@inbook{458c4957a1754d3daa8c4983d8ac1b25,
title = "The Dreyfus Affair for Soviet Children: on the Encoded Poetics of Aleksandra Brushtein{\textquoteright}s Documentary Prose",
abstract = "This essay focuses on the autobiographical trilogy titled The Road Leads Off into the Distance (Doroga ukhodit v dal{\textquoteright}) by Soviet-Jewish writer Aleksandra Brushtein (1884{\textendash}1968). It traces a specific use of a documentary aesthetics that enabled Brushtein to address previously taboo themes in a fictional and allegorical f. Thus, for the first time in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, the novel recasts the life of an educated socialist Jewish family in Tsarist Russia in the form of a fictionalised autobiography narrated by a girl. Furthermore, by implementing various documentary forms, Brushtein provides a detailed account of the Dreyfus affair and the issues of antisemitism within this fictionalised {\textquoteleft}ego-document.{\textquoteright} By recounting the affair to a broader audience for the first time in decades, the novel{\textquoteright}s depiction may also be read as an Aesopian reflection on the late Stalinist {\textquoteleft}Doctors{\textquoteright} Plot{\textquoteright}.",
keywords = "Alexandra Brushtein, Doctor{\textquoteright}s Plot, Documentary aesthetics, Dreyfus affair, Soviet-Jewish Literature, late Stalinist antisemitism",
author = "Natasha Gordinsky",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024.",
year = "2024",
doi = "10.1163/9789004686427\_004",
language = "English",
series = "Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics",
publisher = "Brill Academic Publishers",
pages = "52--70",
booktitle = "Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics",
address = "Netherlands",
}