Writers have always been conscious of the contribution that clothes can make to their work—as material objects, as outward signs of inner character, and as metaphors, especially for language itself. In the early 20th century, however, a time of rapid technological change, as well as of industrialization, globalization, and urbanization, literary interrogations and descriptions of dress evolved to respond to the new ways in which garments were designed, made, marketed, and sold, and to fashion’s increasing pervasiveness in society. Particularly sensitive to these changes were many of the writers associated with modernism, who shared with the nascent fashion industry a preoccupation with questions of novelty and the presentation of the self. Russia was no exception, and there poets, playwrights, and novelists explored and exploited the meanings of clothes and fashion in order to address the urgent questions concerning sex, gender, and race that were thrown up by life in the modern city. Moreover, as elsewhere, these explorations were not limited to the page; rather, writers’ own wardrobes played a part, especially among those who styled themselves as dandies. In other ways, however, Russia diverged from the European norm in its relationship to clothes and fashion and, therefore, in their intersection with literature. First, the habit of appropriating motifs and styles from non-European cultures, which was further galvanized by the modernist turn away from 19th-century culture, had a very different significance in Russia. The long history of ambivalence about Russia’s place in European culture meant that Russians were capable of finding the exotic in their own backyard, leading, for instance, to a vogue for peasant poets. Second, Russia experienced a particularly intense craze for masquerades in the first two decades of the century, which was both reflected in contemporary literature and, in part, a product of an obsession with the connection between inner essences and outer appearances that also manifested itself in modernist poetry. Third, Russian writers of the time were more inclined than most to see their work as part of a wider transformative mission; this often took the form of an attempt to overcome the perceived division between life and art by infusing the everyday with creativity. Clothes, both on the page and in the streets, were an important front in this battle. Finally, the upheaval caused by the revolutions of 1917 and the emergence of the socialist state had profound effects on the organization of fashion as both industry and discourse. Some writers responded by imagining the post-fashion future; others by involving themselves in reconfiguring what socialist commodities might look like; still others by criticizing a surprisingly resilient consumer culture, at least until the Stalin-inspired reorganization of many aspects of society, including fashion and literature, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Article
Clothes, Costume, and Fashion in Russian Modernism
James Rann
Article
Forms of Realism in Dostoevsky and Céline
Max Lawton
Many critics, Michael André Bernstein prominent among them, have noted similarities between the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and the 20th-century French modernist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. These critics often compare the underground man and similar characters in Dostoevsky’s work to Céline’s singular, auto-fictional narrator. Two novels, Crime and Punishment and Death on Credit, grounded in a common literary-historical narrative—that of French Realism and Romantic Realism—show that Céline has a distinct philosophical vision, which is the opposite of Dostoevsky’s.
At first glance, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Céline’s Death on Credit seem to be entirely different in terms of their aesthetics, engagement with national traditions, and thematic preoccupations. The former is a novel with a religious message and a traditionally teleological narrative, while the latter reflects a deeply nihilistic vision of human existence and deconstructs narrative structure and style. Examining the two novels in another light, however, draws attention to Dostoevsky’s treatment of squalid, modern situations and puts Céline into a different, nonnational lineage of authors, while also highlighting the unity of his philosophical vision. For both authors, desperately poor people and acts of extreme violence create the impression of a godless world. The two novels’ focus on poverty and crime seem to have their origin in the two epic cycles written by the most famous practitioners of French Realism and Romantic Realism, Balzac and Zola. In Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the two authors’ most consistent focus is the way systems of economic power force people to commit crimes and the consequences that ensue. This might be said to be so of Realism and Romantic Realism in general: all of the intensive worldbuilding it entails is performed to offer verisimilitude to the desperate crimes by impoverished people it dissects. At the very least, this is what Dostoevsky and Céline both took from the genre.
