Brett Winestock’s study is the first major work to engage with the unjustly neglected Soviet-Jewish author Leonid Tsypkin and at the same time, one of the recent contributions to the exploration of complex literary subjectivities among authors whose Jewish identity cannot be derived from traditional ethno-cultural markers. The book is accessibly written and offers a nuanced analysis of Tsypkin’s prose, in which three features are repeatedly emphasized: its sophisticated intertextuality with Russian literature; its creative engagement with the medium of photography; and its techniques of narrative dis-identification and distancing, which mirror the phenomenon of (self-)alienation as a Jew in Soviet society on various textual levels.
A particularly strong aspect of the study lies in its illumination of the literary context: Winestock not only analyzes Tsypkin’s unique reinvention of Fedor Dostoevskii’s “underground man” as projected to the situation of the Jewish intellectual and the uncensored writer in the Soviet Union, but also situates this literary engagement within the broader Dostoevskii-revival in late Soviet culture, “when the world of the 1860s is occasionally glimpsed from the 1970s” (102). Moreover, the study convincingly demonstrates that Tsypkin, although isolated from global literary culture, belonged to the lineage of authors such as Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kiš, W. G. Sebald, or Witold Gombrowicz—writers who processed the anxieties of European (post)modernity, the trauma of war, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism.
At the same time, however, the book appears to overlook some important scholarship on its subject. While studies in the broader fields of Jewish and Soviet studies are cited, there is a noticeable absence of references to research from the past 25 years that has specifically dealt with Russophone Soviet-Jewish literature of this period, including unofficial Jewish literature. Apart from a brief reference to Alice S. Nakhimovsky’s 1992 important study, the book omits works such as Rita Genzeleva’s Puti evreiskogo samosoznaniia (1999), Olaf Terpitz’s Die Rückkehr des Štetl (2008), or Klavdia Smola’s Reinventing Tradition (2023; German edition 2019, Russian edition 2021). Similarly, Maxim Shrayer’s comprehensive 2007 English-language anthology of “Jewish-Russian” literature, which includes annotated texts by many unofficial Soviet-Jewish authors—including Tsypkin—goes unmentioned.
Considering Winestock’s academic background, which includes time spent in both Russia and Germany, this omission is regrettable—especially in light of current debates on the diversification of academic epistemologies and cultural knowledge. Presumably because the bibliography is almost exclusively limited to English-language scholarship and includes primarily works recognized within the Anglophone academic context, the analysis suffers from a certain argumentative thinness and, at times, a secondary quality in its conclusions. An engagement with the contextually closer sources (the relevant passages are, for instance, on 21–22) could have challenged the thesis of Tsypkin’s absolute isolation and might have revealed a more heterogeneous picture of an uncensored writer by integrating the rich literary milieu of Soviet unofficial Jewish literature. It is even conceivable that Tsypkin was familiar with certain works of Aliyah prose, given that he himself was a refusenik in the late 1970s. Had authors such as Iurii Karabchievskii, Izrailʹ Metter, or Iakov Tsigelʹman been brought to the fore—instead of Joesph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova, or Venedikt Erofeev—the literary image of Tsypkin as a bicultural author could have been considerably enriched. A broader inclusion of the contemporary Soviet-Jewish literary context beyond the boundaries of the Russian and European cultural canons would undoubtedly yield new insights. What is more, the metaphorization of the uncensored Jewish author as a Dostoevskian underground man might then acquire a more precise meaning in the context of Jewish underground literature. Certain features of Tsypkin’s unique literary poetics also find parallels in the semi-documentary, self-reflexive, and highly intertextual prose and travelogues of authors like David Markish or David Shrayer-Petrov.
Even if these poetic features do indeed reflect the spirit and style of late Soviet literature as a whole—which departed from the rigid canon of socialist realism and embraced literary modernity from the 1960s onward—a study of a Soviet-Jewish author should engage more deeply with the specifically Jewish articulations of such prose. It is also worth noting that the theme of antisemitism, which permeates unpublished Russophone Jewish literature, often found literary expression in ways that are highly evident also in Tsypkin’s texts: protagonist’s painful alienation from the own (almost always male) “Jewish body,” mimicry, and racialized self-hatred; phenomena that frequently emerge precisely during the journeys of Jewish protagonists to non-Slavic Soviet republics (in Tsypkin’s case, Armenia; in Markish’s, Kazakhstan; in Shrayer-Petrov’s, Lithuania, and so on). This also includes implicit comparisons of these republics with Israel and numerous other similar (extra-)diegetic motifs, such as the emigration of a son (see, for instance, Iuz Aleshkovskii’s Karuselʹ).
These deficiencies lead to a monograph that, while in many respects accurate and illuminating, ultimately constructs a somewhat one-dimensional image of its title character and nolens volens reproduces the imperial perspective on Jewish literature in the Soviet Union by focusing on Russia’s majority cultural horizon. Brett Winestock certainly enriches this image by the references to some Jewish authors of the time, such as Fridrikh Gorenshtein, but the latter is typically one of the very few Soviet-Jewish authors who have received increasing attention of the international academia in recent years. The book’s discussion of postcolonial approaches would therefore benefit not only from at least a brief foray into relevant theoretical frameworks but also from a broader and more self-reflexive research perspective.
