Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940) is a Russian and Jewish writer, a brilliant prose writer, a subtle poet, a caustic publicist, and a sensitive translator, one of the central figures of Zionism, and the largest ideologue of the Jewish state. His literary works were praised by Alexander Kuprin and Maxim Gorky, and he was friends with Korney Chukovsky, who, at the end of his life, spoke of Jabotinsky: “There was something of Pushkin's Mozart in him, and perhaps even from Pushkin himself... Even his enemies must acknowledge... that he was profoundly talented.” This collection includes two of Jabotinsky's most vivid prose texts, the novels “Samson the Nazirite” (1926) and “The Five” (1936). The novel “Samson the Nazirite” is a hymn to love of freedom, a retold and life-fueled story of a biblical character, an imperfect and invincible hero of the era of the Judges. It seems that the plot is well-known (Samson tearing the mouth of a lion; Samson killing a thousand enemies with a donkey's jaw; Samson and Delilah; Samson triumphing over the Philistines), however, Jabotinsky tells of what remained off-camera: the wisdom and anger that slowly grow from the very core of humanity, and the impossibility and inevitability of victory. In the novel “The Five,” written based on Jabotinsky's memories of Odessa in the early 20th century, the furious roar of history mixes with quiet nostalgic sadness, the innocent hooliganism of students intertwines with latent ferocity and selfless revolutionary zeal, and boisterous merriment clashes with stoic resignation. Here resound the irrepressible love of life and gloomy laughter of Babel's “Odessa Tales,” occasionally — almost childlike pathos from Kataev's “The Sail is White Alone,” and sometimes even the elegiac quality of a very distant yet close Vilna from Alexandra Bruschtein's “The Road Goes Far Away...,” however, the heroes of “The Five” are no longer children, and therefore, the foreboding of wonderful and terrifying changes on the brink of the world's destruction resonates clearer and more fiercely within them.
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