Yiddish Ruthenias: Home Landscapes in the Modernist Poetry of Moyshe Kulbak and Dovid Hofshteyn in the Age of Revolutions and National Revivals in Eastern Europe

Abstract

This dissertation is a contribution to the examination of the construction of literary space in Modernist Yiddish poetry. It focuses on the creation of an Eastern European literary landscape in the revolutionary years of the first quarter of the twentieth century by two Yiddish poets, Moyshe Kulbak and Dovid Hofshteyn. The creation of Eastern European landscapes in Yiddish Modernist poetry represents a literary “discovery of nature,” which puts Yiddish poets in conversation with co-territorial Romantic predecessors. Just as the Romantic poets discovered nature and pondered ideals of national liberation during tumultuous times of revolutions and uprisings, these Yiddish Modernists discovered nature in their own right and pondered their own liberation during an ephemeral formation of a modern Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and the nascent Soviet Union, roughly the years 1917-1921. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the historical and political resonances of these cross-cultural, trans-temporal conversations based in literary space. While Kulbak and Hofshteyn are often categorized as ‘Soviet Yiddish poets’ in anthologies, this study analyzes their early work during an era of revolutions and national revivals and argues that these works should be read in their own terms, independent from ideological categorization that were applied to them later in life. This project reads these poems in their historical context and attempts to recover and expand upon criticism contemporary to them, while at the same time engaging recent scholarship. The landscapes of Kulbak and Hofshteyn challenged hegemonic nationalist claims from a language and culture subjugated by Empire, with claims of non-territorial, local belonging. They promote a sense of cultural belonging, based in a history of cultural syncretism that is a response the violent moment of an epochal shift. It is said that the Romantics invented nature in their poetry, but this project argues that these Yiddish Modernists discovered their local nature for themselves and through it, augmented the ideological assumptions of the Romantics to meet the needs of their specific cultural moment. In the texts, poetic depictions of landscape become a metaplay in which the poet can converse with the ideologies of Empires and claim a belonging in Eastern Europe that was denied to them by national discourses. This project pays close attention to the literary nature of the text; it reads the form in relation to the content of the poem. Kulbak’s landscapes are presented in a variety of hybrid epic modes which he calls “poemas.” With this characterization, he signals an adaptation of the Romantic “poema.” Hofshteyn focuses on a different quintessential genre of Romanticism: the elegy. This project seeks to recover a repressed cultural dialogue that has been lost in the chaos of time and language, and question sets of accepted dichotomies surrounding the national question through close readings of poetic texts. In addition, it includes preliminary translations of three of Kulbak’s long poems, The City, Ruthenia, and Lamed Vov: The Thirty Six, and Dovid Hofshteyn’s first book of poetry, Along Roads.