TY  - BOOK
AU  - Oliver Ready
PY  - 2017
CY  - Oxford, United Kingdom
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 1662-2545
SN  - 9781787074002
TI  - Persisting in Folly
T2  - Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963–2013
DO  - 10.3726/b11191
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1055312
N2  - The theme of foolishness has long occupied an unusually prominent place in Russian culture, touching on key questions of national, spiritual, and intellectual identity. In literature, the figure of the fool – and the voice of the fool – has carried additional appeal as an enduring source of comic and stylistic innovation. Never has this appeal been stronger than in the past half-century, whether as a reaction to the «scientific atheism» and official culture of the late-socialist era, or as a response to the intellectual and moral disorientation that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. Persisting in Folly traces three contrasting phases within this period: the «praise of folly» that underpins acknowledged samizdat masterpieces by Venedikt Erofeev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, and Sasha Sokolov; the sceptical appraisals of the Russian cult of the fool offered in the 1980s by Viktor Erofeev and Dmitry Galkovsky; and the legacy of this conflicted tradition in post-Soviet prose. By combining close readings with a rich comparative and contextual framework, this book charts a new path through recent Russian literature and offers a wide-ranging consideration of the causes and consequences of Russian writers’ enduring quest for wisdom through folly.
KW  - Russian cult of the fool, samizdat literature, post-Soviet prose, holy foolery, the folk fool and intellectual disability
LA  - English
ER  -