On April 28th at 17:00, at the Ligamus bookstore, doctoral candidate Benjamin Arenstein from the University of Chicago will deliver a public lecture on “On the Reading of Poetry and the Poetry of Reading: The Literary Lives of the Soviet Jewish Underground in Leningrad and Lithuania,” organized by the Anthropology Research Center and the Doctoral Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University.

Abstract: This talk will discuss the political stakes of poetry for underground Jewish activists in Leningrad and Lithuania during the 1980s. Focusing on the unofficial samizdat journal LEA (Leningrad Jewish Almanac), I excavate the poetic imaginary of Soviet Jews seeking seeking to emigrate from the USSR. As LEA’s editors and readers articulate, poetry was conceived as an indispensable substance of Soviet underground political life, which, at the same, had little influence on the politics of its readers. Placing close readings of texts by Yuri Kolker, Rimma Zapesotskaia, and Leonid Aronzon alongside anthropological work with LEA’s readers, I explore this paradoxical literary idiom and its implications for underground Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.

Bio: Benjamin Arenstein is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago completing a joint-degree in the departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Middle Eastern Studies. His dissertation project explores the nature of poetry and Jewish nationalism in the late Soviet Union. In addition to his dissertation project, Benjamin is currently working on a manuscript of translated poems by the bilingual Hebrew and Russian author Elisheva Bikhovski (1888-1949).