Her books include The Worlds of S. An-sky, Wandering Soul and The Whole World in a Book.
Safran applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century, and reported the following:
A person who reads just page 99 of my book, more than a person who reads the entire thing, might think that it views Russian political history through a contemporary lens. I write about mid-19th-century writers who live in or travel to the Russian Empire and who describe how they and their fictional heroes listen to and record the words of non-writers, whom they sometimes call “the people.” These writers, I argue, evaluated their own and each others’ listening critically; I see the listening scenes they describe as performances in various genres or modes. In their listening, these writers competed with each other, or with what they saw as other sides of themselves. Their accounts of listening constantly reference the changing communication technology of their period. People sometimes assume that Russia was distinctive in the ways its intelligentsia has felt both oppressed by the government and tragically cut off from “the people,” but this book argues that Russian imperial intellectuals had much in common with members of their mid-century media generation in other countries.Learn more about Recording Russia at the Cornell University Press website.
Page 99 depicts the conflict between Vladimir Dahl, a lexicographer born in Luhansk, and the St. Petersburg censor’s office. When he tried to publish his Sayings of the Russian People in 1853, the reviewers complained that the collection was too inclusive, containing, as it did, evidence of and thus dangerous support for the “people’s” superstition, ignorance, and sectarianism. Dahl defended his collection and his listening techniques, insisting on the authenticity and value of his material, and he drafted a sarcastic letter offering to provide a copy of the manuscript to the Academy of Sciences “if I did not fear the accusation that I would corrupt its innocent morals.” I describe Dahl as listening in an “omnivorous” mode and decrying the censors’ “suspicious” mode of listening, their eagerness to define what others said as threatening to the regime. Dahl too listened suspiciously at times, as when, as part of his work as an imperial official, he made dictionaries of the argots of groups suspected of sectarianism – but he was shocked and insulted to be accused of insufficient loyalty to the government himself. He was not the only imperial bureaucrat to find himself in this paradoxical position.
Like the other characters in the book, Dahl judged himself and was judged by others for his listening to “the people.” His case indicates that although there is a tradition of defining thinkers from this part of the world as simply dissidents or government loyalists, they are actually multifaceted and hard to place. The story of Dahl’s dispute with the censors is representative of the book as a whole in that he was not the only writer I examine to be censored; he resembled Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, Pavel Rybnikov, and Fedor Dostoevsky, all of whom produced ethnographic work after they were exiled for what seemed to be disloyal behavior or writing. Today, in late November 2022, nine months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the question of this Eastern Ukrainian’s loyalties matters differently than it did when I started writing this book. At a moment when hundreds of thousands of people who disagree with Putin’s war have left Russia, it is tempting to categorize Russians as either oppressed or oppressors, good or bad. My book as a whole argues against this bifurcation, even as page 99 provides poignant evidence for its historical longevity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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