Article
History and Culture of the Bulgarian Book
Vasil Zagorov
The concept of Bulgarian book (Balgarska Kniga) is inclusive of manuscripts and printed and digital books written and reproduced in Old Bulgarian, Middle Bulgarian, and Modern Bulgarian in the period from the 9th to the 21st centuries. Along with language, due to a number of historical circumstances related to political, cultural, and economic factors, categories of Bulgarian books also comprise literary products created in foreign languages by Bulgarians with a clear Bulgarian national consciousness. Because of the long period of existence of the Bulgarian state (681–2021) and its two periods of political dependence—the Byzantine rule (1018–1185) and the Ottoman rule (1396–1878)—historical boundaries regarding the creation, distribution, and influence of the Bulgarian book far exceed the political borders of the modern Bulgarian state. The cultural influence of the Bulgarian manuscript book can be attributed to Bulgarian rulers and high clergy who were the first to successfully apply, develop, and disseminate Glagolitic and Cyrillic written systems, thus helping to build an independent Slavic Christian culture in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This influence accounts for the Bulgarian book’s wide distribution as early as the Middle Ages and explains its 21st-century presence in a number of foreign libraries and museums. As a material object and a cultural phenomenon, the Bulgarian book can be studied in five main periods: the manuscript book (9th–19th century); the printed book in the period of the Ottoman Empire (1508–1878); the printed book in the period from the Liberation of Bulgaria to the imposition of the socialist centralized planned model of book publishing (1878–1948); the printed book during the socialist period (1944–1989); and the book in the postsocialist period (1989–2021).
Article
History of Publishing in Lithuania
Aušra Navickienė, Alma Braziūnienė, Rima Cicėnienė, Domas Kaunas, Remigijus Misiūnas, and Tomas Petreikis
The history of publishing in Lithuania begins with the early formation of the Lithuanian state in the 13th century. As the state was taking shape over many centuries, its name, government, and territory kept changing along with its culture and the prevailing language of writing and printing. Geographically spread across Central and Eastern Europe, the state was multinational, its multilayered culture shaped by the synthesis of the Latin and Greek civilizations. Furthermore, the state was multiconfessional: both Latin and Orthodox Christianity were evolving in its territory. These historical circumstances led to the emergence of a unique book culture at the end of the manuscript book period (the late 15th and the early 16th century). In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), writing centers were formed that later frequently became printing houses; books were written in Latin, Church Slavonic, and Ruthenian, with two writing systems (Latin and Cyrillic) coexisting, and their texts and artistic design reflected the interaction of Western and Eastern Christianity in the GDL. During the period of the printed book, the GDL, though remote from the most important Western European publishing centers, was affected by the general tendencies of the Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque, and Enlightenment culture through the Roman Catholic Church and integration processes. During the 16th–18th centuries, publications in Latin, Ruthenian, and Polish prevailed in the GDL. In the 16th–17th centuries, about half of the press production were Latin books that spread along with Renaissance ideas and the Europeanization of the state, while the Ruthenian written language (one of the official state languages) was developed. After the Union of Lublin was signed in 1569, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth promoted the integration processes in public life, manifested by the emergence of the Polish language and the spread of Polish books as well as the growth of publishing in the 18th century.
In the 16th century, several Lithuanian writers emerged in Prussian Lithuania (or Lithuania Minor), the region of the Prussian state populated by Lithuanians. A unique tradition of writing and publishing had flourished there until the start of World War II. In 1795, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map of Europe and a larger part of the GDL lands was annexed to the Russian Empire. However, Vilnius, a seat of old printing and book culture traditions, managed to survive as an important publishing center of the eastern periphery of Central Europe, and as a city fostering publishing in the Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish languages. In the early 19th century, the main forces of authors, publishers, book producers, and distributors of Lithuanian books began to concentrate in Lithuania. In 1918, after the restoration of an independent state of Lithuania, new conditions arose to benefit the development of book publishing. The Lithuanian tradition of publishing, owing to a renewed printing industry and the expansion of a publishing house and bookstore network, significantly strengthened.
Between 1940 and 1990, the country suffered a half-century occupation (the occupation of the Nazi Germans in 1941–1945; the rest was the Soviet occupation) during which the Jewish national minority was destroyed, the Poles were evicted from the Vilnius region, the Germans were expelled from the Klaipėda region, and Sovietization and Russification were enforced in the sphere of civic thought. In Soviet Lithuania, although all the publishing houses belonged to the state and were ideologically controlled, a core of publishing professionals emerged who, after Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, readily joined the publishing industry developing under free market conditions.
