Though H.N. Bialik knew the biblical Prophets in the Hebrew virtually by heart and could compose poetry in letter-perfect biblical Hebrew that would have been entirely intelligible to the Prophets themselves, his notion of the poet as prophet actually came to him from an iconic Russian poem by Pushkin, “The Prophet,” based on Isaiah 6. The lecture focuses on a close reading of his poem Davar (“Word”).

ROBERT ALTER
(Berkeley)

Funding Provided by
Milt & Sheila Hyman
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages and Cultures
UCLA Department of Comparative Literature