Eshkolot announced November program

November 15 at 19:00 - ““Monkey” by Khodasevich. Jewish contexts"

Poet and classical philologist Vsevolod Zelchenko dedicated an entire book to the poem “Monkey ,” but it did not contain everything he would tell at his “slow reading” seminar.

Vladislav Khodasevich made the first drafts of the famous poem “Monkey” (1918–1919) soon after, together with Lev Yaffe, he completed a long and intensive work on the translations and editing of the “Jewish Anthology”. It seems that this contact with modern Hebrew literature was somehow reflected in “The Monkey” and in other large works by Khodasevich from the collection “The Path of Grain,” written in blank verse.

Imperceptible to today's reader, the “Jewish” context of “The Monkey” includes Old Testament allusions, figurative and thematic parallels with the poems of the participants in the “Anthology,” and the rhythmic influence of the poetry of Bialik and Zalman Shneur.

From November 18 to December 9 on Wednesdays at 20:00 - Kulbak's Raysn (Belarus). Slow reading course

Professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature Mark Kaplan [1] of Dartmouth College will lead four slow reading workshops of Moishe Kullback's poem "Raisn" (Belarus) (1922).

Moishe Kulbak (1896–1937) was one of the most innovative and original Yiddish writers of the interwar era of literary modernism. The poem defies many expectations of Yiddish literature: the action takes place in the countryside, not in the shtetl; the Jewish protagonists are a family of farmers, not Torah scholars or artisans; there is little mention of traditional religious culture; the storyline involving the love of a Jewish man for a non-Jewish woman is not condemned by the author.

Each chapter of this epic work is written in its own style and size, corresponding to its content. Mark Kaplan will read and discuss the structural paradoxes and linguistic features of this poem, which deserves a central place in Yiddish literature.

Classes will be held in English without translation. Knowledge of Yiddish is not required.

November 22 at 19:00 - “Poetry in a loop. Mandelstam and aviation"

What does the famous phrase from the Book of Ecclesiastes, “Everything came from dust and everything will return to dust,” and the plane crash of the giant plane “Maxim Gorky” have in common? As the Canadian Slavist Yuri Leving will show , there is a non-obvious connection between these events, which Osip Mandelstam felt and developed in the poem “Not a white mealy butterfly...”, written in Voronezh exile.

N.Ya. Mandelstam claimed that it described the funeral of dead test pilots. Meanwhile, no documentary evidence of the poet’s widow’s version has been found, and the history of the creation of the text remains extremely confusing.

Yuri Leving's book “Poetry in a loop. Mandelstam and Aviation" is published by Boslen Publishing House on November 10.