Humor in Russian Literature: Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol

 

Humor in Russian Literature: Chekhov

Just re-read Chekhov’s Seagull, a play I had not read in years. He designates this thing as a “comedy in four acts,” and I suppose you could see the dismalness of the human condition as comedy. The play, like his other big-name dramas—The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya—is replete with ineffectual losers, mooning over their lost lives and doing, essentially, nothing. Everybody is in love, but in love with the wrong person. The Seagull ends with the suicide of one of the main characters. Comedy?

 

Humor in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky

Those who think there is nothing funny in Dostoevsky’s morbid works have not read Dostoevsky. He has a great sense of humor, but his humor is dark to extremes. Read the passage in Notes from the Underground, where the perverse unnamed narrator describes how he tries—repeatedly—to walk down the sidewalk without stepping aside for an arrogant military man coming from the opposite direction. Hilarious. But, then again, this intense short funny novel is so reeking in hysteria that, for a reader, getting all the way through it is no laughing matter.

 

Humor in Russian Literature: Gogol

Nikolai Gogol used to give readings for a select audience at the homes of his patrons. He was so good at reading/performing his own works, which are genuinely funny, that people would be down on the floor, holding their sides with laughter. There is little or no pure, hearty, loud and joyous life-affirming laughter in Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but Gogol’s works are awash in such laughter. Despite the fact that he himself, who wrote the humor, was a frenetic neurotic—in his personal life one of the most screwed-up of all Russian writers. A religious fanatic and closet homosexual who starved himself to death at age 42.