Uri Nissan Gnessin

The article explores the moment of “invention” of the Hebrew mood. Around the year 1900 a new expression for mood appeared in Hebrew: matsav ruah. The articulation of a new linguistic expression was paralleled by the rise of an original atmospheric prose, mood prose, in Hebrew. By analyzing these parallel events, the article suggests that the matsav ruah of the early 1900s was a new form of self-experience and that this new form stimulated original poetic language created by a cohort of Hebrew, East European writers, including Yosef Hayim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and others. I suggest that, with mood, Hebrew prose figuratively stretched language itself, giving form to a new sense of “being there.” Furthermore, this poetics of mood offered authors an alternative to psychological realist prose and to the fixed subject position it implied. Thus, Hebrew phrasing and poetics of mood offer a potent concept for the analysis of epistemo- logical foundations of early twentieth-century modernism in Hebrew literature while drawing an outline for a wider, comparative view on early twentieth-century European modernism in light of the concept of mood.

This article addresses Uri Nissan Gnessin's modernist poetics through the notion of the contemporary. Examination of a selection of his early texts-a letter, a literary review, and the short story "Jenya"-written between 1900 and 1902 reveals his perception of Eastern European Jewish modernity as heterochronous and polytopic.

This article explores the representation of provincial space in Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Sideways. By analyzing the way in which Gnessin constitutes the lives of three young Jewish sisters living in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century, I argue that his novella sets the ground for a new understanding of a provincial town, namely as a modernist space. In order to characterize this space, the article compares Sideways to Chekov’s seminal play Three Sisters. This comparative reading explores a crucial difference between the chronotopes of the two literary texts. While Three Sisters depends on the metropolitan space of Moscow, which serves as an absent presence in the play, Gnessin imagines a provincial space for which the metropolis does not function as its gravitational force. The contextualization of the relationship between time and space in Sideways within current theories of space and modernism underscores the unique features of Gnessin’s early modernism, which does not rely on a metropolitan chronotope. Instead, it is connected to the provincial space that Gnessin associates with his female protagonists. Thus, from an epistemic standpoint, moving sideways holds a twofold meaning: on the aesthetic level it reflects literary issues that were on the margins of Hebrew literary discourse (as Dan Miron has argued), and on the poetic level it constitutes the representational space of a province in which young Eastern European Jewish women became agents of cultural change

https://www.pennpress.org/9780812240641/the-revolution-of-1905-and-russias-jews/

Using an array of personal letters, diary entries and other sources, this article argues that the confrontation with large urban arenas led to a widespread state of loneliness and an ensuing sense of despair among many young Jewish men across East Central Europe and that many of them found relief from this state of dislocation and confusion by forging strong, homosocial bonds of male friendship that ultimately laid the foundations for the development of Jewish nationalism in the region.

Key figures in this study include the young David Ben-Gurion, Yosef Haim Brenner and Uri Nissan Gnessin.

Among many works translated by Uri Nisn Gnesin (1879-1913), three stories by Anton Chekhov are a true quintessence of Gnesin's translating strategy. The  period of publishing a literary magazine Nisyonot (1905-1906), in which these stories had appeared in print, was the only time when Gnesin fully embodied his vision of a literary work, original or translated, being both an author and a publisher. This situation allowed Gnesin to make decisions at every stage of the writing process, from choosing a source text to filling multiple lacunae in modern Hebrew to designing a title page of his book. Although little has been published on Gnesin's translations of Chekhov, who had been one of the most influential Russian impressionist writers of the late nineteenth century, it may be interesting to examine them from historical and linguistic perspectives. In my paper I try to explore the reasons which made Chekhov so attractive for Gnesin. Even a brief glance at Hatsido and Chekhov's stories demonstrates a conspicuous kinship of writing styles, which I find to be one the main reasons for Gnesin's choice: Chekhov attracted Gnesin with a remarkable ability to show life as he had seen it, to transmit mood through a scenery depiction, to express the most important with only a few words, just like impressionist artists created an atmosphere with a few brush strokes. In  artistic presentation of people and nature, Chekhov made a special accent on immediate emotions. Perception of reality in his stories is often broken into minor sensations, experienced by the characters in their endless reflexion. Meaningless per se, these sensations create in reader's mind bright emotional images, achieving a strong psychological effect. A comparative study of Russian and Hebrew texts allowed me to demonstrate how Gnesin managed to preserve the same psychological effect and remain true to the original, and at the same time found a way to express a new reading of Chechov according to his own literary and aesthetic tastes.