In Search of a Jewish Pushkin: Samizdat Translation in 1980s Leningrad

• In Event: Memory in Translation: Gender, Poetry, and Politics

Abstract

In September 1982, the first issue of the samizdat journal Leningradskii evreiskii alʹmanakh (The Leningrad Jewish Almanac) was published in the Soviet Union. Among its featured pieces on Jewish culture was a sizable section dedicated to the Hebrew works of Shaul Tchernichovsky, republished in Vladislav Khodasevich’s 1920 Russian translation and accompanied by Soviet dissident writer Yuri Kolker’s critical commentary. Reading Khodasevich’s Tchernichovsky translation alongside Kolker’s commentary, this paper explicates the place of Hebrew-Russian poetry in the formation of late Soviet Jewish culture.

Author

• Benjamin Arenstein, U of Chicago