The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot Ivi: In Russian culture this is a recurrent feeling that rou- tinely appears in narratives about national origins: Reflective nostalgia represents a contrasting form of regret: The latter reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one other, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection [ This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary.
Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruin or, on the contrary, has been just renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. This defamiliarization and sense of distance drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future Ivi: Existential, psychological, and cultural reflectiveness is not expressed by a single, unique language, but rather through style, it is a way or mode of look- ing at experience and narrating it.
The relationship between these terms bears review. Freud made a distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning is con- nected to the loss of a loved one or the loss of some abstraction, such as a home- land, liberty or an ideal [ In melancholia the loss is not clearly defined and is more unconscious. Together with concomitant feelings of longing and angst, melancholy belongs to a high form of grief, i. Melancholy and its concomitant feelings almost always reveal a conflict between the individual and the surrounding world [ Melancholy also has a liminal na- ture and, though it historically represented a form of psychic distress, is difficult to define.
It is the totality of moods and states of mind that have arisen in diverse combinations and in diverse situations with diverse individuals Ivi: A heavy feeling of oppression, heart- felt anxiety; sadness, dejection; 2. They lie exactly at the boundary between the personal and social spheres Ivi: Melancholic Identity and Mercuriality Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Boym In short, when a melancholic mind begins to reflect upon itself, the outcome is melancholic humor.
Their reflectiveness tends to prize the evidence of diversity found in culture and in cultural memory — an approach that contrasts with that of restorative nostalgia: While melancholy can be expressed with variable gradations depending on its Zeitgeist Johannisson Chronotopes of Affectivity in Literature 25 Emotional communities are largely the same as social communities — families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts.
But the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover sys- tems of feeling, to establish what these communities and the individuals within them define and assess as valuable or harmful to them for it is about such things that people express emotions ; the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore. Whatever specific linguistic or cultural elements are at stake, a melancholic affective style is marked by pronounced reflectiveness: The overlap of the two models is astonishing, especially as both authors mainly devote their attention to Russian and Russian-Jewish his- tory and culture.
According to Slezkine, human cultures can be divided into two types that reflect the symbolic contrast between the classical gods Apollo and Mercury. Whereas Apollonians are strong and build strong countries, Mercurians are physically weak, and against Apollonians can offer only wisdom and knowledge Ivi: Mercurians oppose wit to weapon Ivi: Despite physical fragility, they are mentally strong and emotively alluring.
Mercurians do not constitute a proper national group, but an emotional community bound by shared estrangement. The quintessential representatives of modern mercuriality, Slezkine argues Ivi: In particular, as he demonstrates throughout his book, the fundamental cultural mutation that defined the modern age occurred among the Russian Jews. Yet a paradox lies at the core of Russian-Jewish mythology — and identity. After the nineteenth century, Russian literature became a form of civic religion. But there is a form of nostalgic estrangement not considered by Prete that emerges from the work of both Boym and Slezkine: Such a nostalgic mood is widely shared by those individuals in which a diasporic identity has been developed and reinforced.
Diasporic intimacy is possible only when one masters a certain imperfect aes- thetics of survival and learns to inhabit exile. The immigrants cherish their oases of intimacy, away from the homeland and not quite in the promised land Boym As Sergej Dovlatov wrote: A Russian-Jewish sense of diasporic estrangement finds its direct reflection in Russian verbal art. Now that was a unique individual! Made of four halves Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, Boym Conclusions This volume demonstrates how a melancholic, reflective, and liminal mood takes shape in the work of various Russian and Russian Jewish authors.
It probably reflects, as Gebert As we have seen, according to Svetlana Boym , Russian culture contains two different nostalgic modalities that are based on contrasting attitudes towards the nature of personal identity, the homeland, the past, and the future. These modalities coexist within a given sub- ject in different gradations, but remain radically opposed from both the cogni- tive and existential point of view. Melancholic expression represents exactly what restorative Apollonians consider to be dangerous for the status quo. An experience similar to that of forced emigration or exile has befallen those post-Soviet Russians who were born in the Soviet era: In addition to the tradi- tionally recognized works from the Russian official canon, i.
Now they are cipher for exile itself and for a newfound ex- ilic domesticity Ivi: In short, Russian melancholic narratives might be characterized by the fol- lowing paradox: Melancholy is that af- fective style which is capable of transforming a multivalent identity into an inte- gral sense of being and the uncertain space of exile into an existential terra firma. That is why the complexion of many sentimentalist works is melanxolija.
Straxov lampooned the fashion for emo- tional excess in by offering an infallible technique for would-be authors: This article, which began as an attempt to understand what toska meant for Xvostova and what literary and historical reasons led her to emphasize it. It is hardly surprising that toska became especially prominent in an era when emotivity, particularly that tending towards the gloomy, was highly valued. The terms on which toskovanie subsequently fell into decline as it ceded ground to melanxolija — however briefly and for some writers, but not all — will be taken up in part five as well.
The contem- plation and expression of these feelings — achieved via a first-person female perspective — constitute the basic theme of both texts, which convey an elegiac mood through a series of affecting scenes that are both vague and very emo- tional, reiterating ideas of sadness, anguish, and longing.
