Terres promises, filiales et patries irréalisées : sur le mécanismes de la mélancolie humoristique russo-juive à travers les pages de Serguei Dovlatov et d'Igor Guberman

Thank to the hybridisation of the Russian oral folk tradition and the heritage of Gogol' and Chekhov with the Russian-Jewish toska, in the 20th Century's Russian literature a new skeptical humorous style was developed and established. The feature of this style is based on the paradox of "laughing through tears". This is not a literary genre, but rather a mental style revealing a specific "structure of feeling", where the paradoxical nostalgia toward "what never had been" prevails. As it is revealed in the works by Dovlatov and Guberman, this style is shown to be the reflection of the diasporic condition and ontological "suspension2 of the Russian Jews. Inspite of the differences between the two authors, their expatriation to the Russia's "affiliates" (America and Israel), their spleen toward their "stepmother-country" and their cospolitanism have generated a common humorous literary and linguistic identity