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The Image of the Karaites in 19th- and 20th-Century Literature
Mikhail Kizilov
The article analyzes the image of the Karaites in Karaite, Jewish, European, and Russian literatures in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The Karaites are Jews who do not accept the teaching of the Talmud and the Rabbinic concept of the “Oral Law.” Many well-known 19th- and 20th-century belletrists were attracted to the Karaites’ unusual Judeo-Turkic culture as well as their influential status in the Russian empire, their wealth, and their intellectual achievements. It appears that there was no unified image of the Karaites among the authors of this period: Men of letters of various countries, religions, and ethnicities presented the Karaites as marginal Jewish sectarians, a “nation of traders,” descendants of the Turkic Khazars and Cumans, true Israelites, and even as “sons of Japheth.” Why were these images so contradictory? There is no doubt that it was, at least in part, due to the Karaites themselves, who by altering their ethnic identity in the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the perception of their community in the eyes of external observers—thus leading modern belletrists to portray them in such contradictory ways.
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Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991): Biography and Overview of Works
James A. Lewin
Why does evil exist? That is the question Isaac Bashevis Singer could not stop asking. The first Yiddish author to win a Nobel Prize and the only established American writer who wrote in Yiddish, I. B. Singer created historical sagas about the Jews in Poland, from premodern times through the Holocaust. He also published memoirs and children’s books. He concentrated his special genius, however, in a plenitude of short stories. With an ironic voice of protest, his earthy, poetic style portrays characters seeking love and truth—in spite of the grand and petty injustices of the world. Haunted by his own sense of survivor’s guilt, the author wrote out of a personal argument with God.
As a Protean and prolific writer, with shifting identities, he effectively named himself. Early on, he was Itche Zinger. He published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in 1935, in Yiddish, under the pen name of “Yitzchok Bashevis,” a nom de plume derived from his mother’s first name. Meanwhile, under the by-line Warshawsky, or son of Warsaw, he provided journalism and humorous articles in Yiddish newspapers, thus distancing the pseudonymous scribe from higher literary aspirations. Occasionally, he became D. Segal. In large measure, his wider success depended on having his work translated from Yiddish, a marginalized language of traumatic memory, into English, a living language with hegemonic influence. He supervised his translators closely and reached a wider audience with stories published in The New Yorker, Playboy, Commentary, and other magazines. As his work reached a global readership, he became Isaac Bashevis Singer, a composite name that allowed the author to maintain his roots while differentiating himself from his older brother, Israel Joshua (aka I. J.) Singer, also a best-selling Yiddish writer. Yet, in marked contrast to his welcome reception from the English-reading public, I. B. Singer has faced rebukes and even denunciation from Yiddish critics who felt uncomfortable with his provocative representations of Jewish life. For devoted fans and relentless critics alike, however, he remains known simply as “Bashevis.”
His litigation with heaven followed the model of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Job. He refused to suffer without questioning his mortal condition. He would not disavow an invisible higher power, and even referred to himself as religious, yet he rejected conventional faith or belief in cosmic compassion. Throughout his career, I. B. Singer wrestled with that twist in the psyche that allows perpetrators of atrocities to lack remorse, while victims of inhumanity may be plagued with self-reproach. He exorcised his demons by arguing with the Almighty through his writing, transforming survivor’s guilt into a protest against the injustice of life. Protest against the cosmic silence extended the artistic bridge between his psychological realism and his fascination with the occult. The author glances back at a lost innocence of traditional values and gazes forward into a world of expanding moral chaos. He satirizes society as a grotesque underworld. He condemns the cruelties of history and refuses to accept easy answers to haunting questions. Although he affirms the existence of an Absolute and portrays atheism as the greatest human failing, by the act of writing, he challenges the ethical standards of the inscrutable universe. While affirming the life of the soul, through his storytelling, he inscribes a compelling protest against the seeming indifference of heaven and earth.
Article
Male Noble Dress in 19th-Century Russian Literature
Daniel Green
Dress was highly semiotically charged in 19th-century Russia. Clothing was a material representation of structures of power; this was a reality that writers were aware of and drew on in their work. What a person wore depended on their status, but also partly on their inclinations. Some clothes, such as uniforms, were legally prescribed, while others, such as fashionable dress, relied on generally understood codes. Noblemen used their clothing choices to negotiate their relationship with the state and to express their political leanings. At times they conformed with and at times they retreated from the norms of the public sphere. They also sometimes dressed in opposition to the status quo. Writers used the significances of different kinds of clothing to explore the nuances of social structures and how they affected individuals within society.
Article
Moscow: The Third Rome
Nick Mayhew
In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly?
Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.
Article
Postwar Soviet Yiddish Literature
Gennady Estraikh
By 1945, Soviet Yiddish literary circles grouped around the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) and the Yiddish sections at the Writers Union. In the 1940s, the poets, prose writers, and literary critics had several publishing outlets, most notably the Moscow newspaper Eynikayt (Unity, 1942–1948), two literary periodicals—Heymland (Homeland, 1947–1948) in Moscow and Shtern (Star, 1947–1948) in Kyiv—and the Moscow publishing house Der Emes (Truth, 1928–1948). Four Yiddish state theatres and other professional and amateur troupes performed works by Soviet and other authors. These all came to an end in 1948–1950, when the Soviet authorities liquidated the entire infrastructure of Yiddish cultural, including literary, life. Scores of Yiddish literati were incarcerated on spurious sedition charges as part of repressions in the last years of Joseph Stalin’s rule. On August 12, 1952, five leading writers—David Bergelson, Itsik Fefer, David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish—were among the executed figures of the JAFC. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the surviving writers could return to “normality,” but Yiddish publishing was renewed as late as 1959. The Moscow journal Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland), launched in 1961, became the center for Yiddish literary activity during the last three decades of the Soviet era. In the heyday of the Cold War, the journal, a forum for a broad variety of publications, was nevertheless better known as an instrument of Soviet propaganda than as a Yiddish literary periodical. Its editor, Aron Vergelis, whose anti-Zionist writings had eclipsed his poetry, acted as a globe-trotting champion of Soviet policies. Meanwhile, the journal, staffed by writers and editors of the older generation, trained a group of authors born after the Nazi Holocaust.
Article
Remaking Charles Dickens for 21st-Century Russia
Emily Finer
Charles Dickens’s writing entered the Russian cultural sphere only a year after he published The Pickwick Papers in England. In 1838, extracts from The Pickwick Papers appeared concurrently in different translations in several Russian journals. Canonical 19th-century writers and thinkers (including Nikolai Gogol, Vissarion Belinsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy) read the novels in Russian, French, German, or English, either serialized in journals or as books. The popularity of Dickens in Russian translation was such that by the centenary of his birth in 1912 the third complete works—with new translations of all the novels—had been published. His stories of childhood were by then commonly excerpted and rewritten in magazines for Russian children. During Soviet times, Dickens increased in importance and was embedded in both official and private cultural spheres. His realism, his interest in poverty, and his own childhood experience of deprivation in London all rendered him suitable for retranslation for the new mass reader and for Soviet children, all of whom were to be furnished with negative portrayals of life under capitalism. Despite these propagandistic intentions, children and adults often identified with the suffering of Dickens’s child characters and found comfort in his reliable happy endings. In the Soviet Union, novels by Dickens typically held positive associations of warmth, safety, and moral consistency. They also offered inspiration for imaginative travel to a foreign country they could not dream of visiting in person. This convergence of official and personal appreciations of Dickens resulted in the publication of the most complete of complete works: thirty volumes of completely new translations supported by detailed scholarly apparatus. This so-called dark green edition was published in time for the 150th anniversary of Dickens’s birth in 1962, and a five-kopek postage stamp with a portrait of Dickens was issued in the same year. By the 2000s, a reading public who read Dickens as children in the Soviet Union could now read Dickens in English, on and offline, and even visit London for themselves. Two hundred years after Dickens’s birth, in 2012, the glossy Russian magazine Snob dedicated a special issue to Dickens with new commissions from notable writers including Eduard Limonov, Evgenii Popov, and Marina Stepnova. For the special issue’s editors, Dickens was less a representative of English culture than a conduit of nostalgia for their childhoods in the Soviet Union. At the same time, they noted that Dickens’s reception in Russia had come full circle: from the hypercapitalist publishing environment of Victorian London to the wild capitalism of Putin’s Russia.
