I have attended a great many defenses, in the military sense, and can report that most of them go poorly. The defender, however well-fortified, is at the structural disadvantage of having chosen a position and being obligated to hold it, while the attacker enjoys the luxury of choosing the angle. Verdun. The Alamo. Every marriage I have ever witnessed. The mathematics of defense are brutal and have not improved with the centuries.
Doctoral defenses, on the other hand, are supposed to be civilized. One presents a thesis. Opponents — formally appointed, formally polite — interrogate it. The committee votes. A degree is conferred. In a properly functioning academy, the outcome is decided before anyone enters the room, and the ceremony is exactly that: ceremony. The academic defense is theatre, and like all theatre, its purpose is to make the inevitable feel like it was earned.
I was in Moscow in February of 1946 to attend a doctoral defense that was, emphatically, not theatre.
Or rather: it was theatre of the kind I understand professionally — the kind where nobody is certain how the third act ends, and at least two people in the room have brought weapons, and the weapons are ideas, which are considerably more dangerous than pistols because you cannot confiscate them at the door.
The candidate was Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He was fifty years old. He had one leg. He was defending a dissertation on the work of Francois Rabelais, who had been dead for approximately four hundred years and who was, in the estimation of the Soviet academic establishment, adequately dead and therefore safe as a subject of inquiry.
They were wrong about this. They were wrong about this in a way that would take them six years to articulate and twenty-five to concede, and when they finally conceded it they did so by publishing the book, which is the academic equivalent of a defeated general sending his conqueror a fruit basket, and which I found — and continue to find — extremely funny.
I should explain why I was there.
I was there because I had read a book published in 1929 called Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, written by this same Bakhtin when he was a considerably younger man with the standard number of legs. The book argued that Dostoevsky’s novels were “polyphonic” — that they contained multiple independent voices, each fully realized, none subordinate to the author’s own perspective. Each character in Dostoevsky, Bakhtin claimed, spoke with an authority equal to the narrator’s. The author did not stand above his creations like God over the firmament. He stood among them, and the novel was not a monologue but a conversation.
Polyphony. Multiple independent voices, each convinced they are telling the story, each correct.
I recognized this. I recognized it the way you recognize your own handwriting on a document you don’t remember writing — with a jolt that is half recognition and half alarm, because if someone else has independently arrived at the same structure, it means the structure is real, which means it is important, which means it is in danger.
I write fugatos. This man was describing what I do.
He was also, I noticed, describing the precise opposite of what the Soviet state did. In 1929, the year Bakhtin published his book, the state spoke with one voice. One party. One leader. One correct interpretation of history, economics, art, science, the color of the sky, the proper method of growing wheat. Monologism — the word Bakhtin coined for it — was not merely a literary observation. It was a diagnosis. He had looked at Dostoevsky’s novels and described a form of human organization in which every voice matters equally, and he had done this while living inside a state that was engaged in the systematic project of ensuring that only one voice mattered at all.
They arrested him the same year.
I do not know whether they arrested him because of the book. The charges were “philosophical idealism” and “illicit religious activity,” which in the materialist Soviet state was the equivalent of being charged with having an imagination, and I have rarely encountered a charge that was simultaneously more absurd and more accurate. The man did have an imagination. It was the most dangerous imagination in Russia. They sentenced him to five years in the Solovki death camp — where, it should be noted, the mortality rate was such that the sentence was less a punishment than a probability calculation — and only the intervention of influential friends got it commuted to six years’ internal exile in Kazakhstan.
That was 1929. He went to Kazakhstan.
The Circle — the group of thinkers he’d gathered around himself in the twenties, the Bakhtin Circle, philosophers and linguists and literary critics who met in apartments and discussed phenomenology and published under each other’s names because operational security is older than the phrase “operational security” — the Circle was broken. Pavel Medvedev: purged. Executed or died in the camps, records unclear, as if the distinction between executed-and-died-in-the-camps is a distinction worth making, which it is not. Valentin Voloshinov: tuberculosis, 1936. Dead. The state broke them apart the way a hand breaks a spider’s web — not out of malice toward the individual threads but out of annoyance that the threads were connected.
