Building the Ratn-Farband: Monumentalizing the Soviet Utopian Project through Yiddish Art and Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines how members of the Eastern European Yiddish avant-garde integrated aspects of Jewish tradition with modernist aesthetics to monumentalize the ongoing task of establishing an industrial workers’ utopia within the Soviet Union. In this context, Peretz Markish’s early Soviet Yiddish texts function as literary monuments that reflect the tumultuous historical developments of the years following the Bolshevik Revolution and mimic the momentous architectural creations of the 1920s. The sculptor Iosif Chaikov’s work on the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition monumentalizes the ostensibly realized utopian dreams of the USSR. Chapter One foregrounds Markish’s Mound (Di kupe), in which the Yiddish writer deploys his poetics to monumentalize Jewish suffering, both in the form of the poema and in the form of the titular Mound. The poema, written as a profaned Yom Kippur liturgy, ritualized Jewish suffering long after the physical evidence of pogrom violence had faded away. Markish creates a koyen-godl (or priestly) mode that implicates his readership in the poema’s profane sacrilege. Within the text, the Mound acts as a physical monument, a reimagined Sinai, and a foundation from which Markish produces more overtly ideological work in line with Comintern values and the Soviet industrial utopian project. Chapter Two examines Markish’s Forty-Year-Old Man (Der fertsikyeriker man) as an unrealized contribution to the canon of Comintern literature and the poet’s attempt to substantiate a new mythology for the creation of an industrialized workers’ utopia on the territory of the Soviet Union. Markish uses a prophetic mode, biblical symbolism and intertexts, and poetic form to present the Soviet project as prophecy yet to be fulfilled. I consider the implications of reading Markish’s text as an alternative conjectural history that embodies the initial utopian aspirations of the forerunners of Soviet culture in the early 1920s. Chapter Three turns to the work of sculptor Iosif Chaikov, whose contributions to the Soviet World’s Fair pavilions monumentalized the ideology of the USSR and presented it on an international stage. I examine Chaikov’s propylaea leading to the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, which I interpret as a reimagined Temple consecrated by the hammer and sickle of Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. My research evaluates whether Chaikov’s work on the propylaea faithfully embodied the initial workers’ utopian idealism of the Soviet Union. My dissertation is framed by an introduction explaining the role of the Eastern European Yiddish avant-garde in redefining aspects of Jewish cultural tradition, and a coda that resituates the legacy of Soviet Yiddish cultural production and examines its influence on the development of modern-day Jewish identities.