Большая поэзия для маленьких детей (Russian Edition)
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 The most well known among them, Mass Graves Bratskie mogily , was sung off screen by Mark Bernes and used by Turov as a connecting thread in the plot He was a truly extraordinary man, who really valued bard music.
And this had a surprising effect, because, for ex- ample, we received a letter from a woman who had lost her memory when two of her sons were hanged right in front of her. She watched this movie in the hospital and she wrote us a letter telling us that she had suddenly remembered where that had happened to her children. She wrote both to Bernes and to the studio in Minsk. Vysockij, like Bernes, regularly received a number of letters from veterans who thought they had rec- ognized themselves in the protagonist of this or that song, a fact that he often mentioned with pride during his concerts.
Here director Jurij Lju- bimov used an approach that would become one of his trademarks, namely pre- senting the bare poetic text without any set. As was the case with all Taganka productions, restrictions imposed by the censorship meant protracted struggles, lengthy negotiations, and multiple post- ponements. In point of fact, the song Mass graves was itself cut before the drama opened in November , although Vysockij had the honor of singing another of his songs on stage. More- over, when he made a brief video in May in order to introduce himself to Warren Beattie, who was then casting the movie Reds, Vysockij began by reciting in Russian some poems from The Fallen written by wartime poet Semen Gudzenko , rather than a selection from his own wide repertoire.
Unlike the prohibited theme of the illegal underground that Vysockij had explored in previous work — and that had no official outlet — the war theme was publicly approved and even officially embraced; his own approach to the War, however, remained sui generis. An initial answer to this question was given by Vysockij himself in an explanation of his constant references to war: Having argued that war provides the best context for investigating hu- man nature, offering as it does constant opportunities for such to be revealed, Vysockij goes on to note that in the martial setting questions of themes such as courage or cowardice, selflessness or egotism, responsibility or lack thereof, re- main substantially invariant across eras: And I often find them in those times.
It seems to me that there were simply more of them then, that the situations in which they found themselves were more ex- treme. If you think about and listen to them care- fully, you will see that they can even be sung today: The motives for courageous acts on the battlefield are quite specific and differ from those that inspire, for instance, climbers. The sentiment is so natural and deeply-rooted, in other words, that no explicit mention of it is neces- sary. Indeed, Vysockij makes no use of patriotic rhetoric in his entire oeuvre — a fact essential to understanding his poetics.
The soldierly sense of duty that Vysockij describes does not appear to be trig- gered by conditioned reflex since the men do reflect upon it , nonetheless, this sentiment ultimately prevails over their other motives for action and, most nota- bly, over an instinct for self-preservation. Their participation in the war results situations have been taken from those days [of war], but all of it could very well happen here, too, even now. This is how I regard them: Regret for the Time of Heroes 97 from various pressing events, but it is mainly the product of individual choice.
In- deed, Vysockij rarely deprives his characters of the chance to choose or, at least, to challenge their fate even in the most dramatic contexts. And thus he thinks before obeying: Nonetheless, it is not the order from above, but his own sense of personal responsibility in pursuit of the common good that prevents him and his companions from giving in to hatred or instinc- tive emotion.
Despite a few variations in poetic tone, the war cycle is a coherent group of songs persistently laced with the themes of friendship, danger, courage, fear, physical exertion, life, and death. Certainly, such an approach itself might be interpreted as adding a touch of aesthetic and psychological authenticity to the subject, insofar as those who were actually involved in the War, whether as participants, witnesses or victims, were often quite unwilling to offer up the grisly details, preferring to recollect the tragedy in all its emotional complexity as a world in and of itself.
While not all of the persons described perform heroic feats, they do all overcome their fears and transcend the limitations imposed by an egotistical sense of self-preservation in order to create an epic together. Recalling the land where he was born, the protagonist remembers his orphanage childhood with implicit gratitude: Decades of exile, misfortune, hardship, unfreedom, and displacement follow: The Chechen does not speak of his own sad fate in order to inspire compassion, but reflects upon it, fully aware that his experience is but one detail in an immense collective portrait of the entire na- tion: Of all the types of violence to which he has been subjected, he is particularly haunted by the ethnic variety perpetrated among the deported peoples: More than one third of the deportees died during the journey or from hardships suffered in the first years of exile, while the survivors were forbidden to leave their place of destination.
The same fate also befell the Crimean Tatars, similarly accused of col- laboration with the Nazis and rounded up by the Red Army in May for deportation to Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan. No one could move, everyone sat in silence. And suddenly someone burst into tears, another began to cry, a third.
In the last stanza, a long-awaited note of almost cathartic liberation sounds: As Austrian scholar Heinrich Pfandl He thus contextualized his own personal and familial affairs in the greater historical narrative that saw the Jews of the tsarist Empire adhere en masse to the progressive and universalist ideology of the Revolution inimical as it was to nationalism and antisemitism , as Yuri Slezkine brilliantly demonstrates.
Initially rewarded with roles of power and responsibility, the Jews fell victim to Stalinist repression in the s: In a list of historical situations allowing humankind to demonstrate its heroic qualities, he regretted that such an opportunity had been denied to him by the epoch in which he lived: We can agree with Klimakova There is no lasting escape from existence: Summing up, Vysockian toska is an existential melancholy that is incom- mensurate with the rudimentary mechanisms of restorative nostalgia: Vysockij at- tempted to overcome the anxiety produced in him by this divide through artistic expression and experience.
Singing offered him a means of transcendence and it is not mere coincidence that Vysockij set himself a furious pace in work and as a result in life cf. His frenetic attempts to achieve an exalted state yet again illustrate an attitude that deeply worried those close to Vysockij and was the primary cause of his premature death. It is quite probable that he more or less consciously considered artistic creation to be his own individual podvig, a heroic feat whose realization required a vzlet or act of taking flight that could not, alas, continue uninterrupted.
His quest to soar con- stantly above daily life was ultimately impossible to reconcile with the physical limitations of human existence. Vysockij was not content with artistic creativity that was restricted to an intimate or personal scale — the result of factors both external and internal, in- cluding his character, his theatrical training, and a certainty that he would not be published or officially recorded in Soviet Russia.
Vysockij was driven to share his art, and the more he immersed himself in others, the more successful he felt it to be. Writing verses was only the first step in this heroic creative process: Vysockij himself affirmed that his songs assumed semi- definite shape only after having passed muster with his audience: This re- corded Alice, directed by Oleg Gerasimov, was first released in as a double album and, after its great success, reissued almost every year until the early nineties; an MP3 version became available in Will you chicken out at once?
Or will you boldly leap? Inter- estingly, his compositions never achieved a final form: Perhaps he felt that the heroic feat of performing a song could not be repeated mechanically and that each realization required new effort and new adjustments. Some clarification of this apparent paradox is suggested by Boym The border between bytie and byt seems to parallel the mythical border between Russia and the West.
Vysockij also meets the definition established by Antonio Gramsci This is exactly what Vysockij does and it explains his success: And by voicing nostalgia for the War and, more generally, for heroic contexts located in other spatial and temporal worlds, Vysockij allowed his public to both accept daily life and to understand it as preparatory to the heroic feat.
Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia. Svetlana Boym What is freedom? To me freedom is the Russian language. He now lives in Jerusalem. Although Guberman worked for many years as an electrical engineer, he has written verse throughout his life. A reliable biog- raphy that might offer insight on this charge does not currently exist, although Guberman himself provides some information on the subject in his prose writings and other scat- tered comments may be found in the memoirs of his friends and other acquaintances.
Indeed, dozens of gariki demonstrate that the poet does not take his own literary endeavors too seriously. Later books including the Seventh and Eighth Journals came out in and , respectively cf. According to Svetlana Boym Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia on oppositions whose psychological appeal belies their rhetorical and artificial nature: Restorative nostalgia is a means to assertively translate a vague and intimate longing into a concrete sentiment that is both ideologized and goal-directed, whereas reflective nostalgia cf.
