A Land of Harsh Ways: "Tristan da Runha" as Jabotinsky's Social Fantasy

This article discusses Jabotinsky's social fantasy "Tristan da Runha" (1925) as one of the central works in his literary oeuvre, which formulates his artistic and ideological predilections on the eve of the founding of the Revisionist movement. By imagining an island community of exiled criminals cut off from civilization, Jabotinsky investigates the conditions necessary for the creation of his vision of an ideal society, one organized in accordance with primal intuition and thus without need of coercive regulatory mechanisms. "Tristan da Runha" offers a key to understanding Jabotinsky's political and aesthetic affinities with English literature and the British colonialist narrative, his underlying social thought, and the underpinnings of his political views in the 1920s.