UCLA

This dissertation argues that Stalin’s rumored plan to deport the Jews of the Soviet Union to locations in the Soviet Far East in 1953 can be examined as a plot-generating device, irrespective of the question of its historical reality. Seen in this light, the deportation plan fits the narrative model initiated by the Purim story as recounted in the Book of Esther. The Purim story offered a model for comprehending (and even generating) the plan, as well as for placing it into a Jewish narrative tradition and a characteristically Jewish conception of time as a series of recurrences or analogies between past and present. The dissertation examines fictional treatments of the plan in relation to Stalin’s last days and argues that early works drew upon this model for representing the deportation plan, while later works additionally developed a fictional Jewish resistance effort to Stalin and his regime as a form of symbolic revenge for his Jewish victims in keeping with the inherent ideological requirements of Purim. These works incorporate elements of the Purim story, at times indirectly or even unwittingly, and thereby draw analogies between that story and the deportation plan because they are working in a particular narrative tradition whose “genre memory” conditions a comparison between the events in the Book of Esther with the events of 1953. In order to explain this connection, the dissertation draws on several schools and major figures of Russian literary theory: the historical poetics of Alexander Veselovsky, Vladimir Propp’s morphological study of the folktale, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory. These theoretical tools help explain how the Purim story made it possible for Jewish and non-Jewish writers to make sense of the rumors connecting Stalin’s death to his postwar antisemitic campaigns. By comparing fictional treatments of the plan in the USSR and the West during and after the Soviet era, the dissertation examines how varying sociopolitical and cultural conditions engendered different representations of the plan that can nevertheless be subsumed within the “Purim-Stalin” genre as a kind of literary and cinematic special Purim.