Reflection or introspection corrodes any comfortable, self-referential sys- tem of values I vs. He is content with everything. Where indicated, we have been able to use the translations of Guberman found in Sokolovskij , although the bulk of the gariki cited here have been rendered into unrhymed English verse by Sara Dickinson, Cecilia Pozzi, and Laura Salmon. Indeed, the sober unmasking of this delu- sion is the only existential happiness that humans can hope for: Toska with no object, in other words, is nothing but the feel- ing of reflective nostalgia, or melancholia.
The same can be said of other frequently occurring lexemes referring to the same semantic domain, i. His smiles and his tears transcend rhetoric and eventually blend: Even when oppressive toska drives the poet to respond in typical Rus- sian fashion by praying, drinking and writing, he invariably filters his feelings through skepticism or irony, rather than dramatizing them: Such individuals live on the margins of a domi- nant culture, in a borderland whose fertile soil nourishes skepticism.
For such exiles, there is no spacetime on earth where this in- ner sense of diversity might be erased — hence their questing takes the shape do Jews always answer a question with a question? Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia of wandering not through actual spacetime, but through their own minds. The component of reflection that is specific to reflective nostalgia results from this process of mental wandering.
They are always potentially ready to leave, to find and adapt to new spaces, and yet to preserve their constitutive strangeness wherever they are. Whereas Apollonians have a clear sense of belonging to a concrete territory and constituting a stable nation — they can leave immovable property to their heirs — Mercurians tend to cultivate knowledge, an asset that can not be inherited, but is easily transport- able in case of flight.
In the host countries of the Diaspora, the Jewish condition of alien brought with it fear, uncertainty, and a sense of ontological suspension, and encouraged concomitant Jewish-Mercurian tendencies towards mastering the languages of the Others, reflecting on alterity, and renewing and even subverting various cultures: Regardless of the particular form that it assumes, Jewish-Mercurian exile appears as intrinsically disharmonic cf. This state of incertitude and its related inclination for reflection inspires in the Jews of the Diaspora both increasing curiosity towards the Other and partial — and ambivalent — identifica- tion with them.
They are the artistic expression of a thoughtful and empathic Mercu- rian mood36, for reflection also means looking at oneself from an outside per- spective, i. A direct connec- tion between his mental flexibility and the reflective nature of his social critique is evident. If serious Apollonian writers experience a concrete sense of cultural be- longing, Mercurians operate in a reality that is paradoxical.
Where Apollonians offer conservative answers, Mercurians pose thorny questions: Such stability does not necessarily mean rigidity, however. Why did my friends always laugh so much at parties? In his treatise On Humor, Pirandello, who was also quite preoccupied with fluctuating identities as at- tested in The Late Mattia Pascal and One, No One, and One Hundred Thou- sand , provides a good description of the empathetic reflective mood, albeit in somewhat different terms cf.
Aimed at in- dividuals or groups that are seen to represent specific faults ignorance, greed, arrogance, etc. Paradox, by its very nature, is exclusively horizontal and anti-Manichean: But I know you are going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me? According to Freud Ivi: Throughout the twentieth century, the paradoxical melancholic mood of Ashkenazi Jewish culture exerted a strong influence on Apollonian culture in the West. Skeptical humor is by no means frequent in either everyday life or literature Freud But the fact that our life is a comedy is understood and felt by only very few of its participants.
I perceive both of these two genres. Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia Guberman expects that the audience for his skeptical humor will be com- posed of skeptics and humorists as well: His well-disposed reader enters an illogical world where laughing is a re- sponse to toska, which in turn is the response to cheerfulness: Indeed, skeptical humor is a form of subversive cogni- tive deprogramming that can make sense of ambiguity much like the insights of Zen Salmon Insofar as Mercurian Jews tend to re- ject dogma, nourish doubt, and invert moments of inconsistent logic, they are perceived by Apollonian culture — which defends the status quo and aches for restoration — as a dangerous threat: A reflective, humorous response to feelings of regret, sorrow, melancho- lia, and nostalgia implies a thorough revision of human binary postulates.
In such cases, subjective empathy paradoxically means the demystification, and thus humanization of the object itself. The process of subjectivizing and humanizing the object also para- doxically makes it available to the Other. Indeed, the more subjective the object of nostalgia, the more universal it becomes. This [Russia] is my one and only homeland.
Poor, hungry, crazy, and drunk! Having lost, destroyed, and exiled her best sons! How could she be kind, cheerful, and loving?! But does that make it any easier? The altered jackets of our elder brothers. San- dwiches wrapped in newspaper. Girls with severe brown skirts. The Languages of Russian-Jewish Nostalgic Feelings As is well known, the Jews lived for many centuries as exiles in the lands of their birth, with no homeland of their own.
This lin- guistic melange that echoed inside and outside of Jewish life fostered, on one hand, open-mindedness, creativity, and an appreciation of novelty, and, on the other, distress, disorder, and a sense of split or discontinuous identity. There is a clear interrelationship among the languages used by Russian Jewish writers, their respective poetics, and the different modalities restorative or reflective of nostalgia that inform their work. That said, the semantically hybrid term pocket. A glass of Azerbaijani wine in the entryway My baby daughter, her mit- tens, her woolen tights, the crushed back of a tiny shoe Manuscripts, the militia, the Emigration Bureau Everything that happened to us is our homeland.
While the earliest examples of Jewish literary writings in Russian were pub- lished in the early s, it was only in the second half of that century that an impressive number of journalistic, prose, and poetic works appeared. Prior to Soviet times, Russian-Jewish writers and publicists had used one or more of the three languages at their disposition: Russian, Yiddish, and the newly revived Hebrew Salmon With few exceptions, Yiddish was the language of exile and popular mostly oral tradi- 63 Some scholars e. At the same time, the Yiddish used in the ghetto of the Pale was an idiom with dual and contradictory significance, a symbol of both exile and home.
Yiddish had produced an aesthetic in which ideas of beauty and standards of artistic worth are inextricably linked to expressions of longing and pain [ Yid- dish arose, at least in part, to give voice to a system of opposition and exclusion Ivi: For several decades, Yiddish remained the sole language capable of fully describing Jewish life, the sole means of realizing the incredible potential of Jewish oral communication. By choosing to write in Russian and about Jews, a writer is taking on a tradition that runs counter to the kind of unconscious self-identification that others, working in their national literatures, take for granted [ If you were going to write about Jews the obvious language was Hebrew or Yiddish; to do so in Russian was to em- bark on a journey of self-contradiction Nakhimovsky The structural ambiguity of the Yiddish world influenced Jewish writers, first among them Sholem Aleichem, to lean towards paradoxical humor as a specific re- sponse to the difficult condition of permanent exile: In Hebrew He dictated the commandments to Moses, in Hebrew He spoke with the prophets, scolded the children of Israel, and sometimes pitied them.
All this He does in Hebrew. But the Lord laughs and cries in Yiddish Jewish authors who chose to write in Russian or Hebrew were inclined towards restorative nostalgia: Palestine was also the chronotopic setting for Rus- sian-Jewish restorative nostalgia, the chief feeling at that time cf. Restorative nostalgia took various forms: In this context, melan- choly was produced by the knowledge that the Jewish love for Russia would never be reciprocated: Similarly, the Russian culture and language assimilated Jewish toska: They started a new life, one finally shared with their Russian neighbors cf.
Russian Denver N17/942
While Yiddish was spoken primarily by parents and grandparents children born in the s who attended Soviet schools could understand Yid- dish better than they could actively use it , it continued to reverberate inside and outside of Jewish life. Such mutual hybridization was made possible by oral exchanges between Jews and Russians in the shared urban spaces of Soviet daily life. Because of the Soviet hostility towards religion, the overt ex- pression of a specifically Jewish identity was a provocative and dangerous action. During the Soviet era, Russian tears became Jewish and vice versa.
