Grotesque realism: a "thousand-year-old popular world-perception" or the allegory of stalinism?

Straipsnyje nagrinėjamos liaudies kultūros apibrėžtys, pateikiamos Michailo Bachtino veikale apie Rabelais. Nužymėjęs lietuviškos veikalo recepcijos kontūrus, aš gilinuosi į liaudies pasaulėjautos kultūrinės raiškos pagrindus – „groteskinį realizmą“. Anot Bachtino, jį sudaro tikėjimas, pirma, karnavale pasiekiama absoliučia socialine lygybe, antra, žmogaus kūne centruota materija, kuri nuolat atsinaujina ir auga (tą atitinka hiperboliška poetika). Kritiškai analizuodamas šias tezes, aš taip pat klausiu, kiek Bachtino teorija buvo paveikta stalinizmo teorijos ir praktikos. Aptaręs kai kuriuos teminius mazgus ir „ezopinės kalbos“ atvejus, keliu hipotezę, kad svarbiausi veikalo konceptualūs šaltiniai yra Nietzsche’s filosofija ir ypač – milenaristinių atspalvių turinti narodnikų mintis. Jei taip, vadinasi, „groteskinis realizmas“ yra (neatsakytos) moderniojo intelektualo meilės liaudžiai vaisiusIn the perspective of the issues discussed in the paper Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World arises as a product of a modern intellectual's love for the people touched by millenarian hues. It is about the intellectual's love for the people as somebody else but him and his environment, for the people as the Other not touched by abstract thinking and education, power and hierarchy - love that continues in our times, too, and of which the history has not been written yet. It is in the context of modern culture that central theses of the study - the humanising and democratising function of laughter and the objects of criticism - dogmatic, hierarchical and ideocratic culture should be dwelt upon. Equally, the "grotesque realism" - the world perception revolving around the hyperbole, deformation and carnal excess - can be defined, more accurately, as the world perception of a part of modern Western society. It would be the world perception of that part of society that has lost its relation with the religious and, primarily, Christian tradition, and which, on the other hand, has not been more deep affected by the outcomes of the "civilisation process": individualistic self-awareness and rationalistic self-discipline. The modern feature of "grotesque realism" is concentration on the human body and overlooking everything else. The description of this popular world perception and its congenial interpretative distilling from Rabelais' renaissance work was Bakhtin's great achievement. This notion is more characteristic, more noticeable and actualised in the countries of "belated modernity" - Eastern Europe and Latin America, where rationality and the contribution of the daily work to the creation of welfare, happiness and equality is not as highly valued as the people's pure heart and the merry ritual of fraternity. Recently this "de-civilising" mentality has been gaining ground in the West, to