Among the ins and outs of the war in Ukraine, the heroism of the speeches and public appearances of Volodymyr Zelensky stands out as something unlikely to be revised by history.
—in the same kind of role, familiarly self-satirizing, suddenly sober and serious. Thinking of the place of a comedian in power, a reader’s mind turns inevitably toward a great Russian critic of the past century, Mikhail Bakhtin, who made his special study the intricate relation of “carnival” with power. At a time when too many are disgracing themselves by turning against Russian art and literature, it is pleasing to understand a Ukrainian hero through a Russian lens.
Bakhtin, who lived a long life, from 1895 to 1975, was a complex and many-sided thinker, a linguist and a philosopher of language as well as a Renaissance historian and literary critic. He missed the Gulag, or, just as likely, the bullet in the head that cut down many of his collaborators, by luck and by inches.
” , that a “carnival” is not only a European peasant festival but an event that gave birth to a whole new way of looking at the world, a world turned upside down. The ugly and ridiculous things that bodies do—copulate, defecate, get drunk, fart—are the special realm of healthy vulgar comedy, of “carnival,” and this comedy reminds us of the limits of power to explain and dominate existence.
Bakhtin was, of course, contrasting the carnival spirit against the cult of personality and the bureaucratic, grinding evil of Stalinism. What he admired in Rabelais and labelled “grotesque realism” is the opposite of social realism, the enforced manner of civic virtue of the Stalin period. But he did not see “grotesque realism” as merely anarchic. Out of the detritus and absurdity comes renewal.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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