In Kamin, the narrator waxes despondent because she is misunderstood by society and alienated from it. Fate and despair push her to a state near death, which she is ready to embrace as welcome solace, only to draw her back again: Sorrows are here with me, deep in my heart, and flow with the blood in my veins [ An eternity, an immeasurable expanse, a wild and endless steppe, where the poor wanderer finds neither shade in which to repose, nor a drop of water to slake his intolerable toska!
The second highest, which is found in Part Four of Letters of a Russian Traveler , marks a sharp decline: Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska 35 ally humorous and ironic tone of his exaggeratedly sentimental tale. While his oeuvre clearly demonstrates that he had no objection to earnest expressions of elegiac sentiment, Karamzin pre- ferred single instances of toska to the more repetitive use favored by Xvostova — at least when not jesting.
It has been suggested that Karamzin tended to shy away from strong emo- tions beginning in the early s, when he abandoned an early infatuation with epic and tragedy for the lighter and more lyrical forms that subsequently became his forte cf. As a prominent trendsetter and literary spokesman for sentimentalism and feminization, he played a key role in promulgating the new fashion by which male writers adopted for their literary work a linguistic register associated with the salon, the boudoir, and, at least in theory, the lin- guistic praxis of women.
Certainly, an accession of emotion was characteristic of both sentimentalism and feminization, but the emotions in question were ide- ally gentle and restrained. Proponents of feminization held that if men were to write as women spoke or ought to speak14, their feelings should be delicate and delicately expressed.
A brief review of the eighteenth-century literary contexts in which toska was used — and sometimes forcefully reiterated — will help us to better understand both why Karamzin later turned away from toska, but also why Xvostova did not. The root appears only once in the Sobranie stixotvorenij Collected Poems, of Antiox Kantemir, for example: It is characterized by a desire for action that is rendered impossible by specific material constraints the writing cannot leave the drawer , illuminating a notion of confinement or constraint found in the Old Russian version of this word16 and retained, as we will see, even in the more abstract and moral tos- kovanie of later eighteenth-century texts, wherein impulses or urges that are al- most physical are contrasted with concrete barriers that require their frustration.
We find the term in the titles of two love poems from After explaining in what this genre consists, he offers an example of elegiac hexameter in several lines of his own making. The notion of toska is absent in the original text and thus forms part of the emotional adornment that Trediakovskij himself adds to the drama. He uses it to characterize the feeling suffered by a male personage, Pha- edria Fedrij , when his courtesan girlfriend unexpectedly refuses to allow him into her home.
Mixail Lomonosov took toska still more seriously, multiplying its appearanc- es, increasing its density, and raising it to the status of a literary concept thorough- ly permeated with the classical spirit. Clearly, he used emphatic toska to sig- nal an elevated literary style. Lomonosovian toska is also more feminine. In Demofon, toska similarly characterizes a sentiment experienced largely by women and directly or indirectly provoked by their love for men with whom they are geographically, politically and thus ontologically and tragically incompatible.
Male characters in the play do not explicitly experience toska, but are occasionally threatened with it as a form of revenge by the women whom they have betrayed. In both tragedies, tos- ka accompanies the compulsory separation of enamoured couples required by a combination of political discord and foreignness. In the third and much later Dimitrij Samozvanec , the root appears only twice, but assumes familiar contours: Though often contextual- ized in genres such as the elegy or song and garnished with pastoral elements, the toska in these verses is nonetheless ostensibly suffered by the male poet himself, rather than by a heartsick woman or an Arcadian shepherd although instances of these also occur Rendering what are presumably his own senti- ments in the register of his own voice, the poet pines and languishes when a love interest refuses to reciprocate his feelings, for example because she is absent, dead, or simply indifferent , or at the hands of a cruel society that has alienated and ostracized him — a favorite theme for Xvostova as well.
As Sumarokov puts it in Protivu zlodeev Against Villains, Wherever I wander, wherever I walk…, ; cf. Despite its emotional vagueness, however, such toska remains physically specific, preserv- ing the legacy of the classically styled contexts articulated by Lomonosov in proposing additional scenarios of carnage: At the same time, Sumarokov is not the direct predeces- sor of Xvostova, since his toska, however personalized, is neither feminine nor emphatically repeated. Notwithstanding his later infamous excoriations of Francophilia, Fonvizin in the s was happily reveling in French-inspired literary anguish.
Thirteen of these have no equivalent in the original French text, but represent embellishments that Fonvizin himself chose to add, evidently following the lead of Lomonosov and Sumarokov in equating this lexeme with literariness. Indeed, Fonvizin left the emphatic repetition of toska behind in the s and the fact that he had overused it before Karamzin had even been born likely contributed to its later lack of appeal. Elsewhere, as we have seen, reit- erative toska occurs primarily in the context of tragic drama, where it is largely a feminine emotion.
When expounded lyrically, as in Sumarokov, to represent the first-person sentiments of the poet himself, the lexeme toska is used much more sparingly. Interestingly, there is another more physiological sense of the word toska that refers to bodily suffering or the pain associated with illness. Fon- vizin , II: Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska 41 able to find any subsequent male writers from the eighteenth-century literary canon27 who repeat toska with anything close to Xvostovian tenacity, i. His goal, the apex of literary achievement, is to be recognized by them for his wide range of expressive talents as well as his artistic and psychological finesse — in terms that he preemptively indicates: Women feel, but men alone are responsible for the public voicing of sentiment.
