This event will be hosted in hybrid format. RSVP to attend in person. Register for the Zoom meeting.
This talk is about poetry and catastrophe, violence and relief work, artistic literature and documentation, injury and care. The lens through which I discuss these topics is the Jewish concept of “hefker,” originating in property law, where it refers to objects that are ownerless and up for grabs. I explore the multivalence of the hefker concept as a legal, poetic, existential, and political/social term, showing how Yiddish poets, Russian language authors, aid workers, and medical professionals—all responding to the pogroms of the Russian Civil War—used the term hefker to describe and conceptualize the experience of mass public violence. To declare a population or individual beyond the realm of law, to act with abandon, to abandon an object, to abandon your ego--these are some of the ways the term evolved. The talk will examine instances of abandonment in documents and artistic literature in Yiddish and Russian.
Harriet Lisa Murav is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to studies of Dostoevsky, and Russian law and literature, her most recent book is As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024).
