Stars in the Night

Index, the admirable English quarterly devoted to freedom of expression throughout the world, prints in a recent issue a group of jokes from totalitarian (or, as in the case of Greece, recently dictatorial) countries, and prefaces the selection with a passage from a recent essay, “The Literary Process in Russia,” by Andrei Sinyaysky:

In recent times only the joke has preserved that exceptional, spontaneous resilience that is characteristic of art and goes beyond mere freedom of speech. No matter how strongly it is suppressed (and there was a time when you could get five or even ten years for “shooting your mouth off”), it only flourishes on suppression, gaining not in bitterness but in humor and l...