The first ap- pears in didactic lines about an allegorical type who represents paranoia: The poet and his female companion s are together in April, and, in the absence of indications to the contrary, it would seem that they also sit beside streams together in summer and commune in October anguish. It is he, who turns feeling into art, while his friend, helpmeet and muse, experiences emotion, but does not produce texts, being limited to the reception and appreciation of his expression. Poslanie thus argues for the male interpretation and publication of female sentiment by both explicitly associating women with toska and pre- venting them from expressing it.
Indeed, the feelings of his erstwhile playmate serve as raw material for his poetry. And at the conclusion of these quoted lines, the poet imposes upon her specific standards of comportment that redirect her gentle appreciation of nature and the seasons to a focus on his own verses. It is these that the Poet threatens to unmask from one moment to the next as he swings unpre- dictably from succor to intimidation.
On bended knee, one woman asks the heavens for their health In a sense, of course, the scenario described by Karamzin in Poslanie of- fers little that is new. The patriarchal configuration of eighteenth-century let- ters, like that of society at large, meant that male writers generally spoke for and sometimes as women. Karamzin, too, construes masculinity as an integral part of feminine identity, its loss a threat to their health and happiness; his female personages are similarly constituted around a masculine core, serve as bastions of admiration for their men, and risk being reduced to vessels of anguish or terror in the eventuality of separation from them.
According to its explicitly gendered division of emotional labor, women are chosen to experience feelings and men to assign and express them. Although women in the sentimentalist era were denied access to male- dominated forums of creative expression with renewed vigor, the ranks of women writers nonetheless continued to very gradually increase and it is not mere chance that feminization became increasingly fashionable as women writers became more visible. Urusova and Reiterative Toska As we have seen, women had been cast in the role of tragic heroines and made to suffer toska by decades of masculine literary production long before they themselves entered the literary arena in substantial numbers.
Her emphatic first-person assertions of anguish and other strong sentiments were an important step towards the literary affirma- tion of women writers. A precedent for such daring may be seen in the verses of Ekaterina Urusova, a poet from the previous — and first — generation of Russian women writers. Specifically, Rather than limiting her to the tender pastoral genres — though he does include them — [Xeraskov] suggests that she could write epic verse like Homer, sing the glory of Russia like M.
Lomonosov, enlighten her readers with didactic verse, and — unheard of for a woman — write for the stage as a tragedian [ In , she published Iroidy Heroides , an unusually lengthy and serious pro- duction for a woman writer. Urusova, too, designs her Heroides as a series of lyrical speeches deliv- ered largely by women bereaved in love. Toska appears twice in connection with the feelings of Zeida, betrayed by her husband, but remaining steadfast in her devotion to him Ivi: She uses her moment in the spotlight to speak three times of her own toska Ivi: By soliciting the sympathy of other sufferers in her audience, she aug- ments both the range and force of her affliction: Those struck down by toska in love.
Weep together with me! Gender, Toska and Melanxolija The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were an era of great change in the shaping and definition of gender. It has also been argued that Rus- sian culture was dominated by a melancholic mood in this period, specifically from the late s to the s cf. As we have seen, this temper or inclination was expressed through various lexemes and sometimes the choice between them was gendered. Karamzin himself preferred melanxolija to toska and took firm steps to establish its place in the pantheon of Russian literary sentiments.
On the melancholic turn in Russian letters, see also Vinickij , A closer look at the specific contexts in which Karamzin uses toska demon- strates that he continued to associate the sentiment with Greek tragedy and pin- ing shepherds, as had Sumarokov and Fonvizin. Melanxolija even served as the title of an important verse in which Karamzin reworks several lines of an excerpt from Jacques Delille In this later verse, personified Melanxolija herself emerges and flourishes precisely where women themselves had faded in Poslanie.
The sentiment of anguish that he had shared with his female companions in Poslanie is purged of their involvement and interfer- ence. In point of fact, women were largely excluded from the experience of melanxolija — or at least from its expression. Symptomatically, however, neither melanxolija itself nor toska appears in the actual verse. A more forthright exposition of feminine despair — and one that emphati- cally uses the term toska — appears in a brief elegy on the death of her sister writ- ten by Elizaveta Dolgorukova in Eschewing melanxolija, the poet reiter- ates the more traditionally feminine toska five times: Explicitly rather than implicitly autobiographical, it justi- fies its own emotivity by providing concrete motivation for it.
Another woman to take up emphatic toska was the poet Anna Volkova, who drew her inspiration directly from Xvostova. Melanxolija is not limited to the purview of male emo- tion, he suggests, and sensitive women ought to be familiar with it. Karolina does assert her right to feel powerful emotions, and recounts an eventful life that has included many of them, but not melanxolija. Indeed, Karolina has little pa- tience for melancholic inclinations, which she views as a pretentious charade.
What pos- sible connection could a woman who does not even understand love or mel- ancholy have with literature? Women may feel melancholy, but he does not indicate that they should take up the pen to share such feelings more widely. Indeed, it seems quite plausible that the articulation of his poetic aims, which appeared a year after Kamin and in the same year that Xvostova published her Otryvki, responded, at least in general outline, to her work and to the cultural environment in which it was so well received. While the fact that Xvostova overused Karamzinian stylemes helps to explain her emphatic quality in general, it does not illuminate her use of reiterative toska per se, which, as this article demonstrates, has no precedent in Karamzin.
