SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the forum “Conceptualizing National Modernism” inspired by the publication of the new book by Galina Babak and Alexander Dmitriev, The Atlantis of Soviet National Modernism: The Formal Method in Ukraine (1920s–Early 1930s) (Moscow: NLO, 2021). Mikhail Krutikov discusses the case of Jewish, Yiddish-language “national modernist” literature in the 1930s and 1940s. The universalism of Jewish modernism was based on a different foundation from Ukrainian modernism and was not necessarily preconditioned by Bolshevism. Gradually, the balance shifted from Marxist to national elements in Soviet Jewish culture, and the effect of formalist defamiliarization (ostranenie) resulted in a shift from territorial to temporal distancing. What began as the utopian project of building an extraterritorial national culture turned into a no less utopian project – under Soviet conditions – of preserving Jewish cultural heritage by integrating it into the new canon of “world” culture.