Laughter as Gnosis in Yuri Mamleev’s ‘Metaphysical Realist’ Works

by Charlie Smith

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Yuri Mamleev hosted an underground salon in Moscow which would soon become the epicenter of what was known in unofficial Soviet culture as the “schizoid underground.” At this communal barrack on Yuzhinskii Lane, writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, and mystics would congregate to share their work and spontaneously develop an esoteric worldview of a highly eclectic nature. The ur-text of this gestalt of late-Soviet esotericism is Mamleev’s novel Shatuny, written between 1966 and 1968, in which a cast of metaphysically deranged characters wander about the center and periphery of Moscow, each engaged in unique searches for a hidden reality within the Self. One such character, Izvitskii, becomes aware of a qualitatively specific kind of laughter – a chuckling, guffawing laughter (“khokhot [хохот]”) – which emerges from an elsewhere in relation to the intelligible world of the Soviet Union (and of Modernity writ large). As the novel’s narrator tells us,

Izvitskii, having tasted of that which lay beyond the grave, now stressed the importance of laughter of the Absolute; and it was an incredible, unprecedented quality if the Absolute possessed its own laughter. It (the laughter) was wild and ungraspable because it was opposed to no one, and its cause was, naturally, not a falling out with reality, but lay rather in something unknown to us.¹

It is precisely this “khokhot” which can be found ubiquitously throughout Mamleev’s oeuvre, from his earliest short prose to his last novels.

This special, otherworldly laughter in Mamleev’s writings derives from a well-established literary tradition which begins with accounts of Byzantine and Russian “fools-in-Christ” or “holy fools” (“yurodivye [юродивые],” “blazhennye pokhaby [блаженные похабы]”) and continues through Russian literature into the twentieth century. In this tradition, laughter operates as an annihilator of received, social “wisdom” – an unmasker of the paltry conceits of all-too-human “reason” – in favor of the true Wisdom of the Divine or the Absolute. Mamleev seeks, through his works, to manifest or evince an immediate metaphysical reality² which radiates from a “beyond” (“potustoronnee [потустороннее]”), and it is by means of the presence of “khokhot” in his works that the alibis of “this world” (“posiustoronnee [посюстороннее]”) are punctured and exsanguinated, allowing something radically “other” to seep through. In this way, “khokhot” functions for Mamleev as a kind of gnosis or active, experiential knowledge that consists in direct, affective proximity to metaphysical reality.

The intellectual historian of holy-foolishness, Sergei Ivanov, has claimed that, from its very inception through Byzantine texts, the figure of the holy fool has existed primarily as a literary device, meant to serve as a counterpoint to social hegemony and false ossifications of religious doctrine.³ Elsewhere, however, Ivanov has critiqued the tendency of contemporary authors and literary theorists to appropriate the figure of the holy fool for the sake of strictly aesthetic or deconstructionist ends; he argues that the “postmodern” mode functions by effecting a “total death of [essential] meanings while preserving a cosmetic textual integrity”; by contrast, the holy fool mutilates the overtly rational or socially comprehensible functions of signification so as to point toward a single, absolute “Meaning” or “Sense” which comes from God.⁴ Mamleev, who is similarly critical of “postmodern” tendencies in literature⁵, conceives of the act of writing as a “monastic feat” by which the author fundamentally alters the reader’s perception of reality.⁶ To wit, for the author in direct contact with the Absolute or “parallel worlds,” the composition of a literary text is an act of insurrection against the distorted apprehensions of “the real” that have been imposed by societal authority; such an act bears immediate consequences on the metaphysical level.

In a volume titled Laughter in Ancient Rus’, a lauded study of the holy fool and medieval Russian laughter which remains a critical resource on the subject, Soviet historians Aleksandr Likhachev and Aleksandr Panchenko emphasize the visionary nature of holy-foolish laughter, as well as its creative and destructive capacities in relation to “reality.”⁷ Drawing heavily from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of laughter as elucidated in The Art of Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Likhachev underlines the ways in which this laughter simultaneously demolishes “the connections and meanings extant in [social] life” while “[restoring] to the world its primordial chaotic quality.”⁸ In the context of Rus’, the bearer of this creative-destructive laughter is most frequently the figure of the holy fool or “iurodivyi,” who flouts and ridicules not only the world’s temporal conventions and norms, but also those of the Church which have adhered to the letter of God’s word while ignoring its spirit. In contrast with patristic literature, which seeks to reveal the eternal, metaphysical basis of the world by means of progressing through a series of greater and greater abstractions, the wielder of laughter deflates the reality of the world by positing a “world of laughter” – a grotesque parallel reality in which the absurdities of the carnal and the material are revealed. As Likhachev tells us,