Toska in Winter As we know, Karamzin turned away from literature in the first decade of the nineteenth century to issues of the Russian state and its history. It also registers the pleasurable sense of re- gret with which he contemplates their shared and bygone past. The elderly Urusova had meditated on winter death in quite similar terms. Her gesture is quite forceful and surprising. Cut short your voice! Urusova herself returned to the connection between toska and difficul- ties of authorship in a verse from on the topic of writing poetry: Xvostova, too, continued to write, though without achieving the same popularity as she had with Otryvki.
Like other women writers in the early nineteenth century, both continued to feel toska: In which literary contexts toska was used, to what extent it preserved a link with the feminine, and where or how often it was reiterated remain topics for further study. We do know, however, that emphatic toskovanie was a feminine activity in eighteenth-century Russian letters and that the enthusiasm with which it was embraced by women writers such as Aleksandra Xvostova helped to encourage male writers such as Nikolaj Karamzin to select melanxolija for their own elegiac discourse.
Nostalgia and Creaturality in H. In this work, the Golem, a man-made creature based on an ancient Kabbalah legend widespread in several Central European countries, takes on openly mes- sianic features, its helpless creaturality1 and hopeless existential loneliness reflect the Jewish longing for God. In line with the tendencies of Neo-Romanticism, revived in Yiddish literature by Leivick himself, he persistently embodied this spirit or character in a blend of art and life in which each of these elements fed upon the other.
Similarly intertwined in his work were the nostalgia of Eastern European Jewish culture, a Russian and revolutionary longing, and Russian toska. The lowing of cattle that walk towards the rock on which they are to be sacrificed Samuel I, 6: It can be found in two passages of the Shabbat treatise 39a and 66b , where it is used in different situations to refer to the longing of a father for his son and that of a son for his father.
The primordial wailing of a nature devoid of any hope or consolation thus takes on the form of a conscious, fully rounded human feeling. The Yiddish Culture of Nostalgia Modern literary culture in Yiddish developed with incredible speed in the second half of the nineteenth century and, over the course of just a few years, evolved from a tradition featuring interesting, but marginal works into one of the leading literary phenomena in Europe.
Because of the circumstances in which it developed, modern Yiddish literature seems to be pervaded by nostalgia. The Central and Eastern European Jewish hamlet, cast as a close-knit community where every life has its own place and meaning and enjoys an uninterrupted vital bond with tradition, not only compris- es one of the essential topoi in the work of the founding fathers of modern Yid- dish literature, but also figures pervasively in the reception and evaluation of this literature.
A feel- ing of nostalgia coupled with the same basic theme, i. In the early twentieth century, Yiddish cultural benkshaft finds expression in two different tendencies, both shaped by external events as well as by chang- es occurring within Jewish society in Central Eastern Europe. In just one gen- eration, traditional Jewish culture detached itself from the world of its fathers, a process that in the surrounding society had unfolded quite differently and over the course of several decades.
At the same time, a powerful Jewish longing for acculturation and integration into that surrounding external world met increas- ingly with an impenetrable wall of ethnic nationalism and anti-Semitism, senti- ments which were soon to reach their international apotheosis. Quite often the Jews had to face a world where, as Ola Watowa It was almost a foregone conclusion that the Bolshevik revolution — which promoted internationalism and equality — would represent the hopes of the Jewish people, at least until its openly totalitarian shift at the end of the s.
It was also fairly predictable that among individuals whose childhoods were still deeply rooted in Jewish tradi- tion, such hopes would assume forms of messianism, one of the most original and problematically distinguishing elements of Jewish thought.
Working with all insurance. One rea- son is that although some feelings relate to emotions, there are many that do not: Gender, Toska and Melanxolija The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were an era of great change in the shaping and definition of gender. With CHFA, you may be eligible to receive a non-repayable grant up to 4 percent for down payment and closing costs when the mortgage loan closes. Inseparable from experience, emotions, and perception, language constitutes the ontological core of the Self: Voles are Moles small as well and primarily feed Moles will spend much of on foliage and plant roots. If deletefacebook has only gotten facebook.
As summa- rized by rabbi Arthur Green The various movements for social progress that have attracted so many Jews, including Socialism and Com- munism, may be seen as forms of secular messianism. Jewish secular messianism, he writes, includes a restoring current, aimed at the restoration of a lost golden age, and a utopian current, aimed at the creation of an unprecedented social order5.
These two currents are intertwined, however, 4 A variety of nostalgia for the shtetl and a re-evaluation of its culture and existential marginality is shared today by anti-nationalist intellectuals and those highly critical of Israel as a state project, such as Daniel Boyarin in the United States and Moni Ovadia in Italy. For this information, I am grateful to Silvano Facioni. As noted, the benkshaft of the European Yiddish world also expressed itself in two different currents: He was the eldest of nine children and the biography of his early years is the typical biography of people living in a shtetl: Later came the yeshive in Minsk, whose en- lightened headmaster allowed the students to study Hebrew grammar, a lay sub- ject and one that was disliked8.
