David Bergelson

Abstract

David Bergelson (b. 1884–d. 1952) was the most important Yiddish modernist prose writer of the 20th century. His innovations in style, character, and especially atmospherics, or “mood,” earned him immediate praise from literary critics, who saw him as the first Yiddish modernist. The fates and feelings of his characters, the settings, and his elliptical, decentered style reflect a unified artistic emotion, the highlight of his fiction. Bergelson wrote short stories, novels, essays, plays, and articles for newspapers and journals, including Eygns, Milgroym, and In shpan, which he founded and edited. Bergelson’s oeuvre can be divided into his Kiev period (until 1919), during which he wrote the novels The End of Everything and Departure, his self-imposed exile in Berlin (1921–1933), and the Soviet period (1934–1952). The Berlin exile was a time of great creativity, as well as a political turning point. Bergelson rather ambiguously proclaimed his turn to communism in 1926. This ideological turn, and the tragedy of his death (he was one of the prominent Soviet Yiddish writers killed on Stalin’s orders on August 12, 1952), has until recently overshadowed engagement with his literary work. Reappraisals of his literary creativity as a whole, and especially after his self-proclaimed turn to communism after 1926, are changing the overall evaluation.