International journal

Speech Genres

ISSN 2311-0759 (Online)
ISSN 2311-0740 (Print)

For citation:

Degaltseva A. V. The feuilletons of the “12 Chairs Club”: Satire as the key to Bakhtin’s “co-creation of those who understand”. Speech Genres, 2026, vol. 21, iss. 1 (49), pp. 93-103. DOI: 10.18500/2311-0740-2026-21-1-49-93-103, EDN: XEOPGY

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Language: 
Russian
Heading: 
Genres of mass media
Article type: 
Article
UDC: 
821.161.1-7.09:811.161.1’38’42
DOI: 
10.18500/2311-0740-2026-21-1-49-93-103
EDN: 
XEOPGY

The feuilletons of the “12 Chairs Club”: Satire as the key to Bakhtin’s “co-creation of those who understand”

Autors: 
Degaltseva Anna Vladimirovna, Saratov State University
Abstract: 

Satire is a way of critical comprehention of the reality, allowing a journalist to implicitly express a negative assessment of socially significant phenomena, forming a certain civic position in the audience. One of the satirical genres of speech is the feuilleton. Understanding the content of the feuilleton and the socio-cultural context that gave rise to it, identifying the problem reflected in it and finding ways to solve it make the reader a participant in the process that M. M. Bakhtin called “co-creation of those who understand”. Nowadays, due to the freedom of speech, the feuilleton is not very popular in democratic media, but some Russian literary and journalistic editions still publish it. In the “Literaturnaya Gazeta” the feuilletons are usually placed in the humorous section “The 12 Chairs Club”. They retain the features peculiar to this artistic and journalistic genre of speech: topicality, satirical refraction of reality, typification of images, active use of means of indirect communication, etc. The purpose of this work is to analyze the techniques used by the authors of the feuilletons to influence the addressee and involve him in the process of critical reflection of the reality. The study of the feuilletons published in the “12 Chairs Club” from 2018 to 2024 showed that they absorb and creatively process the features of other genres of speech (short story, fairy tale, conversation, reportage, business plan, etc.). The authors of the feuilletons of the “12 Chairs Club” start their dialogue with the reader, appealing to their background knowledge, worldview, and interpretation skills. The techniques of actualizing the addressee’s critical thinking in the feuilletons of the “12 Chairs Club” are the following: absurdization of reality, the use of subtext and intertext, language play, the choice of the most suitable tropes and figures of speech for solving communicative tasks (irony, hyperbole, grotesque, pun, metaphor, metonymy, parcellation, etc.), parody on stylistic and structural features of other genres. The associative and semantic content of the feuilletons in the “Literaturnaya Gazeta” is expanded by accompanying their texts with the works of cartoonists.

Key words: 
feuilleton
satire
satirical genres in the media
“Literaturnaya Gazeta”
“12 Chairs Club”
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Received: 
27.08.2024
Accepted: 
12.10.2024
Published: 
02.03.2026