I know what it looks like when a network is rolled up. I have seen it from both sides. The Bakhtin Circle was rolled up with the casual efficiency of a state that had practiced on millions, and the man at its center survived because he had the oldest skill in the intelligence tradecraft handbook: he knew how to become invisible.
He went to Saransk.
Saransk. Let me describe Saransk for you, because you deserve to know where this man spent the next three decades, and because the description will explain a great deal about the kind of person who survives there.
Saransk is the capital of Mordovia, which is a republic within Russia in the way that a drawer is a room within a house — technically accurate, functionally irrelevant. In 1938, when Bakhtin arrived to teach at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute, the city had approximately forty thousand residents, most of whom had not chosen to be there, and a cultural life that consisted primarily of not dying of the cold and, on special occasions, watching someone else die of the cold. The Mordovian Pedagogical Institute was a teacher-training college in a provincial backwater at the edge of the gulag system, and its students were being trained to teach in schools that the state was simultaneously building and destroying, because the Soviet approach to education was the same as the Soviet approach to everything: ambitious, contradictory, and lethal to anyone standing too close to the machinery.
It was here, in a room I imagine was cold and poorly lit because rooms in Saransk in 1938 were definitionally cold and poorly lit, that Bakhtin sat down to write a book about Francois Rabelais.
About Rabelais. About a French doctor and satirist who died in 1553 and who spent his career writing enormous, scatological, beautiful, insane novels about two giants named Gargantua and Pantagruel who ate too much, drank too much, pissed on the citizens of Paris, consulted oracles about whether to get married, fought wars using sausages as weapons, and generally conducted themselves with the kind of extravagant bodily excess that the medieval Church considered an abomination and that Rabelais considered the fundamental human condition.
The book Bakhtin wrote about this was four hundred pages long and was titled Rabelais in the History of Realism, which is the most boring possible title for the most dangerous book written in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, and which I suspect was boring on purpose, because Bakhtin understood — as I understand, as any competent operative understands — that the title of the document is the first line of defense, and the first line of defense should be so unremarkable that the sentry waves you through without reading the cargo manifest.
The cargo, in this case, was dynamite.
What Bakhtin argued was this: Rabelais’s grotesque comedy was not merely entertainment or literary eccentricity. It was the expression of an entire counter-culture — the folk culture of the marketplace, the fair, the carnival. A “second world” that existed alongside the official world of the Church and the feudal hierarchy. In this second world, all hierarchies were inverted. The king became a fool. The priest became a glutton. The body — the sweating, eating, defecating, copulating, dying, regenerating body — was the supreme authority, because the body does not lie about what it needs, even when every other institution in the civilization is lying about everything else.
Carnival, Bakhtin wrote, was the people’s “second truth.” Not the truth of the church, not the truth of the state, not the truth of anyone with a title and a stake in things remaining as they were. The second truth. The truth that appears when the masks come off and the body says what it actually thinks, and what the body actually thinks, invariably, is funnier than what the institution permits.
And here was the thing. Here was the hidden clause in the cargo manifest, the thing the border guard was not supposed to notice, the thing that made this book a weapon:
Bakhtin framed his argument as “radically democratic, anti-clerical, and revolutionary.” Against the medieval Church. Against feudal hierarchy. Against the official culture of an era safely distant and safely dead. Pro-revolutionary. Pro-popular. Pro-Soviet, by implication — the Soviet state was, after all, officially against churches and feudal hierarchies and all the apparatuses of pre-revolutionary oppression, was it not?
It was. Of course it was.
But Bakhtin was not writing about the medieval Church.
He was writing about any institution that speaks with one voice and demands that all other voices fall silent. He was writing about monologism. He was writing about the Soviet state while appearing to write about the Catholic Church, and the disguise was four hundred years of historical distance and the impeccable scholarly apparatus of a man who cited his sources correctly, formatted his footnotes properly, and never once broke character.
I know a cover story when I see one. I have been running cover stories since before this man’s civilization learned to write. The Rabelais book was the most elegant cover story I had encountered in four hundred years, and I include my own in that assessment, which is not a compliment I distribute casually.