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Russian Epistolary Writing from the Middle Ages to the Turn of the 19th Century
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev
Epistolary writing is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Russia’s contributions to world literature—despite the landmark theoretical work of the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, which presciently highlighted the literary interest of the letter and paved the way for the explosion of scholarship on epistolarity in the West in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, the epistolary mode has accompanied and helped to shape Russian literature since its beginnings. For many centuries, epistolary texts offered a space for unusually vivid expressions of unique authorial selves while at the same time encouraging self-conscious play with literary form. Within a century of the adoption of writing by the Eastern Slavs in the mid-10th century, people across the social spectrum were writing letters on birchbark; in the Middle Ages, when Russian writing aimed above all to teach religious truths and build a Christian community, epistolary forms facilitated the creation of exceptionally individualized representations of the author(s) and/or addressee(s) of letters. In the early modern period, epistolary forms played an important role in the development of literature, since they were among the first types of text to be recognized as distinct genres. The late 18th and early 19th centuries witnessed the heyday of the European-style familiar letter, which became a primary literary genre through which elite writers maintained emotional, social, and professional ties, projected a sophisticated self-image, and wrestled with the implications of Russia’s participation in Western cultural life.
Article
Russian Modernist Theater
Alisa Ballard Lin
Few theatrical epochs have had the lasting international impact of Russian modernist theater. The two most influential theater directors to emerge from this era, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, continue to provide rich fodder in their acting theories and performance practices for contemporary theater creators worldwide. Meanwhile, the early 20th century in Russian theater was a time of fierce theoretical and practice-based polemics, rapid technological development, and monumental shifts in theatrical practice as actors were trained in specific internal and external (bodily) techniques and directors took on increasingly more importance for the creative design of a production. At the same time, popular theater was a major avenue of theatrical development in the era, with cabaret and other minor forms enjoying great popularity in Russia and on tours abroad, while avant-garde artists like the Russian futurists created shocking street-based performance art that capitalized on the modernist sense of newness and rejection of the past. Points of debate in studies of Russian modernist theater include disagreement over the definition of what counts as modernist and how seriously to take the polarization and polemics that these theater artists themselves espoused. While modernist theater in Europe is known for its emphasis on closet drama, on grand experiments that were ultimately unperformable, and on mistrust of language and representation, performance practice took a related but different path in Russian culture in the first decades of the 20th century. Despite a great diversity of performance styles, venues, and audiences, theater in the age of Russian modernism unifies around a few key points. First, it placed great emphasis on honing and highlighting the various physical and mental skills of the actor. Second, Russian modernist theater generally valued language and the literary tradition, both Russian and global, despite some efforts to break with literature in theater. Third, theater of this era presented a tone of irony, self-consciousness, and theatricalism. In all its manifestations, it was experimental and self-reflexive, interrogating theater’s relationship to the world and boldly devising new forms. Fourth, Russian modernist theater was richly integrated into its artistic, intellectual, and political context, with ties to science, philosophy, psychology, visual arts, music, dance, film, and literature. Theater came to serve the political ends of the young Soviet nation in the 1920s, though politics were not a predominant force in theater throughout Russian modernism. Theater was not immediately strongly affected by the Russian Revolution of 1917, but by the end of the 1920s, theater was forced to bend to the strong will of Soviet censors, and by the mid-1930s, theatrical innovation was greatly diminished under Stalin-era censorship and its insistence on the style of socialist realism, as well as the general threat of the Stalinist Terror.
Article
Russian Poetry and Cold War Politics in the West
Emily Lygo
The reception of Soviet and Russian poetry in the West was shaped by the binary nature of Cold War politics no less than other fields of culture and sport. Indeed, the associations between poetry and authenticity meant poetry was especially significant as testimony. In the USSR itself, writers’ memoirs were some of the most important texts published in this era, speaking as they did of the personal experience of the Stalin period that had not been expressed before. Konstantin Paustovsky and Il’ya Ehrenburg, for example, published multivolume memoirs during this period, both of which were translated into English and published in the West. A similar focus on individuals and testimony is reflected in the framing of works of Russian literature in English translation. In 1964, Max Hayward and Patricia Blake’s selection of Russian writers was entitled Dissonant Voices, while George Luckyj’s study of non-Russian Soviet literature in 1975 was entitled Discordant Voices. Also in 1964, the translation of the anthology Tarusskie stranitsy was given an additional subtitle, “new voices in Russian writing.” The idea of the individual voice, which is clearly found in lyric poetry of course, was central to the preoccupation with finding an authentic expression of Russia that would be a counterpoint to the Soviet official one.
