Congratulations to Professor Harriet Murav, who was awarded the 2024 Heldt Prize for best book introducing new, innovative, and/or underrepresented perspectives into any area of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies for her book, As The Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2024). The award was presented at the annual ASEEES Convention in November in Boston and is awarded by the Association of Women in Slavic Studies.
In giving the award, the prize committee remarked, "This astute analysis of literature written during the Russian Civil War examines responses to pogroms by the Jewish writers who experienced, witnessed, poetically reimagined, and investigated them in their immediate aftermath. At the center of this study is the Yiddish term hefker, which translates imperfectly to the English term, “abandon” and, like the latter, can refer to being left vulnerable and without rights, or to a breaking free of norms and a scenario of lawlessness. Murav brilliantly shows how various writers drew on the multivalent potentials in the concept of hefker as she examines poetry and documentary reports conducted by aid workers enlisted to record the destruction and identify the potential for recovery. Observing that “Pogrom poets were intensely aware of the tensions between the ways that violence destroys order and meaning in everyday life,” on the one hand, and the role of order and coherence in poetry and narratives, on the other, Murav shows how these writers’ creative work established new forms and registers for capturing experience and undertaking the work of care."
Please see the AWSS website for more on the prize.