The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature 9780804775625

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The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture e d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination A Case of Russian Literature

Leonid Livak

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s stan f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and the Richard and Dorothy Shiff Fund. Portions of Chapter 12 were originally published as “Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment: ‘the jews’ and the Furtive Pleasures of Liberalism,” The Russian Review (January 2009). No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Livak, Leonid. The Jewish persona in the European imagination : a case of Russian literature / Leonid Livak. p. cm.--(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7055-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Russian literature--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Russian literature--Jewish authors--History and criticism. 3. Jews in literature. 4. Antisemitism in literature. 5. Christianity and antisemitism--Europe--History. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. PG3015.5.J49L58 2010 891.709'3529924--dc22 2010018633 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation Introduction. The Western Wall of Russian Literature

vii ix xi 1

Part I  The Generative Model of “the jews” 1. “The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

27

2. Archetypal Elaboration

55

3. Animal Symbols and Human Types

74

4. The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

88

Part II

How Gogol’s Iankel' Is Made

5. “Taras Bul'ba” in Context

105

6. The Theology of Archetypes in “Taras Bul'ba”

114

7. The Opponent

122

8. The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

129

9. The Temptation of Taras

138

10. The Helper

151

vi

Contents

Part III The Discreet Pleasures of Liberalism 11. Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

163

12. Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

177

13. Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

217

14. Of Chekhov and Garlic

233

Part IV

Concerto for Flute Without Orchestra

15. Reb Goethe and the Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

281

16. Isaak Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

300

17. Writing and Reading in the Margins: Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

337

Notes Works Cited Index

371 439 483

List of Illustrations

Figure 1

“The Jews of Worms” (detail)

79

Figure 2 “The Jews of Worms” (detail)

95

Figure 3

155

C. W. Faber du Faur, “Polish Jews and French Soldiers”

Figure 4 Ivan Turgenev, “The Portrait Game” (details) Figure 5

Charles Léandre, Rothschild, France, 1898

Figure 6 Caricature from the almanac Kikeriki Figure 7 Figure 8

195 244 257

George Du Maurier, an illustration for the first edition of Trilby

272

Vladimir Zhabotinskii, “The Savage Cavalry of the First Hassidic Brigade”

322

Figure 9 Boris Efimov, caricature of Isaak Babel'

328

Figure 10 Mikhail Lermontov as an example of a “jewish” racial type, in Hans Günther’s 1930 racial manual

342

Figure 11 Marginalia within copy of Iurii Fel'zen’s Schast'e

352

Acknowledgments

My greatest intellectual debt goes to the many students who, year after year, have provided me with a challenging testing ground for the ideas and analytical methodology informing this book. Without this continuous trial by fire in probing and demanding classrooms, my study would not have seen the light of day in its present form. This book has been in the making for as long as I have been involved in literary studies. Over the years, my reflection on the problems of cultural modeling and Jewish representation has been influenced by colleagues whose opinions I may or may not share but whose thought-provoking conversation I value as much as I appreciate their interest in and attention to my subject matter. I have had the good fortune to discuss many aspects of my research with Alexander Dolinin, Lazar Fleishman, Vladimir Khazan, Judith D. Kornblatt, Galina Kriukova, Alexander Kulik, Ralph Lindheim, Wolf Moskovich, Harriet Murav, Donna Orwin, Anne-Marie Pontis, Omry Ronen, Gary Rosenshield, Gabriella Safran, Norman Shneidman, Efraim Sicher, Roman ­Timenchik, Elena Tolstaia, Mikhail Vaiskopf, and Vladimir Zviniatskovskii. I am especially indebted to Gabriella Safran for her insightful critique of the manuscript. Excerpts from this study have appeared in academic journals, providing me with invaluable critical feedback that further shaped my thought and methodology. I gratefully acknowledge the following scholarly venues for their openness to my research: Jews and Slavs (13, 2004; 19, 2008), Stanford Slavic Studies (2007), The Russian Review (68.1, 2009). Special thanks go to Steven Zipperstein for opening the doors of this book series in Jewish Studies to me; to Edith Klein for the manuscript’s stylistic proofreading; to Mariana Raykov and Jeff Wyneken for

ix

x

Acknowledgments

its production and copyediting; and to Norris Pope and Sarah Crane Newman for steering the book past the Scylla and Charybdis of academic publishing. Professor Hindy Najman, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, was instrumental in securing a publishing subvention for this book. Some debts are too big to be acknowledged adequately. This is the kind of debt I owe to Ann, Josephine, and Isabelle.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

This volume consistently follows the Library of Congress transliteration system for words and names originally written in Cyrillic characters. However, when palatalized proper names (Gogol', Babel', Iankel') appear in the possessive, formed by the addition of an apostrophe (­Gogol’s, Babel’s, Iankel’s), the prime symbol indicating palatalization is dropped in order to avoid redundancy. All translations from foreign languages into English are my own unless otherwise specified.

xi

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

I n t r o d u c t i o n The Western Wall

of Russian Literature

The representation of Jews by European artists and thinkers is monotonous and repetitive. For almost two millennia, it has drawn on a fixed imaginative lexicon with little variation or originality, suggesting the existence of a common model that generates the Jewish image in theology, philosophy, literature, visual arts, and folklore across European cultures. The concept of stereotype does not convey the durability and continuity of Europe’s imaginary Jews; whether connoting mechanical reproduction or implying the cognitive representation of social environment, it evokes prejudice, inflexibility, and exaggeration.1 As a result, it diverts attention from the Jewish image under scrutiny to the ethical evaluation of its carriers, obfuscating the fact that the conceptualization of ethnocultural otherness is not a matter of fully independent personal choices—our culture shapes us as much as it is shaped by us. In my opinion, the concept of stereotype does more harm than good when applied to the examination of Jewish difference in artistic texts. Clashing with the popular view of art as the domain of individual geniuses who are above the bias of their historical age, it puts many a reader on the defensive, effectively turning the study of the Jewish image in art into an exercise in the interpretive exculpation of art’s creators. For these reasons, I find the concept of generative model to be a more productive analytical tool whose axiological neutrality does away with moralizing value judgment, allowing us to focus on the mechanisms behind the genesis and dissemination of the Jewish image. In addition, and contrary to the idea of stereotype as an unchanging imprint, the generative model accounts for the predetermined historical evolution

1

2

Introduction

of the Jewish image and reflects the fact that the human imagination is both culturally conditioned and not always contingent on empirical knowledge. To my mind, when it comes to the issue of cultural modeling, any quest for understanding requires the recreation, rather than the anachronistic criticism, of the religious and social attitudes that have conditioned the imagination of the producers and receivers of the European discourse about Judaism and Jews. I base my argument for the existence of the common European model generating the Jewish image on the findings of those scholars who, in the wake of the Second World War, radically rethought the phenomenon of anti-Jewish animus. The pioneers of this effort, James Parkes and Jules Isaac, see Jew-hatred as a unique expression of group prejudice arising out of a unique cause—the teaching and action of the Christian Church. They postulate the essential difference of Christian Jew-hatred from anti-Jewish hostility in pagan antiquity, arguing that the former shows “no break in the line which leads from the beginning of the denigration of Judaism in the formative period of Christian history, from the exclusion of Jews from civic equality in the period of the Church’s first triumph in the fourth century, through the horrors of the Middle Ages, to the death camps of Hitler.”2 The next cohort of historians and theologians elaborates and nuances this argument. They show that anti-Judaism is an intrinsic need of Christian self-affirmation and a basic element of Christian exegesis, while anti-Christianity is not proper to Jewish exegesis. They further argue that Christian attitudes toward Judaism and its adherents, unlike the pagan ones, express a theological and existential need rather than political or cultural bias; and that biblical hermeneutics, theology, and the patristic adversus ­Iudaeos tradition shape the legal and social status of Jews in Christendom by affirming the identity of the Church through the invalidation of Jewish identity. Crucially, these scholars show how anti-Jewish heritage thrives independently from the physical presence of Jews in European countries; and how the initial religious rationale for the image of the Jew assumes a number of secular guises.3 Indeed, despite the passage of time, the generative model of the imaginary Jews remains stable, assuring the continuity of the image’s inner logic. As a result, the Jewish persona’s evolution expresses itself

Introduction

not so much in narrative or descriptive changes as in motivational recoding. The Jews of the European imagination maintain their cultural role of the paradigmatic Other after Christianity loses its legal and social hold on European societies. Enlightenment thinkers divorce the image of the Jew from its theological justification and give it an Orientalist raison d’être couched in the novel terms of the secular nation-state. In this reinterpretation, the imaginary Jews become a foil to burgeoning secular identities—a negative referent needed by all those unsure of their “Germanness,” “Frenchness,” “Britishness,” and so on. By the mid-­nineteenth century, the imaginary Jews receive a pseudo­scientific grounding at the crossroads of biology, medicine, sociology, and linguistics, becoming a “Semitic race” that is opposed to the “Aryan” one whose habitat coincides with what used to be known as Christendom. This racial and Orientalist recoding culminates in the ideology of antisemitism, which despite its secular guise, draws on the logic and rhetoric of Christian anti-Judaism and the concomitant tradition of socio­cultural Judeophobia, down to the very terms Semite and Semitic, coined a century earlier by German theologians.4 The ecclesiastic dogma of Jewish immutability since the age of Jesus reassures Christians that their own religious praxis retains its original quality despite the passage of time and informs the historical continuity of the imaginary Jews. That is why European religious and secular authorities, mediaeval and modern, are profoundly disturbed by the existence of rabbinic Judaism, symbolized for them by the Talmud, a fact clashing with their idea of the ossified Jewish worship. In the nineteenth century, the trope of Jewish religious immutability morphs into its new secular guise of ethnocultural immutability. And if, as late as 1835, a Russian historian still argues that “the Jews have kept their religious beliefs and primordial character intact for many centuries,” Robert Knox’s 1862 treatise on The Races of Men already postulates that Jewish immutability is, above all, racial, thus replacing religion with biology as the primary motivation of the imaginary Jews.5 My study proposes to explore the representation of Jews in literary fiction by placing them within the continuity of the Jewish vocabulary of difference not only in Christian but also in post-Christian Europe, to use the term by which C. S. Lewis designates the age of cultural

3

4

Introduction

secularization beginning with the Enlightenment.6 In other words, my analytical approach presumes that most narrative and descriptive peculiarities of the Jewish literary type are traceable to the theological and mythical sources informing the generative model of Europe’s imaginary Jews. This investigation, then, is not primarily concerned with Jewish individuals living in Christian and post-Christian societies. Its main interest lies with the cultural model generating the image of “the jews” whose literary life is my preoccupation. I borrow the jarring term “the jews” from Jean-François Lyotard’s essay Heidegger and “the jews,” in which this signifier’s definite article, lower case, plural form, and quotation marks indicate that it does not refer to real people or groups in any historical period. And while my use of this unconventional term and its derivatives (“jewish,” “jewishness”) may run counter to good style, I am happy to sacrifice stylistic felicity for the sake of the estranging effect this artificial usage produces on the reader, reminding us of the similarly contrived nature of the cultural models that inform the human imagination. With some exceptions, Gentile artists and thinkers did not acquaint themselves with authentic rabbinic Judaism or Jewish life. Their idea of Jews would seem to go against the most elementary verisimilitude were it not for the function of “the jews” as the Christian psyche’s symbolic trope—a rhetorical figure with mythical connotations to which Jews in their historical situation are often incidental. Thus, John Chrysostom’s influential Homilies Against the Jews (387–89) have been deemed a “glorious reading for those who love eloquence and zeal untempered by knowledge.” Secular authors fare no better. Walter Scott’s Isaac (­Ivanhoe, 1817) enters the hall of Cedric the Saxon and “turns eagerly to the smoking mess which was placed before him, and eats with haste” a meal that cannot be kosher, although we are told that Isaac is strictly observant. And to top this culinary mess, “the jews” of Scott’s Russian contemporary cook tzitzit (prayer shawl fringes) and tefillin (phylacteries) identified by the writer in a learned footnote as favorite “jewish” dishes.7 But even those Gentile authors who do have a grasp of the Jewish tradition and the life of contemporary Jews hold on to the image of “the jews.” Catholic and Protestant Hebraists, as well as such a connoisseur of the Talmud as Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, study

