Margins of Meaning: Gendering the Landscape of Struggle in THE ZELMENYANERS

• In Event: Women on the Edge: Women’s Rage and Revolution in Russian and Yiddish Literature

Abstract

In contrast to the 19th century, when the margins of the Russian empire were perceived and portrayed as “stagnant" (Lounsbery 2019), “the aesthetically miraculous nature” of the periphery in the 20th century existed in tension with Soviet policies of industrialization. Through the lens of Moyshe Kulbak’s Soviet Yiddish novel THE ZELMENAYNERS, this paper aims to investigate the Soviet project and its implications for the natural and social landscape on the outskirts of Minsk. Questions of tradition versus Soviet womanhood—shaped by collectivization, electrification, and secularization—resonate against the backdrop of the Belorusian countryside, pointing suggestively to the interconnectedness of socio-political and biological ecosystems. Kulbak’s novel reflects the social and ideological volatility of the early Soviet era, when promises of gender equality, sexual freedom, and social progress fostered fluidity in the identities of Soviet territories and their subjects. However, the “wild” possibilities of the 1920s ultimately faded as the insertive, dominating regimes of the Stalinist 1930s took hold. First published in serial from 1929-1935, Kulbak’s novel traces and alternatively subverts and supports the heteronormative, masculine narratives of dominance over the earth that would become a hallmark of socialist realist literature. Drawing breath from Elissa Bemporad’s historical portrait of Soviet Jewish Minsk (2013) and Jack Halberstam’s concept of the “wild” (2020), this paper will examine how women's bodies and social roles served as fertile ground for personal and cultural exploration—and exploitation—on and off the page in the early years of the Soviet experience.

Author

• Elaine Wilson, Columbia University