David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson’s work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction
Part I: Postscripts and Departures
Chapter 1: Congealed Time
Chapter 2: The Aftereffect
Chapter 3: Taking Leave
Part II: Bodies, Things, and Machines
Chapter 4: The Glitch
Chapter 5: Delay, Desire, and Visuality
Part III: A Strange New World
Chapter 6: Judgment Deferred
Chapter 7: The Execution of Judgment
Part IV: Time Cannot Be Mistaken
Chapter 8: Socialism’s Frozen Time
Chapter 9: The Gift of Time
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Harriet Murav is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique and translator (with Sasha Senderovich) of David Bergelson’s 1929 novel Judgment.
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