Nietzscheanism and the Old Testament: Jewish Literature

Jewish literature, comprising a multitude of genres and trends ranging from biblical texts to contemporary prose and poetry, has its roots in the Old Testament. One of its best known works is the Torah, Judaism’s sacred text that contains laws, stories and wisdom. Jewish literature also includes works of classical literature by authors such as Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer and others. Contemporary Jewish literature addresses themes of Jewish identity, national history, religion and culture and continues to influence world literature and culture to this day.

The Golem is the first and most famous novel by the Austrian expressionist writer Gustav Meyrink. The novel was published in 1915 and was a huge success. The scene of the story is laid in Prague. The narrator, who has accidentally mistaken his own hat for someone else’s, finds the name of its owner Athanasius Pernath inside. After this, the protagonist begins to have strange fragmented dreams at night, in which he appears as the very same Pernath − a restorer from the Jewish ghetto in Prague. In these prophetic dreams, the narrator is tormented by premonitions and talks extensively with those around him about spirituality, miracles, God and destiny. Trying to find Athanasius Pernath in reality, the protagonist of the novel discovers that the events he saw in his dreams actually took place many years ago.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Shosha is a touching, poignant story, a rare example of nostalgia for Jewish culture, a love myth in which the spirit of decadence and mythology is amusingly intertwined with everyday life and folklore.

The Aglaja Apocryph by Polish author Jerzy Sosnowski is a brilliant example of combining a utopian communist machine with a romantic love story, in which a woman creates a captivatingly beautiful picture, telling of love, dreams, espionage and a century of technological progress.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being challenges Jewish literature in the form of Nietzscheanism and its slogan ‘God is dead’. The novel has little to do with Jewish literature, but it shades it in the best way possible, demonstrating with its truthfulness and cynicism a certain zeitgeist − a time of godlessness, which finds strength to create its own laws of being.

Lecturer

Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.

The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.

The lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.

Registration