«Зачем нужен этот человек в новом обществе?...»
"Why is this person needed in a new society? ..."

Summary/Abstract: Jewish religion, culture and identity, while suffering in the crisis of assimilation from within since the 19th century, was subject to an agressive external elimination during the antireligious campain of early Soviet years and the target of the state anti- Semitism under Stalin. Political changes and events were reflected not directly in Jewish literature in Russian. This period was the last, forth one in Russian–Jewish literature (1860–1940) when the decline is detected in different ways by writers. The article offers, on a general historical survey as a background, a panorama of Russian–Jewish proseworks of the 1920–1930s, such as Isaak Babel, Lev Lunts, Andrei Sobol, Mikhail Kozakov and Semion Gekht, along with an analysis of their methods, central psychological and sociological categories. Special attention is turned to problems of Soviet taboo for the words “Jew, Jewish”, the name of Jewish heroes, the theme of “otherness” in general, the typology of anti-Semitic caracters and the new phenomens as the “strong Jews” in literature. And, mainly, what new methods of narration are applied in the 1920s to solve an old and difficult question in literature while handling the delicate sujet of anti-Semitism. In the 1920s the earlier emotional approach is succeeded by “objectification” of “priiom”, formulated by contemporary formalist theory. A list of categories and fields open to further research is given in the text.

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