“Give Me the Book of Complaints”: Complaint in Post-Stalin Comedy

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Milla Fedorova
Georgetown University

Abstract

This essay investigates how the means of complaint and the figure of the complainer changed in Soviet comedy films from the Stalin era to the 1960s–1970s. It focuses on the ambiguous nature of complaint during the Thaw and the subsequent Stagnation, periods of radical social change—namely, differentiation between complaint as an instrument of expressing grievance and denunciation as a means to harm an undesirable person. The essay discusses how the motif of complaint correlates with the function of the satirical genre—to expose social and political shortcomings. In English.

 

Keywords

Post-Stalinism, Complaint, Denunciation, Satire, Comedy, Film, Thaw, Riazanov, Gaidai, Daneliia, Klimov


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Sep 23, 2014

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How to Cite
Fedorova, M. (2014). “Give Me the Book of Complaints”: Complaint in Post-Stalin Comedy. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 6(3), 80–92. Retrieved from https://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium/article/view/403
Issue
Vol. 6 No. 3 (2014): Culture of Complaints in Russia and Eastern Europe
Section
Essays
Author Biography

Milla Fedorova, Georgetown University

Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages

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