Hebrew as Heteroglossia: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s First Poetic Attempt

• In Event: Inconvenient Gnessin: Languages of Subjectivity and Death (Hebrew)

Abstract

My reading of Gnessin’s first published short story “Zhenya” (1903) has a twofold goal. On the one hand, it situates his modernist prose within the geopolitical and cultural context of an empire. On the other hand, it offers a new interpretation of this radical Hebrew debut through Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, as a concept which itself was developed within the frame of post-imperial thinking. Building on Bakhtin’s understanding of language as the “inner stratification of a single national language into social dialects, group mannerisms, professional jargons, generic languages, the languages of generations and age-groups” (Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, 262), I will argue that the Hebrew language is one of the main protagonist’s in “Zhenya”. As we will see, in Gnessin’s text the question of reading and writing in Hebrew as well as of translating from Hebrew to Russian is at the core of the plot. At the same time the plot of the story functions as a laboratory for testing the poetic possibilities of envisioning Hebrew as vernacular and oral language.
Therefore, in the first part of my talk I will analyze the representation of the intellectual and educational turmoil in the Jewish society in the late Russian Empire in “Zhenya,” which enables Gnessin to create the social layer of the inner stratification of language. By juxtaposing two forms of learning that stand for two new types of Jewish intelligentsia—the Russian speaking and the Hebrew speaking—Gnessin reflects on the two versions of Jewish modernity. Thus, in the second part of my talk I will show how Gnessin’s meta-poetic attempt to explore the heteroglossia of Hebrew necessarily leads him to yet another crucial task, namely to reflect on the central role that gender plays in language politics.

Author

• Nataliya Natasha Gordinskaya, University of Haifa