David Bergelson's Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity by Harriet Murav (review)

A few Fourth of Julys ago in San Diego, a computer malfunction set off all the fireworks at once. A large fraction of the city was gathered on the beach. First there was cautious applause, then, slowly, the realization that something had gone amiss—that there would be no show, or rather, that the show had happened too fast, with no delay whatsoever between fireworks. Delay, after all, is the stuff of time. As Henri Bergson suggested, everything happening at once would mark the end of time (Murav 181). Time, and the gaps in time, is at the core of Bergson's near-namesake, the Yiddish novelist David Bergelson's, writing. It is also the central focus of Harriet Murav's most recent book, David Bergelson's Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity, which offers a welcome contribution to modernism studies.

Murav's book follows Bergelson's work from his first fiction to his execution in the Lubyanka prison on the August 12, 1952, "Night of the Murdered Poets." The book is not only a definitive contribution to Bergelson scholarship—it brings Bergelson into a conversation about time and memory that includes Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, as well as Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Nora, and the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov. As Galin Tihanov has conjectured, the origins of modern literary theory can be traced to the Russian formalists, who "were the first to see literature as an autonomous domain for theoretical investigation" (62). Like his fellow writer and theorist Viktor Shklovsky, who also came of age with the Russian Revolution, Bergelson was concerned with making perception laborious. Although he lived the last two decades of his life in the Soviet Union, Bergelson belongs simultaneously to multiple worlds, multiple places, and he viewed his revolutionary moment as one that included not only Russia, but all of Europe and beyond. Born in Okhrymovo, a shtetl south of Kyiv, Bergelson helped found the avant-garde Yiddish Kiev-group of writers. He moved to Berlin, where he lived until 1933, and considered a move to the United States. Never a member of the Communist Party, Bergelson wrote publicly of the relative merits of the Soviet Union: his 1926 essay, "Three Centers," favorably compares Moscow to Berlin and New York. In 1933 he returned permanently to the Soviet Union, where he publicly wrote to bolster the Soviet leader, and privately wrote of his interest in the Jewish people, and even in the nascent state of Israel.

At the modernist moment, and particularly the Russian revolutionary moment, time was "out of joint." It was a moment, as Walter Benjamin put it, "shot through with splinters of Messianic Time." As a result, time itself, as epitomized by the pause or rupture, becomes more important than any concrete event. Of all the great writers of the Russian Revolution, there is arguably none who exemplifies this more than Bergelson, the most widely read Yiddish fiction writer of his day. Bergelson, like most of the Soviet Yiddish modernists, is woefully underexplored in English-language scholarship, yet his fiction—which he wrote in pre-Revolutionary Ukraine, interwar Berlin, and finally the Soviet Union—helps to distill a core obsession of his generation: how to make sense of seconds, minutes, and years in a period of transformation. Murav has taken a great step in rectifying this, traversing the writer's life and work to reveal Bergelson's conception of time in a period when time was moving either too quickly or too slowly. Bergelson's characters are keenly aware of their own belatedness, or, alternately, experience a clarifying or brutal delay in time—between sentencing and execution, between suicidal plan and action, between the engagement and the end of the engagement. "Salvation," Murav observes of Bergelson's early fiction, which tended to focus on the marginal space of the shtetl, "is always deferred" (34).

Bergelson's delayed characters might be seen as a reaction to his era. As Svetlana Boym has written, "After the October revolution, Soviet...