During the Revolution, Leivick joined the Bund, the supranation- al and Yiddishist Jewish socialist party, which had been founded in Vilna in Although he had already made his debut as a promising author in He- brew, once he joined the revolution, Leivick decided to abandon the sacred idiom and shift to Yiddish, the language of the deprived masses — and it was in Yiddish literature that he later made his mark as one of its greatest representa- tives.
In , Leivick was suspected of subversive activity and arrested by the tsarist police; during the trial — an episode mentioned by B. Everything that I have done I did in full consciousness. I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary Party, the Bund, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, its bloody henchmen, and you as well Ivi: Leivick was sentenced to four years of forced labor and permanent exile in Siberia.
In an isolated cell in the Minsk prison tower, Leivick wrote his first dra- matic poem, Di keytn fun Meshiakh The Chains of the Messiah , which was published only in Together with The Golem and Di geule komedie The Comedy of Redemption, , The Chains of the Messiah completes a triad of works on the idea of Messianism and these three works were published as such in Israel in under the title Hezyoney Geulah, Visions of Redemption. In this context, the poet himself — and others as well — can come forward as a messianic figure.
It was in this same period that a picture was taken of Leivick dressed in traditional Russian garb with chains around his waist and ankles: The final destination was a hamlet called Vitim, where the poet was supposed to spend the rest of his life. Named after a tributary of the Lena river, this village boasted an average tem- perature in winter of minus thirty-five degrees Celsius and lay at a distance of six thousand kilometers from Minsk. And yet, thanks to the money that some comrades who had earlier emigrated to America daringly managed to send, Leivick accomplished the almost unthinkable and escaped from Siberia.
He did this by purchasing a horse and cart, which he drove to a railway station, travel- ing across Russia and Germany, and eventually to the United States, where he landed in the summer of Like many intellectuals of his time, Leivick faced great professional and personal difficulties in the States; these are described in some of his most pop- ular plays, such as Shmates Rags from or Shop from It was a symbolic landscape, but also the setting of painful and tangible personal experiences, as described in his famous poem Oyfn di vegn Sibirer On the Road to Siberia from Oyfn di vegn Sibirer Emets nokh itster gefinen a klepl, a shtrikl Fun mayne a tserisenem shukh.
A rimenem pas, fun a leymenem krigl a shtikl. A bleter fun heylikn bukh. Oyfn di taykhn Sibirer Ken emets nokh itster gefinen a tseykhn a shpendl Fun mains a dertrunkenem plit; In vald — a farblutikt-fartriktn bendl, In shney — ayngefroyrene trit Leivick In particular, for Leivick and for most of his readers, Jewish messian- ism was closely intertwined with Russian tradition. It is not mere chance that Harshav twice compares him to Dostoevsky; and, according to Roskies Leivick was linked to more recent Russian culture as well. Over the years, however, he moved further away from these Russian sources: Dramatishe poeme in akht bilder The Golem.
There is abundant scholarly literature on the legend of the Golem; in addition to the books included in the Bibliography, see, for example, Idel His sufferings in this period were also exacerbated by tuberculosis, which obliged him to undergo long periods of hospitalization and consequent isolation from the outside world. After the Shoah, Leivick was the first among Yiddish poets and writers in the United States to give voice to the widespread sense of disorientation and feeling of guilt for the catastrophe that many of his writings — including The Golem — seemed to have disturbingly foreshadowed.
Leivick died in New York in He had spent the last four years of his life paralyzed and unable to speak, visited constantly by writers and friends. He was compared to the starets Zosima of The Brothers Karamazov in both his own outlook and in the devotion that others demonstrated to him Harshav, Harshav Nahshon , particularly pp. When you pass our Church you have to take our hat off!
The lesson that day was on the binding of Isaac and when Leivick heard Abraham described as lifting the knife, he burst into hysteri- cal tears. Though the teacher tried to comfort Leivick — it was just a test, Isaac was not slaughtered! Returning home on that same day, young Leivick walked past the estate of Count Yassevitch13, who, everyone knew, had a mad son that he kept locked up.
Great terri- fying eyes. The man himself — a giant, the black hair of his head and face dishev- eled, wild. It was a game, Leivick recalled, invented to entertain the prisoner, to show him that he wanted to cheer him up. Russian nineteenth-century novels often tell of pranks played on village idiots and greeted with general hilarity, but in this case, Leivick inverts the expected prank to punish himself.
In the first episode, the sudden and unjustified act of anti-Semitic 13 Also spelled Jasiewicz. I have been unable to find any information confirming the historical existence of the Count, although this surname was very common in that region. Leivick thus presents himself as a messianic figure, but not in the image of a triumphant Messiah, the son of David, but according to another Talmudic model provided by Jewish tradition, i. The Talmud states that the Messiah is a beggar waiting at the gates of Rome.
And how can one recognize him? While the other lepers change their bandages all at once, the Messiah does so one bandage at a time, so as not to be late cf. The first of the eight scenes into which The Golem is divided, entitled Clay, takes place at night just outside Prague and presents an argument between the rabbi and the shadow of the Golem that he is about to remove from the darkness. His grave in the Jewish cemetery of Prague, which has remained untouched to this day, is often visited.
