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This article examines the complex of connections between Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner's work and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's art and thought. A writer, critic, editor, publicist, and translator, Brenner was a key figure in the Hebrew republic of letters in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although Brenner's writings deal extensively with existential dilemmas of the Jewish people, his fiction and publicist writing demonstrate an obvious affinity for Russian literature, particularly Dostoyevsky's narrative art. The first part of this article discusses ideological and poetic aspects of Brenner's works that combine his experience of \"recovering\" from the ideas of universalist socialism during his service in the tsarist army with his affinity for Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions . The second part addresses the influence on Brenner's early conceptual novels of the artistic stratagems employed by Dostoyevsky to critique the Enlightenment in Notes from the Underground . The third part offers a comparative analysis of the artistic stratagems used in the publicist writings of Dostoyevsky and Brenner, particularly their attempts to incorporate fictional elements into journalistic texts.

This article explores the understudied role of Gomel as an important center of literary production during the emergence of Hebrew modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. Prominent writers such as Gershon Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin fostered personal and literary dialogues in and with the city. By combining various methodological approaches—New Historicism, literary cartography, and regional history—we analyze the unique spatial dynamics that sparked Gomel's transformation into a laboratory of Hebrew modernism. While grounding our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin in the spatial turn in literary theory, we argue that these three canonical Hebrew writers created literary texts that captured the urban experience of this eastern European Jewish metropolis. We trace the evolution of Hebrew texts written in Gomel from a synchronic perspective and construct a detailed description of the town's literary-cum-cultural history. At the same time, we focus on Gomel's broader historical and geographical status within the Pale of Settlement and demonstrate how each of the three writers used a different literary genre—the urban miniature, the novel, and the novella—to create a unique representation of Gomel's urban space. Furthermore, by focusing on the chronotope of Gomel, our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin underscore that these texts are grounded in Gomel's urban fabric through particular forms of local belonging, rather than an abstract notion of \"uprooted\" existence.

First was his stage of activism as a member of the Bund, the Jewish social-democratic party, during a period that coincided with his literary apprenticeship in the Jewish communities of the tsarist empire. \"1 In addition to autobiographical allusions and the reflection of personal ideological misgivings, this strategy aimed to present a fictional composition as a diary, note, or oral monologue transcribed- that is, as a text not originally intended as a literary work at all. [...]Brenner 's rhetoric of sincerity aimed not only to present literature as both faithful and close to real life, but also to respond to the important life questions of his generation and express opinions about them. [...]according to Brinker, Brenner's writing constitutes an actual stance of sincerity with clear intellectual content rather than merely a game that presents the appearance of sincerity. [...]to use an expression borrowed from the theory of Harold Bloom, Brenner might have been stricken by \"the anxiety of influence\" in relation to Dostoyevsky's work, as manifest in distinct expressions of the ongoing influence of the great writer on his own work and of the desire to break free from it to bring out his own unique literary voice.7 Brenner's affinity for Dostoyevsky's narrative art was not accompanied by an imitation of his style.

The article analyses ideological and genre aspects of Joseph Brodsky's work, associated with the imperial theme in Russian literature. By drawing on methods from comparative literature, historical poetics, and empire studies I claim that a concern with space is not only central to Brodsky's work but also consistent with his imperial thinking. Brodsky's verse maintains a direct dialogue with Classicist poetry and Acmeist poetry (particularly Osip Mandelstam), both of which dealt with the notion of empire through adoption of the \"high\" literary style. The Imperial theme in Brodsky's oeuvre also overlaps with the dismantlement of the Russian imperial subject at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, I argue that he was, above all, the last Russian imperial poet.

[...]the reception of Tolstoy into Hebrew culture is part of a broader phenomenon of Jewish-Russian contacts at the turn of the twentieth century when educated Jews born in the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Western and Southern provinces of the Russian Empire started to look for modern means of selfrealization. According to the article, a group of Jewish Tolstoyans that Brenner belonged to even wanted to buy a piece of land in America for the sake of realizing their mentor's vision. [...]it seems the immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 only deepened her attachment to European culture. Besides translating War and Peace into Hebrew (1952), she wrote the essays, \"The Unity of Man and Cosmos in Tolstoy\" (Ahdut ha-adam ve-ha-iakum etsel Tolstoy), \"Anna Karenina,\" and \"Tolstoy and the Theater,\" published in her collection of essays on Russian literature (Ha-sifrut ha-rusit be-mea ha- 19). According to Goldberg, attempts to transcend objective reality through ecstasy can lead to extreme subjectivity, a state in which the poet is incapable of approaching the \"pure idea.\" Tolstoy's image is also present in later periods of Hebrew culture. [...]the early 1960s, there was indeed a steady flow of articles (at least some of which were taken from the Soviet press) and reviews of new translations in the Hebrew media, primarily the daily newspaper Davar, the major organ of Labor Zionist movement.

This chapter presents a selection of book review essays which investigate the topics of cultural studies, literature, and thought. The first book examines the meaning of Judaism and Jewishness in the modern age. The second book reviewed aims to construct a “genealogy” linking the key components of Jewish secularism. Other books reviewed here discuss the perception of the Jew as the ultimate “Other” in European Christian culture, the modernist Hebrew republic of letters in Europe in the first third of the twentieth century, and prewar and wartime experiences of Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The final book reviewed examines the history of American Jewish literature focusing on the small community of American Hebraists during the first half of the twentieth century.