From Romantic to Realistic Laughter

This paper compares forms of laughter specific to two diachronic systems, one of which was formed in the 1790s-1840s, and the other in the 1840s-1880s. One of the main indicators of romantic laughter is its inseparability from serious content (comic obituaries, laughter through tears, irony, unintentional comic, auto-parodies, etc.). On the whole, laughter in the Romantic period is at once both identical and non-identical. In contrast, realistic laughter is not mixed with seriousness, but constitutes its analogue. On the one hand, laughter similar to seriousness becomes unfunny (the “Literary Morning” in Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”) and compromises the foreign comic (the hackneyed and dubious jokes of Dostoevsky’s, Chekhov’s and other realist writers’ characters). On the other hand, laughter in the second half of the 19th century acquires a pragmatic charge as an analogue of practical behaviour and chooses as its target l’art pour l’art (the poets of “Iskra”), as well as artistic texts in which the means do not correspond to the ends (the poems of Captain Lebyadkin). Apart from correlating with the seriousness, the analogue comic implies the creation of an artificial persona that provokes laughter (the mask of Kozma Prutkov).