To a degree greater than reality, the world of laughter opposes the [world of spiritual abstraction]. The world of laughter is the world of ‘the low,’ the world of matter, the world which pulls back the curtain on reality to reveal its poverty, nakedness, stupidity, ‘mechanicity,’ the absence of all meaning or sense; the world of laughter destroys the entire ‘sign system created by tradition.’⁹

In the eyes of the holy fool, the external world of social “culture,” being the antithesis of his inner, spiritual culture, is to him an “anticulture.” The outer world is worthy of his laughter and depravity, which evokes terror and repulsion in his onlookers. He is both the ridiculer and the ridiculed, dependent on his audience, but what is essential in his peculiar form of laughter is the way in which it indicates his status as a partaker in gnosis, knowledge of a reality other than this one. As Likhachev claims,

The holy fool sees and hears that which others do not know. His anticultural world (i.e., the world of ‘real’ culture) has been restored to ‘reality’ – the ‘reality of the beyond [potustoronnego].’ His world exists on two planes: to the ignorant, it is laughable, while those who understand find in it a special meaning.¹⁰

The term “gnosis” may be translated from Greek simply as “knowledge.” But this is knowledge of a particular sort, heterogeneous from any form of knowledge which might be communicated socially. Wouter Hanegraaff, a leading scholar in the relatively new academic field of “Western Esotericism,” defines gnosis as “esoteric knowledge”¹¹; gnosis “does not refer to rational, philosophical knowledge, but to religious, spiritual insight, based on revelation.”¹² It is precisely in this sense that holy-foolish laughter functions as an indication of gnosis. We may take, for example, an account collected in Igor’ Kuznetsov’s 1910 essay on holy-foolish saints Vasilii and Ioann in which a drunkard enters a tavern and demands to be given wine. In doing so, he makes himself vulnerable to demonic possession. Being the only one with eyes to see the demon encroaching on the inebriated man, Vasilii the Blessed breaks out into a “chuckling laughter [v golos zakhokhotal Vasilii Blazhennyi].” Disturbed by this seemingly unmotivated laughter, the drunkard questions the holy fool, who then reveals what only he has been able to see.¹³

Such an allusion to an “anti-world” – a world of radical negation made present through laughter – is of central importance to Yuri Mamleev’s “metaphysical realist” works. Within conditions of modernity, in which secularism, materialism, and humanistic “reason” have almost totally occluded the super-rationality of the Absolute and have pretended to discredit the indispensable guidance of religious tradition, Mamleev finds no other recourse than to bring about a “shift” (“sdvig [сдвиг]”) in consciousness by means of “a certain ‘ridicule’ of reality, of its limitations which, naturally, call up laughter.”

Laughter points to the fateful imperfection of the world. Perhaps the only being at which it would be impossible to laugh would be one who is absolutely perfect. The world, then, provides one with the possibility of endless laughter. And if the distance from the great to the laughable is only a single step, then one does not have far to go in moving from the laughable to the great.¹⁴

For Mamleev’s underground Moscow milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, the living, institutional tradition of Orthodox Christianity was all but inaccessible. Soviet ideology (at least in part an extension of the modern, post-Enlightenment worldview), having replaced the role of Christian doctrine in prescribing parameters for proper social thought and behavior, had become the dominant paradigm against which the contemporary analog of a holy fool might levy his laughter. As Mamleev describes the “spiritual situation” of his time and place, he and his coevals experienced waking life “as a prison, a tyranny of pseudo-reality, regardless of what form it might take: the petrified spiritual ‘dogmas’ of yore, vulgarized by human consciousness, or simply any form of everyday routine, internal or external.”¹⁵

The intuitive, esoteric, and unorthodox means by which members of the Yuzhinskii Circle prosecuted their spiritual searches bore, in this sense, an explicitly gnostic character. Through their various artistic productions and oral traditions, they began to develop a practice or mode of contemplation which they called “the I Religion.”¹⁶ According to this doctrine, the only exit from externally imposed reality was to be found by turning inwards and seeking, at any cost, that aspect of the “I” which transcended the world. Mamleev’s form of gnosis, then, can be qualified as “gnostic” according to a definition formulated by attendees of the first international colloquium on Gnosticism, convened in Messina, Italy in 1966:

Not every gnosis is Gnosticism, but only that which involves […] the idea of the divine consubstantiality of the spark that is in need of being awakened and reintegrated. This gnosis of Gnosticism involves the divine identity of the knower (the Gnostic), the known (the divine substance of one’s transcendent Self), and the means by which one knows (gnosis as an implicit, divine faculty that is to be awakened and actualized).¹⁷

To this definition, I would add that “gnosis,” particularly in Mamleev’s case, is a knowledge which cannot be accumulated, transcribed, or communicated discursively; rather, it is an immediate, active knowledge of the transcendent, the Absolute, or the “Abyss,” which is not rationally comprehended, but rather intuited and felt by means of exposure to the very object of gnosis. One might equate this form of knowledge with the state of “theosis” achieved through hesychastic practice in Orthodox Christianity or with breaking through a boundary of one’s habitual reality and transcending into that which is radically “other” in relation to it.

As concerns the relationship between laughter – “khokhot” – and gnosis in Mamleev’s works, we might first consider its textual function. Almost without exception, “khokhot” appears in Mamleev’s stories and novels whenever characters are confronted with a sudden rupture in their usual apperception of the world and of themselves. In the story “Black Mirror” (c. 1983), a character by the name of Semion Ilyich encounters a mirror in his apartment which does not reflect him or the room in which he stands, but rather an abyssal gloom in which he “sees his fate.”¹⁸ Terrified and innervated by what he witnesses there, Semion begins to ask himself a horrifying question: “Who am I?” After further interactions with this mirror, an opening into the “beyond,” he comes into contact with a figure who has two heads, four eyes, and four ears. This being interrogates him about his lack of supernumerary body parts, prompting Semion’s image of reality to suddenly implode, and causing him to burst into a fit of chuckling laughter:

Then he began to chuckle [khokhotat’]. The form of his own body seemed to him unusually funny and absurd. The fact that he only had one head was particularly hilarious […]. Only one tongue, two eyes, and one nose. There was something here to chuckle about!¹⁹

Later, after a certain process of transformation within Semion reaches its apogee, it is not “he” who chuckles anymore, but the disturbing presence that now spills out of the mirror:

From out of the mirror, which had become semi-black, it was as though tendrils from beyond were forcing their way. A chuckling laughter resounded from its great depths. Someone, dark and formless, came tumbling out of it all the time before dissolving in mid-air, and… khokhot, khokhot, khokhot.²⁰

Here, the affect of revelatory, gnostic laughter becomes unmoored from a definite subject. Semion’s false “I” or “temporal ego” has been destroyed by the action of “khokhot,” while some ever-inchoate pseudo-being rushes forth to obliterate the illusion he has had of what constitutes “Self.” We might perversely read Brian Massumi’s definition of “affect” as a fitting description of the way in which this laughter reveals an incomprehensible gnosis concerning the “I.” Massumi adopts a definition of affect from Baruch Spinoza, describing it as “an affection [in other words an impingement upon] the body, and at the same time the idea of the affection.”²¹ In essence, according to this definition, affect (as something “virtual”) precedes both its impingement upon a “body” and that “body’s” subsequent reflection upon and reification of the impingement as an “idea.” In other words, in the moment of this “impingement,” the reality of the impinged body is constituted by the impingement itself, something that has no place or time. Following the thought of Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze, Massumi makes the event of the impingement ontologically primary, while the “body” which reacts to it and the mind which turns it toward signification are its products. Massumi goes on to say that “[a]ffect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement […]. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective.”²² In this light, what distinguishes Mamleev’s “khokhot” as an affect is the fact that it is never confined by the secondary moment of an emergent idea; the ideas which characters have about themselves are always violated, reduced to a dissolving shade, perpetually tumbling out of an abyss. Moreover, while Massumi’s source of affective “impingement” is something “virtual” which nonetheless remains immanent to physical reality, the affect of “khokhot” originates from a radically transcendent “beyond.” It is contact with this unassimilable “beyond” which creates an affective impingement, not on the body but on the soul.

We should also consider the visual aspects of the noun “khokhot,” which Mamleev uses as a constant symbolic stamp for limit events of a metaphysical nature. In “Black Mirror,” the very word “khokhot” begins to repeat after an ellipsis caused by a breakdown of the narrative voice, making an incursion into the mind of the reader. “Khokhot” is as much an image as it is a sound – some kind of pseudo-eidetic presence on the field of the page which denies comprehension while insisting that some devastating super-reality darkens behind it.

