In Search of Marc Chagall: Review Essay

Abstract

Marc Chagall: On Art and Culture, edited by Benjamin Harshav, translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 225 pp. $49.50. Marc Chagall and His Times, A Documentary Narrative, by Benjamin Harshav, with translations by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 1026 pp. $39.95. The two volumes constitute a major ingathering of the verbal culture of Marc Chagall across the twentieth century. In pursuit of his subject, Professor Harshav collected every scrap of letters, poems, essays, notes, autobiographical writings, musings, bills, etc. in Yiddish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and English. He also harvested letters and private communications from Chagall's wives, friends, daughter, collectors and art dealers with the intention of illuminating the complexity of a major plastic artist of the twentieth century. Professor Harshav's own multicultural life shadows in its way the geographical movements and cultural growth of Chagall as the artist moved physically, psychologically and culturally through traditional and secularizing Eastern European Jewish life and culture, Russia of the Silver Age and the Soviet Union, France of the Belle Epoque, the Inter-war years, Vichy, and post World War Two. Harshav pursued the Chagallian pilgrimage to Mandate Palestine and later Israel and even followed to America and captured Chagall's wanderings among the Yiddish cultural emigre milieu in New York and the elite Anglo-American world. Harshav's tireless labors have brought together in chronological order the written artifacts of Chagall's verbal communications. He and Barbara Harshav have cleanly translated them into English and published most of these manuscripts for the very first time. They have performed thereby a most notable accomplishment as Kulturtraegers opening to cultural historians, art historians, post-colonial comparatists, Jewish Studies specialists, etc., the scattered writings of Marc Chagall and his contemporaries. The volume, Marc Chagall: On Art and Culture, gathers together in chronological order 1. the public addresses and communications of the plastic artist and 2. the translation of the first published critical study by Efros and Tugenhold on Chagall's art, written in Russian, which attempted to contextualize Chugall's works as the unique expression of the Jewish Imaginary of Eastern European Jewry. This important short study provided European critics in the Inter-War years -- via German translation -- some fuzzy perspective on Chugall's art without much iconographic help. In the Introduction of On Art and Culture, Harshav provides a biographical overview of Chugall's life and then proceeds to contextualize and interpret his presence in terms of the Eastern European Jewish world in flux just before the Revolution. Then Harshav proffers his explication of Chugall's multicultural personality. From Part i to Part 6, following the chronological order, Harshav presents before each selection a short authoritative commentary which guides the reader to observe in the text what Harshav considers important. This scholarly approach follows the style of positivist literary history manuals which dominated lycees and Gymnasiums in pre-and post-World War One Europe. The presentation of facts is generally unerring. References are minimal and often allude to other scholarly essays on Chagall by the editor himself. Harshav has a perspective that brooks little contradiction. He presents himself as the authorative figure with his knowledge of all these languages, his own life experience as one of the last native Yiddish speakers from Vilna, the crown site of Yiddishism, his own Hebraic and Slavic cultural experiences, and his intuitive understanding -- himself a published poet and distinguished scholar of poetics and linguistic theory. Harshav, therefore, considers himself a guide to a lost world of which he holds the keys (any previous interpretative efforts being comparative failures), and, given this plethora of new documents, implies that his presentation should be taken as authoritative. …