He lost his leg in 1938. The year he arrived in Saransk, the year the Great Terror was consuming people at a rate that made the French Revolution look like a particularly aggressive homeowners’ association meeting. Osteomyelitis — a bone infection he’d carried since childhood. They amputated the right leg. Bakhtin, one-legged, newly arrived in a provincial backwater, his friends dead or scattered, the state that had arrested him still very much operational and very much interested in people who had been arrested before, sat down in his cold room and began writing about how laughter defeats fear.
Not theoretically. Not as a proposition to be debated at a future conference. Now. He was doing it now, in real time, as a one-legged exile in a frozen republic at the edge of the gulag system, and the laughter he was describing was not comfortable laughter, not the laughter of people who are safe, but the laughter of people who have seen the worst and have decided, with full knowledge of what it costs, that the worst is funny.
“Laughter overcomes fear,” he wrote — and I am quoting, because this sentence has earned the right to be quoted — “because it is uninhibited and limitless.” Not because it denies what is terrible. Not because it pretends the terror isn’t there. Because it refuses to be smaller than the terror. The terror says: you are nothing, and the universe is vast, and the forces that govern your life are beyond your comprehension, and the only appropriate response is silence and submission. And the laughter says: yes, and?
He wrote this in Saransk. One-legged. In the dark. While Stalin was still alive.
I could have wept. I didn’t. I was reading it for the first time in 1943, in a copy that had circulated through channels I will not describe, and I was sitting in a cafe in Lisbon, which was neutral and warm and full of spies, which is to say it was the opposite of Saransk in every respect except the one that mattered, which was that both cities were full of people pretending to be something they were not.
I read the Rabelais manuscript in Lisbon and I understood three things:
First, that this man had independently derived the structural principle I had been working with since before the temporal catastrophe — that polyphony is the ward and homogeneity is the attack, that the multiple voice is the defense and the single voice is the weapon, that the thing which speaks in one pitch and demands all other pitches fall silent is the thing I have been hunting across centuries.
Second, that he had done this not from music but from literature, which meant the principle was not musical but structural — deeper than any one art form, resident in the architecture of human congregation itself.
Third, that he had hidden it inside a book about a dead French satirist with the skill of a man who could have run any intelligence service in Europe and had instead chosen to run a one-man philosophical resistance from a frozen classroom in Mordovia, which was either the most heroic or the most insane allocation of talent I had ever witnessed, and I had witnessed the construction of the pyramids, and I had witnessed Crowley’s cooking, which is another story entirely.
And then there was the matter of the cigarette paper.
I learned this detail later — in Moscow, at the defense, from a colleague of Bakhtin’s who told it to me with the specific Russian combination of admiration and horror that is reserved for acts of genius so extreme they become indistinguishable from acts of madness.
It was 1941. The Germans invaded. Bakhtin had been working on another book — a study of the Bildungsroman, the novel of education and growth. Years of work. A manuscript. And he had sent it to a publisher in Moscow, as one does, and the publisher’s offices were destroyed in the invasion, and the only surviving copy was Bakhtin’s own.
Paper was scarce. Paper was scarce the way air is scarce at the bottom of a mine — not absent, but present in quantities that forced you to make decisions about what you would use it for, and the decisions were brutal, and the decisions were daily.
Bakhtin smoked.
Bakhtin smoked with the dedication of a man who had found, in nicotine, the one reliable ward against the specific cold of a Mordovian winter and the specific anxiety of being a philosophical dissident in a state that executed philosophical dissidents. He smoked constantly. He smoked the way I play the harpsichord — not as a habit but as a practice, not for pleasure but for the specific quality of attention it produced. And when the rolling papers ran out, as they did, as everything ran out in wartime Russia except suffering, which was in surplus, he looked at the stack of paper on his desk and he made a decision.
He rolled his cigarettes with the pages of the Bildungsroman manuscript.
Page by page. Chapter by chapter. He huffed and he puffed and little by little, he smoked his book.