Although, in the Russian language, this “word” commonly signifies a specific timbre of laughter via onomatopoeia, it can be likened to an analogous word spoken in Dostoevsky’s short story “Bobok” (1873).²³ In this story, the protagonist visits a graveyard where he is suddenly able to hear the interred engaged in a chaotic, cacophonous polylogue. One of these disembodied voices describes a process by which, once buried, the various egoistic layers of the dead’s personality begin to decay. After a period of roughly three months, the soul (or, otherwise, the conscious residue) of that being which was once a human immersed in society grows silent. There is one being in this graveyard who has reached this stage and, on an intermittent basis, occasionally emits a single, uninterpretable word – “bobok.”²⁴ Like Mamleev’s “khokhot,” Dostoevsky’s “bobok” is a sound denoting the presence of something cosmically “other” and an image denoting the absolute limit of that which can be known about what lies on the other side of death. It functions in much the same way as the gnostic glossolalia of texts found among the Nag Hammadi scrolls²⁵ and as the form of monastic silence expressed by holy fools as “glossolalia, distorted muttering, intelligible only to [themselves]” which serves as a form of “‘autocommunication,’ a prayer-in-silence directed toward the self and toward God. It bears in direct relation to the passive side of holy-foolishness, i.e., self-knowledge and self-perception.”²⁶ Likewise, when Mamleev’s characters laugh, they do not communicate in any externally cognizable sense; their “khokhot,” if it can be treated as communication of any kind, is a non-transitive communication – a communication with the Self or an “autocommunication.” This kind of laughter constitutes an affect which is hermetically sealed, whose effects are perceptible in the material world, but whose causes come from an inaccessible elsewhere.

There are other precedents for “khokhot” which Mamleev has drawn from the annals of Russia’s metaphysical literature. One of the most pointed precursors of this unique form of laughter may be found in Aleksandr Blok’s apocalyptic 1905 poem “The Invisible One [Nevidimka],” which Mamleev cites as one of the most important literary works to prophesize the coming calamities of the twentieth century. The following quatrain is particularly illustrative:

In the shade of a coffin lamp,

A racket persists over the city.

Upon the red band of the dawn

A soundless chuckling sways.

В тени гробовой фонари,

Смолкает над городом грохот.

На красной полоске зари

Беззвучный качается хохот.²⁷

In Blok’s poem, “khokhot” is situated at the very boundary of the perceptible, at the liminal edge of the crepuscular moment. The coming tumult of the twentieth century can only be imparted here through a paradoxically “soundless” affect. This brief excerpt serves as the basis for the opening of another short story by Mamleev titled “Charlie” (c. 1983). The narrator begins by describing a mirrored doubling of the modern world (New York City) and that of the “beyond” (the grave):

It was summer. The sun shined in the empty sky like a furnace being stoked in hell. New York – low, squat, especially in comparison to the endless sky above it – suffocated. But its stone slabs were inordinately large if one were to look at them up-close; they were indifferent to everything. They were petrified in the heat like graven images bereft of any hidden significance. A sprawling stone graveyard crowded the far bank of Hudson Bay across from the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Its headstones resembled small skyscrapers; they were just as blunt and monotonous, with narrow and impassible streets running in between… They crowded each other out, as if there were no place for any of them. It was indeed very expensive to find a place here. Nearby, an interstate carved through space. Cars rumbled over it, but neither the living nor the dead could hear the racket [grokhot], as they were deafened by their own life and non-being… On the other side of the interstate, and the city of the dead, swarmed a city of the living that trailed off past Manhattan and had already become something else. This was a conglomeration of brick houses which rose no more than two or three stories high – faceless edifices reminiscent of rigid anthills.²⁸

In covertly echoing Blok’s poem, which rhymes “grokhot” with “khokot,” Mamleev establishes a relationship between the “here” (Manhattan with its skyscrapers) and the “beyond” (the cemetery with its gravestones). The “racket [grokhot]” – an externalized, profane equivalent of the prophetic and gnostic “khokhot” – serves as a boundary between worlds, concretized as urban topography, bringing them into communication while maintaining their mutual unintelligibility and incommunicability.

