Samizdat and the Remaking of Jewish Culture in Leningrad: A Soviet Reading of Vladislav Khodasevich and Shaul Tchernichovsky in the Leningradskiĭ evrejskiĭ alʹmanakh

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Samizdat and the Remaking of Jewish Culture in Leningrad: A Soviet Reading of Vladislav Khodasevich and Shaul Tchernichovsky in the Leningradskiĭ evrejskiĭ alʹmanakh

Sat6 Apr11:45am(15 mins)

Where:

Teaching Room 7

Stream:

Jewish Culture and Memory

Presenter:

Benjamin Arenstein

Authors

Benjamin Arenstein¹; ¹ University of Chicago, United States

Discussion

In September 1982, the first issue of the samizdat journal Leningradskiĭ evrejskiĭ alʹmanakh (The Leningrad Jewish Almanac) was published in the Soviet Union. Like many Jewish samizdat journals of the 1980s, this publication sought to educate its readers on various aspects of Jewish tradition and culture that lacked institutional support under Soviet rule. Among its featured pieces on Jewish culture was a sizable section dedicated to the Hebrew works of Shaul Tchernichovsky, republished in Vladislav Khodasevich’s 1920 Russian translation and accompanied by Soviet dissident writer Yuri Kolker’s critical commentary. Reading Khodasevich’s Tchernichovsky translation alongside Kolker’s commentary, this paper explicates the place of Hebrew-Russian poetry in the formation of late Soviet Jewish culture. What role did Hebrew-Russian translation play in Jewish literary activity during the late Soviet Union? In what ways did samizdat publication mediate and structure the relationship between late Soviet Jewry and pre-revolutionary Jewish literature? How was the broader cultural position of Soviet Jewry during the 1980s articulated through or in opposition to Jewish literary production in Hebrew and Russian? This paper seeks to excavate the historical entanglements of Hebrew and Russophone literatures. In doing so, it makes a case for the centrality of multilingual literary paradigms for understanding Jewish culture of the late Soviet Union in particular and Soviet underground culture in general.

Programme

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