Contenu du sommaire : Autour de la littérature juive russe

Il'ia Serman, Debate in 1908 on the subject of Jewish literature in Russian language and the post-October decade. The most eminent Jewish writers took part in the debate that suddenly made its appearance in the Russian press in 1908: Kornei Chukovskii argued that the participation of Jews in Russian literature was undesirable because of their own bimillenary tradition and the impossibility to create a masterpiece in a foreign language. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, who had helped Chukovskii a few years before to penetrate into Russian journalism, supported him in this debate inciting Jews who wrote in Russian to deal not with questions of general character but with their own problems which were not solved in spite of the large participation of Jews in the revolution of 1905. This article borrows for historical observation purposes of the ideas discussed in 1908 the works of the novelist Iurii Tynianov (1920's-l930's) which illustrate indirectly his Jewish preoccupations anguish.

Alice Stone-Nakhimovsky, Encounters: Russians and Jews in the short stories of David Aizman. By choosing to write in Russian and about Jews, a writer becomes both Russian and Jew, sympathiser and self-hater. These contradictions are particularly evident in the work of the turn-of-the century writer David Aizman. In a series of stories relating to the pogroms, he takes up the difference between Russians and Jews in their apprehension of the same event, and explores the values of the Russian literary tradition as they apply to the pogroms. Yet even when the reality of Jewish life deflates the myth of productive suffering and casts doubt on the idea of the peasantry as the source of genuine wisdom, Aizman retains an ail-encompassing love for mother Russia. In his very materialist world view, which denies his Russian Jews both their religion and their traditional sense of community, this love for Russia represents a singularly powerful spiritual note.

Hamutal Bar-Yosef, The poetic status of direct speech in the stories of Isaak Babel'. Considerable attention has been directed to the "poetic" qualities of Babel's style. Babel's stylistic heterogeneity is by now widely accepted - ambivalent, multivoiced narrator being its most common explanation. Reading Babel's short-short stories not only paradigmatically but also syntagmatically reveals a principle of dynamics in style-shifts, leading to a climax, where "anti-poetic" facts are accompanied by a bare "anti-poetic" style of direct speech. Babel1, whose general inclination is towards "showing", focuses on "telling" in these direct-speech statements. This is illustrated by two stories, the first and the last of Konarmiia. It is further argued that penetration of speech style into ornamental or archaic "poetic" style also represents a poetic crisis: Babel' sensed the growing authenticity and relevance of "lean" simple language over symbolistic stylistic tendencies as a representational vehicle of the new reality.

Efim Etkind, On "imports" in poetry and, in particular, on the Jewish accent in the Russian poetry of the 1920's. Poetical expression accumulates all the elements of a language condensing them and mobilizing all their qualities in the name of the esthetic objective. Some of these elements are borrowed from other languages and other cultures. As far as Russian in its aspect of poetical idiom is concerned, the author notes the import of the following elements: Homeric epithets, Italian phonetical system, Gipsy romance with its specific melody, metric forms of prosodies, "macaronic" vocabularies (French and German). It is within the framework of this context that the author analyzes elements borrowed from the language of the Bible, consequently from Hebrew culture and from Yiddish. During the 1920' s , Russian poetry was enriched by Jewish accents which penetrated in the work of Bagritskii, Svetlov, Utkin and Sel'vinskii. All of these variations are specific: Bagritskii represents the anti-Jewish revolt of an assimilated Jew; Utkin endeavors to create a mixed Language situated between Russian and Yiddish; SvetLov opposes to each other the two national accents and insists on the unavoidable victory of the Russian language which represents at the same time a victory of internationalism over national and Local prejudice; Sel'vinskii proceeds with phonetic experiments aiming at demonstrating the possibility of expressing by Russian graphism all the melodies and all the accents (be they dialects, slang or national), and also Gipsy, Ukrainian and Jewish folksongs.

Ewa Berard-zarzycka, Ilia Ehrenburg: Jew, Russian and European. 1891-1928. This article deals with the first part of Ehrenburg' s life marked by two sojourns in the West : 1908-1917 and 1921-1940. This for him is a period of dilemmas and complex choices of a cultural identity : Jew, Russian or European? Ehrenburg starts by cutting himself off from his Jewish roots, turning first to Catholicism, then to "Russianism". If later on he reverts to the Jewish heirloom, this is because it represents for him an essential element of challenge to Europe and to Russia, spiritually rent by war and revolution and dominated by the cult of progress, discipline and collectivism. He contrasts them with the "Jewish spirit" which he defines as a quest for universal ism, an eternal revolt and loneliness. However, in Ehrenburg1 s view this "Jewish genius" can conceivably exist only within the framework of the diaspora and cultural osmosis. This article presents numerous unpublished documents.

Régine Robin, The difficulties of a Soviet Jewish identity: the First Congress of Soviet writers of 1934. It is intended in this article to set forth the difficulties, if not the impossibility of the emergence of true identity of Soviet Jews in the 1930's. Starting with the speeches delivered at this Congress by Soviet Jewish writers using Yiddish, endeavors have been made to determine the image of their own culture as seen and presented by them and the place they occupy in the pan-Soviet system as a whole. The following themes have been taken up: problems of the language, of folklore, of cultural heirloom, of the relations of Soviet Jewish writers to Jewish writers of other countries, the theme of Birobidzhan. It is important for cultural historiography to point out instances of historical obstacles and mistakes as well as of cultural success. The object of this article is the research bearing on the causes of failure of Soviet Jewish identity.