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 DOI: 10.1515/arcadia-2026-2002 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | A dream recorded by Samuil Kissin and poems by Vladislav Khodasevich |
| Keywords | Dream Poetry Context archaeology Judaism Population Identity music Negotiation Front military Literature Reading process Jewish identity Trace psycholinguistics The holocaust |
| Key points | Argues that Kissin's dream record and Khodasevich's poems reveal how private oneiric expression and later poetic elaboration negotiate the trauma of Russian-Jewish identity on the Eastern Front during World War I. |
Abstract
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 anti-Jewish violence, and compare the dream’s imagery and cultural patterns with contemporaneous poetic responses by Vladislav Khodasevich. Methodologically, the essay treats dream reports as a distinct kind of testimony: often fragmentary and private, such records register affective and cognitive dissonances that public genres may erase or suppress. Reading Kissin’s dream record alongside Khodasevich’s poems allows us to trace how private oneiric expression (along the lines of Dominick LaCapra’s version of Freud’s ‘acting out’) and later poetic elaboration (‘working through’) negotiate the trauma of Russian-Jewish identity under wartime conditions.