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While reading, The Five, the 1935 novella by Vladimir Jabotinsky, I was especially struck by the following passage in which the narrator, a Russian Jew in Odessa, is visiting a Russian family home and reflects on the difference he perceives between the speech of the Russians and that of his own Jewish social circle:

“It was only while sitting in their house that I could appreciate how much exhilarating brilliance there was in our own everyday conversation at Marusya’s house – and I suddenly felt how very nice and cosy it was when this brilliance was lacking… . everything lacked brilliance; they used everyday, commonplace words, not long, not short, not witty, not moving – simply nice words; unadorned, ancestral thoughts, a sweet infusion of the soul, Galakhov’s anthology …”[1]

The difference between the speech of this family and that of the narrator’s circle is not a matter of the language being used. The Jewish social circle Jabotinsky describes is the one of his youth in Odessa – assimilated young Jewish intellectuals whose native language was Russian. Jabotinsky taught himself Hebrew, but had no connection to either Jewish languages or religious culture in his early life. At the turn of the century Odessa was far ahead of the rest of the Pale of Settlement in terms of progressive ideas, but even so social interaction between Jews and non-Jews was limited. Jabotinsky later became an ultra-nationalist and argued that Hebrew must be the national language of the Jewish state toward which he worked, but as a young man in Odessa he had not entirely come to terms with his own Jewish identity. In many ways Piatero, written towards the end of Jabotinsky’s life, seems to be a return to the time when he was grappling with the question of what makes an individual “Jewish” or “Russian” – language, religion, or culture?

            The passage quoted above describes the moment in which the narrator clearly experiences that there is, after all, some kind of innate difference between Russians and Jews, and that it is manifested in language. A whole cultural history, “unadorned ancestral thoughts,” imbues the speech of these Russians with a certain quality. The question then arises, how can we define this difference, and out of what does it originate?

            One explanation comes from Mikhail Bakhtin, the 20th century philosopher/literary theorist who, although not Jewish, grew up in the several of the major cities in the Pale of Settlement. Bakhtin defines as “accent” that quality that distinguishes one individual’s speech from that of another. This is by no means what we usually understand as “accent” – the way a non-native speaker pronounces words. Rather, Bakhtin’s accent is the inevitable reflection in speech of the unique social, historical, cultural, and experiential position of the individual. As no two individuals will ever have the exact same experience or situation in the world, everyone’s speech possesses this accent. Bakhtin’s accent could also be described as the semantic intention of speech that results from the speaker’s unique experience and situation. If accent is framed in terms of semantic intention, it is implicated in dialogue, possibly the most important concept in Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue presumes another person who is capable of understanding and responding to one’s speech. This relationship also affects the speech itself – speech anticipates the future response, and addresses the other individual in a specific social context and historical moment. Bakhtin uses the term “dialogic” to refer to speech that is engaged in this kind of relationship, and in order to separate his discussion from the limits of dialogue in its formal definition. In order for an utterance to be dialogic, it must be connected to a speaking subject, and therefore to a particular social and historical moment and place, to a particular semantic position in regard to the surrounding world. Thus for Bakhtin each individual’s speech is determined and conditioned by his or her unique situation.  

I find Bakhtin’s idea very attractive, but it does not entirely coincide with the situation described by Jabotinsky. In The Five the differentiating quality of language is tied to an entire social group rather than an individual. While Bakhtin does suggest that national languages relate to each other in a dialogic manner – that is, they “inter-illuminate” one another – and that social groups can also have a shared semantic position towards others, his writings do not provide a clear indication that these positions will manifest in the speech of individuals within the group. In addition, while reading The Five one gets the sense that Jabotinsky is suggesting, or at least worrying about the possibility, that one’s language reveals some inimitable and innate aspect of one’s identity that is predetermined. The Five follows five Jewish siblings as they each attempt to decide who they will be and how they want to live – it is essentially a Bildungsroman five times over. In such a novel, in which the social and political settings are both on the verge of total upheaval and the decisions one makes can have fatal consequences, the idea that you may not actually have the freedom of self-formation looms like a terrifying sentence. I can’t help but wonder if Jabotinsky, who had spent most of his adult life in a radical project of self-definition and national definition, was using the writing of this novel as a way to look back at the time when he chose the direction of his life and to wonder if everything that had followed had been an illusion.

