The Jewish theologem of the Russian avant-garde (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Abba Gordin and Velvl Gordin-Beobi on the background of Kdushi Musaf for the New Year)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the memoirs concerned with avant-garde cafes in revolutionary Moscow 1917–1918. “The Stall of Pegasus” and “Cafe of Poets” by Abba Gordin recently translated from Yiddish into Russian. The author of the memoirs was a prominent anarchist and at the same time had a traditional Jewish education. The article deciphers the complex Jewish subtexts of this memoir text based on the ideas of Kabbalah (“Sepher Yetzirah”) and medieval Jewish prayer books. Particular attention is paid to the problems of Abba Gordin’s attitude to the futuristic “zaum” and his purely Jewish reaction to the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom he calls the “High Priest of Poetry.” The paper compares the ideas previously expressed by the author of the article on the interaction of the works of Russian futurists, Russian and Russian-Jewish avant-garde artists, etc. with Jewish mysticism and imagery. These ideas were previously expressed only from the Russian side. The analyzed text makes it possible to see that the Jewish participants in this dialogue perfectly understood their Russian contemporaries and answered them from a Jewish, albeit extremely avant-garde, point of view. Taking into account purely religious, religious-mystical Jewish sources, named by Abba Gordin, allows us to see both sides of the dialogue, to verify the previously discovered Jewish sources of the Russian avant-garde and take the first steps in constructing the theological background of the Russian avant-garde based on both Christian and Jewish texts and sources.

Keywords:

Abba Gordin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, “The Stall of Pegasus”, “Cafe of Poets”, Yiddish, anarchism, Russian futurism, Judaism, Kabbala, Jewish imagies