To conclude, Mamleev deploys “khokhot” in his literary works not as a strictly formal device or linguistic toy meant to embody a breakdown in signification, but as a real and immediate opening into the “Abyss” of metaphysical reality. This is a form of laughter which has a deep pedigree in Russian literary tradition, with roots in mystical, spiritual practice. “Khokhot” is an affect unmoored from any false, temporal subject – a gnosis afforded only to the supreme “I” of Being as such. To partake in “khokhot” is to escape the world and its illusory trappings. As the author of the gnostic Gospel of Philip writes, “Redemption is no laughing matter, but a person goes laughing into heaven’s kingdom out of contempt for these rags. If the person despises the body and considers it a laughing matter, the person will come out laughing.”²⁹

1. Mamleev, Yuri. Shatuny (Ad Marginem, 2002), pp. 168-9

2. Yuri Mamleev has referred to his literary method as “metaphysical realism.” This form of literary activity cannot be reduced to mere “fiction” or aesthetic play. Mamleev conceives of it, rather, as an authentic esoteric practice by which the author reveals a broader scope of reality as such, incorporating its usually imperceptible metaphysical layer. As he writes in his essay “Metaphysics and Art,” “I am deeply convinced that art (and literature in particular) can be the most important expression of metaphysics and philosophy in certain cases. It is ‘most important’ precisely because the image can be superior to the idea. The image possesses many planes and is more paradoxical than a simple thought. Therefore, the literary text is often more profound, metaphysically and philosophically, than a strictly philosophical text (or the two are at least equal in value).” Mamleev, Yuri. “Iskusstvo i metafizika”: Sud’ba bytiia: Za predelami induizma i buddizma (Moscow: Enneagon, 2006), p. 100.

3. Ivanov, Sergei. Blazhennye pokhaby: Kul’turnaia istoriia iurodstva (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2005), p. 142.

4. Ibid., p. 381.

5. Mamleev, Yuri. “Liudi zadaiut sebe neveroiatnye voprosy...”: Stat’i i interv’iu (Moscow: Traditsiia, 2019), p. 77

6. Mamleev, “Ten’ liutsiferova kryla,” p. 43.

7. A.S. Likhachev, A.M. Panchenko, N.V. Ponyrko. Smekh v drevnei Rusi (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984).

8. Ibid., p. 3.

9. Ibid., p. 39.

10. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

11. Hanegraaff, Wouter (ed.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006), p. vii.

12. Ibid., p. 403.

13. Kuznetsov, I.I. “Sviatye blazhennye Vasilii i Ioann, Khrista radi moskovskie chudotvortsy”: Zapiski moskovskogo arkheologicheskogo instituta, t. VIII (Moscow: 1910), pp. 84-5, quoted in Smekh v drevnei Rusi, pp. 123-4.

14. Mamleev, “Ten’ liutsiferova kryla,” p. 41.

15. Mamleev, Sud’ba bytiia, p. 26.

16. Ibid., passim. In his most important metaphysical tract, The Fate of Being, Mamleev revises the title of this doctrine, changing it from “the I religion” to “the metaphysics of I,” insisting that all religions are propagated on the acceptance of an insuperable gulf between God and His creations, whereas “the metaphysics of I” takes as its basis the Hindu philosophy of “Advaita Vedanta (Non-Dual Knowledge)”; According to the non-dual variant of Vedanta, there is no real distinction between the authentic Self (Atman) and the Supreme Being (Brahman).

17. Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, pp. 403-4.

18. Mamleev, Yuri. Chernoe zerkalo (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), p. 165.

19. Ibid., p. 169.

20. Ibid., p. 172.

21. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), p. 31. Massumi adds the bracketed note concerning “impingement.”

22. Ibid., p. 35.

23. Elsewhere, I have shown how this later short story of Dostoevsky’s was explicitly influential in Mamleev’s development of “metaphysical realism” as a literary method; cf. Smith, Charlie. “Demons in the Gloom: Yuri Mamleev’s Shatuny and Metaphysical Realism” – presented at the 54^th annual ASEEES Convention in Chicago, Illinois, November 2022.

24. Dostoevsky, F.M. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 t. T. 21 (L.: Nauka, 1980), p. 51.

25. Meyer, Marvin (ed.). “The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (Harper, 2007), p. 255; idem, “Three Forms of First Thought,” p. 725.

26. Likhachev et al., Smekh v drevnei Rusi, p. 96.

27. Blok, Aleksander. “Nevidimka” (1905), quoted in Mamleev, “Metafizicheskii obraz Rossii (esse),” p. 152. Italics mine.

28. Mamleev, Yuri. “Charli”: Skitaniia (Moscow: Al’pina, 2023), p. 271.

29. Meyer, “The Gospel of Philip” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, pp. 178-9.