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.” Using the text that appears on a new memorial plaque on the building in Prague where Franz Kafka was born, Galina Babak discusses attempts to “catch” Franz Kafka in rigid identity categories and she notes the new plaque’s “neopositivist” rejection of this approach. This same collision encapsulates the challenge of writing about the USSR as a “whole.” Babak rejects black comedy as a frame for Soviet history because it is no longer possible to be simultaneously “inside” and “outside” Soviet life – a position essential for the production and consumption of Soviet-era jokes. Instead, she argues in favor of an analytical position that goes beyond the plaque’s neopositivism and embraces the complexity and hybridity of the Soviet past.