Introduction

Judaism for the sake of Christian exegesis and view Jews, at best, as objects of conversionary ambition. Official experts traveling in Russia’s Pale of Settlement to study Jewish life, from Gavriil Derzhavin to the emissaries of the Imperial Geographic Society, only recycle and rationalize their preexisting idea of “the jews.”8 In their obsessive monologic dialogue with Judaism, Christian writers and thinkers rarely allow Jews to argue on their own terms, instead advancing what they think “the jews” should say or do as a religious symbol and a marker of cultural difference. The physical presence of Jews within the reach of Christian observers has never been a defining factor for the “jewish” image. English writers in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and French writers in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, are intensely preoccupied with “the jews” despite the expulsion of Jews from both countries in 1290 and 1394, respectively. Shylock rises to fame at a time when no observable Jewish community has lived in the British Isles for hundreds of years. A similarly keen interest in “the jews” is manifest in Russian culture from the eleventh century on, with virtually no Jews in open sight in Kievan Rus', Muscovy, or the Russian empire until the first partition of Poland in 1772.9 Such examples abound. They alone suffice to place Jewish-Christian economic rivalry among those explanations of Jew-hatred that Martin Buber describes as “superficial and transitory” thanks to their failure to account for the continuous influence of religious patterns on the cultural imagination. They also put a nail into the coffin of the Marxist analysis that presents anti-Jewish animus as a by-product of class struggle. This approach, rigidly adopted by Soviet ideologues and promoted with more finesse by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre, treats Jews as the scapegoats of the ruling classes, who thus channel the fury of the exploited masses. Yet this explanation fails to account for unremitting Judeophobia under communist dictatorships, which supposedly do away with economic exploitation. The same failure to appreciate the role of religious patterns in the cultural—particularly secular—imagination informs, albeit to different ideological ends, Edward Said’s exclusion of Jews from his study of Orientalism (1978) despite the fact that as a method for describing cultural alterity, Orientalism crystallizes in the process of the “jewish” image’s secular recoding.10

5

6

Introduction

Past experience teaches that a scholarly inquiry into “the jews” does not get far if it is predicated on their comparison to Jews. The focus on this comparison among the early students of “the jews” in artistic texts did little to clarify the image’s fuller meaning. Such pioneering works as B. Gorev’s Russkaia literatura i evrei (Russian literature and the Jews, 1917–22), M. J. Landa’s The Jew in Drama (1926), Joshua Kunitz’s Russian Literature and the Jew (1929), and Manya Lifschitz-Golden’s Les Juifs dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (Jews in medieval French literature, 1935) rarely go beyond “an oddly parochial (as well as unhistorical) sense of astonishment that novelists and playwrights could have strayed so far, in their portrayal of Jews, from the biological or physiological or behavioral actuality.”11 The main contribution of the early critics resides in positing “the jews” as a valid subject of scholarly inquiry. But even today, a theoretically updated version of the same approach—“exploring the ways in which literary treatments of Jews in nineteenth-century Russia reflected the realities of Jewish life”—yields few analytical insights.12 Background research and commentary on Jews or Judaism, which hold together such sociologically inclined studies, appear to miss their mark because the subject under investigation requires attention, above all, to Christians and Christianity. A product of cultural modeling often reveals more about those who invoke it than those it describes. Let me make clear that I do not deny links between real life and cultural imagination; nor am I intent on arguing that the behavior of Jewish individuals or groups has nothing to do with the European discourse about “jewish” difference—after all, the Jewish rejection of Christianity is at the core of this discourse. But convinced as I am in the preeminence of cultural conditioning over empirical knowledge in the human imagination, I challenge the traditional view of the relationship between fact and fiction in the construction of the “jewish” Other. In this book, I argue that most historical facts of European Jewish experience are not the sources of the “jewish” image. Instead, they are enlisted to support the image’s preexistent structure. For example, the concept of “jewish” carnality, elaborated by the Church Fathers, finds many embodiments, among them—medieval Jewish moneylenders and modern Jewish capitalists. Similarly, “jewish”

Introduction

demonic seditiousness, as defined in patristic literature, is later confirmed in the eyes of the Gentile majority by a professional specialization of Polish Jews (alcohol-farming) and by the visibility of Jews in radical left-wing politics—historical facts that through the prism of the generative model, acquire the same symbolic function as “jewish” well-poisoning, ritual murder, and aid to the Antichrist. Many critical studies further suffer from the desire to define this or that author’s personal attitude toward Jews on the basis of “the jews” in their works, a desire that tends to blur the lines between literary and extra-artistic discourses and often abuts anachronistic moral judgment. But even if the scrutiny of a given author’s personal attitudes is justified by extra-artistic documentary evidence, the usefulness of this evidence in the interpretation of art as a mirror of personal feelings remains problematic. For instance, does the depiction of Jankiel the tavern-keeper in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1832–34), frequently touted as a Judeo­phile work of art, reflect the author’s true feelings or is it a bow to literary fashion, especially considering the manifest anti-Judaism and Judeophobia of Mickiewicz’s Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage (1832) and of his lectures at the Collège de France (1842–44)? And how can we be sure that extra-artistic Judeophile statements reflect an author’s innermost beliefs and do not just pay lip service to current ideological fads? Consider, for instance, the 1858 protests against the Judeophobe ethos of the Petersburg newspaper Illiustratsiia signed by many Russian and Ukrainian writers whose own artistic depiction of “the jews” would shock today’s reader.13 Most crucially, as they speculate about an author’s personal attitude, critics unjustly presume that an artist should feel something or other for an abstract, heterogeneous, and heterodox group by virtue of utilizing an eponymous stock literary type. This presumption homogenizes a diverse community whose membership is continuously questioned and redefined from within. To admit the very possibility of an artist’s “feelings for Jews” is to reduce the latter to a common denominator in an echo of the Christian procedure of turning Jews into “the jews.” One thinks of the bitter French joke—Un philosémite est un antisémite qui aime les Juifs (A philosemite is an antisemite who loves the Jews)— which, as I will show in the third part of this study, is applicable to

7

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Introduction

the Judeophile discourse in fin de siècle Russian literature. By trying to reconstruct an artist’s personal attitude, critics unwittingly adopt the basic premise of the language of “jewish” difference, which has been recently dubbed allosemitism, “the practice of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them.” This practice hails from Christian theology for which “the jews” are the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God, as Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov argues in 1941—a view that makes the positive and negative “feelings for Jews” two sides of the same coin.14 For these reasons, my study will sidestep the issue of artists’ personal attitudes on the assumption that, before the Second World War, a non-Jewish European author could not have been free from the narrative and symbolic logic of Christian anti-Judaism or the concomitant allosemitism, be it expressed in Judeophobia or Judeophilia. As iconoclastic as they may be in their art and thought, it is naïve to expect artists and intellectuals to defy the symbolic and narrative patterns instilled in them from childhood, especially without a major shift in cultural attitudes in their lifetime, like the one brought about by the slow realization of the full extent of the Nazis’ destruction of Europe’s Jews and of its moral and spiritual implications for Western civilization. True, this is difficult to admit in the case of authors elevated to the status of cultural institutions. Yet the critics who project the iconoclasm of a Dostoevskii, a Solov'ev, or a Rozanov on their writings about “the jews” unwittingly or deliberately obfuscate the unoriginal and derivative nature of these writings.15 This is not to say, of course, that assimilated Jewish writers and readers did not internalize the generative model of “the jews” as part of their acculturation in European societies. This phenomenon, ignored by the pioneers of the study of the “jewish” image in artistic texts, makes the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia a necessary part of any inquiry, including the present investigation, into “the jews” of the European cultural imagination. Marginalizing the issue of authorial attitudes, we also reduce the importance of the thorny question of terminology applicable in the study of “the jews.” The term most often used and abused in the course of

Introduction

many such studies is anti-Semitism. This term was coined by Wilhelm Marr to denote a (pseudo)scientific ideology in contrast to traditional anti-­Judaism and Judeophobia. The anachronistic use of this term in reference to attitudes predating Marr’s Antisemitic League (1880) is counter­productive because it draws on the vocabulary of “jewish” difference in order to describe that same vocabulary. This fallacy is only partially undone by the change in the term’s spelling—antisemitism— recently proposed as a way of showing the senselessness of the concept of “Semitism.”16 Thus, throughout this study, I will speak of anti-Judaism when theology appears to be the primary motivation of the imaginary “jews” (from the Church Fathers to Nikolai Berdiaev to Jacques Maritain). Judeo­ phobia, in its dual sense of hatred and fear, will denote social, political, and cultural attitudes engendered by Christian anti-Judaism, even if their religious sources are no longer apparent. Judeophilia will designate those intellectual trends that espouse the image of “the jews” but advocate their moral improvement and elimination as the religious and cultural Other through favorable social treatment in the hopes of converting (for example, young Martin Luther, the English Puritans, Vladimir Solov'ev) or assimilating them into the modern nation-state (Enlightenment-inspired liberalism). Such terminological distinction is all the more important for my study because Judeophobia and Judeophilia have been the preferred terms in Russia both before and after the birth of antisemitic ideology. Characteristically, as late as 1916 a Russian commentator treats the term anti-Semitism as novel and sees its meaning as different from that of Judeophobia. I will therefore use the term antisemitism in its modified form when the image of “the jews” seems to appeal primarily to racial theories, even if its initial religious motivation remains important.17 To sum up, the present investigation is not concerned with Europe’s so-called Jewish question or with various authors’ putative opinions of Jews as expressed in “the jews” of their literary fiction. My interest lies elsewhere. I explore the meaning and function of “the jews” as a literary type within the economy of artistic texts; and the reasons for which authors invoke this particular type. These reasons, as I will show, reside with writers’ psychological and intellectual idiosyncrasies that are articulated in the imaginative lexicon of Christian and post-Christian

9

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Introduction

cultures. “The jews” loom large in the European code of cultural otherness as the object of projection that reveals more about the personality of its users than about Jews and Judaism.18 This approach, I hope, precludes the marginalization of the inquiry into “the jews,” too often relegated to the periphery of cultural and literary studies by virtue of focusing on phenomena that today may appear as parochial (Jewish experience) or anomalous (antisemitism). It is my conviction that when writers and artistic texts are treated on their own terms, the scrutiny of “the jews” stops being a Jewish matter and becomes an indispensable tool for reaching better insight into the imaginative universe of a Gogol', a Turgenev, or a Chekhov, to cite a few names at the center of my investigation.

❊ The Christian narrative’s basic story, embodied in the Gospels (and especially in their Passion parts), conveys the myth of redemption more effectively than theology, whose outreach is limited to learned elites. This basic story casts “the jews” in a mythical and archetypal role that leaves a profound impact on the receivers of the Christian narrative—so profound, in fact, that “the jews” continue to perform the same role in the post-Christian imagination. This mythical and archetypal dynamic makes “the jews” a perfect candidate for the narratological analysis developed by Vladimir Propp and Algirdas Greimas, as well as for the psychological analysis informed by Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which like structural narratology is grounded in the study of myth and folklore. Scrutinizing the Russian folktale, Propp proposes a set of invariant functions whose combination constitutes a mythical narrative and which are embodied by different dramatis personae in different narratives. Greimas, in turn, addresses the redundancy of Propp’s list of invariants, reducing it to six narrative functions: Subject/Object, Sender/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent. These narrative functions, or actants in Greimas’s terminology, constitute the immanent level of any given mythical narrative. On the apparent level, these actants are personified by various dramatis personae, or actors. Greimas shows that each actant can have any number of actors in a given narrative; and, inversely,

Introduction

an actor can personify several actants.19 Proceeding from Propp’s descriptive typology to the elaboration of a deep structure common to all mythical narratives, he postulates the possibility of a single model generating several narratives. Finally, Greimas’s vision of actant pairs with opposite functions echoes Jung’s idea of psychological archetypes as having two faces, positive and negative, impersonated by different characters in different narratives. Drawing on this theoretical framework, I will argue that Christian narratives employing the actor called “the jews”—be they ecclesiastic, folk, or artistic narratives in nature— are informed by this actor’s role as the simultaneous personification of two actants, Helper and Opponent, in the basic Christian story, which thus sets the narrative principles of the generative model of “the jews.” A question immediately arises. Can “the jews” ever act out the Subject, especially at a time when cultural secularization seems to challenge Christian imaginative patterns? Consider modern Judeophile artistic narratives: these ideologically motivated works tend to preserve the actor’s traditional function and descriptive lexicon, simply banishing the Opponent and stressing the Helper in the image of “the jews” as meek and defenseless do-gooders who persist in their secondary role of a litmus test for the religious or secular virtues of the Gentile actor(s) playing the Subject. Hence the ease with which, from the early days of political liberalism, European authors shuttle between “jewish” villains and saints.20 In fact, even if all but “jewish” characters vanished from a Judeophile text, its saintly “jews” would still not embody the Subject in the eyes of the Gentile reader, because this function belongs to the authorial persona implicitly present in the text and whose exhibition of liberalism challenges the majority opinion. But what about assimilated Jewish writers? Can “the jews” play the Subject in their artistic texts? Theoretically, this is possible; but in practice, as I will argue in the last part of this study, such cases are hard to come by. It follows that the study of “the jews,” whose narrative function is secondary by definition, may very well distort authorial intent and consequently amounts to the deliberate violation of a literary text’s semantic structure. We commit interpretational fallacy by the very fact of focusing critical attention on those literary personages who are relegated to the circumstantial roles that are fully contingent on the role

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Introduction

of the narrative Subject. A case in point is the modern treatment of The Merchant of Venice as a play about Shylock, although the merchant in the title is not Shylock, who is originally conceived by Shakespeare as a character auxiliary to the play’s Christian heroes and, in keeping with his narrative function, exits the stage long before the play’s end. Likewise, Gogol' could not have imagined that the character of Iankel' in his “Taras Bul'ba” would one day overshadow the Cossack whose name appears in the story’s title. Embracing nonetheless the interpretational fallacy that makes “the jews” the focus of literary analysis, my study will make every effort to keep this critical procedure from becoming more anachronistic than it already is. To this end, I will consistently analyze “the jews” of Russian and Russian-Jewish writers against the backdrop of the original cultural and historical circumstances of the texts in which this actor appears.

