High Life

40 品 马克·夏加尔原名莫伊舍·扎卡尔罗维奇·夏卡尔，是典型的犹太名字。 他于1887 年出生在利奥兹诺犹太人村落，距离白俄罗斯主要城市维捷布斯克仅 五十公里，当年属日薄西山的俄罗斯帝国一部分。在沙皇统治时期，犹太人一般 被禁止在栅栏区（或称定居区）以外地区居住。栅栏区的位置与早已亡国的波兰- 立陶宛联邦领土大致相若，后者因多次被奥地利、普鲁士和俄罗斯瓜分领土而不 复存在。栅栏区于1791 年由凯瑟琳大帝设立，并为继后七位沙皇所沿用，直至 1917 年爆发俄国革命。 夏加尔出生在一个操意第绪语的哈西迪犹太教家庭，由于家境贫困且保守派 犹太教禁止图像，据他回忆道，小时候家里没有任何形式的艺术品。当时，动 辄导致上百人伤亡的反犹骚乱时有发生，反犹主义则是家常便饭，是制度化的 内政政策。俄罗斯犹太人当年的处境，与第三帝国于1935 年颁布纽伦堡法案至 1938 年发动水晶之夜期间，德国犹太人的情况极为相似。时至战间期，夏加尔 的作品被苏联当局谴责为「资产阶级产物」，更被纳粹国民教育与宣传部约瑟 夫·戈培尔定性为「颓废艺术」。 在历史的滚滚巨轮前，夏加尔俨如螳臂当车，不得不多次逃离老家俄罗斯和 归化地法国。在惊涛骇浪的情况下，夏加尔得以逃离第三帝国的傀儡政权维希法 国，并在轴心国入侵苏联（代号为巴巴罗萨行动）前一天抵达美国纽约。由于战 事药物短缺，贝拉·罗森费尔德于1944 年卒于当地，令夏加尔肝肠寸断。老家 的命运，则比波兰华沙更悲惨：以木材建筑为主的维捷布斯克几乎完全被夷为平 地，而当地人民的死伤率亦高达99%。 Chagall was born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal in 1887 in the Liozna shtetl, less than 50 kilometers southeast of the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Under tsarist rule, Jews were generally forbidden to live outside the Pale of Settlement, largely comprised of lands of the former Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had ceased to exist following partitions by Austria, Prussia and Russia. Created by Catherine the Great in 1791, the imperial policy was upheld by seven successive Tsars and in effect until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Chagall was born into an observant Hasidic Jewish family of humble origins and frugal means which, by his own account, had no art of any kind at home. During his youth, pogroms remained a constant threat, whereas anti- Semitism was a fact of everyday life, indeed institutionalised. The situation of Russian Jewry was eerily akin to the period between the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and Kristallnacht in 1938 under the Third Reich. His works, meanwhile, were denounced as “bourgeois” bySoviet authorities and branded “degenerate” by propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels. Hapless and helpless before the unstoppable wheel of history, he had to leave his native Belarus and adopted country on several occasions. Fleeing collaborationist Vichy France, he reached the United States just one day after the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, had begun. Due to a medicine shortage, his beloved wife Bella Rosenfeld would not survive the war, nor did 99% of the people of Vitebsk, which suffered a worse fate thanWarsaw.