Legend holds that he was the cre- ator of the Golem. The shadow then disappears, after one last unheeded prayer, his apparition soon replaced by the sinister one of the Priest, whose name is Polish — Tadeush Ta- deusz — and who hisses to the rabbi: Nor ze, funvanem kumen dos tsu dir azoyne oygn? Retsikhe shpritst fun zey un shvartse gvure, Vi kumt retsikhe tsu a rov?
The cynical Tadeush is certainly right when he sees retshikhe, slaughter, in the eyes of the rabbi, when he recognizes him as an alter ego of the Golem. The Golem, half man and half puppet, endowed with supernatural strength but ready to obey every request of his creator, will be the savior of the helpless Jews.
He will be the one to stain his hands with blood in obedience to a higher will; thus it has 15 Quotations in this article from the original Yiddish text of The Golem are taken from Leivick , while the English translations found largely in the notes are from Leivick In the second scene, entitled Walls, the Golem is no longer a shadow, but a person. He has a name, Yosl, Joseph, that reminds us of his messianic destiny and a rough-hewn appearance: At first, the Golem can feel only the most primordial, violent feelings: The rabbi seems both disap- pointed and fascinated by his creature.
He teaches him to bend his head if he has to walk through a very low door, to move objects instead of sweeping them away; he teaches him that the sunset is not a fire that will soon devour every- thing. His rage explodes in an expressionistic outburst, his desperation at finding himself in a world so incomprehensible and threatening recalling scenes in works by other contemporary authors about the tragedy of the First World War: Es hoybt zikh epes inveynik in mir un vergt, Un klapt, a klinkerey in beyde oyern, Un far di oygn — royt un grin… Un mayne fis zey hoybn zikh, zey viln geyn, Un mayne hent ot gibn zey a khap dikh farn halz Un trogn zikh avek mit dir In the following scene, Through Darkness, the distance between the Golem and the community that he is supposed to protect continues to grow.
When the biblical God had called Abraham, the patriarch had answered with the single word: Hinneni, Here I am, and it is from this absolute readiness that Jewish sa- cred history was born. The relationship between the Golem and the rabbi may also be seen as a degraded version of this narrative from the Book of Genesis: God-Maharal will not call Yosl, but Yosl will think he has heard the call, and when he, like Abraham, leaves everything to answer: Un shtendik dakht zikh mir, ikh her dayn kol: Ikh tu a sets Di hak in holts areyn un entfer: Un ale nehmen lakhn, iberkrimen: In the meantime, events come to a head.
And the rabbi answers: Gor a sakh, a sakh Nor gebn konen mir zey gornisht, gornisht, hert mir? Un epes konen mir — o, io, mir konen, reb Basevi, mir viln ober nit. Mir viln nit… mir hobn Tsu alts un alemen fun gor der velt Nor tsugerirt zikh mit eyn shpits fun finger, Gor fun der zeyt a hoykh geton mit unzer otem, Un alts un ale fun der gantser velt Vet trogn shoyn oyf eybik unzer finger, Un shturems, virblendike shturems veln oysbrekhn Fun unzer leykhtn oysgehoykhtn otem… The fourth scene, Beggars, is set among the poor who are quartered in the Fifth Tower, a sort of timeless non-place belonging to noone, perhaps a refer- ence to the Minsk Tower where Leivick himself had been imprisoned.
Tadeush wants to throw the Jews out of even that horrible shelter: According to a well-known prophecy, the Messiah will come when the world is either completely good or when it is completely evil. In either case, mankind will have to be ready to welcome him and to accept change. In the scene Unbidden, Prophet Elias and the Messiah are two beggars, one old and one young, both with sore hands and feet and waiting for dawn at the out- skirts of Prague. As noted above, however, no redeemer may come without having been called for.
The time is not yet ripe; the awaited Messiah can only be the Last One, who marks the end of time. It is the Maharal himself who sends the two miserable beggars away. Fun den man, vos trogt zayn tseylem Tsu dem betler mitn zakh, kumt der oysleyzer, der goylem, mit a fist un mit a hak In scene six, Revelations, the Golem wakes up in the Fifth Tower, where the Maharal had imprisoned him together with beggars and victims of the pogroms.
Here, the puppet suddenly reveals his messianic role; the time set for his birth has come: Nevertheless, the power that he has suddenly acquired does not mean that the Golem is moving away from his creator: In the penultimate scene, In the Cave, the plot draws to a close.
In the dark tunnels of the Fifth Tower that connect cathedral with synagogue, Tadeush and a monk carefully carry sealed bottles containing the blood of the child they have killed. Blood is the key word in the last pages of the poem, the blood which the Golem smells from afar. Only he will be able to prevent the final slaughter, but the means by which he can do so are the same as those used by Tadeush and his fellows. The Golem tries to brace up, repeating the ter- rible formula, but he is continually tormented by nightmares and phantoms he cannot explain.
Deserted by the Maharal and lost in the airless underground tunnels, he finds the bottles with the blood and probably intends to murder Tadeush and his assistant. But visions haunt him: The rabbi has not visited him for eight days. The memory of that terrible night in the Fifth Tower is still vivid in the larg- er community: And yet, the Rabbi would still like the Golem to learn to live among other Jews, to relish the sound of their prayers. Moreover, the violence that the Rabbi himself has triggered within his creature — indeed, the violence for which the Rabbi created him — cannot be restrained.
