ИСТИНА

Comedies of Leonid Gaidai rely on viewers’ intimate knowledge of fundamental narrative models of Soviet culture, both official and unofficial. Perhaps one of the reasons for the comedies’ popularity is the intertwining of the two. The main official narratives are the socialist realist masterplot and the narrative of war as the fundamental cultural logic of Russian/Soviet society. In addition to Soviet narratives, Gaidai’s films employ models originating in Russia’s imperial past, such as, for example, the relations between the imperial center and periphery. Gaidai’s characters often travel to imperial outskirts or discuss the fate of colonial lands: Kemska volost (the Finno-Ugric Kem region), Kazan khanate, Finland and even America, whose Brighton Beach is represented as a periphery of the Russo-Soviet imperial universe. Another trope which Gaidai engages with is the so-called people-mindedness (“narodnost’”), which existed both in the 19th-century Romantic and the Soviet versions. Among unofficial models of cultural behavior, Gaidai engages with the criminal underworld culture, the unofficial economic practices, and of course drinking culture. Finally Gaidai deals with such registers of Russian culture as folklore and the phenomenon of royal impostors, closely connected with the idea of the sacrality of political power in Russia.