The hidden languages of Russian satire and humour

The article deals with various ways to convey covert meanings in a comic text, examining how satirists and humorists make use of hidden forms of communication with the reader. The writer, as an experienced diagnostician and forecaster, is able to open up a huge expanse of that which is not obvious in real life. In this regard, the art of Anton Chekhov is extremely indicative. This article considers various forms of hidden semantics in Soviet-era writing, from the well-known irony and allegory to more elusive elements of comic technique, such as associative signals, references to suggestive quotations, play with readers’ expectations, figures of “seeming”, literary mystification, the use of detail, of strange language, emphasis on characters’ gestures, errors of intonation, and comically colored pauses. The article demonstrates the ways in which satirists and humorists utilized speech behavior of as a form of active opposition to the official language of Soviet ideological cliches and dead verbal formulas. The presence of hidden semantic layers in the work requires that the reader perform complex tasks of text reception such as decoding and creatively deciphering hidden messages in the work. These techniques have popularly been described as “the cryptography of literature.” The literary text becomes a kind of figurative and verbal secret writing, understandable only to initiates. Analysts of such texts diligently engage in finding accurate and adequate semantic keys to them