Une approche exotique de la littérature russe juive

Since the emergence of a Russian- Jewish literature in the 1 860s, a great many debates have opposed the supporters of the existence of such a literature and others who, at best, considered that those books written in Russian by Jewish writers were of insufficient quality and could not be regarded as genuine literature, especially when compared to the "great" works of Russian literarure. The adoption of an exotic approach consists in considering Jewish-Russian literature as a triangular territory whose three apexes are the reader, the time and the society he or she lives in, and the Jewish world as a cultural entity. Those studies which use ethnic origin to determine whether a writer belongs to the Jewish-Russian literary tradition are not very convincing. Neither is the language used a satisfactory criterion. So, what remains is, as some American scholars advocate, to regard each text as an authentically exotic territory so as to discover to what extent it contains elements of Jewish culture. Studying the inner workings of these texts is rather like undertaking an expedition in an unfamiliar, exotic country.Czerny Boris. Une approche exotique de la littérature russe juive. In: Revue Russe n°38, 2012. La perestroïka de Gorbatchev : piteuse déconfiture ou réussite historique ? pp. 119-132