[ Modiya > Theater > The Dybbuk ]
The Playwright
Portrait of An-sky by Leonid Pasternak.
Shloyme-Zanvel Rappoport/Semyon Akimovich An-sky
(1863-1920) was one of the most remarkable figures in
Russian and Jewish history and literature. Born to a
traditional, Yiddish-speaking Jewish family, An-sky
became a Populist activist who worked among poor
Russians, an author of fiction, poetry, and drama in
Yiddish and Russian, and a life-long revolutionary.
As an ethnographer, he treated topics as diverse as
the folklore of Russian miners, literacy among the
peasants, the beliefs, behaviors, and artistic
heritage of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, and
their losses during World War I. As a writer, his
work had a tremendous impact on his contemporaries and
later generations. His poem, "Di shvue" (The Oath),
became the anthem of the Bund, the Jewish labor
movement. The Destruction of Galicia, his memoir of
three years as an aid worker among despoiled Jews
behind the lines during WWI, is a unique and wrenching
account (translated into English as The Enemy at His
Pleasure).
The Dybbuk complicates any attempt to neatly
categorize its author. Although the play has come to
be seen as smoothly linking a timeless Jewish folk
culture with a modern dramatic and literary art,
An-sky did not simply reproduce, but rather knowingly
stylized the folk beliefs he had studied. With this
stylization, he remade his material according to the
politics and the aesthetics of his time. The
rebellion of the young lovers in the play against the
rich father of the heroine Leah echoes socialist
theories about the coming revolt against capitalism;
the association of folk culture with revolution was a
cherished notion in An-sky’s circles; and the hero
Hannan, a kabbalist who invokes the name of the devil
to win his beloved and is struck dead, has something
in common with the compelling, confusing heroes of the
Russian revolutionary movement. The politics and the
aesthetics of the early-twentieth-century Russian
Empire shaped An-sky's play, which shaped Jewish
theater, and even, arguably, the Jewish artistic
sensibilities of the twentieth century.
Question
The Dybbuk was largely a product of its author's involvement in ethnographic research. Some contemporary critics faulted the play as a pastiche of folkloristic elements. Discuss the relationship between folklore and art. Try to think of other examples.
Reading
Safran, G. (2006) The Worlds of S. An-sky:
A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. Stanford University Press.
S. An-sky (1863-1920), Poet, Ethnographer, Dramatist, Social Activist. Jewish
Heritage Online Magazine.
http://www.jhom.com/personalities/ansky/index.htm
Links
Between Two Worlds: S. An-sky at the Turn of the Century. An International Conference, Stanford University, March 17-19, 2001.
http://hdl.handle.net/1964/934
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