50-я Международная научная филологическая конференция имени Людмилы Алексеевны Вербицкой

The Chukchi joke cycle outside Russia

Guillem Castañar
Докладчик
старший преподаватель
Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет

201
2022-03-18
14:00 - 14:30

Ключевые слова, аннотация

Chukchi, Estonia, ethnic jokes, post-socialism, translation

Тезисы

Chukchi are a minority people from the Chukotka Peninsula, the easternmost tip of the Russian Federation. On the second half of the last century–likely in the early 1970s (Mijaylin 2016)–Chukchi became butts of a highly productive Russian-language joke cycle, whose origins are most likely to be found in widely spread audiovisual cultural products, such as films (Arkhipova 2003), songs (Graham 2003) and even textbooks (Draitser 1998). Chukchi soon were a favourite butt of Soviet ethnic humour, featuring mainly in jokes based on the script of stupidity. However, the popularity of these texts was not limited to the Russian territory. As it has been already observed (Laineste 2008, Krikmann 2009), Russian-language jokes (political as well as ethnic) spread throughout the Soviet Union, thus creating a sort of pan-Soviet joke tradition shared in the different republics. Chukchi jokes attained great popularity, particularly in the Soviet Republic of Estonia. In this country, Chukchi jokes were told primarily in Russian, but they were also frequently translated into the local language. On some occasions, even macaronic versions, combining Russian and Estonian, were created. After the collapse of the USSR, the Chukchi remained a favourite joke target in Estonia. However, the evolution of these characters over time and outside Russia has not been studied. Previous research works show that the image of these targets did not change in Russia in post-soviet times in terms of scripts, language mask nor image (Castañar 2021). This article deals with the evolution of post-socialist ethnic jokes about Chukchi outside the Russian linguistic area, specifically in Estonia. Using a comparative approach applied to the study of humour and jokes (Davies 2002, 2008, 2001), two different sets of jokes, both including texts from different periods, are confronted: on the one hand, Russian- and Estonian-language Chukchi jokes from the archives of the Estonian Literary Museum; on the other hand, Chukchi jokes in Russian from Russian sources. It is detected that these jokes undergo a process of simplification–in terms of plots and contents–outside of Russia, which becomes significantly acute in texts that are translated from Russian into Estonian.