In Andrei Sobol΄’s (1888–1926) biography everything is ready for making him a cult figure—fuzzy identity, ruthless nomadism, skepticism, and revolutionary fire. After labor camp, prisons (arrested both by Reds and Whites) and escape, Sobol΄ took a position in a Writers’ Union, but protested against party control over the arts. He then successfully sunk into a deep depression, and after several suicide attempts, killed himself on a boulevard bench.

Vladimir Khazan, who is the first to devote a book to the writer, presents only a brief biography in the preface, where the crucial theoretical definition of the term Russian-Jewish is also shortly touched upon, and then “set aside” (13). He shares the existing opinion that Sobol΄’s literary works are, almost without exception, autobiographically-inspired, and accepts the definition of double affiliation theory by Shimon Markish, launcher of this branch of scholarship back in 1970s, but mentioned only twice (12, 148 in notes); less than he deserves to be.

Khazan has been engaged with this topic and author since the early 1990s. This book sums up his earlier papers and his book in Russian (2015) that explains the structure of the book, reminding us of a collection of articles on 140 pages. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are monothematic and comparatively short, discussing Sobol΄ and his short-lived journal Evreiskii Mir, his translation of Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem, including their highly interesting correspondence, and Sobol΄’s connection with the Jewish theater.

Both part I and III have three chapters. In Chapter 1, three open letters of Sobol΄ are published with scrupulous and ample background information, the first one regarding the objectives of Russian Literature in a debate with Baal-Makhshoves; the two others on the topics of anti- and false philo-Semitism in letters addressed to Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Ivan Bunin (1915, 1919).

Despite the fact that the forty page Chapter 3 is given to “Jewish Themes, Motifs and Images in Sobol΄’s Works,” these texts, which are also discussed in detail in Pyl΄ (Dust) and Evreii (Jews), are analyzed in Parts I and III only from the point of view of facts and themes, not in terms of contemporary literary scholarship on identity, narratology, or cultural studies. Important terms of national studies such as “implicit Jew” or “concealed Jewishness” are introduced, but en passant, as labels (106). The brilliantly-discovered paradigmatic “Sovietization” of the short story “Song of Songs” (87–90) lacks a proper discussion of its literary merit. In Vstan΄i idi the protagonist's prototype is convincingly identified with Pinhas Rutenberg, the future defense attorney for Mendel΄ Beilis (99–105), but the text of the short story is hardly investigated or only stereotypically—“the donkey is an ancient symbol of wandering” (98)—missing here is the grotesque merging of Jewish and Christian symbolism, mirroring the Jewish protagonist's baptism and return to Judaism.

Nearly half of the bibliography consists of entries dated before 1926, and some of them, such as Sobol΄’s text on the Habima published earlier only in Hebrew, are presented fully (141–42), so Sobol΄ is seen mostly through the eyes of the authors of critical essays of his contemporaries. Important texts like On Forced Labor, “Nightmare,” Men on Foot, “Ruins,” Man Overboard, and Reminiscences of a Freckled Man are not mentioned.

Every scholarly book has to choose which method will supplant the other possible approaches. This book is an indirect apotheosis of traditional philology and archival work because Khazan managed to excavate not only essays from the smallest provincial newspapers but also rare letters, hidden sketches, and correspondence data, and even to identify and illuminate persons behind the many unknown names. This is the strength of this book, constructing a basement of the facts from many scrupulously gathered little stones, thus preparing a place for the future edifice of the proper analysis of oeuvre. This is a future task, along with the deeper embedding of this work into the corpus of Russian-Jewish, then Russian and Jewish, then world literature. Not only Aleksandr Kipen and Sobol΄ can create merit in depicting the “muscular Jew” (86). A broader, longer thematic thread of physically “strong and tough,” “self-confident and physically strong” Jewish characters has been already outlined earlier, starting at a watershed date of 1882, from Sergei Yaroshevskii, right up to the works of Isaak Babel΄: “Kipen's horse trader, Yushkevich's Leon Drei, Sobol's Siberian farmer, Babel's Benya Krik” (Zsuzsa Hetényi, In a Maelstrom, 2008, 108, 138, 203, 236, 279–81).

The dominance of archival material over literary analysis is not a mere methodological question. The final conclusion of Khazan's book is that in Sobol΄, “the symbiosis of the Russian and the Jewish element … reached such a degree of harmony that the resulting contradiction—which undoubtedly exists—is no longer perceived as a contradiction” (143). This would be hard to show on Sobol΄’s oeuvre, which derives its genuine value from doubts, suffering, and wandering. This striving for harmony may ensue from the author's wishful thinking, but not from research, a fact detectable in the title of the book, a modified quotation from the Pogreb (Cellar), where we read: “three crosses, a triple burden …” It is much harder to achieve a balance with three crosses on the shoulder or harmony with three handicaps than with two.