The Dreyfus Affair for Soviet Children: on the Encoded Poetics of Aleksandra Brushtein’s Documentary Prose

This essay focuses on the autobiographical trilogy titled The Road Leads Off into the Distance (Doroga ukhodit v dal’) by Soviet-Jewish writer Aleksandra Brushtein (1884–1968). It traces a specific use of a documentary aesthetics that enabled Brushtein to address previously taboo themes in a fictional and allegorical f. Thus, for the first time in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, the novel recasts the life of an educated socialist Jewish family in Tsarist Russia in the form of a fictionalised autobiography narrated by a girl. Furthermore, by implementing various documentary forms, Brushtein provides a detailed account of the Dreyfus affair and the issues of antisemitism within this fictionalised ‘ego-document.’ By recounting the affair to a broader audience for the first time in decades, the novel’s depiction may also be read as an Aesopian reflection on the late Stalinist ‘Doctors’ Plot’.