The Bildungsroman study is lost forever. Whatever it contained — and given that its author had independently derived the structural theory of the polyphonic ward from literary criticism alone, it presumably contained something worth reading — is ash. Carbon dioxide. Dispersed into the atmosphere of Mordovia and thence into the general atmosphere of the planet, where it is presumably still circulating, which means you have almost certainly breathed a molecule or two of Bakhtin’s lost masterwork, which is either the most democratic form of publication imaginable or the most tragic, and I incline toward both.
He smoked his own book.
I want to sit with this for a moment, because it is important and because it is the funniest thing that happened in Russia in the twentieth century, and there is considerable competition for that title.
The sacred clown — and I use the term precisely, because I have known sacred clowns across cultures and centuries, from the yurodiviy of medieval Russia to the heyoka of the Lakota to the unnamed person at every wedding who knows exactly when to make the toast that reduces the bride’s mother to tears of laughter at the precise moment she was about to cry from something else — the sacred clown has a specific relationship to his own productions. He makes the thing. The thing does its work. And then the thing is consumed, or destroyed, or given away, because the function mattered, not the artifact, and holding on to the artifact would be a form of the same hoarding, the same accumulation, the same single-voiced insistence on permanence that the sacred clown’s entire vocation exists to oppose.
Bakhtin smoked his book because the function had already transferred. Whatever the Bildungsroman manuscript knew, Bakhtin knew. The pages were a container. The container was empty. And Mordovian winters are cold, and a man needs to smoke, and the pages were right there, and — I have to believe this — there was a moment, one moment, when Bakhtin looked at his own handwriting going up in flame and felt something that was not despair but its precise opposite.
The man who theorized that carnival laughter treats its own productions as disposable — that the carnival body regenerates what it destroys, that the downward motion (degradation, consumption, death) is simultaneously the upward motion (renewal, rebirth, laughter) — demonstrated the theory on his own body of work.
He didn’t just write about it. He did it. The commentary was the tradition continuing. The analysis was the performance. The theory was the practice, and the practice was rolling the theory into a cigarette and smoking it in a cold room in Mordovia while the state that had arrested him for having an imagination continued, outside the window, to execute people for having imaginations, and the smoke rose, and the words dispersed, and the function — the function — survived.
I know what that looks like. It looks like what happens when you lose your name to something that eats identities, and your opera to a temporal catastrophe, and your legend to a pipeline of charlatans, and you keep working anyway because the work is the thing, and the work is the thing, and the work is the thing.
The defense, then. Moscow, 1946. The Gorky Institute of World Literature. February. A room that was large enough to hold the audience, which had grown beyond what anyone expected, because word had gotten out that this was not going to be an ordinary dissertation defense, and in Moscow in 1946, where entertainment options were limited to the Bolshoi (state-approved beauty), the cinema (state-approved narrative), and drinking (state-approved oblivion), an intellectual bloodbath at a dissertation defense was something people would cross the city for.
Bakhtin stood at the front of the room. One leg. A crutch. A suit that had been fine once and was now the specific shade of distinguished poverty that Russian academics wore the way French academics wore ennui — as a badge, as a credential, as proof that they had chosen knowledge over comfort, which was either noble or insane and which was, in either case, the only choice available.
He was smoking, of course. He was always smoking. The cigarette was part of the apparatus, the way the quill was part of mine — not an accessory but an instrument, a tool for modulating the pace of speech, for creating pauses that were not empty but loaded, for giving his hands something to do while his mind did something else entirely. Every good operative knows the value of a prop. Bakhtin’s was a cigarette. Mine, historically, has been an accent.
He began.
He talked about Rabelais. About the marketplace. About the carnival tradition. About the “grotesque body” — the body that is open, unfinished, in process, always exchanging with the world around it, always eating and excreting and copulating and dying and being reborn. He described this body in language that was precise and scholarly and contained, within its precision and its scholarship, a controlled detonation. Because the “grotesque body” was not merely an aesthetic category. It was the opposite of the “classical body” — the sealed, completed, perfected, monumental body of official culture. The body of the statue, the icon, the Ascended Master.
I sat in the back of the room and listened, and what I heard was my own fugato described in the language of literary theory. Two violins and a bass. Multiple voices. The body as conversation, not monument. The carnival as counterpoint, not unison. The marketplace as polyphonic space — a hundred sellers, a hundred buyers, a hundred haggling voices, and the laughter that erupts when someone says the thing everyone was thinking and no one had the nerve to say.