❊ The elaboration of “the jews” from an actor embodying a narrative function to a stock type in European art and folklore is mediated on several discursive levels. If the basic Christian story instills in the minds and psyche of its recipients the narrative role of “the jews,” theology provides the rudimentary vocabulary to describe this actor. Beyond the Gospels, clergymen propagate the image of “the jews” in didactic tales (exempla), sermons, hagiographies, apocrypha, and anti-Judaic tracts (the adversus Iudaeos genre). Their effort is paralleled in the church drama and visual arts of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, and in the school drama and quasi-religious puppet theater (vertep, betleika, and so on) of east Slavic lands. Anti-Judaism and Judeophobia are disseminated, first and foremost, by the learned elite: written or commissioned by clerics, the verbal and visual vehicles of the imaginary “jews” ensure the transformation of a theological abstraction into a stock figure of folklore. Filtered through folklore, “the jews” often re-ascend to the level of the elite, as in the cases of the blood libel legend in Western Europe; or of the Cossack songs composed in seminaries but cited by seventeenth-century Ukrainian scribes as folk traditions.21 Secular authors add another dimension to this dynamic. For instance, Chaucer’s “Prioress Tale” simultaneously draws on the blood libel leg-

Introduction

end recently minted by an English cleric and on the folklorized Miracles of the Virgin, thus consecrating the novel motif of ritual murder by the force of artistic persuasion and the prestige of the written word. And if after the decline of ecclesiastical culture the generative model of “the jews” retains its hold on the European cultural imagination, it does so owing largely to the combined impact of folklore and secular art, which convey the narrative and descriptive peculiarities of the actor called “the jews” as effectively as exegetic and didactic religious genres.22 Early students of “the jews” in art typically adopted a diachronic approach: they wrote histories of the “jewish” image, favoring a comprehensive chronological survey over a selective analysis. This approach presumes that over time the image undergoes changes meaningful enough to warrant an exhaustive account of its manifestations in a given national artistic tradition, historical period, or literary genre, often at the expense of the comparative rapprochement of texts from unrelated historical, cultural, or generic series. Yet such a comparison reveals the image’s remarkable lack of change. And it is precisely this continuity that renders most diachronic studies of “the jews” in the European artistic and cultural imagination dishearteningly monotonous and repetitive. A study informed by the idea of art history as a cumulative progression focuses on the evolution of artistic forms and is predicated on the concept of change. But a lack of change is also significant and requires explanation. Since the human imagination is subject to cultural conditioning, artistic expression is rooted in social conventions and may defy authorial intent by appealing to the collective memory of a given author’s culture. As a result, the diachronic logic dictating that an artistic event in period C is shaped by homologous events in periods A and B tends to overlook the possibility that all three might draw on the same implicit model in the imaginative vocabulary of their culture. This model can be revealed by bringing to a common denominator chronologically, geographically, and generically disparate instances of “the jews,” as I attempt to do in the present study. By adopting this comparative approach, I hope to clarify the “jewish” image’s fuller implications in modern literary, philosophical, and political discourses—implications that are not always apparent even to the image’s contemporary

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Introduction

carriers and consumers—against the backdrop of the pan-European generative model, which has been producing this image for centuries.

❊ While the life of “the jews” in Western ecclesiastic, folkloric, and artistic discourses has been adequately described, it remains poorly elucidated in the Russian cultural sphere. Few methodological equivalents to the post–Second World War scrutiny of “the jews” in Western European literatures and cultures exist in Russian studies. The notable exceptions are all very recent and include such work as Alexander PereswetoffMorath’s monograph on the adversus Iudaeos tradition in medieval Russian literature; Mikhail Vaiskopf’s survey of Russian Romanticism; Leonid Katsis’s and Henrietta Mondry’s studies of modern Russian art and thought; and Ol'ga Belova’s explorations of east Slavic folklore. Such relative paucity is not surprising if we consider the failure of Russia’s intellectuals to grasp the larger significance of the Shoah, in part due to Soviet ideological pressure and in part to their own unreadiness to face the harsh truths of Christianity’s role in casting Jews as Europe’s paradigmatic Other—witness the resistance to post-Auschwitz theology manifest among Russian theologians who persist in the millennia-old one-way dialogue with Judaism and in its concomitant denigration to the ends of Christian self-affirmation.23 Moreover, the extant studies of the “jewish” persona in Russian letters, including recent work by such Western Slavists as Gary Rosenshield and Elena Katz, ignore some eight hundred years of the image’s development on the Russian soil and view it as a modern importation from the West.24 But even though secular art in Russia is a late bloomer, it takes a leap of faith to explain the ubiquity of “the jews” in ­nineteenth-century Russian literature by foreign literary influences alone. Since the introduction of Christianity in Kievan Rus' (988), the Russian cultural imagination has been haunted by “the jews” despite the virtual absence of Jews in Russia until the late eighteenth century. Western influences, even when they were stimulated by interest in the empire’s recently acquired Jewish minority, could not have been the only, or even the defining, factor in fostering the persistent attention to “the jews” as a literary type manifest among modern Russian writers.

Introduction

While we cannot deny the role of foreign examples in a young secular art form, the Russian literary tradition in all its aspects (exegetic, homiletic, epic, hagio­graphic) is not much younger than its Western counterparts. For centuries this tradition codified the image of “the jews” in Russian culture and should not be discounted in the study of this image in modern Russian literature. Despite its present lacunae, the study of Russia’s “jews” is not a matter of filling a minor gap in the story of Europe’s paradigmatic Other as told by Western scholars on Western material. This study enriches our understanding of the image’s meaning and mechanisms in general. This is because Russia’s “jews” are informed by a combination of factors unknown in the West. The Russian empire was the only modern European state whose treatment of Jews drew explicitly on the precepts of Christian anti-Judaism. Russia became the staging ground for a clash of medieval religious attitudes and modern Western thought, from the Enlightenment ideal of acculturation to racial science to antisemitic ideology.25 Furthermore, the study of the “jewish” persona in Russian art and thought faces unique methodological hurdles whose resolution may open new horizons for inquiries into “the jews” of other European cultures. The lack of a post–Second World War tradition elucidating Russia’s imaginary “jews” makes us turn to Western scholarly examples and methodologies. But are there limits to the application of these approaches, developed on Catholic and Protestant material, to Orthodox Russia? Can we view a culture reputed for its premodern isolation as part of the European continuum for the dissemination of the “jewish” image? Finally, what are the boundaries of the Russian cultural sphere in the larger Orthodox one, considering that population flow between Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia ensured the cross-fertilization of Orthodox and Catholic intellectual, artistic, and popular traditions concerning “the jews”? A case in point is the poet and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin, who is dispatched at the very beginning of the nineteenth century to the empire’s recently annexed western provinces with the task of forging a state policy on Russia’s Jewish minority. Born in Kazan', far from Catholic influences and observable Jewish communities, Derzhavin travels to Ukraine and Belorussia with the basic baggage of Christian

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Introduction

anti-Judaism and the idea of “the jews” inculcated by the Russian ecclesiastical and popular traditions. Yet the traveler not so much observes Jews as absorbs the local lore about “the jews.” The result, recorded in Derzhavin’s diary and reported to the tsar, is an amalgam of religiously motivated Judeophobia, with quotes from a sixteenth-century Russian anti-Judaic treatise (Iosif Volotskii’s Prosvetitel'); modern political theories from the West; and Catholic-inspired popular traditions—all of it integrated in the author’s preexisting imaginative framework. As far as Derzhavin’s idea of “the jews” goes, then, no barriers exist between Catholic and Orthodox theology; Western and Russian political thought; or Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian folklore.26 The methodological problems listed above cannot be adequately treated within the confines of my study. I will only briefly formulate my position inasmuch as it informs my approach to “the jews” of the Russian cultural imagination. The doctrinal theology underlying Byzantine and Russian ecclesiastical traditions is that of the ancient Church and the seven ecumenical councils—essentially identical with the doctrinal theology of the Western Church. The Great Schism of 1054 did not concern the Church’s teaching about Judaism. Nor did the Protestant Reformation challenge traditional theological anti-Judaism and the concomitant image of “the jews,” maintaining both at the center of its exegesis and myth. The treatment of Jews in Byzantium—the primary source of religious and legal thought in Kievan Rus'—followed the same theological and legal premises as the treatment of Jews in the Latin West. There was a constant exchange of ecclesiastic and popular traditions regarding “the jews” between Byzantium and Latin Christendom. These traditions arrived in Kievan Rus' and Muscovy through both Greek and Latin channels.27 Christianity brings anti-Jewish propaganda to Rus' not only in the form of the New Testament but as a literary genre that includes treatises against Judaism and exempla about “the jews” for popular consumption. The anti-Judaic homilies of John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian are very common in Rus' and Muscovy; they circulate in all major canonical readers (Margarit, Zlatostrui, Izmaragd) and imbue original Russian works with the ideas and phraseology of the patristic adversus Iudaeos tradition. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the in-

Introduction

tellectual elite of the recently baptized Kievan Rus' (unlike its Byzantine counterpart, which is then consumed by anti-Latin polemics) pays significant attention to “the jews.” All authoritative Byzantinists—from Hilarion to Clement Smoliatich to Cyril of Turov—reiterate in their sermons the Church’s teaching about Judaism and its adherents, laying the groundwork for Judeophobia in Russian culture.28 In the thirteenth century, Russian anti-Judaism branches out into historiography and hagiography. Concern with “the jews” marks “The Tale of the Baptism of Rus'” (the Primary Chronicle), in which prince Vladimir evaluates Judaism following the Byzantine “selection of faith” literary plot. Historiography is also the focus of translations from Jewish sources (usually via Greek versions) with added Christological commentary. Among these annotated translations are excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, Paleia tolkovaia, which replace the Bible in Russia until the sixteenth century; Tolkovaia Psaltir', Russia’s source of the Psalter text; Josephus’ The Jewish War; and many other texts (such as Slovesa sviatykh prorok; Arkhivskii [Iudeiskii] khronograf; Knigy vremen'nyia i obraznyia Georgiia Mnikha). These polemical works—continuously recopied and cited by such different figures as the sixteenth-century persecutor of heretics Iosif Volotskii and the seventeenth-century schismatic Avvakum—use the Christological revision of Jewish history to position Rus' and Muscovy within the framework of universal history. This quest for identity stimulates the anti-Jewish zeal of the Kievan neophytes and later of the Muscovite adherents of such political doctrines as “Moscow—the third Rome” (fifteenth century) and “Rus'—the new Israel” (sixteenth century). The same preoccupation with “the jews” marks Russian medieval vitae. In the oldest hagiographical collection, the ­Kievan Crypt Paterikon (thirteenth century), monks didactically confront “the jews” in implicit or explicit theological disputations and take passion from them in imitation of Jesus and Byzantine literary models.29 Unlike these sources, intended for consumption by the learned elite, Greek and Latin apocrypha are a major venue for the transmission of the elite’s anti-Judaism and Judeophobia to the population at large. A case in point is the gospel of Nicodemus (including the Acts of Pilate and the Epistle of Pilate) whose Russian versions circulate in sermons (Cyril of Turov), legends, popular prints, and folk verse from

