Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies

Dream as the Only Evidence: Samuil Kissin and the Jewish Population in the Front Zone of the Great War

Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies June 1, 2026 Edward Waysband

Abstract My article examines a single, capacious piece of evidence – a dream recorded by the modernist Russian-Jewish poet Samuil Kissin (1885–1916) in a wartime notebook – and asks what that record reveals about Jewish experience and self-identification on the Eastern Front during WW1. I situate Kissin’s dream in its local historical context of expulsions, (self-)censorship, and widespread...