Avraham Shlonsky's Path to the Hebrew Literary Canon

Abstract

Avraham Shlonsky published in 1924 his first poetry volume Distress (Dwai) that was rejected by contemporary criticism. In one decade only, in 1934, appeared Stones of Void (Avney Bohu), the single most central and influential book in 1930s Eretz Israel modernist poetry. In this essay I analyze the changes and reversals in Shlonsky’s poetry and in its reception within a single decade. The volume Distress offered expressionist poetry with abject materials, due to the poet’s aspiration to import European modernism to Hebrew poetry, but posited a model that didn’t cohere with national expectations. In the volume In the Wheel (1927) the same abject repellent materials were transformed into the sublime and appeared in national contexts, thus advancing his acceptance to the canon. In the work Stones of Void Shlonsky returned to European modernism, but imbued it with a symbolism whose musical tones were familiar to many Hebrew readers from Russian poetry. The preference for sheer musicality offered a process of construction in absence, which set up an analogy to the project of national construction. This volume positioned Shlonsky as a canonical poet as it presented the possibility for modernist poetry that was considered appropriate in the Hebrew literary field.