The ability to mock, even maliciously, even with derision towards themselves, is the wonderful, high-minded feature of the ineradicable Jewish people [ Jews returned to Russian verbal art the forgotten predilections — easiness, elegance, total humor. That is exactly how — would you believe it? On this song see also M.
Due to Stalinist repression, and although appreciated by the Soviet intelli- gentsia, Jewish skepticism and paradoxicality found no support in official Soviet ideology, which was characterized by seriousness and increasing dogmatism as well as a quasi-religious set of beliefs, axiomatic myths, and rules.
If the Soviet authorities were ready to accept humor structured on a binary principle jokes are always widespread in dictatorships , they could not admit doubts and ques- tion marks. Soviet Jews became increasingly adept at using encoded subtexts as their verbal skills grew stronger. The relationship between Russians and Jews became more complex in the last two decades of the Soviet era, when massive Jewish emigra- tion to Israel and to the United States began.
There was no choice or, rather, it was a ridiculous choice: The general pattern would appear to be that the stronger the dream of a radiant future or pride for a glorious past, the more an author is prone to gravity, romanticism, and rhetorical dramatization cf. Sud- denly my wife and I were invited to that department of visas and registrations that all remember [ How many people have dreamt that all their doubts would thus be resolved by others, removing the damned splinter of free choice!
In the seventies I saw many Jews who dreamt not of emigration, but of a life-long struggle for permission to emigrate [ Having been Jews in Russia, in Israel they paradoxically became Russians: An affective attachment to Russia was constituted by memory alone: The most onerous of these concerned the linguistic sphere, since language was not only a marker of his identity, but also the means for his professional activity.
For almost all of the Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel after the s, He- brew remained a foreign language. Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia In The Book of Wanderings Kniga stranstvij , Guberman describes the ful- fillment of a request made by an old Russian Jew who had asked his daughter to divide his ashes between Petersburg and the Judea Desert in a humorous, but poignant image of the Russian-Jewish split identity: Such a profound division of identity triggered in its subject either of two opposite reactions — denial or acceptance — both fraught with toska.
An old Soviet joke summarizes this paradox quite well. A Soviet Jew emigrates to Israel, but after a few weeks regrets the decision and heads back to the USSR; he then once again returns to Israel, then back to Russia, and so on, several times. When finally asked by the increasingly impatient authorities in both Russia and Israel in which context he ultimately feels better, the Jew replies: His dau- ghter took out of her handbag an old school pencil case, we shook out of it a handful of gray ashes: We smoked in silence.
Whatever he sings in gariki or states in prose about Russia contains apparent inconsistencies and contradictions: In meta-exile, the poet finds that his real, one and only homeland is neither a time nor a place, but the Russian language, the very essence of his identity. Inseparable from experience, emotions, and perception, language constitutes the ontological core of the Self: Russia is also the place of memory and intimacy, where the Russian lan- guage reverberates on all sides, be it in Siberia or in a Moscow kitchen: Thus, Russian today assumes the function of Yiddish in the past, giving voice to the nostalgic sounds of the exiled.
If the Lord laughs and cries in Yid- dish, those exiled from Russia to Zion laugh and cry in Russian: Through reason, he gains distance and the resulting ostranenie facilitates his empathic approach to all kinds of nonsense. Unlike tragedy, skeptical humor is not cathartic, but represents a form of emancipation or even abdication from drama and tragedy, an acceptance both cognitive and affective of the funny-yet- poignant paradoxes of human existence.
Whatever his political views and regardless of his obvious affection for Israel, the poet looks at any religious orthodoxy or dogmatic ideology with marked diffidence, precisely because his general ontological mood conflicts with the assumption of such a cogni- tive position.
In both prose and verse, he also repeatedly rejects any form of blind nationalism: Skepticism, the poet suggests, is the direct result of a discontinuity between dreams and reality, and allows one to substitute false beliefs or illusions with the comparatively liberating feeling of sober melancholy: Such melancholic suspen- sion is an enduring phenomenon in the history of Jewish cognitive and emo- tive experience.
