Laughter as Gnosis in Yuri Mamleev's 'Metaphysical Realist' Works

• In Event: Byss and Abyss: Orientations toward Immanence and Transcendence in Russian Thought and Literature

Abstract

This paper will address the ubiquitous appearance of "chuckling laughter [khokhot]" in the "Metaphysical Realist" works of Yuri Mamleev. Looking back to the millennia-old tradition of holy foolishness and the morphology / functionality of laughter in the Russian literary canon, I will demonstrate the way in which Mamleev's idiosyncratic laughter serves as an inscrutable allusion to active, metaphysical knowledge (gnosis) derived not from this world, but from "the beyond [potustoronnee]."

Author

• Charlie Smith, U of Illinois at Chicago