Herderian echoes at the roots of Shloyme An-sky’s ethnographic thought

Abstract

The work of the Russian-Jewish writer Semen An-sky (1863-1920) is profoundly heterogeneous. The common denominator of his production in the fields of publishing, activism, drama and fiction is his commitment to ethnographic studies. This article aims to explore the theoretical background of An-sky’s ethnographic thought, focusing in particular on its philosophical nuances. At a methodological level, the following procedure will be applied: in the first part, the author’s biographical path will be reconstructed, revealing the stages that first brought him into contact, at a political level, with revolutionary socialism and then, at a literary level, with Russian populism. What emerges is a fascination for ethnographic study aimed, at first, at deepening contact with the Russian worker and, at a later stage, at safeguarding the ethnographic heritage of Jewish culture through expeditions to the Chassidic shtetls in the Ukrainian regions of Podolia and Volinia in 1912 and 1914. This transition from the Russian to the Jewish world results from An-sky’s probable reading of the philosophical works of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), to whom the second part of this article is dedicated. Based on the comparison of textual excerpts from three of Herder’s works and three articles by An-sky, the comparison reveals the philosopher’s influence on the ethnographer on three thematic levels: folk tradition as the repository of a people’s soul, spirituality as the essential vehicle for the transmission of this tradition, and the significant value of childhood in the preservation of this heritage. The result of such an examination is, therefore, a rather concrete influence that Herder’s philosophical ideas exerted on An-sky’s ethnographic thought, an influence attested in the scholarly literature (Lukin 2006: 284), but never, it seems, actually deepened. In a rather rich and in-depth body of studies on An-sky’s multifaceted activity, therefore, the present article expresses the intention to scrutinise more carefully the sources of theoretical, literary and philosophical inspiration at the origin, in particular, of the last phase of An-sky’s activity, almost entirely dedicated to the collection of folkloric material that would allow the preservation of Jewish tradition and stimulate the creation of a totally Jewish art.