Gabriella Safran has now published her long-awaited biography of Semyon An-sky, the Russian writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary. As testimony of Semyon An-sky's importance to Russian culture, we have the words of Russia's finest modernist poet, Osip Mandelshtam, who wrote in The Noise of Time:
Semyon Akimych An-sky combined in himself a Jewish folklorist with Gleb Uspensky and Chekhov. In his single person he contained a thousand provincial rabbis, if one reckons by the amount of his advice and consolations, conveyed in the guise of parables, anecdotes, and so on. All that Semyon Akimych needed in life was a place to spend the night and strong tea. People ran after him to hear his stories. The Russian-Jewish folklore of Semyon Akimych flowed out like a thick stream of honey in marvelous unhurried stories. Semyon Akimych was not yet old but he had an aged grandfatherly appearance and was stooped over from the excess of Jewishness and Populism: governors, pogroms, human misfortunes, encounters, the most cunning patterns of public life in the improbable circumstances of the Minsk and Mogilyov satrapies, etched as though with a fine engraving needle. . . . In a house where everyone was knocking against the graven image of Mikhaylovsky and cracking the tough agrarian nut, Semyon Akimych gave the impression of a gentle Psyche afflicted with hemorrhoids.Footnote 1
An-sky is portrayed as a vagabond wanderer “like a tender Psyche with hemorrhoids” sitting in a St. Petersburg salon, satisfied with a cup of strong tea and regaling the wealthy Jews of the capital. Mandelshtam mocks the talk—nostalgia about the Jewish past, tales of revolutionary deeds, and travels through war-torn territory—as similar to the insipid rhetoric of An-sky's teacher, the populist writer Gleb Uspensky. Despite this drubbing, Mandelshtam acknowledges that this was An-sky's finest hour, and that his stories flowed like thick honey. This depiction portrayed An-sky's brilliance and reflected a slice of Jewish life in St. Petersburg in its full richness at the end of the tsarist days.
Despite the fact that An-sky's contributions were celebrated in three distinct areas—he was a writer, a revolutionary, and an ethnographer—today his fame is based almost entirely on his authorship of The Dybbuk, the drama that inspired the Habima troupe and became the basis for contemporary Hebrew theater in Israel. And what makes this fame all the more paradoxical is that The Dybbuk was actually written in Russian for a Russian audience, as a piece of propaganda for Jewish acceptance in the Russian cultural world.
Thus, it was not his early involvement with the Haskalah that he threw off in favor of Russian populism, his weak Yiddish, or his unimpressive Russian fiction that have earned him his present fame. Moreover, even his depictions of the folk from his Jewish ethnographic expeditions were quickly eclipsed by stronger competition from artists and writers: Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Solomon Iudovin, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and I. L. Peretz. In addition, almost no one today remembers An-sky's revolutionary activity. His Socialist Revolutionary Party was merely one of many that surrendered to the Bolsheviks in 1918.
However, when one looks at these activities as a whole, one can make out a coherent pattern. An-sky embodied the idea of the “empire Jew” par excellence. The collage of selves he projected was not extraordinary, but typical for the Jewish St. Petersburg of the fin de siècle. An-sky and Jews like him in Russia's capital cultivated identities and were fully aware of their audience. Such Jewish intellectuals viewed themselves as bridges between the East European Jewish center and the Russian capital where culture and power met the Russian language, its lingua franca. In this sense, An-sky's self was not born from and nourished from the folk, but was invented from the latest trends of nationalism and cultural modernism. In everything that he recalled and retold, there was an acknowledgment that his Jewish identity, his Russian soul, his revolutionary activism, and his ethnographic searching were all strategic decisions, aesthetic stylizations, and inventions of self that properly reflected the decadence of modernism rather than any genuine coin.
In her biography, Gabriella Safran cleaves closely to the turns of An-sky's life, following his trajectory through Haskalah, socialism, agrarian terrorism, and then Jewish nationalism and Zionism. She views him as a bilingual and bicultural type who tried to heal the divisions in his soul while traversing Jewish and Russian/European geography. Thus, Safran underscores the diverse sources that An-sky attempted to unite within himself—Yiddish, Hebrew modernism, Torah, Talmud, Russian culture and history, French and Russian radicalism. She writes:
Much of An-sky's career can be seen as an attempt to break down these barriers. As an SR [Socialist Revolutionary] propagandist, a Zionist speaker, and a Jewish community organizer, he inspired audiences with visions of revolution and renewal that would unite traditional people and intellectuals. In his editing, writing, and speaking on literature and folklore, he worked to help the folk and the intelligentsia (both Russian and Jewish) understand each other and thereby to bring them closer step by step. In his ethnographic expedition, he tried to return to the folk through the ecstatic modes of Jewish mysticism. Only in his best writing did he acknowledge the contradictions at the heart of the fantasy of reconciliation. (294–95)
Her decision to hold close to An-sky's biography gives the book a strong narrative focus, but this focus also pulls some important contexts from view. I would have liked to hear more about An-sky's relation to Yiddish modernism and an answer to why his populist literary style lagged twenty years behind that of his contemporaries. I would also have liked to know if his treatment of women reflected the romanticism of an entire culture and whether his wanderlust reflected the need for escape that affected a whole generation of Jews who marched out of Russia between 1881 and 1921. Safran does an excellent job showing how hard An-sky worked to unite his contradictions, attempting to create from them a grand synthesis. Many in his generation achieved far less.