After the death of Stalin, the voices of poets writing in the USSR who had been censored by the authorities were recovered by academics and émigré Russians: Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago and its poems and the poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam and Anna Akhmatova were amplified in the Western media as voices that could express authentically the suffering, injustice, and inhumanity of the Stalinist system. In the case of Dr. Zhivago, the CIA also worked clandestinely to ensure it was published and distributed in the West. The fact that these works remained only partially published in the USSR fueled the ongoing criticism of the Soviet government’s repressive nature. At the same time, young poets such as Evgenii Evtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, publishing some poetry that challenged Stalinist norms and criticized the past, were fêted by the Western media. They were subject to political censorship, of course, and had to compromise with the authorities in order to pursue their careers.
Across the Cold War years there was a hardening of opinions in the West toward poets who compromised with the regime, and support for those such as Natalia Gorbanevskaya who fought for human rights in the USSR and were prepared to suffer imprisonment for their principles. Uncensored poetry, smuggled out to the West, was published and often accompanied by stories of arrest and imprisonment and sadistic practices in psychiatric hospitals. Poets were among the writers who began to emigrate, too, forming the third wave of Russian emigration; Joseph Brodsky arrived in the USA in 1972 already well known for his trial by the authorities and time spent in northern exile as punishment. Stories of persecution, and poetry written in the Gulag or prison, were undeniably testament to the tyranny of the Soviet government, and could even play a political role themselves: Irina Ratushinskaya’s release from the Gulag in 1986 may have been influenced by the publication of her work and campaigns for her release in the West.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies financed cultural institutions such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in order to promote and amplify criticism and damning evidence of Soviet illiberalism; this meant that poetry and literature that served the cause of anti-Soviet agitation was perhaps more easily accepted for publication, and more widely translated and promoted. Such manipulation of cultural organs, for example the high-profile and high-quality magazine Encounter funded by the CIA, does not detract from the quality of work produced by its contributors, most of whom were unaware of the financial backdrop. Joseph Brodsky’s poetry, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987, is no less talented for being read and discussed in the context of anti-Soviet discussion; indeed, Brodsky himself wrote against tyranny and criticized the USSR. Nonetheless, the story of Russian poetry in the Cold War cannot be told without acknowledging its interactions with politics.
Article
Yiddish in Interwar Berlin
Marc Caplan
Berlin in the interwar era of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was not a center for Yiddish culture so much as a periphery dependent upon more dominant locations of Jewish life such as the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In this respect, the status of Yiddish reflects a greater sense of marginality and dislocation then characterizing German culture, which, at the time, felt unmoored from its imperial coordinates of the 19th century and under the sway of more innovative international cities such as Leningrad, Paris, New York, and especially Hollywood. The draw of Berlin for Yiddish-language writers or community activists was therefore not the allure of Weimar culture or the hopes of attracting large audiences among German Jews. Instead, the economic disorder of the Weimar Republic, paradoxically, offered financial windfalls and business opportunities for migrants with foreign currency—particularly for writers with contacts to the American Yiddish press. Moreover, Germany, unlike Poland, maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union, which allowed writers and activists sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution a safe haven while the home front remained riven by military conflicts, scarcity of basic necessities, and an uncertain political future. The heyday of Yiddish activism in Berlin was relatively short-lived, only dating from about 1921 until about 1926. After that date, the Soviet Union had achieved political stability and began to invest, at least for the next decade, in a wide series of Yiddish-language cultural institutions including publishing houses, newspapers, centers of higher education, and popular entertainment. Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that Yiddish culture made a deep or lasting impact on the German culture of the Weimar Republic, for Yiddish readers, the literature produced in Germany ranks among the most important and innovative achievements in Yiddish culture of the 1920s. The most significant writers to have resided in Berlin during this era include Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), and Moyshe Kulbak.