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Introduction

the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. This apocryphal text serves as the focus of theological reflection at the time of Ivan the Terrible; periodically enters Russian canonical readers; and already in modern times informs such literary works as the grand duke Konstantin Romanov’s play, Tsar' iudeiskii (The King of the Jews, 1914), and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1940).30 Ol'ga Belova convincingly illustrates the existence of a common corpus of folklore about “the jews” in the areas of Eastern Europe with Orthodox populations. The shared Byzantine-Kievan religious heritage, at least with regard to “the jews,” informs Orthodox popular cultures despite their geopolitical divisions.31 For the purposes my study, then, I will treat Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian folklore as one east Slavic discursive body of texts. Furthermore, thanks to their shared theological roots in the Latin and Greek doctrines, “the jews” of east Slavic folklore do not essentially differ from those of Catholic and Protestant areas. There is a plethora of cognate Western and Russian folk traditions about “the jews,” which share the same Byzantine ecclesiastical sources or result from direct Catholic influences. Thus, in the Latin West the Greek Miracles of the Virgin give rise to the widely disseminated tale about “the jews” who throw a boy into the flames; the same tale has numerous Russian equivalents.32 Greek exempla also travel both ways. For instance, Russian adaptations of “The Merchant’s Surety” (“the jews” cheat a Christian, but a sacred object exposes them) have their Catholic homologues. Similarly, the Byzantine tale of disputation between an ascetic and “the jews” exists in east Slavic and Germanic versions; as does its derivative about a buffoon and a “jewish” philosopher. The list of examples is long, since Russian scribes often adopted Catholic and Protestant traditions even when Greek versions were available.33 All this suggests that as far as Christianity’s paradigmatic Other goes, confessional differences are not all that important. In my opinion, the commerce of Orthodox and Catholic, ecclesiastic and popular, traditions about “the jews” justifies the application of the methodologies developed by Western researchers to Russia’s imaginary “jews.” Russia’s oft-exaggerated isolation from the West does not place its culture outside the European continuum for the dissemination of the

Introduction

“jewish” image. Latin ecclesiastic and legal influences arrive in Rus' via Bohemia and Poland in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, adding to the spread of popular Catholic traditions about “the jews” by foreign merchants, wandering German mimes, and the Dominican monks whose order establishes itself in Kiev in the early thirteenth century and views anti-Jewish propaganda as the core of its missionary activity.34 Latin traditions about “the jews” manifest themselves in various ways on the Russian soil. The doors of the Novgorod Cathedral, made in Germany before 1138, feature Christ’s arrest and flagellation by “the jews” wearing conic hats in accordance with Catholic legal praxis and iconography. Originally Catholic, nativity scenes and the Church drama travel via Poland to Ukraine and Belorussia (sixteenth century) and as far as Siberia (eighteenth century) in the form of puppet shows whose main villains are “the jews.” Even such popular Russian folk narrative as “Son Presviatoi Bogoroditsy” (The dream of the Holy Mother of God), which contains an attack on “the jews,” may be of Catholic origin.35 The Muscovite elite translated many Western works dealing with Judaism and “the jews”—a practice surviving well into the eighteenth century.36 A case in point is Novgorod’s archbishop Gennadii. This persecutor of the “Judaizing heretics” knew about the expulsion of Jews from Spain even before its completion and expressed his admiration for the methods of the Spanish Inquisition. A fighter for the purity of the Russian Church, Gennadii did not hesitate to draw on Western sources: he ordered the translation of German Christological commentaries to the Hebrew Bible and of Latin anti-Judaic treatises—the apocryphal Epistle of Rabbi Samuel (1339) and the works of the twelfth-century Franciscan monk Nicolas of Lyre. Gennadii surrounded himself with Catholic scholars for the purpose of fighting the “Judaizing heretics.” At the same time, he borrowed from the very heretics he fought several translations of Western adversus Iudaeos texts, since the alleged Russian Judaizers were equally hostile to Judaism.37 This use of “the jews” as the primary symbolic trope for conceptualizing human foes and hostile ideologies testifies to Russian culture’s integral place in the European continuum for the dissemination of the “jewish” image. Indeed, from the very start of the Christian experience, feuding Christians accused one another of “jewish” practices. Byzantine polemicists

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Introduction

routinely assimilate to “the jews” all those Christians, whether Greek or Latin, whose beliefs or praxis they deem heretical. The same rhetorical tool is used in the inter-Protestant and Protestant-Catholic polemics. Luther and his followers describe the Catholic Church as “the Synagogue of Satan”; Anglicans put Presbyterians in the same category; and the Polish Church accuses all Protestants of both “Judaizing” and converting Christians to Judaism. And since “the jews” are Europe’s main paradigm of difference, Byzantine and Latin writers see their Muslim foes as but a version of “the jews.” Thus, if the invading Mongols are identified by European scholars as the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Luther extends this classification to the Ottoman Turks. Moreover, from the seventeenth century on, the European colonial discourse tends to describe newly encountered peoples in terms of the Lost Tribes of Israel, be they the Australian aborigines, the Eskimos, or the American Indians.38 The same imaginative mechanism is manifest in the logic and rhetoric of Russian polemicists. Kievan and Muscovite authors routinely accuse Catholics of “jewish” worship. The Church sees a fifteenth-century Russian Protestant movement as a “Judaizing heresy” spread by “the jews,” although historians have been unable to confirm the heretics’ Jewish ties. The seventeenth-century Russian Church schism employs the same polemical devices. Archpriest Avvakum, a leader of the Old Believers, describes his foes as the Christ-killing “jews,” while the official Church’s supporters do likewise in reference to the Old Believers.39 Following Greek models, Muscovite authors equate the Ottoman Turks with “the jews.” And folkore echoes this equation. In Russian epics, Christians fight an army that is above all “jewish” but is also pagan and Muslim. In fact, any political enemy is potentially “jewish.” Thus, a chronicler describes Pskov’s sixteenth-century rebellion against Moscow as “jewish” behavior. Beginning in the seventeenth century, proRussian Ukrainians accuse Poles of favoring Judaism over Orthodoxy; Polish polemicists retort that the anti-Polish Ukrainian leader, Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, descends from “the jews”; and the pro-Polish Ukrainians see the Russian Church as “Judaizing.” It comes then as no surprise that east Slavic popular traditions commonly encode as “jewish” any religiously or culturally marginal group.40

Introduction

To sum up, even a cursory overview of the dissemination of the imaginary “jews” in Rus' and Muscovy belies the contention of some historians that “the jews” of the Russian cultural imagination are the product of Polish Judeophobia, which spreads into Russia after the partitions of Poland and subsequently finds a new life in the antisemitic ideology similarly imported from the West. This claim looks too much like a psychological projection, considering that a structurally identical yet opposite school of thought holds “Muscovite Jew-hatred” responsible for the Judeophobe culture of the Polish-controlled Ukraine. Both arguments are as dubious as they are indefensible by the high scholarly standards of their promoters.41 Anti-Judaism and the resulting Judeophobia came to Russia with Christianity and we should consider them no more foreign to Russian culture than Christianity itself. Kievan Rus', Muscovy, and the Russian empire are part and parcel of the European cultural space for the dissemination of the “jewish” image. In this light, the custom of depicting the Last Judgment scenes on the western wall of Orthodox churches acquires new significance, especially since Judas, the eponymous representative of “the jews,” figures prominently in the Last Judgment iconography. Using the pompous metaphor “the temple of Russian letters” (khram rossiiskoi slovesnosti), engendered by the cult of literature in nineteenth-century Russia, we can in all justice describe “the jews” of the Russian literary tradition as characters from the western wall of that temple. And not just because their artistic representation on the western wall of Russian literature mirrors the one we find in all European literatures. Russia’s imaginary “jews” are fully comprehensible only in the context of the generative model they share with their counterparts in other European cultures. As a result, they serve as Russian literature’s permanent point of contact with its Western counterparts.

❊ My study is divided into four parts. The first one examines the image of “the jews” at the intersection of Greimas’s and Jung’s analytical methods in order to lay bare the narrative and archetypal logic, as well as the basic descriptive vocabulary, encoded by the generative model of “the jews.” Here I establish the analytical framework for the subsequent

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Introduction

inquiry into the imaginary “jews” in the works of individual Russian and Russian-Jewish writers. The second part shifts attention from the general to the specific, analyzing the two redactions of Nikolai Gogol’s story, “Taras Bul'ba” (1834, 1842)—a text that became as paramount to the representation of “the jews” in Russian literature as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to their depiction by English writers. This close reading will test the analytical framework elaborated in the first part of my study by exploring the uses to which an individual artist can put the generative model of “the jews” in specific cultural, literary, and historical circumstances; and the extent to which these uses are shaped by an artist’s intellectual and psychological idiosyncrasies. The third part once again shifts the reader’s attention, this time from the close reading of one literary work to the comparative study of “the jews” in several texts by two authors: Ivan Turgenev’s “The Jew” (Zhid, 1846) and “The Hapless Girl” (Neschastnaia, 1869); and Anton Chekhov’s “Mire” (Tina, 1886) and “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (Skripka Rotshil'da, 1894). Here I will attempt to illustrate how apart from being a repository of a creative writer’s psychological, intellectual, and aesthetic anxieties and concerns, the imaginary “jews” can serve, on the one hand, as the means and the pretext for an intergenerational artistic and philosophical dialogue within one national literary tradition, and on the other hand, as a bridge enabling cross-cultural intercourse between seemingly unrelated events in the artistic and intellectual life of modern Europe. The last part of my study explores the dynamics of “jewish” representation in the writings of assimilated Jewish authors for whom Russian language and culture are the only means of creative self-expression. To this end, I examine the literary oeuvre of the Soviet writer Isaak Babel' and the émigré writer Iurii Fel'zen, whose respective political and existential choices reflect their radical aesthetic and philosophical differences. The discussion of “the jews” in Babel’s and Fel'zen’s writings will lead us to the larger problem of Russian-Jewish authorship. By scrutinizing, against the backdrop of its generative model, the “jewish” persona in the works of Russian writers of Jewish descent, I hope to highlight the hitherto ignored problems in the ongoing critical debate

Introduction

about the very possibility of Russian-Jewish literature as distinct from Russian-Jewish writing. Since I do not intend this study as a history of the imaginary “jews” in Russian letters—as already mentioned, exhaustive histories are redundant by virtue of the image’s lack of structural change—my inquiry begins in the 1830s and ends on the eve of the Second World War. Such temporal brackets are not dictated by any notable shifts in Russian cultural attitudes. Indeed, the opposite is true: even the shock of the Shoah failed to disturb the continuity of the “jewish” image in Russian culture, as most recently illustrated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay Dvesti let vmeste (Two hundred years together, 2001)—a compendium of unselfconscious Judeophobia steeped in the tradition of the Russian imperial discourse about “the jews.”42 I am simply bound by the authors and texts I have chosen for analysis, a choice dictated by my personal view that “the jews” in the writings of Gogol', Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel', and Fel'zen stand out (not least thanks to the complexity of their creators’ art and personae) against the backdrop of the uncountable “jews” in Russian letters who are as predictable, repetitive, and dull as only stock literary types can be. But the same is true for “the jews” in the literary traditions of all European cultures. It is my ultimate hope, therefore, that the analytical method developed and tested in this study may contribute to the investigation of “the jews” in non-Russian cultures as well.

