From 1931 to 1935 Gor&soft;kij's editorial leadership of the Soviet
publishing house, Academia,
made manifest his
commitment to issuing classics in world culture, some of which,
unrealized, form a part of the unexamined cultural history of the
nineteen thirties. Among these is an anthology of Medieval
Hebrew-Arabic literature of Spain (eleventh–fourteenth
centuries), emblematic of the fate of the Jewish literary
intelligentsia in the period of the Spanish Civil War and Soviet
literary politics in the years from 1936–1938. The choice of
Gor&soft;kij as chief editor of Academia
had been
predicated not only on producing classic works for a Soviet
readership, but on showcasing the Academia
list in the
West. The projected publication of Hebrew-Arabic letters of a golden
age in Spanish culture emerges as a paradigm through which the
aspirations of Gor&soft;kij, the compilers of the anthology, and the
poets and specialists who were to be its illustrious contributors,
might be understood as Aesopic commentary: History throws up its own
unwitting correspondences. My paper, based on the
Academia
archive at RGALI, will make this clear.
In 1936, Academia
had projected an anthology of the
Sephardic Jewish efflorescence in eleventh-to-fourteenth-century Spain
for publication within the year. Two volumes, one of belles-lettres,
the other, of philosophical and historical writings, were under
consideration. Poets Benedikt Liv&shachek;ic, Pavel Antokolskij, and
Elizaveta Polonskaja, together with the Jewish historian, S. Cinberg
and the leading Orientalist at the Saltykov-&Shachek;&chachek;edrin
Library, Yehiel Ravrebe—all had contracted to collaborate in
this effort to bring the gems of Sephardic Jewish literature and
learning into the Russian literary canon.
This projected anthology particularly reflected the goals and
standards of Gor&soft;kij's leadership of Academia
(1931–1935). Indeed, in translating Samuel Hanagid
(996–1056) the project stood on the cutting edge of the
discipline, for the first authoritative edition of Hanagid's poetry,
taken from manuscripts in the precious Cairo Geniza repository, had
been issued in Cambridge, England just two years earlier. The
anthology of Hebraeo-Arabic literature of Medieval Spain affirmed
Gor&soft;kij's encouragement of Soviet publications for
Academia
in the science of prosody, such as the volumes
that he had co-edited with Brjusov of the poetry of Latvia and
Finland. The Hispanic-Hebraeo-Arabic anthology was to have introduced
examples of Arabic quantitative metres in the lyric forms of the
non-strophic
Of all the bizarre twists in the transplantation of Hebraic culture
beyond fifteenth century Spain, this, surely, was one of the most
paradoxical. The ban on Hebrew culture in Soviet Russia, personified
in the mandatory exile of the Habima Theater in 1926 that until then
had been protected by Gor&soft;kij, was being stringently
enforced. Under the policy of national in form, socialist in
content,
the Sovietization of Jewish culture was in full
swing. By 1936 the campaign against Formalism left no place for
complexities of lierary expression in any language. Why, then, would a
State publishing house choose to revive a literature that had been
officially banned?
The history of this volume of Medieval Hebrew literature in
translation must be glossed within Russian literary politics of the
1930s. Until late summer 1936, materials had merely trickled into the
Academia
editorial office. By Fall, however, permission
to visit libraries outside of Moscow and acceptances from solicited
contributors had markedly accelerated. What had happened? In July, the
nations of Europe had responded to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War, proclaiming a new alignment. In counterpoise to rising Fascist
Germany, the Soviet Union had rallied to support of the Spanish
Republic. The treasures that Academia
had been
gathering from private libraries and that had been on hold in the
Academia
editorial offices, suddenly acquired the
immediacy of the embattled Spanish hillside. Eleventh-century Samuel
Hanagid who had led Muslim armies to victory against neighboring
insurgents now had become a newly discovered warrior of a living
Spanish heritage.
There may have been another cultural paradigm at work as well. The
poets and philosophers of mid-tenth- to mid-eleventh-century Andalusia
had worked with the rulers of the principalities in which they lived,
making for an elegant symbiosis of culture and statesmanship. The
historical analogy of the relationship of the Jewish writer and his
value to the State presumably was not lost on Russia's cultural
panjandrums. Indeed, in it may have been concealed the particular
export
value of the Judaeo-Arabic literary volumes,
just as to an extent, the Soviet export
of writers to
cover the Spanish Loyalist cause cloaked the darker side of life at
home.
The message did not succeed. In 1938, after a year-and-a-half of
successful negotiation and translation, all aspects of the
Academia
anthology of Hebrew literature were
blocked. Officially, the project was not proscribed. Rather,
Academia
house abruptly was
restructured.
In its new organization there would be no
place for an anthology of Medieval Hebrew Literature, its editors, or
its contributors. The purges were in full tilt. Benedikt
Liv&shachek;ic and Yehiel Ravrebe were shot. The fate of the
translations that they submitted, along with Polonskaja and
Antokolskij, is not clear. More than likely, they were destroyed.
Gor&soft;kij's most recent biographer, Lidija Spiridonova,
following Romain Rolland, claims that the terror in the USSR
began not with the murder of Kirov but with the death of
Gor&soft;kij
in June of 1936. At that juncture, she asserts,
Academia
was doomed. If so, its projected anthology of
Hispanic Hebrew-Arabic poetry reveals it truly to have been dipped in
the shades of Spain: in the colors of resistance, reversal—and
of wine
: Red to the eye, sweet to the drinker,
once it goes to the head, it rules the heads of states.