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What is satire? According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary satire is “a branch of literature ridiculing vice or folly.” From this preliminary definition I would gather that there have to be two essential elements in satire: (1) something intrinsically wrong or evil in the object of satire (a “vice” or “folly”); and (2) an aggressive or hostile attitude coming from the subject of satire, that is, from the satirist or from the reader who replicates the satirist's attitude.
A passage from Alexander Zinoviev's (1980) satirical novel The Radiant Future exemplifies the two points:
…when Lenka [the narrator's daughter] came in to kiss me goodnight she asked me casually what internationalism was. I started to explain, but she cut me short with a wave of her hand.
“That's all out-of-date rubbish. Internationalism is when a Russian, a Georgian, a Ukrainian, a Chuvash, an Uzbek and all the rest get together to go out and beat up a Jew.”(p. 140)
For a moment, the narrator takes his daughter seriously, that is, attempts to mouth the standard party-line definition of internationalism, no doubt a definition like the one to be found in a recent Soviet dictionary:
INTERNATIONALISM: international solidarity of the working class, of communists of all countries in the struggle for common goals, their solidarity with the struggle of peoples for national liberation and social