Viktor Fink’s Play 'The New Homeland' as the Historical Inversion of the Promised Land

• In Event: Beyond the Chronotope: Reading Thematically across Temporal and Geographic Boundaries

Abstract

Viktor Fink’s literary sketch and play, The Jews in the Taiga (1932) and The New Homeland (1933), vividly portray the plight of stateless ethnic minorities, including Koreans, Ukrainians, and Jews, in the Far-Eastern region of the Russian Empire and the subsequent Soviet Union. This paper delves into their struggle to establish a state within the liminal space of the Soviet borderland, utilizing opium, military might, and wealth, against the backdrop of dekulakization and the Soviet initiatives to forcibly integrate them into a “new motherland.” In this context, Fink’s play, which portrays the promised land as already existing in the Soviet Union, was none other than sacralizing the Soviet borderland, where ethnic minorities can freely converse in a blend of Korean, Ukrainian, and Yiddish languages. Employing Bakhtinian historical inversion, however, the paper argues that this portrayal lacks substantive concreteness, as the sacralization of the Soviet borderland appears empty and sparse, with all substantial qualities attributed to Fink’s promised land through inversion. By situating the experiences of Koreans, Ukrainians, and Jews within the broader framework of colonialism, nationalism, and socialist experimentation, this research underscores that the planned construction of the new homeland embodies the indefinite postponement of the promised future.

Author

• Byungsam Jung, Syracuse U