Charms of the Cynical Reason

The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture as well as in the post-soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-soviet tricksters including such cultural idioms as Ostap Bender Buratino Vasilii Tyorkin Shtirlitz and others. The steadily increasing charisma of Soviet tricksters from the 1920s to the 2000s is indicative of at least two fundamental features of both the soviet and post-soviet societies. First tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the soviet (as well as post-soviet) social universe. Secondly these characters epitomize the realm of cynical culture thus far unrecognized in Russian studies. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical contradictory and inadequate world not as a necessity but as a field for creativity play and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols discourses contradictions and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.