23

O n e  “The jews” in Christian Theology

and Myth

As theology and myth pay unequal attention to events and personages within one religious system, the importance of references to “the jews” in creeds may vary by writer, but the actor called “the jews” is central to the Christian myth. The narrative structure of this myth shapes one’s idea of “the jews” even without exposure to theology, permitting the image’s survival in post-Christian cultures. The Christian myth originates in Paul’s doctrine, which combines Jesus’ deification with the view of his death as a cosmic sacrifice whereby Evil tries to defeat Good, unwittingly causing a salvific event (I Cor. 2:8). In this myth, “the jews” commit deicide, “killing the Lord Jesus [. . .] and opposing all men” (I Thes. 2:14–16). In other words, “the jews” are cast in the stock mythic role of a power that brings about the necessary redemptive death of a deity. Pairing Jesus and “the jews” in a deicidal relationship, the Christian myth continues the tradition of such pairs in world mythology (compare Osiris and Set, Baal and Mot, Balder and Loki, and so on). As Jesus’ persecutors, “the jews” serve Satan, whose narrative role is transparent in his very name—the Hebrew stn and the Greek diabolos both have the root meaning akin to that of the English opponent. Such identification with a narrative function makes the motives of “the jews” as an actor quite incidental—narrative logic overshadows motivation. Indeed, as Frank Kermode shows, the basic Christian story is driven by actants, not actors. In Kermode’s estimate there was no Judas in the earliest accounts of Jesus’ death. Judas materialized only gradually, reflecting the Christian myth’s fusion of the figure of betrayal, committed by all the apostles who did not share Jesus’ fate, with that of ritual sacrifice.1 Judas is chosen as Satan’s proxy in the basic Christian story

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The Generative Model of “the jews”

­ ecause his hellenized name derives from the patriarch and tribe of b Judah, making him a symbol of “the jews.” This etymology is still evident in the homonymous relationship of the terms юдеи, иудеи (Jews) and Юда, Иуда (Judas) in east Slavic folklore and early modern Russian drama, which often combine them into one phrase: юдушка-юдей (Judas-Jew), жиды-юды (Jews-Judases).2 In the Gospels, “the jews” are a negative signifier referring to the Jewish religious community as a symbol of all that resists Christ. Luke’s “jews” deliver (3:13), deny (3:13–14), betray (7:52), condemn (13:27), kill (2:23; 7:52; 10:39; 13:28), and crucify (2:23; 2:36; 4:10; 5:30; 10:39) Jesus, while the Romans are exonerated (3:13; 13:28). In John, this usage implies that “the jews” as a people oppose Jesus, clamor for his blood (19:14f.), and execute him (19:16). Matthew, likewise, suggests that not just their leaders but “the jews” as a whole wish Jesus dead: “All the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” (27:25). Like Luke, John exculpates the Romans. His Pilate refuses to crucify Jesus under Roman law, but “the jews” insist that he die under their own law of blasphemy. The intimidated and aggrieved Pilate gives Jesus “to them to be crucified” but has Jesus’ title, “King of the Jews,” affixed to the cross in confirmation of his messianic claim (19:6–22). The same exculpation of the Romans marks the apocryphal gospels and European folklore. East Slavic traditions see “the jews” as the only persecutors of Jesus, unlike the Romans, who either appear as his helpless friends or become indistinguishable from “the jews.” Thus, Pilate figures in the popular imagination as “a Jewish prince” and “a Jewish bishop” (compare “the rich Jew named Pilate” of English ballads) flanked by “the Pilate-Jews” (zhidy-pilatyri, zhidy-stropilaty).3 Algirdas Greimas’s view that an actor can personify several actants is especially pertinent for the narrative functions of Helper and Opponent. Secondary by definition, both functions are contingent on the Subject, being the projections of the Subject’s desire to act (Helper) and of the Subject’s doubt vis-à-vis this desire (Opponent).4 Such narrative logic informs the basic premise of the Christian myth: since Jesus’ death is paramount to universal redemption, his slayers play simultaneously the Helper and the Opponent. Paul deals with this axiological paradox, wherein the executioner is both a villain and a benefactor,

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

by arguing that Jesus’ foes act unwittingly, as “God’s enemies for your sake” (Rom. 11:28). His view enables Luke (7:52), Matthew (26:54), and Mark (14:49) to present the crime of “the jews” as an act that both challenges God’s authority and follows God’s plan. This logic also goes into explaining Satan’s actions as part of the divine plan to strengthen the true faith (Helper) by putting it to test (Opponent).5 Using Greimas’s schema of narrative functions, the structure of the basic Christian story can be represented as follows: Immanent level (actants) Apparent level (actors) Subject Jesus Redemption Object Sender God Receiver Humanity Opponent Satan, Judas, “the jews” Helper God, Mary, Joseph, Apostles, Followers, Romans, Satan, Judas, “the jews” The Evangelists’ appointment of “the jews” as an actor embodying two opposite functions is dictated by Christianity’s paradoxical dependency on its rejected ancestor-faith. Judaism is so crucial to the Christian self-image that even the hatred its practitioners allegedly nurture for Jesus and his religion serves to reassure Christians in their identity. This hatred shows that “the jews” pay unremitting attention to Christianity, fearing and therefore confirming its righteousness. “Judaism defines itself in opposition to Christianity. [. . .] The Jews are not and cannot be indifferent to Christianity,” intones Sergei Bulgakov, projecting his obsession with the false cult of “the jews” on the Jewish tradition, whose attitudes toward Christianity historically range from complete indifference to defensive polemics in the periods of increased Christian attacks.6 In Rosemary Ruether’s view, Christian anti-Judaism expresses a need to legitimize the new religion in Jewish terms by insisting that Christological reading reveals the true meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. As long as the practitioners of Judaism do not share this reading, the validity of Christianity remains problematic. Such a role makes “the jews” a repository of religious doubt. “In this sense,” writes ­Ruether, “the Jews do indeed ‘kill Christ’ for the Christian, since they preserve

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the memory of the original biblical meaning of the word Messiah which must judge present history and society as still unredeemed. For Judaism, Jesus cannot have been the Messiah, because the times remain unredeemed and neither he nor anything that came from him has yet altered that fact.”7 Let us qualify this statement by adding that even if Judaism had ceased to be actively practiced, Christianity would still have needed its hermeneutic “jews” to deal with its basic aporia, namely, that Christ’s coming did not restore humanity to its prelapsarian state. But in the context of Judaism’s coexistence with Christianity, the deicide charge indeed articulates the awareness that Jewish disbelief challenges Christian belief. Consequently, the quality of “the jews” as a theological scapegoat reinforces their narrative role, since the Opponent is little more than the destination for the Subject’s displaced doubt about the attainment of the Object. The scapegoat is a repository for the negative part of the human psyche, which it helps to purify by making evil visible (conscious) and therefore removable. John Chrysostom articulates this scapegoat function of “the jews” when he refers to their worship as polluted and diseased.8 But if theology projects on “the jews” the doubt about its own validity, the Christian myth sends their way the guilt of all those who implicitly benefit from Jesus’ death, which has all the trappings of a human sacrifice, as confirmed by John’s chronology, where this death coincides with the slaying of the Passover Lamb (19:32–36). As key participants in this human sacrifice, “the jews” act out the mythical role described by Hyam Maccoby as “the sacred executioner” and by René Girard as “the secondary scapegoat”—they perform a socially required yet reprehensible task, assuming the blame for the slaying, which benefits the society at large.9 Like the mythical Sacred Executioner, “the jews” are both untouchable and degraded. This degradation is expressed by the metaphysical dispossession that strikes “the jews” as divine punishment for their deicidal crime: God’s covenant with Abraham passes onto Christians, who become the new and true Israel. As a result, the Christian revision of Jewish sacred history focuses on the polemical appropriation of the Jewish tradition and pushes the problem of authenticity to center stage. The correct (authentic) interpreter of the Jewish Scriptures is also

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

the rightful heir to God’s promises. Thus hinging on the metaphysical dispossession of “the jews,” Christian identity is firmly anchored in the logic of a family feud over inheritance, a feud in which “the jews,” in their quality of the carriers of the ancestor-faith, are alternately imagined as a parent-figure and an elder sibling. This imaginative dynamic of filial strife was especially urgent in cultures that valued patrilineal heritage, considering that the mystery of Jesus’ birth was far from universally accepted in early Christianity. Repressed doubt about the authenticity of Jesus’ claim to divine parentage is echoed in the ambiguous status of God the father in the Christian myth. God’s insistence on the death of his son to expiate the sins of humanity is a figure of anxiety at the unutterable thought that he is rejecting Jesus’ filial claim and with it the Christian claim to the status of the verus Israel. This anxiety is taboo in Christian theology, which speaks instead of God’s love for humanity as manifest in the sacrifice of his son. As a result, the taboo apprehension and animosity toward a cruel and rejecting God the father are displaced on his devotees and ever-suspected favorites, “the jews.” Dominated by the male imagination, the basic Christian story thus furnishes the dramatis personae to animate the private oedipal psychodramas of its recipients. A Christian male, encouraged to identify with Jesus, can associate God the father with “the jews” as Christianity’s parent-figure, given that ambivalence toward parents, expressed in simultaneous gratitude and resentment, is mirrored in the dualism of the narrative role of “the jews” as Christ’s Opponent-Helper.10 Take, for example, the memoirs of Russia’s grand duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich Romanov, who wrote, recalling his childhood: Before coming into contact with the official Church, I associated the word Jew with the figure of the old smiling man who used to bring chickens, ducks, and other poultry to our Tiflis palace. I felt sincere affection for his kind, wrinkly face and could not have thought that Judas had been his forefather. My catechism teacher, however, told me daily about the suffering of Christ. He corrupted my infantile imagination until I saw every Jew as killer and torturer. He impatiently rejected my timid appeals to the Sermon on the Mount: “Yes, Christ told us to love our enemies,” father Georgii Titov would say, “but this must not change our view of the Jews.”11

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Ostensibly, this is an account of formal religious instruction. But the author must have had prior exposures to the basic Christian story, being aware of Judas as the forefather of “the jews,” who are described here in tune with their mythical status—an aged paternal figure that both nourishes and slays (the fowl has been or will be killed). Furthermore, there is no proof, other than the writer’s assumption, that the purveyor of poultry was actually Jewish. The claim is doubtful in light of the Russian imperial court’s intense Judeophobia and its consequent fear of “jewish” pollution. It is probable that the child saw the purveyor as “jewish” because he had the qualities that the young Christian associated with “the jews.” Such examples of the place of “the jews” in the oedipal imaginary of male Christians are aplenty. We find one in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s memoirs, Dichtung und Warheit (Poetry and truth, 1811). The author recalls his childish horror of “the jews” imagined as a parent-figure whose “cruelty toward Christian children” he knew from the ritual-murder mural in Frankfurt’s bridge tower. Another example hails from Nikolai Leskov’s unfinished autobiographical sketch whose young hero, living far from the Pale of Settlement, is acutely aware of the danger posed by “the jews” to Christian children. It may not be an accident that the oedipal role of “the jews” was first laid bare and parodied in art by a woman. Resentful of his father’s sacrifice of paternal duties to “the affairs of the nation” (compare God’s sacrifice of his son to the greater good), the young hero of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Harrington (1817) is given to hysterical fits at the sound of “jewish” old-clothes men under his windows. After his mother bribes one such trader to make him disappear, “the jews” arrive en masse to seek similar rewards, until it turns out that they are actually Christian beggars dressed up “as like [. . .] a malicious, revengeful, ominous-looking Shylock as ever whetted his knife.”12 ❊ The initial rationalization for the actorial appointment of “the jews” is provided in the New Testament and patristic literature. By the fifth century, the Church doctrine about Judaism and its practitioners was in place. Scattered in literature from Paul to Augustine and never set

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

forth in one document, this doctrine nevertheless shapes ecclesiastical teaching about Judaism and civil legislation concerning Europe’s Jewish communities.13 Moreover, this doctrine’s principal themes furnish the invariant situations and rudimentary lexicon to describe “the jews.” These situations and vocabulary, in turn, sow the seeds of the homiletic, artistic, and folk narratives in which “the jews” receive further imaginative development through analogical thinking informed by psychological archetypes, animal symbolism, and human stereotypes. The principal themes of the Church doctrine about Judaism and its adherents include: the substitution of Judaism by Christianity; the inability of “the jews” to understand their own Scriptures; the deicidal nature of “the jews”; the divine punishment visited upon them; and the role of “the jews” as witnesses to the truth of Christianity. Examining these themes with an eye on their narrative and descriptive potential, we must keep in mind that the transformation of the theological abstraction called “the jews” into the eponymous actor of homiletic, popular, and artistic narratives follows two basic principles: the realization of metaphors through the literalist application of symbolic language, and the possibility of a dual interpretation for each quality attributed to “the jews”—a duality engendered by the actor’s narrative function of the Helper-Opponent.

