RECEPTION OF ERIH KOŠ’S NOVEL BIG MAC AND POETICS OF “SOCIALIST SATIRE”

Abstract

Firstly, the paper outlines the regressive transformation of Soviet satire from a developed literary form in the 1920’s and the beginning of 1930’s to a peripheral literary phenomenon during the dominance of the dogmatic socialist realism. Earlier signs of that change are found in the texts penned by the Soviet critic Vladimir Blum in 1925. and 1929. The second Blum’s text is part of a significant debate on socialist satire that occupied the pages of the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. This debate reveals the disaccord between the critics regarding the need for satire in a socialist society and brings forth the demand for a satire which would reflect the progressive accomplishments of said society, heralding the basic requirements for the survival of satire in the epoch of social realism. The second part of the paper introduces the texts and debates from which a kind of an informal poetics of Yugoslav satire can be reconstructed. In these texts, under the ever-strong influence of socialist realism as the ”correct” model for the relationship between literary works and reality, the specificities of socialist satire were reassessed. Said texts also show how long-standing the doubts of Soviet critics from the 1920’s were, especially regarding the questionable ”constructivity” of satire in socialism. In the final part of the paper the reception of Erih Koš’s satirical novel Big Mac is examined in light of these doubts, so as to determine to what extent the critical judgments in the reviews of this novel were based on the aforementioned informal poetics of satire.