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3 Chapter One From Enlightenment to Revolution: A Century of Cultural Transformation A C U R I O U S R E N D I T I O N of Jesus’s expulsion of the moneychangers borders the entrance to the Trinity Church in the Kiev Cave Monastery. The monastery’s icon school painted this fresco in the 1730s and ’40s, and it is positioned in such a way as to suggest that Jesus is driving a group of merchants and moneychangers out the actual church door. Jesus shows a full face, reminiscent of the holy figures of Orthodox icons; most of the moneychangers and sellers of doves, depicted in profile as they bend toward their spilling wares, show only one eye, an iconographic representation of evil.1 Unlike their counterparts in expulsion scenes by Rembrandt and El Greco, these merchants and moneychangers are made to resemble Jewish merchants of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe: at least two wear yarmulkes, and the others have beards and hats characteristic of Jews of the Ukrainian territory. Beyond the theological relationship between Jesus and the moneychangers, the fresco suggests a conflict between the Christian Slavs and the Jews of this region, as well as between official Christian culture and market commerce in eighteenth-century Kiev. As concern over issues of cultural coexistence in the Ukrainian territories increased in the Tsarist Empire in the nineteenth century, images of market vendors and market products became increasingly important to the art and literature of these territories. The historical backdrop for this study of literary exchange is a century of profound transformation in demographics, politics, and culture, a century bracketed by the Russian-language writings of a Ukrainian, Nikolai Gogol, and a Jew, Isaac Babel. Gogol wrote “The Sorochintsy Fair,” the first of his stories based in the Ukrainian territories, in 1829, and Babel wrote his stories about Stalin’s agricultural collectivization in Ukraine in 1930. Gogol, Babel, and a great many writers who came between them evoke a commercial landscape as a means of describing the cultural exchange constantly taking place in the Ukrainian territories. The popularity of the commercial landscape as a Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands 4 literary device reflects three historical developments. First, Catherine II had annexed these regions into the Tsarist Empire in the late eighteenth century , bringing in new European ethnic groups. Second, political institutions responded to this newfound diversity by gradually seeking to dominate and modernize ethnic minorities. Finally, and most important for our purposes, these demographic and political trends spurred artists’ and writers’ preoccupation with the conflicts and intersections among Russia’s many ethnicities. The century covered in this book coincides with the duration of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. The borders of this region were expanded for the last time in 1835; restrictions on Jewish residence were not lifted until 1917. Within the greater Pale of Settlement, which extended beyond Vilna and Vitebsk in the north, Warsaw in the west, and the Crimean Peninsula in the south, the Russian-ruled Ukrainian territories known as Malorossiia, or “Little Russia,” offer a remarkable case study in literary and artistic crossfertilization .2 The commercial landscapes depicted in the Russian, Ukrainian , and Yiddish texts in this study were modeled on actual fairs and markets within these Ukrainian borderlands, but all were written for a broader readership throughout the Tsarist Empire and beyond. Before the partitions of Poland (1772–95) that divided the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Jews played an integral role in an economic system dominated by the Polish magnates. These nobles in turn granted the Jews freedom and protection. Tsarist Russia had no ready infrastructure to similarly integrate the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews it absorbed.3 Accordingly, the tsarist government attempted to remake the economic configuration of the region, weakening business bonds among Jews, Polish lords, and peasants.4 The Russian majority viewed Jews as outsiders, untrustworthy because of their religious differences and their historical link to the Polish overlords and not easily integrated into Russian conceptions of a nation and its people. By contrast, Ukrainians’ fraught relationship with Russia has constituted what Orest Subtelny has called a “together-separate-together-separate sequence,” from the end of Kievan Rus’ in the thirteenth century to territorial reunifications in 1654, 1795, 1935, and 1944, and, most significantly, with Ukrainian independence in 1991.5 A series of Cossack rebellions in the eighteenth century led Catherine II to dismantle the Zaporozhian Sich, the center of the Cossack infrastructure...

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