Although Jewish tradition also includes a Rabbinical branch of cognitive inflexibility the heritage of Shammai , skepticism is an ancient component of traditional Jewish exegesis as well — and it reflects the condition of exile itself as well as an elemental Judaic aversion to dogmatism. The roots of melancholic Ashkenazi humor thus seem to be of a piece with the ancient tradition of skeptical Judaism Here, God Himself can be considered a student of the Talmud, his arguments bested in discussions with rabbinical scholars Ivi: Such an idea of God renders Judaism and the Judaic God substantially different from the Christian religious model: Only Christianity has dogmas and moral authorities, which invoke the authority of God and his representatives.
Judaism does not [ So the question still remains unanswered: In response to difficult questions people often answer with a counter-question: The rabbi is not a dogmatist who determines truth for future generations. Rather, he negotiates between past and present. And if he does not do his job well, he is fired.
So God as an authority plays no role [ In sum, between God and the Jewish people, in history and the present, there is a loving, skeptical, but constructive and mutual mistrust Ivi: Guberman seems a worthy heir of both ancient Hebrew and modern Ash- kenazi skeptical traditions, his latest collections of gariki giving ever more evidence of this philosophical framework. God paradoxically re- sponds to humanity with benevolent mocking, sometimes even expressing him- self in seemingly trivial language — albeit in an entirely non-trivial way: Jews can amicably joke with their sole God because they created Him at least as much as He created them: Here again, the gariki trigger a feeling of skeptical melancholy: He has at least three contradictory hypostases, ranging from the empathic and powerless, to the powerful and indifferent, to the guiltless and absent: God represents our longing for Him, a nostalgic reflection of His longing for us: Through contrast, Guberman illustrates the intrinsic gap between metaphysical ethics, which im- plies passive subordination to external dogmas, and skeptical ethics which vi- tally contributes to the moral struggle within each of us.
In a universe governed by an inconsistent God, on a planet inhabited by inconsistent beings, in chaos that is governed by chance and necessity, verbal humor and drinking are the only responses that Guberman, a mournful optimist, has to combat toska. Life is so heavy that it deserves lightness: Poetry itself becomes the stylization of chaos, rather than a means to achieve fame or status. For Guberman, accepting toska means transcoding it into Russian-Jew- ish paradoxicality — and thus reinvigorating all the humorous resources of his beloved mother tongue.
The more refined his verse technique, the stronger the element of playfulness. His verses propose an approach to life without either self-deception or despair, replacing these with humor and skeptical melancholia, in short, a form of ethical, ironic, and melan- cholic heroism: Once we accept the logic of the universe — which at first seems senseless to us — we can change our perspective and look at things from an estranged ostranennoe position. Gariki express the poignan- cy of knowledge and the pleasure of de-dramatization: As Guberman puts it: The Presence of Absence. Paolo Sorrentino, La grande bellezza1 Reconciliation is to understand both sides; to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side.
Thich Nhat Hanh 1. In his view, memory, or shared history, serves as a constitutive element in the formation of human so- cieties. The problems of mem- ory and identity that Margolit and Blustein tackle seem particularly crucial in the swiftly changing context of contemporary Russian society, where it is now possible to witness a process of reconstruction and re-creation very similar to that typically occuring in individuals after the experience of trauma or shock — which is exactly what the collapse of the Soviet Union was, in diverse and often contradictory ways, for many of its citizens.
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Lindy and Robert J. Still more frequently, scholarly debate on the process of historical change in Russia has emphasized the equivocal character of the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet state. Thus, the Soviet legacy cannot be ignored. In the words of Dobrenko and Shcherbenok, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society and culture are still dependent on their Soviet heritage, which is upheld and rejected, often simul- taneously, in practically all fields of symbolic production, from state ideology to ar- chitecture, from elite literature to mass culture.
Russian culture remains suspended between the historical narratives of the emergence of the new nation from the ruins of the USSR and the Soviet cultural legacy, whose models are no longer functional; Croatia, and Armenia Lindy, Lifton It lacks the structure and limits of a discrete disaster, such as an earthquake. Natural disasters have something approaching an end point: The pressures are both acute and chronic, both individual and societal.
