Science against Injustice: A Literary Investigation of Vladimir Bogoraz's Silhouettes from Gomel’

ABSTRACT In 1904, Vladimir Bogoraz went to Gomel’, a city in the province of Mogilev in the central-west of the Russian Empire, to interview Russians and Jews and to report on a trial relating to a pogrom that had occurred there in September 1903. The semi-fictional work that resulted, Silhouettes from Gomel’: Sketches (Gomel’skie siluety. Ocherki), which Bogoraz published under the pseudonym Tan, gives voice to a diverse gallery of those who participated in the pogrom or witnessed it: Jews, Russians, men, women, teenagers, the elderly, Old Believers, court officials, a state-appointed rabbi, and injured victims. This article represents the first attempt to offer a scholarly analysis of Bogoraz's remarkable work in the context of both the history of Jewish–Russian relations and of the evolution of the genre of literary ethnography to which it belongs.