The result is a grotesque tragedy: Iz dos a shtraf far unzer freyd, Reboyne oylem? Iz doz dayn shtraf far veln rateven zikh? Ti hostu nisht baviligt? Mayn zind far veln opnemen baym faynt dos zeynike; Der faynt hot oyfgemant Ikh hob gevolt farmaydn blut un blut fargosn Dvorel runs in, terrified. The Golem reaches out to her, thinking she has come to be with him. The Maharal orders the faithful to resume the song that marks the beginning of the Shabbat.
Here again, Leivick highlights the problem of violence being completely alien to Jewish identity. Dervayl hot zikh mit eynuneyntsik rege Fartsoygt mer, durkh mir, dayn leben; Zay dankbar mir far der gerateveter rege, Vayl ot fargeyt zi The devising of utopias and conjuring up of complex plans for salvation is pointless, Leivick argues. While Leivick knew that even the greatly yearned for coming of the Mes- siah would change nothing in the human condition, he also held that continuing to wait for and to believe in his arrival was necessary.
As the narrator explains: While Yiddish, to which Leivick chose to attach his destiny, is generally associated — at least in its secular version — with the simul- taneous acknowledgement and acceptance of dispersion and of exile, Yiddish language and culture also participated, albeit in often conflicting and troubled ways, in the building of the new country. Leivick spent the greater part of his life hovering between two idealizations of life in the Diaspora, both of them reflective in mood: These two visions culminated after his death, as had often happened in his life, in a symbolic event, namely the creation in Tel Aviv in of the House of Lei- vick, a cultural center and museum, as well as the Israeli seat of the association of Yiddish writers and journalists This institution is one of very few in the state of Israel where the sounds of Hebrew and Yiddish, together with the multiple nostalgias of the Hebrew world, coexist in relative harmony — and both worlds, significantly, are contained in its name: Bet Leyvik, Leyviks Hoys.
Translated by Cecilia Pozzi and Sara Dickinson 27 At the same time, this guttural and poetic idiom of a disinherited and homeless people, a language whose very structure would seem to symbolize exile, necessarily sug- gested paradox and a sort of bizarre defeatism. Indeed, in the early years of the Israeli state, Ben Gurion led an aggressive campaign against Yiddish culture, which he identi- fied with the humiliation and powerlessness of the Diaspora. This article will focus on that variety of Vysockian toska that might be defined, paraphrasing Giambattista Vico Unless otherwise noted, subsequent volume and page numbers in this chapter for citations of Vysockij refer to this edition.
Heroic gestures simultaneously constitute a supreme form of human ex- perience for Vysockij and serve as the object of nostalgia — and it is in this light that they appear in his most well-known musical-poetic cycles. Harsh expanses of steppe and polar ice, underground mines, and mountain peaks are among the spaces selected by Vysockij to elaborate his conception of heroism.
When locat- ing heroism in other eras, Vysockij often chooses to contemplate the heroic feat in the context of war. Particular attention will be devoted in this article to the origins of this choice as well as to the expression of heroism found in his songs about the men who fought in World War II. The blend of a profoundly personal nostalgia for the heroic feat with widely shared public sentiments enabled both Vysockij and his audience to transcend the quotidian reality of daily Soviet life.
In these lyrics, we can begin to intuit a link between heroism and the ethical nature of true friendship the only admissible kind found elsewhere in Vysockij as well6. Nikolaj Rerix, who in characterized podvig as a concept that is specifically Rus- sian and thus untranslatable into other languages, highlighted the notion of moral choice found at its core: Heroism accompanied by fanfare is not capable of conveying the immortal, complete, and all-encompassing idea contained in the Russian word podvig [ Those who choose to take on the heavy burden of the podvig bear it voluntarily Rerix His impetu- ous temperament, his romantic sense of honor, and his irrepressible surges of creativity clashed constantly and irremediably with the paralysis that reigned in Soviet society during that era.
In particular, Vysockij suffered from the stifling conformity that reigned in the official artistic institutions and from the hostil- ity of the politico-cultural bureaucracy, that, while never overt, was insidious, systematic, and encountered by him daily8. His travels through poetic space took him to dramatic geo- graphical settings and harsh climates: His colleague, however, who up until that moment also been his friend, obeys a mistaken instinct for survival and, in a display of irrationality and irresponsibility, succumbs to the urge to flee.
Luck- ily, fate has prepared a happy ending for both men, as well as for the truck that they are delivering to a construction site beyond the Urals: Having overcome adversity with remarkable firmness, the hero reaches his apotheosis in a demonstration of magnanimity — as genuine as it is laconic — to- wards his weaker companion: In role lyrics, a lyrical procedure is used to appropriate epic material: Regret for the Time of Heroes 81 Though his coworker fails the test of friendship, the heroic protagonist re- mains generously disposed towards him. Both songs are set in dramatically rendered environments that sharply contrast with one another and with daily life: Severe atmospheric conditions are exploited still more fully in Beloe bezmolvie White Silence , where perennial pack ice serves as stage for the mental states and heroic acts of polar explorers: Such homecom- ing is tolerable only because it is necessary in order to subsequently embark upon yet another path of ascent.
