По поводу смеха у Достоевского: новые исследования

The recent appearance of two miscellanies of studies dedicated to humour and laughter in Dostoevsky’s work are a precise testimony to a new awareness of this aspect of the Russian writer’s poetics. An aspect that, despite its centrality and importance, had been paradoxically removed from the critical discourse from the very beginning. This article analyses in detail one of these volumes, entitled Funny Dostoevsky: New Perspectives on the Dostoevskian Light Side (ed. by Lynn Ellen Patyk & Irina Erman, 2024). The book is full of interesting and original insights, and some of its theses invite discussion. The stereotype of Dostoevsky as an over “serious” and exclusively “tragic” writer will be difficult to undermine, especially at the level of mass reception, yet these studies, along with other clues, hint at an orientation less influenced by prejudice, at least at the academic level. Therefore, editorial choices such as Claudia Scan dura’s are also important: Scandura, a specialist in Russian poetry, has recently published in Italian, in her own translations, a collection of Dostoevsky’s verses accompanied by a wonderful preface focusing on his particular type of humour and the importance it had for the OBERIU collective in the 1920s.