SUMMARY:

This essay is a contribution to the discussion forum “Mainstream Narratives of Soviet History and the Laughter of Surprise,” framed as responses by literary scholars, historians, and political scientists to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s essay “Soviet History as Black Comedy.” Evgeny Dobrenko identifies socialist realism as a totalizing aesthetic practice that defined the essence of the Soviet system. According to Dobrenko, to an observer located outside this all-embracing cultural sphere, socialist realism was a constant source of “involuntary laughter.” The comic effect of Stalinism and Sovietness in general was a result of their fundamentally imitative character.