Fine Lines: Hebrew and Yiddish Translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Verse Novel Eugene Onegin, 1899–1937.

Abstract

This dissertation is a literary and historical case study of Russian-Jewish translation, one of the competing strategies in the East European Jewish “language wars” to create a modern literature in either Hebrew or Yiddish. I argue that Yiddish and Hebrew writers, who were anxious for their respective chosen literary languages to earn a place in world literature, fashioned their literary movements after Russian examples. In particular, they understood Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin as not just a genius, but as the transformer and modernizer of Russian literature who gave voice to the indigenous and mastered the foreign. Those who translated Pushkin into Jewish languages aimed to enrich Hebrew or Yiddish in accordance with the foreign, or Westernizing, side of this program, but when Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik chose to gather Jewish materials rather than translate Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, he was following a Jewish version of Pushkin’s Slavophilic side. The imperative to render the masterpiece, macaronic novel in its sonnet-like “Onegin stanzas,” in accordance with the greater project of translating world literature into Jewish languages, cut across the language war’s Yiddish-Hebrew lines and the Jewish political and aesthetic spectrum. The lines of the language war are clear, however, in this diachronic study which shows that the institutional and linguistic features of the two languages at given times in history determined how and when the novel was translated. Fine Lines explores translations and their paratexts by Buki ben Yogli, Dovid Frishman, A. Y. Grodzenski, Leyb Naydus, Avraham Levinson, and Avraham Shlonsky, and is among the first scholarly attention several of them have received despite their prominence as poets and public intellectuals. Covering the period between the Jewish celebrations of the centennial of Pushkin’s birth and that of his death, it begins in 1899 in Saint Petersburg with liberal maskilim, moving to the Great War, Russian Civil War, and interwar years in Vilna, Grodno, Kustin, Ekaterinoslav (mostly Polish and Lithuanian Jewish communities) amid Diasporist and Zionist politics, and concludes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1937, demonstrating that Jews in Palestine left the Jewish Diaspora but found the Russian Diaspora.