The Replacement and Supersession of Judaism by Christianity Christian substitution theology holds that at the time of Jesus Judaism was a degenerate cult which had traded spirit for matter; and that the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah fulfilled God’s covenant with Israel, making the Jewish Scriptures valid only insofar as they predicted the advent of the Church. Jesus replaced Israel in God’s eyes, and Christians became the new chosen people. The Mosaic Law was abrogated and replaced with God’s Grace. The revelation of Jesus as the Messiah voided the religious praxis of “the jews” of all spiritual significance by contrast to the spirituality of Christian worship.14 These theses, challenged only by the Vatican II council (1962–65) and still upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church, are expounded through

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a limited set of tropes that link “the jews” to the semantics of obsolescence to reflect their outlived religious praxis. Common among them are metaphors opposing Christianity and Judaism as light and darkness or life and death. Polemicists quote John 6:53 (“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye shall have no life in you”) to depict “the jews” as uniformly old or even corpselike, and frequently oppose the flourishing Christianity with the withering Judaism, its branches broken off from their holy root and its source (the Law) dried up. The Christian imagination has fostered this imagery for nearly two millennia. As late as 1864, “the jews” represented for Russian publicist Ivan Aksakov “that which has ceased to live. [. . .] The believing Jew,” writes Aksakov in his essay against Jewish civic equality, “keeps crucifying Christ and carries on in his mind the desperate and furious struggle for an outlived right to spiritual primacy against the One Who came to abolish ‘the Law’.”15 To illustrate the contrast between Christianity’s spiritual fertility and Judaism’s barrenness, exegetes routinely appeal to the biblical story of Jacob’s wives, casting the infertile Leah as “a type of the synagogue” and “the younger and beautiful Rachel, [as] a type of the church, who [. . .] brought forth Joseph, who also was himself a type of Christ.” And since the stigma of spiritual infertility marks “the jews” as parasitical, theologians see this actor, who gives birth to and then rejects Christianity, as a negative parent-figure akin to the cuckoo—a bird that places its eggs into the nests of other birds.16 The popular imagination elaborates on and literalizes the exegetical image of “the jews” as the living dead and the spiritual parasites who usurp the Scriptures they cannot properly use. On the one hand, “the jews” are assimilated in European folk traditions to other mythical parasite-exploiters, who subsist on the flesh and blood of the living—witches, vampires, and the like. On the other hand, they serve as the ur-symbol of exploitation, be it economic, sexual, political, or cultural. Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers, for whom culture is synonymous with Christian civilization, translate the theological meaning of “the jews” as an antiquated and infertile entity in the terms of their inherent intellectual obscurantism and barrenness in cultural endeavors. According to this secular reinterpretation of religious tropes, “the jews” always

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

emulate the achievements of others instead of creating their own. This motif becomes especially urgent in the nineteenth century, when assimilated Jews enter en masse the European field of cultural production (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology), sparking intermittent debates about “the jews” as artists and creators of cultural values, debates which only recycle and secularize the idea of “jewish” spiritual infertility, now as the result of “jewish” cultural foreignness and racial inferiority.17 The theological designation of “the jews” as the parasitical undead reaches its ultimate development in the actor’s appointment to symbolize physical, spiritual, and cultural decadence in fin de siècle Europe. The imaginative potential of substitution theology is manifest in literary fiction. It informs, for example, Walter Scott’s description of Isaac of York as an “emblematical personification of the Winter season” (71), and Pushkin’s treatment of the Wandering Jew legend in an unfinished poem of 1826, where “the jews” mourn the death of a child (their only progeny) against the backdrop of an old man pouring over the Bible. Pushkin’s plan was to have the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus bring them the good news about Christ’s birth. We find the same logic in the nineteenthcentury Russian travelogues whose “jews” pray and get married wearing funeral shrouds; their synagogues recall tombs, and their decrepit living quarters blend effortlessly with local cemeteries and provoke musings about the ephemeral nature of all things. There is little originality, therefore, in Ivan Bunin’s 1910 sketch of Jerusalem’s Western Wall and of “the jews” who pray in front of it, resembling “biblical corpses” with faces “pale as death”—an image his narrator contrasts to that of the child Jesus in the Temple, no doubt to suggest the futility of “jewish” worship.18 Substitution theology conveys the struggle for primacy between Christianity and its ancestor-faith by rhetorical tropes that are steeped in the semantics of a family feud. But since the father-son rivalry comes dangerously close to revealing the basic Christian story’s repressed ­oedipal animosity toward God, the father’s role in the exegetic discourse is played by an elder brother (Judaism) stripped of his birthright by a younger sibling (Christianity). Accordingly, theologians use biblical stories of sibling rivalry—particularly the tales of Abel, Isaac, and Joseph— to argue that the Hebrew Bible prophesies Judaism’s supersession by Christianity. “The Jews lose and we receive” is a common summary of

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this metaphysical expropriation, which is often couched in the terms of material dispossession: “the jews” lose not only their favor with God but also the land and property given to them by God. We find this motif of material dispossession in the Kievan Primary Chronicle’s “Tale of the Baptism of Rus'” (thirteenth century); in medieval Latin poetry, which depicts the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in the year 70 as a crusade avenging Jesus’ death; and in the Khludov Psalter illuminations (ninthcentury Byzantium), where Mount Sion is topped by a church.19 Historically, the trope of the replacement of “the jews” by a new verus Israel has been the primary metaphor in the self-­conceptualization of emerging European nations. A variety of millenarian thinkers nurture theories about the forthcoming baptism of “the jews,” by force or gentle persuasion, in their homeland, which would thereby become the Promised Land. Such theories punctuate the intellectual histories of Portugal, Spain, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, and America. In Russia, millenarian conversionist zeal peaks in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, flaring once again in Vladimir Solov'ev’s writings.20 But the ethos of rivalry inherent in substitution theology often tips the balance in favor of confronting, rather than converting, “the jews.” Thus, in Fichte’s theory about the Germans as the chosen nation bringing spiritual regeneration to the world, “the jews” figure as the antipode, the spiritual usurper opposed to this mission. Russia’s Slavophile ideologues, likewise, endow the Russians with the universally redemptive spiritual mission hindered by the anti-chosen people of “the jews.” And the same logic informs Dostoevskii’s idea of “the jews,” inseparable from his messianic belief in the divine purpose of the Russian people.21 The motif of metaphysical dispossession reflects the Christian method of revisionist interpretation, which reduces the Jewish tradition to a host of figures prognosticating the coming of Christ—what Erich Auerbach describes as the “figural interpretation” and Harold Bloom as the “appropriation and usurpation” of the Jewish Scriptures. This revisionism is predicated on the basic dilemma of the “jewish” image. On the one hand, it downgrades the status of the Hebrew Bible to the auxiliary role of a source text whose only raison d’être is to furnish evidence in support of the new faith (the Helper function). Christian creeds are superior to those of “the jews” even in name, since the adjective in “Old

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

Testament” bears the connotations of spiritual obsolescence. On the other hand, oblivious of the Christian reading of their Scriptures, “the jews” continue to claim as their own the text that codifies their Law, thus challenging Christianity (the Opponent function).22 The resulting ambivalence toward the “Old Testament,” evident already in the quandary of Paul’s disciple Marcion, who rejects the Jewish Scriptures as the work of Satan, is palpable across Europe. In England, the round-topped diptych design for the tablets of the Law is applied both as a sacred attribute in the depiction of Moses and as a negative emblem of “the jews,” and is finally adopted in 1218 for the denigrating Jew-badge. In France, the illuminated Bible des Limbourg (fifteenth century) features a funeral of the female allegory of Judaism holding the tablets of the Law. A German house relief (Regensburg, sixteenth century) depicts “the jews” forcing a sow to read a tablet of the Law. In Russia, the apprehension of the Hebrew Bible leads to the common ignorance of its contents (apart from the Psalter): the full text of the “Old Testament” is compiled in Muscovy only in 1499, in response to the “Judaizing heresy.” The view that a close study of the Jewish Scriptures leads to heresy or insanity informs the Kievan Paterikon’s vita of Nikita Pecherskii (thirteenth century) and still has to be ridiculed in Antiokh ­Kantemir’s 1738 satire. As late as 1825, the entire stock of the Torah in Russian translation is burned in Petersburg as heretical. Another form of anxiety regarding the “Old Testament” is aired by the eighteenth-century French theologians who blame “the jews” for tampering with the Scriptures to conceal their Christological message. Similar ambivalence vis-àvis the Hebrew Bible marks the modernist revival of mysticism in fin de siècle Russia despite its radical rethinking of the ecclesiastical dogma.23 Some students of “the jews” in European art tend to view its use of biblical motifs as an expression of “positive feelings” toward Judaism and its practitioners. A case in point is Viktoria Levitina’s Judeophile reading of Artakserksovo deistvo—a theatrical adaptation of the Book of Esther performed for the Russian tsar in 1672. But the play’s text does not bear out Levitina’s thesis: it casts Esther as the “new queen,” a symbol of Mary and the Church, who comes to replace the disobedient “old queen”—a transparent allusion to Judaism. The Book of ­Esther in fact readily lends itself to Christological appropriation, hence

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Luther’s high regard for its didactic potential. Furthermore, Esther’s story traditionally functions in Christian Europe as a source of political allegory. Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, for example, liked to be called the new Esther, all the while banishing Jewish merchants from Russia as Christ-killers. Advocating the ideal of the enlightened monarchy, Gavriil Derzhavin depicts Esther as a Mary-figure who transforms the vengeful despot Artaxerxes (God-figure) into “the Tsar who is god and man” (Christ-figure). And in keeping with this didactic tradition, Vladimir Sokolovskii’s 1837 versified adaptation of the Book of Esther makes the heroine convince Mordecai, the symbol of “the jews,” of the superiority of Christian values. Symptomatically, Sokolovskii’s opus was published by the tsar’s political police.24 Early modern drama in Russia and Ukraine abounds in biblical stories reread in Christological terms and adapted to current political needs. In these texts, Solomon praises the Trinity and Mary; Daniel informs Nebuchadnezzar about the birth of Jesus; Judith tells Holofernes that “the jews” will be divinely punished for rejecting Christ; Joseph’s brothers betray him with the words, “His blood be on us and our children”; Isaac and Job prefigure Christ; Abraham asks God to make Russia his chosen nation; and David’s “meek and patient” kingdom symbolizes Russia, while the army of Goliath is a figure of Sweden (in the vertep, David’s puppet wears a crown with a cross).25 The “reverence toward Israel” gleaned by today’s students of the “jewish” image in such polemical rewriting of the Jewish tradition strikes me as anachronistic, wishful thinking. This well-intentioned reading all but obscures the ethos of dispossession informing Christian substitution theology by subscribing to a secular myth of our time, that of the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—a hyphenated pairing that has fascinated some observers of European cultural history by its violent incongruity.26

“The jews” Cannot Understand the Spiritual Meaning of the Bible Preoccupation with authentic interpretation informs Christian theological claims that “the jews” misconstrue the Scriptures by giving

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

them a literal reading. Blind to the higher (Christian) meaning, “the jews” do not see the evident truths of the sacred texts because God deprived them of spiritual vision and gave them “eyes that should not see” (Rom. 11:7–8), so that “when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ it is taken away” (2 Cor. 3:14–16; 4:3–4). Consequently, the literal-minded “jews” observe the material precepts of the Law in contrast to the spirituality of Christian worship. As inauthentic interpreters, “the jews” are enemies of truth and “never get their fill of blaspheming their Benefactor.” All their utterances are therefore profane by definition.27 Spiritual blindness and literal-mindedness reveal the essential carnality of “the jews.” In the Kievan Paterikon, they exemplify gluttony and drunkenness, while in George Herbert’s opinion, “He that doth love, and love amiss / This world’s delights before true Christian joy, / Hath made a Jewish choice.”28 The carnality of “the jews” means that their worship is materialistic and has no spiritual significance. Writes ­Vasilii Rozanov, “The Jews do not have a religion in any spiritual sense. Instead, they have endless daily rituals: ways to wash, to eat, to trade. Instead of a religion they have material rites, material ceremonies, material traditions” (italics in the original). This view is common in twentiethcentury thought. Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov, for instance, denounce the ideology of antisemitism, all the while castigating Judaism as the antireligion that codifies the precepts of materialism. Along the same lines, the reputed antisemite Otto Weininger sees the development of “modern materialistic science” as a manifestation of “the Judaic element” in culture, whereas his contemporary, the reputed Judeophile Vladimir Solov'ev, derives the triumph of capitalism in Europe from “jewish” antispirituality. Not to be outdone, Berdiaev links both capitalism and communism to the religious materialism of “the jews.”29 A common trope describing the interpretive deficiency of “the jews” is that of impaired sight, not least because of its prominence in the tale of Paul’s conversion. Paul’s claim that “the jews” have “eyes that should not see” is recycled by John (“He has blinded their eyes” 12:37–40) and many later writers. Echoing the association of “the jews” with darkness, the exegetes who use the figure of impaired sight appeal to the story of Jacob’s wives, wherein “the elder Leah with weak eyes” is “a type of the