For a counter-argument on the application of trauma studies to post-Soviet reality, see Blacker et al. The Presence of Absence the result is the instability of its ideological symbolic order and a palpable trauma- tic void, which its subjects fill with their incoherent, emotional, and ideologically charged interventions. This suspension between the traumatic experiences of the past, both remote and quite recent, and an underdeveloped and unstable narrative about it, are at the core of contemporary Russian culture, marking it as an inheren- tly post-Soviet culture Dobrenko, Shcherbenok According to Etkind Ibidem: In my view, surveys reveal the complex attitudes of a people who retain a vivid memory of the Soviet terror but are divided in their interpretation of this memory.
While the state is led by former KGB officers who avoid giving public apolo- gies, building monuments, or opening archives, the struggling civil society and the intrepid reading public are possessed by the unquiet ghosts of the Soviet era. Haunted by the unburied past, post-Soviet culture has produced perverse memorial practices that are worthy of detailed study Ibidem. Following Kujundzic, we should today be witnessing the performance of multiple autopsies on the corpse of the Soviet past.
We will also further explore the contemporary debate on the role 4 Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya Can nostalgia itself be considered a form of reconciliation with a traumatic past? And what role do art and literature play in this pro- cess? Ambiguous nostalgic longing is linked to the individual experience of history.
Through the combination of empathy and estrangement, ironic nostalgia invites us to reflect on the ethics of remembering6. What is Nostalgic about Nostalgia? Post-Soviet Identity, Nostalgia, and Art Clearly, understandings of the past evolve and can vary widely7. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Jeffrey Alexander suggests that collec- tive trauma is continuously created through discursive re interpretation.
An article in that issue by Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko analyzes materials such as private photos from family albums to demonstrate the contradictory quality of Thaw Era visual narratives about the violent sup- pression of popular unrest in cf. In particu- lar, they identify an oscillation between the nostalgic and the traumatic, which they take to be a characteristic feature of these narratives. According to Kevin Platt Within the frame of the current and rather confused debate on post-Soviet identity, the concept of nostalgia can be helpful for describing a more general atti- tude towards the shared re-appropriation of a common Soviet past that continues to exert strong influence on constructions of contemporary Russian identity.
The concept of nostalgia itself, of course, has multiple shadings that must be taken into account. More recently, Kalinin By linking the present with the past, Medvedev effectively suggests both that the past should be evalu- ated positively and that it provides the source of a sense of tradition: There is thus a component of nostalgia in this modernization, a particular sense of a break between the present and past that endows the past with a positive value. Add to this a nationalist mindset that valorizes the notion of conti- nuity between an idealized past and an unfulfilled present, and the result is a glori- ous tradition that invites its heirs to assert their place within it, thus becoming part of the historical nation.
Using somewhat more clinical language, Dobrenko and Shcherbenok In short, Medvedev and the Russian state have both integrated cultural trau- ma into the ongoing construction of a national narrative by exploiting the senti- ment of nostalgia widely felt among its citizens. A nostalgic connection with the past is thus essential to the shaping of identity, whether that of a single individual or of an entire nation. Or was she write longer sentences, more shift them to a client that he or of awkwardness and heartbreak down unique traits and unorth- learning—just as I was—that emoticons, and be more play- she is better equipped to help.
Overnight, they scored essential in our evolution into literally do it in their place. By to awkwardness and rejection? According these dating assistants had vide for our ultimate goal of and genuine experiences. Does the match above all—myself. Are they crawling back to bed in a guilt- the bottom of the barrel, what For example, one match told try.
That cringe-worthy sham- dating anyone else right now? I tried leaving Facebook. It was en- every person I met at a party or cial networking that consumed ica and the overall surveillance- want to buy a Ford you can buy tirely because of Facebook. We have based ad model. Like a black a Chevy. I was terribly forgotten or perhaps never no- widow or a murderous butler, Facebook? But really, the harder our mutual friend Kaitlin texted awkward and a little lazy and as ticed how many hours our par- Facebook is the poisoner inside question is — what is Facebook me one day.
