Authoritarian Laughter
eBook - ePub

Authoritarian Laughter

Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

  1. 318 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Authoritarian Laughter

Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

About this book

Winner of the 2024 BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) Women's Forum.

Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbyt? investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.

Broom was multidirectional—it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.

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Yes, you can access Authoritarian Laughter by Neringa Klumbytė in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Baltic History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Acknowledgments
  2. Relevant Dates
  3. Note on Transliteration
  4. Introduction: Authoritarian Laughter
  5. 1. Banality of Soviet Power
  6. 2. Political Intimacy
  7. 3. The Soviet Predicament
  8. 4. Censorial Indistinction
  9. 5. Political Aesthetics
  10. 6. Multidirectional Laughter
  11. 7. Satirical Justice
  12. 8. Soviet Dystopia
  13. Post Scriptum: Revolution and Post- authoritarian Laughter
  14. Conclusion: Lost Laughter and Authoritarian Stigma
  15. Notes
  16. References
  17. Index