He was describing the dancefloor. He was describing the opera. He was describing the thing that happens to a room full of people at the exact moment the music finds its hinge and the individual bodies stop being individual and start being something else — not a mass, not a mob, not the thing the entity makes when it eats the voices and leaves a single tone, but a conversation. A fugato. A state in which six hundred people are simultaneously themselves and something more than themselves, and the “more” does not consume the “selves” but amplifies them.
He was describing what I was trying to do in the Haymarket in 1745 when the lights went out.
He did not know this. He had never heard my music. He had arrived at the same structure from an entirely different direction, through Dostoevsky and Rabelais and the specific experience of being a one-legged exile in a monologic state, and the convergence — two minds, separated by centuries and disciplines, arriving at the same structural truth through completely independent paths — was either a coincidence or a proof, and I do not believe in coincidences, and I never have, and the proof was sitting in front of me in a bad suit with a cigarette and one leg and the calmest expression I had seen on a human face since Marcus Aurelius, who also had excellent operational composure and whose diary was, now that I think about it, also a disguised field manual for surviving under conditions of totalitarian pressure, which may be a pattern worth noting.
The three official opponents spoke. They were in favor. All three recommended the higher degree — Doctor of Sciences, not the lesser Candidate. The audience was electric. The vote was narrow, but it passed. Bakhtin had won.
He had not won.
The State Accrediting Bureau — the VAK — intervened. This was not unprecedented but it was unusual, and the unusualness of it told you everything you needed to know about how accurately the state had read the book. The VAK reviewed the dissertation. The VAK demanded six years of revisions. The VAK, when the revisions were submitted, overruled the academic committee and downgraded the degree from Doctor of Sciences to Candidate of Sciences.
The practical difference between the two degrees was ration cards. The Doctor of Sciences received better rations. The Candidate did not. In Moscow in 1946, where food was still scarce and the winter was still the winter and a one-legged man in a provincial teaching post had limited alternative sources of nutrition, the downgrade was not an academic nicety. It was a sentence. Not to death — the state was not, in this instance, that direct — but to a specific quality of deprivation that would follow him for years, that would thin his already thin frame, that would make the cigarettes he smoked do more damage to a body that had less to defend itself with.
They took his ration cards because they understood the book.
This is what I mean when I say the monologic state correctly identified the dialogic weapon. The VAK did not downgrade the degree because the scholarship was deficient. The scholarship was impeccable. They downgraded it because they recognized — at the institutional level, with the institutional instinct of a system that had been identifying and eliminating threats for thirty years — that this book about a dead French satirist was a machine for thinking thoughts the state did not permit.
And they were right. That is exactly what it was.
They could not say this. They could not stand in front of a microphone and announce: we are reducing this man’s food allowance because his analysis of sixteenth-century French literature constitutes a threat to Soviet ideological coherence. The sentence is absurd. The sentence is the funniest sentence the Soviet bureaucracy ever almost said. But they knew it, and Bakhtin knew they knew it, and I knew they both knew it, and the entire defense — the entire six-year ordeal of the defense — was a carnival, a Rabelaisian farce, a grotesque comedy in which the most powerful state on earth fought a one-legged professor over ration cards because his book about laughter was making them afraid.
Laughter overcomes fear because it is uninhibited and limitless.
The state was afraid. The state was afraid of a book about how laughter overcomes fear.
The recursion is so perfect it makes my teeth hurt.
He went back to Saransk. Of course he went back to Saransk. Where else would he go? He was a provincial professor with one leg and a Candidate of Sciences degree and a book the state had correctly identified as dangerous and a habit of smoking that was, if anything, intensifying with the years, and he had been offered nothing better, because nothing better is what you are offered when your work has been recognized as a weapon and the state has decided that the most efficient response is not execution — execution creates martyrs, and martyrs are a form of polyphonic persistence — but diminishment. Reduce the man. Reduce his rations. Reduce his degree. Reduce his visibility. Make him smaller. Make him provincial. Make him forgettable.