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synagogue.” Speaking about “the jews,” theologians distinguish between interior (spiritual) and exterior eyes—physical sight is not enough to see the truth. This logic introduces the motifs of distorted vision and mistaken identity into the conceptualization of “the jews”: they once saw Jesus but missed his true identity in much the same way as now they read the Scriptures but miss their true meaning.30 Finally, realizing the metaphor of impaired sight, medieval homiletic literature and visual arts posit the eyes and vision of “the jews” as loci of difference. Following the logical progression from literal-mindedness to carnality to materialism, Christian writers describe “the jews” as inherently immoral. As an embodiment of carnality, “the jews” live for the lower nature alone—a conclusion that implies, among other things, their sexual deviance. Pursuing luxury and pleasure, “the jews” are thus homologous to women, the ur-symbol of sexuality and carnality in the eyes of the Church Fathers. The association works both ways. As the weak link in the divinely sanctioned community, Christian women are more likely than men to ally themselves with “the jews.” On the other hand, “the jews,” their gender notwithstanding, can acquire qualities marked as female.31 Not contenting himself with the association of “the jews” and women, Chrysostom writes, “After collecting troops of effeminates and a big mob of female prostitutes, [the Jews] drag the whole theater [ . . . ] into the synagogue [which] is not only a whorehouse and a theater; it is also a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals.” The animal simile in this passage is not a mere invective. Suffering from the incapacity to ­understand, “the jews” are akin to animals by virtue of mental deficiency, unspirituality, and immoralism. Canine similes are especially popular in the description of “the jews,” in part because they allow the application of such phraseological clichés as “rabid/mad dogs” and “blind like a puppy,” which stress “jewish” mental deficiency and spiritual blindness. In Russian linguistic context, canine similes additionally mark the speech of “the jews” as profane and libelous, owing to the polysemy of the verbs laiat' (to bark, to curse) and brekhat' (to bark, to lie).32 In the opinion of theologians, the spiritually void religious praxis of “the jews” only parodies Christian worship, just as their interpretation of the Bible mocks its Christological reading. This quality of the dis-

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

course of “the jews” as a blasphemous parody posits their speech as a locus of difference and makes them homologous to the figure of the Fool, equally rich in demonic connotations. Characteristically, Russian didactic literature stigmatizes all profane and foul language as “jewish” well into the seventeenth century.33 In addition, the “jewish” anti-­interpretation of the Bible gives rise to an invariant situation—the intellectual contest between Christians and “the jews.” In the world of realized metaphors, there is no need for explicitly theological disputations inevitably ending in Christian triumph, although such exempla and folk tales are common in all European cultures. Swindling “the jews” in daily life is an equally legitimate affirmation of the truth of Christianity (compare Gurth in Scott’s Ivanhoe: “To suffer the Jew to pay himself would be [. . .] unchristian, since it would be plundering a believer to enrich an infidel,” 132). By the same token, the failure of “the jews” to defraud a Christian shows the superiority of the winner’s faith.34 In modern times, the interpretive deficiency of “the jews” is extended to all forms of intellectual activity. It serves to rationalize the axiomatic inability of “the jews” to create cultural values—a secular form of the theme of “jewish” spiritual infertility discussed above. They cannot be original philosophers or artists because, as Ivan Aksakov puts it, “the limited worldview to which the Jews are doomed by refusing to supplement the Old Testament with the New” prevents them from “rising to the abstract understanding of the essence of the Jewish question,” let alone of other social and cultural matters.35 The standard Enlightenment trope of “jewish” cultural obscurantism and religious fanaticism, which has its heyday in the official discourse about “the jews” in nineteenth-century Russia, also draws on the tradition of “jewish” spiritual blindness and literal-mindedness, even though the tsarist officials and ideologues motivate this trope by pointing to the debilitating effects of a Talmud-centered education. Describing “the jews,” theologians implicitly distinguish between reason (wisdom) and intelligence. Reason is the spiritual quality of seeing through the surface of things, while intelligence denotes the ability to manipulate objects and information and is proper to both animals and humans. As the generators of untruth, “the jews” can be cunning (intelligent), but they do not possess reason, for otherwise

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they would have perceived their religious error. G.-E. Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (1779) seems to challenge this perception, endowing “the jews” with wisdom. But in the play’s Judeophile logic, wisdom is the quality of those “jews” who admit the truth of Christianity, albeit without converting. The unbelieving lot of them, however, remains “dumb, stubborn, and mad,” to quote Vil'gel'm Kiukhel'beker’s “Agasfer” (Ahasuerus, 1842). The same clash of intelligence and reason is projected on cultural matters and eloquently stressed in Matthew Arnold’s opposition of “Hebraism and Hellenism” (1869) as the two pillars of the Western civilization, the former “setting doing above knowing” and the latter striving “to see things as they really are”— principles that distinguish, in Arnold’s view, the “Semitic race” from the “Indo-European race.”36 In Arnold’s day, the secular recoding of the “jewish” image shifts the trope of mental inferiority from the spiritual to the sociocultural and medical planes. In 1858, a Russian ethnographic sketch described “the jews” as “ignorant in all that did not concern daily life, incredibly stupid with regard to abstract notions, but sharp and subtly ironic in the resolution of practical matters.” Gentile responses to the success of assimilated Jews in professional and cultural fields follow this logic. The smart “jews” are said to owe their achievements in the natural sciences, law, medicine, and journalism to the extraordinary ability they possess in materialistic matters. At the same time, “the jews” are denied the capacity to create original art or philosophy because of their alienation from the spirit of European cultures. Ultimately, the theological trope of “jewish” mental deficiency finds its realization in the belief endorsed by the fin de siècle psychiatric science that “the jews” suffer from congenital nervous disorders. This figure of the hysterical and neurotic but smart “jews” survives even today.37

“The jews” Are the Deicidal People The deicidal murderousness of “the jews” is commonly conveyed by Christian exegetes through such phrases as “the synagogues of the crucifiers,” “the Jews nailed/fastened Him to the cross,” “the Jews

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

tortured Him much,” “a Jew pierced Him with a spear,” “the deicidal multitude of the Jews,” and so forth. This imagery still punctuates the Holy Week services of the Russian Orthodox Church. Capitalizing on this theological and homiletic tradition, east Slavic folklore and early modern Russian and Ukrainian drama describe in graphic detail the deicidal crime of “the jews.” Russian high culture also keeps abreast with the deicidal accusation: the collective and exclusive guilt of “the jews,” with the Romans nowhere in sight, is stated matter-of-factly by the most original Russian theologians and historians of religion well into the twentieth century.38 Construing “jewish” deicidal guilt as both collective and continuous, theologians find in the story of Cain and Abel a prefiguration of the crime and punishment of “the jews.” Writes Augustine, “We say to the Jews, ‘You put Christ to death’, although it was their parents who did this, so they will grieve for having in a sense done themselves what was actually done by those from whose stock they have descended.” Like Cain, the eternally guilty “jews” serve as a didactic negative example for all to see. But this also means that “the jews” function as Jesus’ structural analogue. Like the physical stigma carried by Cain (Gen. 4:15), the stigma of “the jews” is the mirror reversal of Jesus’ stigmata as symbols of physical mortality and spiritual immortality (John 20:19–31). As Christ’s antipode, “the jews” are spiritually dead yet physically preserved by a divine decree.39 The notion of the continuous and collective guilt of “the jews” was not a mere hermeneutic abstraction—it informed state policies toward Jews. Purging newly conquered territories of their Jewish population, Ivan the Terrible used to say that “no tsar, prince or king should trust or spare those who betrayed and killed our Savior.” In a similar vein, Mikhail Romanov’s coronation manifesto (1613) discredited a pretender to the throne, the second False Dimitrii, as a leader of “the deicidal Jews.” Among other things, the continuity of the deicidal charge ­implies that “the jews” always yearn to do to Christians what they did to Christ. This idea remains urgent in Jewish emancipation debates in eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century Russia. In 1890, emperor Alexander III wrote on a petition for relaxing Russia’s antiJewish policies, “We must never forget that the Jews crucified our Lord

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and spilled his priceless blood.”40 This logic lays bare the rationale of the deicidal accusation, which as mentioned above, articulates Christian self-doubt and anxiety vis-à-vis the continued practice of Judaism. We find the same logic in the Kievan Paterikon’s vitae of Theodosius, Evstratii, and Nikon. Theodosius “went to the Jews [. . .] reproaching and reviling them, and calling them rebellious and lawless, because he wanted to be killed preaching about Christ.” The way this monk goes about convincing “the jews” to convert suggests that he is hoping not so much to baptize them as to imitate Jesus, taking martyrdom from Christ-killers. And although the episode’s historical basis is dubious, its inclusion in a hagiography shows that the author expects his readers to find the episode plausible. The vita of Evstratii capitalizes on the same expectation. Captured and sold to a Jew in Chersones, the monk enjoins fellow Christian slaves to starve and “die in Christ,” who “redeemed us from the curse [of the Law; Gal. 3:13]” and “made us sons and heirs.” Blaming Evstratii for the death of his slaves, the Jew crucifies him. “When the day of Christ’s Resurrection drew near, he mocked the holy Evstratii—what they did to our Lord Jesus Christ, and how He was mocked, is written in the Gospel—and so also this blessed man was nailed to a cross.” The Jew offers to take Evstratii down on the condition that he break his fast, but the monk only taunts the Jew, who then kills him with a spear. That very day “the jews” are expropriated and expelled from Chersones. The tale contains the familiar motifs of substitution theology. It employs the tropes of sibling rivalry and dispossession: Christians are free from the Law as “sons and heirs”; “the jews” lose property; the slave owner’s taboo function as a figure of a cruel, law-imposing God is veiled by his theological role as a rejected elder sibling replaced by new “sons and heirs.” Other notable motifs include pollution fears (the rejection of “jewish” food) and the view of Mosaic Law as a yoke (slavery). Finally, the continuous deicidal guilt of “the jews” is manifest in the casting of the monk’s death as that of Jesus. Evstratii’s brother Nikon stresses this point when he replies to his own captors, conflating John (19:15) and Matthew (27:25): “My brother whom you sold to the Jews to be crucified has appeared to me. They will be condemned together with those who said, ‘Away with him, away with him, crucify him. His blood be on us, and on our children!’”41

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

Although no longer the “sons and heirs” of God, “the jews” are not orphaned. Their status is summed up in Jesus’ remark, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:43–44). Accordingly, theologians describe “the jews” as ­Satan’s instruments, whose houses of worship are “the synagogues of Satan” and “the dwelling places of demons.”42 As Satan’s minions, “the jews” play a role of their own in the final battle of good and evil. Christian eschatology holds that the Antichrist will be born to Judas’s tribe, that of Dan, and circumcised in Jerusalem. “The jews” will follow this son  of Satan and of a “jewish” harlot (a travesty of God’s union with Mary) as their messiah. The motif that “the jews” await a messiah of Satanic lineage to restore their lost privileges mirrors and inverts Christian messianic expectations. East Slavic folklore is rife with this motif, as are the canonical and apocryphal writings of the Russian eschatological tradition, whence it migrates into political discourse. The Russian Holy Synod, for example, declared in 1806 that Napoleon’s conference with rabbis and Jewish scholars on the status of French Jews was the Antichrist’s effort to “reunite the Jews” to the ends of “overthrowing the Church of Christ and proclaiming himself the false messiah.”43 Kinship with the rebellious angel motivates the spiritual blindness of “the jews.” As contentious as Satan himself, “the jews” do not even try to understand the Christian message, taking perverse pleasure in the denial of truth. Like Satan, they are deliberate unbelievers: they know the truth but tempt Christians by its denial. Thus, Thomas Aquinas believes that “the jews” saw Jesus as the Son of God but killed him anyway, affecting ignorance.44 The replacement of the original covenant with the new one marks the continued practice of Judaism as Satanic, intensifying the danger of the spiritual pollution carried by “the jews.” In Chrysostom’s words, “anything that happens against God’s will, even a sacrifice or a fast, is as polluted as anything can be.” As this Church Father sees it, “the jews” not only defy God by practicing their outlived faith but “ensnare the simple.” Like Satan, they “steal” Christians and “hold [them] in Judaism.” Chrysostom’s homilies originally strove to prevent Christians from “befriending Christ-killers.” And we find the same segregationist thesis in an 1891

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sermon by the confessor of Russia’s Alexander III. But the Russian fear of “jewish” pollution actually peaked much earlier, at the turn of the fifteenth century, when churchmen saw the rise of interest in the Hebrew Bible among the Orthodox (an echo of the nascent Western Protestantism) as the “jewish” plot to pollute Holy Russia with the “Judaizing heresy.”45 These pollution fears historically inform state policy across Europe. In Roman, Byzantine, and premodern Russian law, their impact ranges from the ban on intermarriage and the sharing of food to the introduction of vestimentary “jewish” markers (in Latin Christendom only). The Crusade massacres, wholesale expulsions, and ghettos in the Catholic West are matched by the purges of Jews from the lands Muscovy conquers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; by the ban on Jewish settlement in Russia until the late eighteenth century; and by the residential and social restrictions imposed on the empire’s Jewish subjects after the partitions of Poland. Indeed, the rhetorical furniture of the seventeenth-century debates on the readmission of Jews to Britain reappears two centuries later in the discourse of Russian officials. If in Cromwell’s day the foes of Jewish migration fear the land’s moral pollution, Odessa’s governor pleads in 1882 for school quotas that would end the “moral corruption of Christian children through exposure to Jewish pupils.”46

