The Sublime Lightness of Creation

In the third volume of his studies in Russian-language Israeli literature (the first two were Nostalgia for a Foreign Land, 2016, and Elusive Reality, 2020), Roman Katsman discusses its fundamental mythologems, while suggesting a new approach to myth-creation. This is a book about how literature preserves its significance by addressing the main questions of our time through the imagination of miraculous encounter and everyday holiness, catastrophe and salvation, victim and foundation, cities and empires. The book dwells on the most famous as well as the less known but no less bright novelists: Efraim Bauch, Alexander Goldshtein, Linor Goralik, Daniel Kluger, Leonid Levinson, Anna Likhtikman, Elena Makarova, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, Victoria Reicher, Dina Rubina, Yakov Shechter, Nekoda Singer, Dennis Sobolev, Alex Tarn, Yakov Tsigelman, Naum Vaiman, and Mikhail Yudson. This book is for everyone who is interested in modern Russian and Israeli literature and culture, theoretical problems of modern literature, mythopoesis, issues of Russian and Jewish emigration and mobility, the history of twentieth century literature, and literary processes in the twenty-first century