They were terrible at this. They were terrible at this because diminishment is a form of suppression, and suppression, as I have had occasion to note in several centuries’ worth of field reports, activates the mechanism it is trying to kill. Ban the play and the play becomes famous. Arrest the writer and the writing circulates underground. Downgrade the degree and the dissertation becomes legendary. The Rerouting Principle. Every time.
Bakhtin in Saransk. Teaching. Smoking. Receiving guests with tea and cigarettes — the tea weak, the cigarettes strong, the conversation stronger than both. “Obsessively private.” Shunning “politics, official meetings, and the telephone.” Refusing, as his biographers would later note with something between admiration and bewilderment, “the vanities of victimhood.”
That last phrase. The vanities of victimhood. I have been thinking about that phrase for twenty years and I have not exhausted it. There is a temptation, when you have been broken by a system — when your friends have been killed, your leg has been taken, your degree has been reduced, your book has been suppressed, your other book has been literally smoked — there is a temptation to make the breaking into your identity. To become the-man-who-was-broken-by-the-state. To wear the wound like a medal. To let the violence done to you become the most interesting thing about you.
Bakhtin refused. He refused the way a musician refuses a wrong note — not with effort, not with struggle, but with the quiet authority of someone who knows what the right note sounds like and has no interest in playing anything else. His identity was not the broken man. His identity was the man who wrote the Rabelais book. And the Rabelais book was about laughter, not about pain, and the laughter was not a denial of the pain but a refusal to let the pain have the last word, and the refusal was itself the argument, and the argument was the book, and the book was the man, and the man was in Saransk, smoking, teaching, refusing the vanities of victimhood with a composure that I recognized in my bones because I had been doing the same thing since a temporal catastrophe took my name and gave it to something that eats identities for a living.
The book was published in 1965. Twenty-five years after it was written. Stalin was dead. Khrushchev had come and gone. The thaw — that brief, luminous period when the ice cracked and you could see, for a moment, the water underneath — the thaw made publication possible, and Bakhtin’s students and supporters pushed it through, and Rabelais and His World appeared in Moscow bookshops in 1965, and what happened next was the last and most beautiful iteration of the recursion.
Soviet intellectuals read the book.
Soviet intellectuals read the book and understood what it was.
And they used it. They used Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival laughter as a framework for their own coded dissent. They discussed Rabelais at academic conferences and meant the Politburo. They analyzed the “grotesque body” in seminar rooms and meant the body politic. They cited Bakhtin in papers that were, themselves, Bakhtinian — scholarly prose serving as smuggled ward-technology, the commentary on the tradition being, itself, the tradition continuing.
Bakhtin became, as the scholars would later write, a figure of “almost cult status” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the word cult is doing more work in that sentence than the scholars realized, because what formed around him was not merely academic admiration but something closer to a lineage — a transmission of method, of posture, of the specific skill of saying the dangerous thing inside the safe sentence. The Aesopian tradition. Russian to the bone. A tradition of speaking in code that is older than the Soviets and older than the Tsars and older, probably, than the language itself, because wherever there is a state that insists on one truth, there will be people who find ways to say the second truth inside the first, and the finding is its own kind of laughter, and the laughter is its own kind of survival.
The recursion: Rabelais wrote carnival laughter against the medieval Church. Bakhtin wrote about Rabelais’s carnival laughter against the Soviet state. Soviet intellectuals used Bakhtin’s analysis as a framework for their own carnival laughter against the same state. Each layer performed the function it described by wrapping itself in analysis of the previous layer. The commentary was the tradition continuing. The theory was the practice. The practice was the theory. Four hundred years of recursion, each iteration harder to suppress than the last, because each iteration looked more like scholarship and less like subversion, and the looking was the disguise, and the disguise was the tradition, and the tradition was laughter.
The man Peter the Great tried to kill in the eighteenth century — the yurodiviy, the holy fool, the one person who could tell the tsar the truth — reappeared through Dostoevsky as a literary character, through Bakhtin as a theoretical framework, through the Soviet intelligentsia as a mode of discourse. Each time the tradition was suppressed, it returned in a form that was harder to identify and harder to kill. The fool becomes the character. The character becomes the theory. The theory becomes the method. And the method — the method is just a man in a cold room, rolling his own book into cigarettes, refusing the vanities of victimhood, and writing about laughter.
