Chizhik Pyzhik, gde ty byl?


Na Fontanke vodku pil.


Vypil riumku, vypil dve,


Zashumelo v golove.


(Chizik Pyzhik, where've you been? / Drinking vodka on Fontanka. / Had a glass, then another, / Then my head went buzzing.)


There is no Russian who would not know this simple, somewhat silly ditty. Many, especially outside St. Petersburg, come to know Chizhik Pyzhik before they know the Fontanka canal. For many, the catchy tune is the first and often only musical piece they can play on the piano.


Now Chizhik, this small, quick, bird -- a siskin -- first immortalized in song has been cast in bronze by Rezo Gabriadze, the Georgian artist, playwright and director, and will forever perch on a wall along the Fontanka embankment.


The joyous inauguration of the monument to the bird character from a "drinking" song was the climax of the Zolotoi Ostap Festival.


The third annual celebration of this Humor Festival, held in late November, the gloomiest and darkest season in St. Petersburg, has brought together the cream of the nation's comedians for some comic relief.


For Russians the name Ostap is as familiar as Chizhik Pyzhik and needs no further explanation. A sort of cross between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and O'Henry's adventurers, Ostap Bender -- immortal protagonist of "Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf," the two novels by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov -- is no less important in understanding the ever-mystifying enigmas of Russian life than Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's characters. The novels, set in the 1920s, are quoted from and alluded to as much as Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin."


In the 1960s, the years of my youth, the novels were probably the most read works in the country. We used to compete to show who was best versed in the plots and who could quote the most by heart.


Given all that, it is striking that hardly any Westerners -- even among those well read in Russian literature and Russian studies -- are familiar with this bible of wit. Is Russian humor untranslatable? Or are the absurdities of Soviet life, masterfully ridiculed by Ilf and Petrov, so alien to Western experience that they cannot relate to them?


And what is happening now? Has the sun set on a triumph of seven decades of communist rule: brilliant, bitter and biting but somewhat outdated, Soviet-style humor? Are we drifting into a humorless, matter-of-fact, businesslike reality of survival and moneymaking? When was the last time you heard a new, really biting and sarcastic joke like the millions of good ones from the old days?


Maybe Zolotoi Ostap is one of the last attempts to cling to this tradition -- the last laugh before everything changes and all we have left is Chizhik Pyzhik on the Fontanka.