SUMMARY:

In this article Mark Lipovetsky elaborates a revised model of the Soviet trickster, both as a literary narrative and a social type. Lipovetsky contends that Soviet trickster narratives communicated not a marginality of social status and experience in the USSR, but rather a very typical if not mainstream positionality. These narratives served as the main source for a distinctive type of Soviet subjectivity – a Soviet cynic – which was an alternative to the normative ideological subjectivity exclusively studied by historians of Soviet society. By embracing the trickster narrative, a person was transformed from a slave of circumstances into an active and autonomous actor of the social drama and even an embodiment of artistry and freedom. Thus, the trickster narrative performed the crucial function of returning social agency to people – not only to actual subalterns but also to various marginalized and stigmatized categories of Soviet citizens. It is this function of the Soviet trickster narrative as endowed with a sense of agency in an objectively constrained situation that was primarily responsible for tricksters’ incredible popular appeal.