Description
Book SynopsisWinner 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 Klumbyte investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.
Broom was multidirectionalit 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 Lau
Trade Review
This book—a historical ethnography of Soviet Lithuania's satire magazine The Broom—is an insightful reading produced thirty years after the state discipline of Soviet socialism was replaced by the self-discipline of Lithuanian nationalism.
* The Russian Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Authoritarian Laughter
1. Banality of Soviet Power
2. Political Intimacy
3. The Soviet Predicament
4. Censorial Indistinction
5. Political Aesthetics
6. Multidirectional Laughter
7. Satirical Justice
8. Soviet Dystopia
Post Scriptum: Revolution and Post-authoritarian Laughter
Conclusion: Lost Laughter and Authoritarian Stigma