In his mountain songs, the vital and vitalist Vysockij suggests that our only means of achieving happiness is choosing to set out again and thus to perform not just one, but several heroic feats, waging sustained battle against our own weaknesses and fears: As we gradually supersede one trial after another, uncertainty and appre- hension give way to a self-confidence that borders on exaltation: Not one step back! While the two brief and apparently random quatrains that Volodja intones lack any explicit connection with mountain heroism, they can be linked to his general vision of mountaineering.
The quest for such opportunities is con- stant in his work, perhaps because it is through the demonstration of heroism, in his view, that one earns the right to be called a human being. Hero- ism constitutes an ongoing process that, despite moments of triumph, is imbued with uneasiness and longing.
Vysockij himself appears to have been driven by a troubled restlessness or anxiety in his ceaseless desire to uncover heroes. He searches for heroes everywhere, ranging widely through space and time to do so. The feats of such personages offer at least temporary respite from the con- tinued threat of quotidian stagnation, their repeated acts of heroism constituting a bulwark against the encroachment of the mundane as well as the vital reasser- tion of full human dignity. As noted, the quest for heroism takes Vysockij to ex- treme geographical contexts: His search also leads him to the past and, particularly, to the era of World War II and to the heroism of the soldier.
He began to write war songs in the first half of the s25, when no theme in Soviet culture was more widespread than that of the Second Great Patriotic War. Ubiquitous in the figurative arts and classical music, the War was also featured in hundreds and hundreds of novels, stories, plays, poems, lyrics, songs, historical essays, journalistic reportage, war diaries, and films, both doc- umentary and non-.
Regret for the Time of Heroes 85 the conflict with Napoleon that broke out in , clearly underlined historical continuity with the tsarist epoch. Nonetheless, while he does mourn a profound lack of heroism in the dismal, gray, and dispiriting life that surrounds him, Vysockij does not seek return to the past.
A lack of interest in such themes allows him to avoid the heavy finality of either tragic or rhetorical emphasis, and to conclude his songs with the acknowl- edgement of a permanent, ongoing state or condition of toska. At the end of the day, artistic pro- duction seems to have allowed Vysockij to simultaneously sublimate and come to terms with a sense of loss through the act of commemorating it. It is also true that since his songs contain no clearly expressed desire for any actual restoration of the past, they generate in listeners a variety of nostalgia that is linked less to properly historical memory than to remembrance shot through with an emotional and even deeply personal nostalgia.
Since the struggle for survival that characterized the War era did not lend itself well to the discussion of ideological fine points, rehabilitated s pa- triotism was easily reconciled with the official image of the USSR as different nationalities united to defend the native land against medieval Nazi barbarity. In the initial months of the war, I had to take him, as a three-year-old, with me to work.
Sometimes he would sleep right there on the tables. When the air-raid sirens went off, we went down into the bomb shelter. It was always crowded, very hot and stuffy. And did he whine? Volodja came up to the loft several times, too, with his little toy bucket Safonov With the adjective bylinnye, referring to the Russian folk epic, Vysockij blends historical reality with folkloric reminiscence.
The age-old concept of the war trophy requires little ulterior explanation. With the passage of time, the term progressively moved towards the criminal world, becoming a slang term for institutions of detention cf. It is instructive to compare the verses quoted above with what Vysockij himself declared about the motives that drove him to write songs about the war: Indeed, most of the protagonists in his war songs are individuals or well-defined groups. Nonetheless, Ballad on Combat contains no trace of any disenchantment or bitterness towards youthful romantic idealism.
On the contrary, fidelity to the teachings of books read in childhood and adolescence constitutes an ethical requirement for human beings: Immediately after the war, Volodja lived with his father and stepmother on a Soviet military base in Eberswalde, East Germany for almost three years from the end of to August Volodja began to love books very early [ He loved retelling to his friends what he had been reading.
He had an excellent memory. He could memorize a poem after reading it only once [ In Germany and later in Moscow my friends would come to see us. You can imagine what men who had served together on the front lines would talk about when they got together. I pay tribute to this era with my songs. Regret for the Time of Heroes 91 Red Banners.
Nonetheless, for all their plausibility, these songs seem to be set both in World War II, and also — simultaneously — in a metahistorical or mythologically prototypical dimension. May 9, was proclaimed a national holiday — as it had been in the early postwar years — and the tradition of holding an impos- ing military parade on Red Square was revived as well. Ana- tolij Kulagin This twentieth anniversary of the victory was celebrated with under- standable pride by the large majority of Soviet citizens, to whom the War had caused indescribable suffering and hardship.
The Communist Party exploited the event to launch a major campaign of self-celebration, mobilizing expo- nents of the creative intelligentsia. Painters, sculptors, prose writers, poets, playwrights, theatre and film directors each responded to the call on the basis of their talents if they had any and character, be it a tendency towards servil- ity or the affirmation of courage and a sense of dignity.
Vysockij himself was involved during this period with two important projects that he would never have occasion to regret and that marked a significant step in his artistic evolu- tion. Danelija that met with great success. He committed suicide in Regret for the Time of Heroes 93 the heroic to the lyrical To discuss your consignment opportunities with Sofe Design Auctions, please contact our Consignments Department by calling: With a never-ending blitz of consign consign- ment solicitations coming at you constantly, choosing the right auction house can be a tough decision.
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