometimes it seems that the joke will be the only survivor of our
