Géographie de la mémoire dans la littérature russe-juive

The Geography of Memory in Russian Jewish Literature The article is a reflection on the content and the way books of memories concerning the Russian Jewish world are composed. Since the 1990’s and above all the beginning of the 21st century, there has been an increase in the publishing of letters and memories of either well-known people or mere witnesses of the evolution of the Russian Jewish world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The three texts I analysed, The Remembrances of a Grandmother by Polina Vengerova, Memories of a Life by Klavdia Starkova and The Book of my Life by the historian and politician Semen Dubnov, are all characterized by when they were written and by the cultural and religious origins of the authors. I have chosen these particular works so as to grasp the complexity of the relationships between Jews and Russians in the intimacy of memories and the assertion of a double identity, Jewish and Russian. Studying these three distinct works has enabled to define a common geography with elements of a Jewish and of a Russian landscape. The emphasizing of the convergences of this landscape should permit to define the Russian Jewish world in an original way, as an addition of Russian and Jewish elements with an identical weight and importance

Aesthetics · Art · Humanities · Identity (music) · Judaism · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies