Abstract Ilia Il’f and Evgeny Petrov’s satirical novels Dvenadtsat’ stul’iev and Zolotoi telenok are beloved Soviet classics celebrated for their wit and subversive humour. Scholarship on this literary diptych has attended to the tension between laughter and the state, as well as these texts’ (mis)alignment with the Soviet system. This article expands upon extant scholarship to contend that the laughter of these novels constitutes a form of freedom. Drawing breath from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology together with studies in asexuality and dandyism, this article theorizes a uniquely queer Soviet laughter that exists in opposition to the derisive laughter of the state and asserts joy in the face of failure. The trickster figure embodies this laughter of liberation and commits to the aesthetics of queer performance to transcend the boundaries imposed by the Soviet regime.
Elaine Wilson (Sat,) studied this question.