That work, published in the cycle of ‘Literary Monuments’, was the first introduction of the concept of the ‘Russian democratic satire’ into the scholarly discourse. In the article ‘At the Origins of the Russian Satire’ which preceded the comments to the texts, according to the ideological demands of her epoch, the author connected the Russian democratic satire, and the fiction literature of the nineteenth century with the monuments of the Russian literature of the seventeenth century — such approach was inescapable in the late Stalin’s period. Although it was not such artificial one, as it could look, because many of the published texts reflected Russian cultural realities still kept in the twentieth and even in the twenty first centuries (for instance, we could compare ‘The Service for Pub’ and the novel ‘Moscow—Petushki’ by V. Erofeev). In that article, and in the comments to the published texts, A.-P. put a special attention at the anti-clerical character of many of the monuments (‘Tale on Priest Sava’, ‘Tale on Shemyaka’a Trial’, ‘The Service for Pub’, and others).
After the works by D.S. Likhachev, and A.M. Panchenko on the ‘laughable culture’, the concept of the ‘Russian democratic satire’ almost completely disappeared from the scholarly discourse, its place was taken with the ideologically neutral ‘laughable culture’, but it is not always justified. Reduction of such deep phenomenon as anti-clericalism to the ‘carnival’ and ‘laughable culture’ only seems an attempt to simplify much more complicated relations between clerics and laic people, as well as inside the ecclesiastic milieu itself.
Literary monuments published by A.-P. in that book were quite different, but they were unified with satiric approach. For the first time, that research work presented a significant part of the Russian culture as a single phenomenon. Besides, those texts helped to come into the daily world of the seventeenth century — not into a sample picture, as in ‘Domostroy’, but into the real life. A.-P. noted: “The satire of the seventeenth century did not come in touch with exclusive events, did nor describe outstanding heroes and deeds; it comes into the common life of its reader and depicts it in such way, which forces that reader to consider injustice, lie, hypocrisy and corruption of authorities, falsity of church sermons, and so on; it stimulated its reader to take a closer look at the culprits of his hapless life” (p.166).
Adrianova-Peterz V.P. Russian Democratic Satire of the Eighteenth Century. / Publ., article and comments by V.P. Adrianova-Peterz. Moscow—Leningrad, Ac. of Sc. of the U.S.S.R., 1954, 292 p., ill.