A witty overview of humour in Russian culture.

Notes on Transliteration; Notes on the Contributors; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Tragicomic Principles in Pushkin's Drama 'The Covetous Knight'; 3. Gogol as a Narrator of Anecdotes; 4. Antony Pogorelsky and A.K. Tolstoi: The Origins of Kozma Prutkov; 5. Comedy between the Poles of Humour and Tragedy, Beauty and Ugliness: Prince Myshkin as a Comic Character; 6. The Young Lev Tolstoi and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey: the Test of Irony; 7. Fashioning Life: Teffi and Women's Humour; 8. Two Facets of Comedic Space in Russian Literature of the Modern Period: How Foolishness and Buffoonery; 9. Jokers, Rogues and Innocents: Types of Comic Hero and Author from Bulgakov to Pelevin; 10. Escaping the Past?  Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twentyfirst Century: the Case of Zoshchenko; 11. Evengy Zamiatin: The Art of Irony; 12. Godless at the Machine Tool: Antireligious Humoristic Journals of the 1920s and 1930s; 13. The Singing Masses and the Laughing State in the Musical Comedy of the Stalinist 1930s; 14. The Theory and Practice of  'Scientific Parody' in Early Soviet Russia; 15. Laughing at the Hangman: Humourous Portraits of Stalin; 16. Varieties of Reflexivity in the Russo-Soviet Anekdot; 17. Humour and Satire on Post-Soviet Russian Television