Even with the years and why is it so hard to quit it? Surely Allison would their social networks. But created a Facebook account, I rounds of phone calls with rela- sisted the truth that it was spying even is. When When technological innova- — she had announced her en- platform. In the wake of phabetically in a Rolodex. People data leaked, we should have car- and ride-sharing apps replace tell me before she told everyone the Cambridge Analytica scan- spent a lot of time on these sorts ried our own damn drinks and taxis. Who Even Does That? Not all of us had these, institutions.
Face- No one wants to change them- but I assure you, they really did book, texts were texts, emails in some cases, succeeded to be- book is the digital equivalent selves or their habits, because used to exist: If deletefacebook has only gotten facebook. Facebook is one it entirely. I loved being able to keep missing.
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In the auction business, it comes down to this: At Iconic Memorabilia, we take the necessary steps to make sure that these objectives are achieved in impressive fashion S. CO - Congratu- submit to the identity police, previously invisible. Why on earth did they also wrote up an endorsement.
As more and pay attention to. But ents and older relatives — joined, ularly deleted their Facebooks years older than I actually was, why I had been selected, the an- therein lies the rub: Some found that was too high a price to pay for swer was, just as most press com- tually no way for Facebook to chafe at me. I can still remember they could all-too-easily reacti- my privacy. Even if had followed, in chronological Even as Facebook took a big- back from him in a day.
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I aggressively monitored the data brokers, tracking cookies, family vacations. Getting ahold now reply to all my friends with privacy settings of my posts, ad targeting, predictions based of Phil is only a click away. Just as I was readying tions and governments. Malone, Facebook of my own accord. My The fun and games only end- vanished from my life.
Alex Stamos, Chief from people who I barely liked out, Facebook is a must-have in perspective. I was locked out Word of the Day game in which sion: Facebook was the worst. Stamos was nice about it, but ments and MindBody which I. Unit A3, Centennial, CO www. I have a morbid fear of on Tinder over a decade later. I am bad at respond- privacy scandal broke in the for in-person support groups in ter, they all work with the same using the service, but in a handful ing to emails, let alone initiating news, I began to withdraw from a wide range of ever-narrowing identity system, the phone num- of cases, there was no recourse.
I added less informa- demographics — from casual ber, a standardized format that is Sometimes I missed being able naturally fall out of touch with tion, I commented less on sta- interests like Instant Pot recipes regulated and administered far to contact someone with the im- me for long stretches of time. I tuses, I stopped taking pictures of for Korean food to heavy life- outside of the purview of Silicon mediacy that Facebook provided, am one of the worst emotional my friends.
Of course, if you change but in general, if I really needed laborers I know. Like every other tech reporter forms of cancer. I going to be truly out of touch, dal. I missed dance a few clicks away. And because everyone is about you as possible. While all mates got engaged and married Christmas cards. My ers, none of them seek to suck Classmates got engaged and and link to it on Facebook. Facebook, for and the family photo album, but Perhaps it would be easier if I in touch through these means. It was that I suddenly rituals that bind us together. I was an class reunion, the baby shower. I suppose if we have to do my support network was.
I switch from one to the intentionally and thoughtfully. Moles, voles and gophers: How burrowing wildlife can damage your lawn and garden Soft, spongy lawns may be in diameter and one may see indicative of various problems small molehills of excavated soil underfoot that occur relatively in areas around the yard. In many areas, burrowing Voles wildlife can wreak havoc on Even though their name is landscapes. Identifying which similar, voles look nothing like critter is causing the damage moles. Voles are Moles small as well and primarily feed Moles will spend much of on foliage and plant roots.
They ate between holes created by spend their days digging long moles and voles, but foliage eat- tunnels from their dens in search en around an entry or exit hole of grubs, earthworms and tuber suggests the presence of voles. Prairie dogs tend to be more er protected areas. Wire mesh fences buried and angular snouts. Gophers tend to make them easy to spot.