Reclaiming Ukrainian Jewish Russophone Literature of the Twentieth Century: The Cases of Eduard Bagritskii and Isaac Babel

• In Event: Competing Liberations in the Literature and Art of 1920s Ukraine

Abstract

In this paper I propose to study the Jewish component of 1920s Ukrainian literature, more specifically the Odesan modernist authors Eduard Bagritskii and Isaac Babel. I argue that their writings are steeped in the cultural and linguistic pluralism of their birthplace and highlight their Ukrainian legacy, previously diminished or overlooked in the mainstream Russocentric scholarship. In so doing, I emphasize Bagritskii and Babel’s civic Ukrainian identity in addition to their ethnic Jewish identity and reclaim these two authors as representatives of the Ukrainian Jewish Russophone literary tradition rather than of Russian literature, decolonizing Russian imperialist strategies of recognition that justified their appropriation of national literatures.

Author

• Olha Khometa, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign