About

Gabriella Safran is the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 1998 and her B.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Yale University in 1990. Safran has written extensively on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky, published by Harvard in 2010, is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, revolutionary, and wartime relief worker. Her teaching and research focus on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is currently working on two monograph projects: one examining how people in the Russian Empire listened across social lines, recorded and imitated voices in various media from the 1830s to the 1880s, and reflected on listening and vocal imitation; the other exploring the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Gender studies
• Economic history
• Political economy
• Art
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Literature
• Linguistics
• History

Selected publications

• Harriet Murav. <i>As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine</i>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024. xi, 317 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $90.00, hard bound. $45.00, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Harriet Murav. As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024. xi, 317 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. 45.00, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• Escape Vehicles

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-10-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines Russian-Yiddish intersections in Russian and Yiddish novels. It argues that while late nineteenth-century novels depict Yiddish as something to escape, as do Soviet Russian-language novels, post-Soviet Russian-language novels could depict Yiddish instead as a means of escape from East European Jewish generational trauma. It focuses on two Yiddish novels and one Russian one, as well as translation between the two languages. In “Fishke the Lame” (Fishke der krumer, 1869, 1888), by S.Y. Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), the narrator’s distracted and un-self-aware speech style signifies generational poverty and ignorance; in The End of Everything (Nokh alemen, 1913), by Dovid Bergelson, the characters reject the Mendele style but cannot escape the confines of their lives; but in Klotsvog (2009), by Margarita Khemlin, the first-person narrator’s distracted speech style is enacted in and tied to Russian and Sovietese, in opposition to Yiddish, which is linked to liberation and self-consciousness.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Comparative Literature · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This special issue provokes a radical reconsideration of the pasts and futures of world literature thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, accompanied by triumphalist declarations of the end of history. Conceived in the wake of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 and completed amid the invasion of Ukraine in 2022—two events with global reverberations that decisively punctured the illusions of a post-imperial, post-socialist, and post-racial world order homogenized by the unfettered spread of neoliberal capitalism—the articles collected here return to the prehistories and afterlives of a distinct body of transnational, transregional, and transmedian works that emerged from a shared desire to think beyond racial capitalism and socialism conceived within narrow ethnocentric and geopolitical frameworks. Looking backward and forward from the turn of the twentieth century to the present and beyond, they present new theoretical approaches and critical toolkits for what we call the literature of socialist anti-racisms. The connected histories of socialist anti-racist literature, however, were far from unadulterated dreamworlds of solidarity and emancipation; its inherent contradictions, visible on the very surfaces of the texts and contexts examined by our authors, assume particularly nightmarish contours from the vantage point of our shared, violent present.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Short Fiction, Language Learning, and Innocent Comedy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Philosophy

  This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

  PublisherDOI

• Recording Russia

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book examines scenes of listening to “the people” across a variety of texts by Russian writers and European travelers to Russia. The book challenges readings of these works that essentialize Russia as a singular place where communication between the classes is consistently fraught, arguing instead that, as in the West, the sense of separation or connection between intellectuals and those they interviewed or observed is as much about technology and performance as politics and emotions. Nineteenth-century writers belonged to a distinctive media generation using new communication technologies—not bells, but mechanically produced paper, cataloguing systems, telegraphy, and stenography. Russian writers and European observers of Russia in this era described themselves and their characters as trying hard to listen to and record the laboring and emerging middle classes. They depicted scenes of listening as contests where one listener bests another; at times the contest is between two sides of the same person. They sometimes described Russia as an ideal testing ground for listening because of its extreme cold and silence. As the mid-century generation witnessed the social changes of the 1860s and 1870s, their listening scenes revealed increasing skepticism about the idea that anyone could accurately identify or record the unadulterated “voice of the people.” The book looks at how writers, folklorists, and linguists such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Dahl, as well as foreign visitors, thought about the possibilities and meanings of listening to and repeating other people's words.

  PublisherDOI

• Crossing

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter argues that people mocked Dmitry Grigorovich as a tourist with a notebook for many reasons: his own demonstrative foreignness; his thematizing of epistemological uncertainty in his own writing; and, especially, Russian writers' need in the midcentury to find examples of inadequate listening to “the people” and to distinguish themselves from those rivals. The chapter begins by looking at Grigorovich's own writing, considering the novella <italic>The Village</italic> (1846), which recounts the short sad life of the peasant woman Akulina. Because Grigorovich was such an entertaining speaker who sometimes behaved like an adolescent, it makes sense to understand him as crossing, claiming a connection with Russian peasants in ways that made his claims of Russianness into “a focal object of play, contemplation, and dispute.” Grigorovich's crossing in <italic>The Village</italic> prompted critical comments and articles that reflected on the logistics and politics of reproducing rural language, even as they played with, contemplated, and disputed the author's identity. The chapter explores the ways in which writers who were engaged in “crossing” used examples other than Grigorovich to express their anxiety over being something like comic philologists.

  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2022

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• Notes

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Paper Making

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter assesses listening and paper making in three stories from Ivan Turgenev's <italic>Notes of a Hunter</italic> (1852): “Khor' and Kalinych,” “The Singers,” and “Bezhin Meadow.” In all three, Turgenev's hunter-narrator thinks about his tenuous aural access to peasant voice. The first includes the purchase of rags to make paper; the second involves a song contest won by a paper factory vatman; and in the third a paper smoother describes a <italic>domovoi</italic> (house spirit), who manipulates the tools in a paper factory. The chapter argues that Turgenev's careful descriptions of hand paper making at a time when paper was increasingly being produced through an automated process—in stories about listening to “the people” in the dark—anticipate and respond to the critics' valorization of unmediated listening. In <italic>Notes of a Hunter</italic>, he finds a different way to justify his transcription of his characters' thoughts and thereby his critique of serfdom: he makes the production of paper and thus writing itself seem a natural part of the countryside.

  PublisherDOI

• Ringing

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses the listening contest between two aspects of a foreign traveler, Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, the Marquis de Custine: the empathetic self that he sees as truly French and Catholic, and the heartless one that he identifies with Russia. Inspired by folklore and by the ideal of Christian unity, Custine and his Russian acquaintances tell tales of Russia as a frigid testing ground for people to demonstrate that they can hear against the odds. Their stories allow one to situate stereotypes about Russian silence in the global media environment of the midcentury, when new cultural tectonic patterns meant that around the world metallic instruments were falling out of use for urban communication. The chapter begins by looking at Custine's depiction of himself as responding to the Russian soundscape with prophetic listening, meaning that he hears a divine voice that others do not. It then studies tales of Northern silence—where frozen words wait to thaw and be heard—that figure in European imaginings of Russia. Finally, the chapter considers texts where the metallic ringing sounds of bells or cannons, in the percussive mode, compel people to think about death and their own guilt.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robin Judd

  New York University Press

  4 shared

• John Bushnell

  4 shared

• Ron Suny

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• David L. Hoffmann

  The Ohio State University

  4 shared

• Saul Cornell

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Lucy Murphy

  New York University Press

  4 shared

• Austin Jersild

  Dominion University College

  4 shared

• David Moon

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures

  Harvard University

  2010