Boys! Recall the famous story of the legendary character celebrated by Boris Polevoi! Ребята! Вспомните знаменитую историю легендарного персонажа, воспетого Борисом Полевым! -Viktor Pelevin 1 But Chapaev was revisited, over and over. In this fi nal chapter we come full circle. Despite Astafi ev's indictment of traditional Soviet war literature, in the post-Soviet period the fi gure of Chapaev continued to resonate. As we have seen, he and his comrades, literary depictions of war heroes and Cold

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... War antiheroes, were constants across the Soviet twentieth century. Long aft er people ceased reading Furmanov's 1923 novel, Vasily Chapaev lived on. In 1941 he was mobilized to help with the war eff ort and featured in the short fi lm Chapaev Is with Us! 2 Th e Vasiliev brothers' fi lm too remains beloved, although in post-Stalinist times more for its humor than for its historical portrayal of the Civil War era. 3 Even in twenty-fi rst-century Russia, Soviet-era Chapaev anecdotes still make up a signifi cant percentage of all jokes told. History and humor. Th e appropriation of Chapaev by the Soviet and post-Soviet populace speaks to the centrality of the myth of the peasantwarrior and to the necessity of treating Soviet sacred myths with a grain, or a gorst (handful), of salt. 1 Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra. Zhiznʹ nasekomykh. Zatvornik i Shestipalyi. Prints Gosplana (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 7-122; 28-29. 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChik40rcrw&feature=related. Also interesting is the "Hollywood-style" trailer created by recent fans to accompany the original fi lm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ORc8hQjR0&feature=fvsr. 3 See Graham, Resonant Dissonance; Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 2008); and John Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) for discussions of Chapaev and Chapaev. Upon its release in 1934, the fi lm was lauded by Pravda, whose editorial read, "Th e whole country is watching Chapaev!" Graham credits the surge of Chapaev jokes to the thirtieth anniversary of the fi lm in 1964, aft er which it began to be shown frequently on television (Resonant Dissonance, 6).