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Cultural
Continuity in the Diaspora: Paris and Berlin
in 1917-1937
The Experience of Russian Jews in an Era of Social Change
Research
Project based at the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies,
University of Bath
(sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, UK,
under the International Networks Scheme)
“Between
Metropolis and Diaspora”
2nd Interdisciplinary
International Network Symposium
16-17 February 2009 at the University
of Portsmouth, England
Conference
Programme
Abstracts
Exhibition:
Russian Jewish Artists and Book Design, 1919-1928
During the years following the 1917 Revolution in Russia,
Berlin
became the first capital of the Russian Diaspora, the epicentre of Russian
creativity, and a Mecca of Russian art. What distinguished Berlin from the
other centres of the post-1917 emigration was the unprecedented intensity of
communication going on at the time between Metropolis and Diaspora, a
‘dialogue’ that found expression in the most diverse forms of an often
unexpected symbiosis between literary and social forces, their feverish
regrouping, but most importantly by the various activities of their literary
and artistic life.
Those activities are the topic of the second symposium of
a network of scholars, writers, and artists who have undertaken to study the
various facets of the strong interactions between what was eventually to
crystallize into two divergent branches of Russian cultural production,
Soviet and Émigré, the former prescribed by the Bolshevik
elites, the latter characterised as creative freedom on the price of
dislocation. The study of this incredibly rich and manifold cultural
production requires a thorough awareness of the changing status of its agents
from within an established, geographically based tradition to writing in exile.
With reference to Russian Berlin, the status of its agents varied, depending
on their degree of resistance or conformity to the new governing elites in
Soviet Russia, but also on their experience in
pre-revolutionary Russia,
including their working languages – Russian, Yiddish, or Hebrew –
which most of them maintained in exile. We know that many Yiddish-speaking
intellectuals from the former Pale of Settlement spent time in Berlin
between the end of the First World War and the mid 1920s. Their communication
and dissemination through the medium of Yiddish (and Hebrew) turned Berlin
into what Daniel Charni called “the
most important centre of communication between the five-million-strong Jewish
population of America
and the approximately ten million Jews of Eastern Europe”. But the true
extent to which Russian Berlin was Jewish remains to be studied.
It is the aim of this symposium
to shed light on the various public spheres of Russian Berliners and their
interactions. In particular, we welcome contributions along the following
broad headings:
• The emerging literary production and its realization in
different languages, depending on the status of agents in pre-revolutionary Russia:
Yiddish and Hebrew, besides Russian. This allows us to include both the acculturated
Russian Jews expanding into writing in Russian, and those dis-assimilating by
turning to the medium of Yiddish and Hebrew.
• The dissemination of their products through periodical and publishing culture. Although much
of what was indeed produced and disseminated in Berlin was conceived in
Russia, in retrospect Berlin nevertheless turns out to be the first step in a
transitory process that received its biggest impact from the creativity
within periodical culture, partially as a continuation of the traditional,
pre-revolutionary, thick journal, partially as a consequence of the
popularization of journalism culture following the crisis of book publishing
in early 1920s Russia.
• Places of encounter and debate: organisations,
associations, and literary cafés as discursive centres.
• Berlin
as a site of the visual and performing arts including patronage, and the
tradition of display culture.
• The broad ideological
spectrum of agents and the support lent to them from local communal institutions
and relief agencies as well as overseas contacts in Warsaw,
Moscow and Paris.
In illustrating this site, the images of Marc Chagall’s
paintings were used, from the electronic gallery at http://www.abcgallery.com/C/chagall/chagall-4.html
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