Persisting in Folly

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the author(s)/editor(s)
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Conventions
• Introduction
• The Scope of this Study
• Folly’s longue durée in Russian Culture and Literature
• Holy foolery
• Folklore
• Pre-revolutionary literature
• The early Soviet era
• The Late Soviet Cultural and Literary Context
• Prelude: Fools in Search of an Author (Voinovich’s Chonkin, Shukshin’s chudiki)
• Part I: In Praise of Folly
• Chapter 1: From the Underground Man to Dame Folly: The Erasmian irony of Moscow-Petushki
• Notes of a Psychopath
• Moscow-Petushki
• The Erasmian Tradition
• The Basis of the Comparison in Genre, Form, and Rhetoric
• Foolish Women and Androgynous Folly
• The Drinking Party and the ‘Transvaluation of Values’
• The Shared Philosophical Sources of Praise of Folly and Moscow-Petushki
• Chapter 2: Not to Reason Why: Life against mind in the fiction of Yuz Aleshkovsky (Nikolai Nikolaevich, The Hand)
• Introduction
• Nikolai Nikolaevich (1970)
• The Hand (1977–1978)
• A ‘Hangman’s Narrative’
• Hangman as Holy Fool
• The ‘Vicious Circle of Reason’
• The Re-evaluation of Values
• Chapter 3: Wisdom and Stasis in School for Fools
• Part II: Appraisals of Folly
• Chapter 4: ‘The Idiot is You’: Viktor Erofeev’s assault on the cult of folly
• The plot
• The second collapse of ‘humanism’
• A satire of Erofeev’s samizdat contemporaries?
• Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Fool outside Christ? Dmitry Galkovsky’s myth of Rozanov-yurodivyi and its precursors (Sinyavsky, Ven. Erofeev et al.)
• The Émigré Perspective: Yury Ivask and Andrei Sinyavsky
• The ‘Eccentric’ Perspective: Venedikt Erofeev’s Rozanov
• View from the Dead End: Dmitry Galkovsky’s ‘Wise Mistakes’
• Concluding Thoughts: Integrity at What Cost?
• Part III: Continuations and New Directions since 1991
• Chapter 6: The Infantility of Viktor Pelevin (‘The Ontology of Childhood’, Omon Ra, Generation ‘P’)
• Omon Ra (1992)
• Generation ‘P’ (1999)
• Chapter 7: In Search of Maturity: The fool and his brother (Terekhov, Pavlov, Sadulaev, Makanin, Sharov)
• Chapter 8: The Fool and his Father, and Sometimes her Mother: Intellectual disability and holy foolishness (Buida, Vasilenko and others)
• Postscript
• Про Иванушку-дурачка и золотую рыбку
• About Ivan the Fool and the Goldfish
• Select Bibliography
• Primary Sources: Literature, 1963–2013
• Secondary Sources: Literature, 1963–2013
• Secondary Sources: Social and Cultural History, 1963–2013
• Secondary Sources: Folly and Related Topics in Literature and Culture
• Index
• Series index