Евгений Котляр. Предчувствие апокалипсиса: образы синагог и тема крушения еврейского мира в искусстве революционного времени

Premonition of the Apocalypse: Synagogue Images and the Motif of the Destruction of the Jewish World in Art of the Revolutionary Period

By Eugeny Kotlyar

[Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts]

Source: Judaica Ukrainica 6 (2017)

Publication date: December 1, 2017

Publication type: article

Language: Russian

Full text:

 

Abstract

Though de jure bestowing equality and freedom on the Jews of the former Russian Empire, the Revolution and Civil War simultaneously shattered the Jewish world with bloody pogroms, impoverishment, and destruction of traditional ways of life. This new reality permanently altered the face of what would become Soviet Jewry, a body born out of physical and spiritual torment of the transitional period. Culture and art reflected the situation: synagogue images in artistic works illustrated the ongoing drama, as synagogues — the key locus of Jewish life — were being destroyed in front of one’s eyes. The present article uses an art-historical study to trace the evolution of the image of the synagogue in the artistic works of the period as seen through the prism of Jewish discourse. It analyzes the semantic content of the image as a specific motif and marker of Jewishness in the visual art of the revolutionary era. In previous years the ethnographism and genre art had dominated the depiction of such motifs, but during the years of revolutionary convulsion the treatment and destruction of synagogue images gradually came to reflect the sense of ruin and horror. In certain cases these depictions reached a climactic, even apocalyptic intensity.

Keywords: Jewish art, Jews in the Russian empire, Jews in the USSR, synagogue art

 

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DOI 10.14653/ju.2017.05