Abstract: The cu
ltural pluralism that surfaced with the onset of Glasnost’ raises the interesting question of whether Stagnation might be somewhat of a misnomer for what was happening in the artistic and cultural life during Leonid Brezhnev’s administration. Although his regime tried its best to “tighten the screws” by increasing censorial control over cultural production, it couldn’t revert the process of cultural and social transformation set in motion by Khrushchev’s Thaw. Instead, it produced a milieu for a fascinating dialectic between authors and the State. Applying Linda Hutcheon’s theory of irony to Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s film “In the world of Fables” (1973), I would like to demonstrate how this dialectic has affected the development of subversively potent trends in the language of Soviet animation.Biographical statement: The proposed paper is a part of my PhD dissertation: “Ideology, subversion and Soviet cartoons during Brezhnev’s ‘Stagnation’”, which I hope to complete in summer 2011. My research interests at the moment are subversion and critical discourses in the field of cultural production in particular visual arts, cinema and animation, as well as the role of the artist in such production. My long term interests are in animation history, theory and method.