Abstract Walter Benjamin’s 1928 review of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s So lacht Russland! (1927) proposes a peculiar relationship between laughter and politics. What he will read later along the lines of a successful reception of technology, as the ‘cheerfulness of communism’, appears during the late 1920s as a medium for enabling intercultural understanding via a shared affect economy and critical reflections across historical-cultural ruptures. This article goes beyond evaluating the accuracy of interpretations of Zoshchenko’s writings and instead takes his texts as catalysing different configurations of humour and politics in reception trajectories. Benjamin’s position, voiced from Berlin, is juxtaposed and contrasted with at times diametrically opposed readings articulated by critics based in Moscow and Prague. In turn, Benjamin’s figure of a ‘nachtönendes Gelächter’ gains shape less as a pro- or counter-revolutionary interpretation of Zoshchenko but more as a critical category for engaging with cultural relations from a multi-sensory point of meaning-making.
Sophia Buck (Tue,) studied this question.