- Anne Buke is a PhD Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures. 

When a person uses the word “heart,” it can have either literal or metaphorical connotations. When I started watching the 2003 documentary film Chernobyl Heart to prepare for a recent lecture delivered in the CREEES-sponsored course “Issues in Global Health,” I assumed the word “heart” in the title referred to the struggle and perseverance that the people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Russia have demonstrated since the world’s largest nuclear explosion took place there on April 26, 1986. However, rather than the triumph, inspiration, or silver lining I had anticipated, I was struck by the word’s literal meaning, a reference to a heart condition, and a rude awakening about radiation’s lasting effects in the region. Chernobyl “heart” refers to a specific medical condition that is now common among children in the contaminated region, born with multiple holes in their hearts. As I learned from the film and subsequent lecture, the Chernobyl accident is perhaps even more relevant today than it was 27 years ago.

During the lecture, Dr. Herbert Abrams, a professor of radiology, emeritus, at the Stanford School of Medicine, detailed the various effects that radiation exposure has on the body. His first example involved a 26-year-old man who was exposed to radiation during an accident on August 21, 1945, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Because this victim was hospitalized just 25 minutes after the accident, doctors were able to observe the complete spectrum of radiation effects on the body, from the time of exposure until his death 24 days later. The man’s initial reaction included nausea, vomiting, and fever, and progressed to massive ulceration, skin loss, blisters, lesions, and pericarditis before he died. Dr. Abrams also showed photographs from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, noting that radiation levels in Chernobyl were at least 400 times greater than in these incidents.

Dr. Abrams stressed that amount, measured in rads, is the most critical factor in radiation’s impact, since radiation in small, directed quantities is a common treatment for various cancers. He shared a journal article that listed the three specific dose-dependent syndromes associated with radiation sickness. Hematopoietic (bone marrow), the first syndrome, occurs in patients exposed to 200-600 rads, and causes bone marrow to stop producing blood cells; most victims die in about a month. The second syndrome, gastrointestinal, occurs at around 700 rads, and causes even more severe nausea, vomiting, and hemorrhagic diarrhea, as it cripples the intestinal epithelium. Most gastrointestinal victims die in about a week. Finally, the third, the central nervous system syndrome, at about 2,000 rads, causes mental cloudiness, drowsiness, tremors, and brain hemorrhage, in addition to the effects caused by the first two syndromes. For these victims, the exposure becomes fatal within several days.

In contrast to Dr. Abram’s lecture, the documentary Chernobyl Heart explored radiation’s lingering effects, focusing on the region’s children almost 20 years after the disaster. The film follows Adi Roche, the chief executive of an Irish-based charity called “Chernobyl Children International,” as she visits numerous orphanages and hospitals in Belarus and Ukraine to document the disaster’s lasting impact. Her crew documents the extreme birth defects, cancers, and other tragic medical conditions that are now common in the region. Ms. Roche notes that while it is difficult to prove a direct correlation between the disaster and each specific diagnosis, doctors, parents, and other residents in the area stress that these cancers and birth defects were not so common before the explosion. According to Ms. Roche’s organization’s website, there has been a 200 percent increase in birth defects and a 250 percent increase in congenital birth deformities since 1986. Moreover, children living in the contaminated areas are expected to possess “genetic markers” whose long-term effects are still unknown, and which might be passed on to the next generation. With these statistics in mind, it becomes apparent that Chernobyl is not just a disaster of the distant past, but an event whose consequences are with us today and will reverberate for generations to come.

If these harrowing medical statistics are not worrisome enough, the film reiterates another disturbing fact: the structure, or sarcophagus, that now contains the remaining radiation and debris from the accident is nearing collapse. In 1986, when the explosion took place, the reactor released just 3 percent of the lethal material within; the remaining 97 percent is enveloped in unstable concrete that was constructed in haste in order to contain the disaster. Plans for reconstruction emerged in 1998, but the new confinement structure presents tremendous engineering challenges and must be assembled at a distance to keep workers safe from dangerous radiation levels.