The Trickster in the Modern Russian Lit

Catalog description

“Trickster” does not simply mean “deceiver” or “rogue” (the definition of trickster according to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary), but rather “creative idiot”, to use Lewis Hyde’s expression. This hero unites the qualities of characters who at first sight have little in common — the “selfish buffoon” and the “culture hero”; someone whose subversions and transgressions paradoxically amplify the culture-constructing effects of his (and most often it is a “he”) tricks. The trickster is a typical comic protagonist – it is enough to recollect Renard the Fox from the medieval Roman de Renard, Panurge from François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Sanchо Panza, Beaumarchais’s Figaro, Gogol’s Khlestakov, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Yaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ Producers, Bart Simpson and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen), as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert along with many other comical characters of the same genre – to confirm this self-evident thesis