“As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine” is about poetry and catastrophe, violence and relief work, artistic literature and documentation, injury and care. I discuss these topics through the lens of the Jewish concept of “hefker,” originating in property law, where it refers to objects that are ownerless and up for grabs. I explore the multivalence of the hefker concept as a legal, poetic, existential, and political/social term, showing how Yiddish poets, Russian language authors, aid workers, and medical professionals—all responding to the pogroms of the Russian Civil War—used hefker to describe and conceptualize the experience of mass public violence. To declare a population or individual beyond the realm of law, to act with abandon, to abandon an object, to abandon your ego--these are some of the ways the term evolved.

Guest Speaker: Harriet Murav, Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative and World Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Bio: Murav is the author of six monographs and co-editor of five books on Russian and Yiddish literature. She co-translated Judgment (2017) and is working on In the Shadow of the War. Her recent work includes As the Dust of the Earth and a new project on contemporary Ukrainian poetry.