I left the defense in 1946 carrying something. This is what you do: you enter a room, and if the room has done its work, you leave carrying something that was not in your pockets when you arrived.
What I carried was this: the knowledge that the structure I had been working with — the fugato, the polyphonic ward, the multiple-voice defense against the single-voice attack — was not mine. Was not musical. Was not even, in the deepest sense, technical. It was human. It was the thing humans do when they are in a room together and the room allows them to be more than one thing at a time. Bakhtin had found it in novels. I had found it in trio sonatas. The sacred clown finds it in the moment the joke lands and the whole room is laughing and the laughter is not at anyone but with everyone, including the person who told the joke, including the person the joke is about, including God, who — if the risus paschalis tradition is to be believed, and I believe it — told the first joke on Easter morning when He walked out of a grave and looked at Death and said, in effect, yes, and?
I walked out of the Gorky Institute into a Moscow evening that was cold in the way only Moscow can be cold — not aggressively, not maliciously, but with a kind of comprehensive, ontological commitment to coldness that implies the city has thought carefully about warmth and has decided against it. The snow was falling. The streetlights were doing their best, which in Moscow in 1946 was not very good. Somewhere in the building behind me, a one-legged man was putting on his coat and gathering his notes and preparing for the trip back to Saransk, where he would continue, for nineteen more years, to teach, to smoke, to refuse the vanities of victimhood, and to wait for the world to catch up with a book he had written in the dark about laughter and the body and the sound a civilization makes when it remembers that it has more than one voice.
He did not know I was there. He never knew. I prefer it that way. The witness does not introduce himself to the evidence.
But I will say this, as a professional assessment and not as sentiment, because sentiment is what I traffic in and assessment is what I am:
I have known operatives across centuries. Spies, provocateurs, double agents, moles, the whole taxonomy of clandestine tradecraft from Walsingham’s shop to the OSS to the things happening now that I will not discuss because some of them are still operational. I have seen every style of covert work there is — the flamboyant (Crowley, who was terrible at it), the meticulous (Fatio, who was brilliant at it), the intuitive (Randolph, who did not know he was doing it until it was too late to stop).
Bakhtin was the best.
He was the best because his cover was perfect. Not impenetrable — impenetrable covers attract attention; the fortress invites the siege. Perfect. Which is to say: it was exactly what it appeared to be. He was exactly what he appeared to be: a literary critic. A scholar of Rabelais and Dostoevsky. A provincial professor with one leg and a cigarette and an interest in the European novel. This was not a disguise. This was the man. And the man was also, simultaneously, without contradiction, the most effective covert operator in the Soviet Union, because his weapon was not a microfilm or a dead drop or a clandestine radio but a book, and the book was about laughter, and the laughter was about freedom, and the freedom was hidden inside the scholarship the way the second truth is hidden inside the first, the way the counter-subject is hidden inside the fugue, the way the sacred clown is hidden inside the literary critic is hidden inside the one-legged professor is hidden inside the man who smoked his own book and refused the vanities of victimhood and waited twenty-five years for the world to publish what he’d written in the dark.
The recursion is the defense. The commentary is the tradition. The tradition is laughter.
And the laughter, as he wrote in Saransk with one leg and a cigarette and the calmest operational composure I have ever witnessed in any century:
The laughter is uninhibited and limitless.
The laughter cannot be killed.
Just delayed.
Post-script: He was formally rehabilitated in 1967. The arrest was annulled. He could live legally in Moscow. By then he was seventy-two years old and, by all accounts, not particularly interested in Moscow. He died in 1975, by which point he was already a legend, and the legend was already doing its work, and the work was a book about laughter that had survived arrest, exile, amputation, the destruction of its author’s circle, a world war, a paper shortage, a bureaucratic siege, and a twenty-five-year suppression, and had emerged on the other side as the theoretical foundation for understanding how laughter defeats exactly the kind of power that tried to kill it.
He smoked his own book. The smoke dispersed. The function survived.
The second violin enters four bars after the first.