9 - Jewish Writing in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, 1917–1941

Summary

I am a Jew, convinced, faithful, and I rejoice at that … But I am a Russian Jew, and Russia is my native land, and I love Russia more than any other country. How can I reconcile these things?

LEV LUNTS, Letter to Maksim Gorky (unsent), 1922

We are the vanguard, but of what?

ISAAC BABEL, 1920 Diary, 21 July 1920

THE PERIOD from the revolution to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 saw a major flowering of Jewish literary creativity in Russian, Yiddish, and, to a lesser extent, in Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. This was part of a larger phenomenon. The 1920s was a period of great artistic creativity and innovation in the Soviet Union which was, in some degree, the continuation of a revival that had begun in the 1890s. This ‘Silver Age’ of Russian culture affected all aspects of artistic life: art, ballet, and music, prose and poetry. It produced important prose writers and playwrights, most notably Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreev, Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Maksim Gorky, but it was above all in poetry that its greatest achievements were to be found. These years saw the impact on Russian life of European modernism, with its stress on the individual and on ‘art for art's sake’, which led to a rejection of the utilitarian aesthetic which had been dominant in Russian literature since the 1860s. Russian poets were now deeply influenced by Symbolism, especially by the work of the French poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. Like them, they stressed the importance of the poet's individual vision of reality, a reality whose roots were to be found not in the everyday world but in a hidden realm that could only be revealed by the use of symbols. Their poetry thus sought affinities with music, through which the moods of this concealed world could be revealed.

Russian Symbolism was not a coherent artistic movement and its principal adherents, Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Valery Bryusov, were not only frequently at odds personally, but also embodied two distinct artistic visions. Blok, Bely, and Ivanov saw the movement as a mystical religion with the poet as high priest, while Bryusov envisaged Symbolism as primarily a literary technique.