Yoav Ronel - 'Love, Zionism and Melancholy in the Prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky'

This talk deals with the representations of a melancholic national and subjective desire, in the prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921), one of the prominent figures of the revival period of modern Hebrew Literature. Berdichevsky – as critics have shown repeatedly – claimed that the national revival will come from the birth of a new, erotic, willful and vital subject: the young, in-love and “detached” (Talush) protagonist of many of his stories, who represents the fracture point of Jewish modernity and secularism at the end of the 19th century. Ronel suggests that erotic love and the desire for a national revival in Berdichevsky’s poetic work appear as experiences of a melancholic desire that does not exhaust itself because it has already lost its object. And that this desire is the hinge around which the new life of Berdichevsky’s work turns. The erotic and vital desire – both subjective and national – is built upon an inherent sadness and melancholy.
The revival period was characterized by a tension between the desire for the founding of sovereign Jewish nationality, and a deep doubt concerning the historical possibility of that project. Berdichevsky held a radical and anti-positivist position concerning the national-political debate: In his publicist and philosophical texts, the author repeatedly called for the need for Jewish sovereignty, and for the cultivation of a subjective and collective erotic will. Such calls stood against Berdichevsky’s disbelief in the possibility of such endeavour, and even in the survival of modern Jewish culture. Ronel argues that the melancholy found at the heart of his work is not opposed to the erotic and the national desire but preserves them. That is why Berdichevsky’s poetic and philosophical language does not distinguish between love and melancholy. Melancholy, Ronel thus argues, is not a biographical or psychological sadness and loss, but a poetic-political device. It is a mechanism for the suspension of subjective and national desire, and functions as the key to a renewed understanding of the author’s work and life.