“The jews” Are Divinely Punished for the Crime of Deicide God turns a deaf ear to the religious praxis of “the jews,” whose stubborn clinging to Judaism after the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah dooms them to the eternal fires of hell. Even Mary does not intervene on their behalf, while pitying other sinners. “And there came a voice to her saying: I see nails in my Son’s hands. How can I have mercy upon them? And she said: I do not pray for the infidel Jews, but for Christians I ask thy mercy,” relates The Descent of the Virgin into Hell, an apocryphal tale popular from Spain to Russia.47 God’s wrath strikes “the jews” in this life as well. It is expressed in the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 and in the subsequent dispersion of “the jews”

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

(in contrast to Jews, whose Diaspora predates the Roman-Jewish wars). Such a reading of historical events kills two birds with one stone. On the one hand, the image of the Romans as the original avengers of the deicide reinforces the motif of their innocence in Jesus’ death; on the other, the capture of Jerusalem, the Temple’s ruin, and the exile of “the jews” realize the metaphor of the metaphysical dispossession of Judaism by Christianity. Thus, nineteenth-century Polish émigrés refuse all analogy with the exile of “the jews” because it makes them akin to a divinely reprobate group and clashes with their hope for a speedy redemption.48 The figure of dispossession, whether spiritual or physical, casts “the jews” in the stock mythical role of the guardians of valuable objects. Desired objects can vary—they range from the divine covenant to the Scriptures to knowledge to wealth and women—but the mythical logic of the Christian-“jewish” confrontation remains the same. It draws on the mythical hero’s task of turning an ogre (Opponent) into a donor (Helper), which constitutes a symbolically charged act that both announces and proves the hero’s righteousness.49 And since Christian theology and myth are largely shaped by the male imagination, which tends to see the conflict of Judaism and Christianity as a clash of older and younger men, the invariant situation arising from the figure of the dispossession of “the jews” is steeped in oedipal connotations. Symbolizing the central taboo of Christian mythology—the cruel and infanticidal God the father—“the jews” of homiletic, artistic, and folk narratives routinely lose their daughters to young Christian suitors for whom these female objects of desire are, above all, motherfigures in transparent disguise. By depriving the “jewish” father of the female he so jealously guards, this physical appropriation of the mother-figure by a young man functions as an emasculating device and a symbolic parricide. The figure of dispossession inevitably engenders the apprehension of the exploited party’s revenge. This fear is present, for instance, in the vita of Evstratii, who resists the slave owner’s attempt to reverse the divinely ordained hierarchy of Christians and “the jews.” The same fear informs the association of “the jews” with the Antichrist, under whose reign Jerusalem will be restituted to its previous owners; and the tenacious

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legend of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel waiting beyond the Caspian Sea to be unleashed upon Christendom.50 Ultimately, the apprehension of a plot nurtured by “the jews” in order to upset the divinely willed order of things by avenging and reversing their dispossession makes them the prime suspect and culprit in all religious, social, and political strife befalling Christian lands. The trope of exile into Christian cultures, prominent among the punishments visited upon the deicidal “jews,” articulates their association with the figure of a traveler through space and time. This link of “the jews” to the motif of travel derives from their quality of the undead, who reside on both sides of the divide between the sacred and the profane spheres. “The jews” inhabit the spiritual chaos of the orbis ­exterior by virtue of refusing the Christian values of the divinely ordered community. Characteristically, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s years of wandering, 1829) allegorically isolates Judaism in a gallery exterior to that of Christianity and separated from it by a closed door.51 And yet “the jews” haunt the orbis interior by virtue of providing the Book that conclusively proves Christianity’s truth. This capacity to inhabit two worlds, shuttling between order and chaos, makes “the jews” as able a traveler as Satan himself and gives rise to a number of motifs—“the jews” as mediators between the living and the dead; as guides in a foreign land (a motif visible already in the fourthcentury legend of Saint Helena and the Holy Cross); and as smugglers of people and goods across national borders.52 Visible wretchedness is another punishment visited upon “the jews” in this life. Their state of physical and social infamy has to be observable because its main value is didactic. God makes “the jews” the negative example for Christians. Like Satan, who didactically instills the fear of God in the hearts of the faithful, “the jews,” in the words of a medieval Russian writer, are “a scarecrow erected for our sake.”53 In secular literature, this scarecrow function sets the tone for the descriptions of the physical condition and environment of “the jews.” Until the midnineteenth century, Russian travelogues, not to mention literary fiction, follow a rigid formula for the depiction of “jewish” bodies, homes, and synagogues, which uniformly inspire revulsion or pity. These narratives tend to explain the wretchedness of “the jews” in theological terms, al-

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

though in keeping with the liberal spirit of the age some authors express sympathy for the plight of this divinely proscribed people.54 The theological requirement of “jewish” didactic wretchedness finds its literal realization in the legal doctrine of servitus Judaeorum, which bans Jews from exercising authority over Christians. A series of laws thus shapes the socioeconomic profile of European Jews to mirror the state of infamy of “the jews.” From its birth in the newly baptized Roman Empire until the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, this legislation deprives Jews, in various European countries and in different historical periods, of the right to own slaves or hire Christian servants; to hold public office; to bear arms; or to own or cultivate land. The servitus Judaeorum doctrine receives special urgency in the age of the Crusades in the works of Peter of Cluny, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas, so that by the thirteenth century Jews become the legal servi camerae of Christian princes, in compliance with their theological image. Naturally, the servitus Judaeorum doctrine is prominent in emancipation debates. G.-E. Lessing censures this doctrine in his play The Jews (1749) by putting it in the mouth of a negative personage who discovers his exemplary master’s “jewishness”: “You, a Jew, had the gall to take an honest Christian into your service? You should have been serving me! That’s as the Bible would have it! Heaven help us! In my person you have insulted the whole of Christendom!” A century later, the same argument, this time made earnestly, will be common currency in the debate on the admission of Jews into Russian civil service.55

“The jews” Exist to Demonstrate the Truth of Christianity The valuable service that “the jews” render to Christians in the quality of a negative example leads us to the last theme in the Church teachings about the practitioners of Judaism: the witness-people myth. This myth sublimates Christianity’s inability to suppress selfdoubt in the face of persistent Jewish religious life. “The jews,” so the narrative goes, survive as part of the divine plan to confirm the truth of Christianity. Their state of infamy bears witness to the first

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coming of Christ and reminds the world of the eventual second coming. Whereas the uninterrupted existence of Jews after the revelation of Jesus saps Christianity’s self-confidence, “the jews” testify to its righteousness. Putting the finishing touches on the witness-people myth, Augustine writes that the wretchedness of “the jews” confirms the Christological interpretation of the Scriptures by “bearing witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ.” Moreover, “their dispersal [. . .] resulted in the increase of the Church of Christ in every quarter of the globe.”56 In a paradox whose roots are to be found in the narrative logic of the basic Christian story, the enemies of Christ promote Christianity. Exegetes take the servitude of “the jews” to its logical conclusion by interpreting Paul’s words—“If their rejection of Jesus has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead!” (Rom. 11:15)—to signify that the baptism of “the jews” is part of the eschaton. At the end of time, says Augustine, “Elijah the Tishbite will come; Jews will accept the faith; the Antichrist will persecute; Christ will judge; the dead will rise again; the good and the evil will be separated; the earth will be destroyed in the flames and then renewed.” This scenario posits conversion as the ultimate service of “the jews.” Naturally, such dependency is terrifying: what if “the jews” refuse to be baptized even at the end of time? This fear marks the sixth-century prayer Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis (Let us also pray for the perfidious Jews), which survives in the Catholic Good Friday liturgy past the Second World War. The same fear informs medieval exempla, whose “jews” invariably convert; it plagues Vladimir Solov'ev, who prays on his deathbed for the conversion of “the jews”; and dogs Léon Bloy, whose pupil Jacques Maritain consequently makes proselytizing among Jews his life’s oeuvre.57 The motif of “the jews” as witnesses to Christianity’s truth—a testimony all the more valuable because it emanates from the enemy—is manifest in a wide variety of ecclesiastic, popular, and literary narratives. It forms the backbone of the legend of the Wandering Jew. But we also find it in the confessions of “jewish” converts in nineteenthcentury English literature—a novelistic genre accompanying the mil-

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

lenarian evangelical revival in Britain. Furthermore, in tandem with the theological trope opposing the Law to Grace as slavery to freedom, the witness-people myth engenders the image of “the jews” as a servant-figure, which is the mirror opposite of the motif of “jewish” parasitism. Patristic literature illustrates the thesis that “the elder [people] shall serve the younger” (Rom. 9:12) with Paul’s allegory of Abraham’s wives (Gal. 4:21–31): Hagar the handmaid bears a slave, whereas Sarah the free woman begets Isaac, a symbol of Christians. Augustine offers another arresting image, likening “the jews” to a blind slave charged with his master’s books. Along these lines, Russian clerics see “the jews” as slaves whose servitude among the nations fulfils “the first covenant’s servitude to the younger.” We find similar imagery in visual arts, where the blindfolded Synagoga points to the Bible for the benefit of Christians; Flavius Josephus, in an oversized “jewish” hat, points toward Christ; and the Fortress of Faith allegories feature the blindfolded and shackled “jews” attacking the Fortress’s Christian defenders.58 As the only tolerated non-Christian group in medieval Europe, Jews were protected by the witness-people myth, which postulated the necessary physical preservation of “the jews,” albeit in a degraded state. Anti-Jewish violence contradicted the Church doctrine and was condemned by higher clergy. But this violence resulted from the paradoxical duality of “the jews” in Christian theology and myth, which fostered social attitudes no religious authority could contain. Even sophisticated theologians, let alone the lower clergy and laymen, succumbed to annihilation fantasies vis-à-vis “jewishness” as a system of belief and behavior. Chrysostom, for example, promoted the witnesspeople myth, all the while applying Christ’s words to “the jews”: “As for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them” (Luke 19:27). By the same token, the sermons of nineteenth-century Russian clerics against pogroms were rendered ineffective by virtue of combining pacifist rhetoric with the standard fare of theological anti-Judaism.59 It has been argued that the protection afforded European Jews by the witness-people myth diminished with the erosion of the religious worldview in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. But the

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myth’s protective power was undermined as early as the thirteenth century by the propaganda of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, which eventually placed the Jews of Western Europe before the alternatives of apostasy or expulsion. Orthodox authorities followed this pattern. Preventing Jewish settlement and cleansing Jews from conquered territories, the Muscovite rulers made an exception for apostates. So did the Ukrainian Cossacks during their conflict with Catholic Poland in the seventeenth century.60 ❊ Let me now illustrate the narrative potential of Christian theology and myth for the actor called “the jews” with the example of a folktale, “The Jew in the Brambles,” whose variants are found all over Europe. The Brothers Grimm redaction goes as follows:61 A hard-working young man is employed by an old man, who pays him no wages. The hero does not complain and, after three years, asks permission “to go into the world and travel for a while,” in other words, to test himself and establish his worth (righteousness). The master gives him three pennies and lets him go. On the road, the young man meets an old gnome, gives up his money out of pity for old age, and receives from the gnome a violin whose sound makes everybody dance. Next he meets an old Jew, calls him a dog without provocation, and tricks him into entering a thorny thicket. Playing the violin, the young man torments the Jew and takes away his moneybag. The Jew convinces a judge to sentence the young man to death. The hero wants to play his violin one last time; the wish is granted over the Jew’s objections; and they all dance until the judge promises to void the sentence. The hero then confronts the Jew about the moneybag, which its owner admits to having stolen. The Jew is hanged on the spot, for no further proof of his guilt is necessary in the story’s economy. The tale contains many invariant situations and motifs arising from the theological image of “the jews”: an intellectual confrontation confirming the righteousness of Christians; the dispossession of “the jews” for the benefit of Christians; their vengeful attempt to reverse the loss at the expense of Christians; canine similes; the playful treatment of suffering, which turns the old Jew into a Fool-figure and the

“The jews” in Christian Theology and Myth

object of didactic laughter. The Jew’s manner of death establishes his kinship with Judas, who hanged himself, and so does his moneybag— an attribute of Judas’s image in Christian iconography. The blood money Judas passed on to his progeny is the implicit meaning of the old Jew’s crime, which does not need explicit articulation or further proof. But the true conflict in this tale is not between the Christian and the Jew. Their confrontation masks the taboo tension between the hero and his old master. This confrontation pits the meek and generous young man, whose innocence is clear in his ignorance of the value of money, against a cruel and possessive father-figure who acts as both the Sender and the Helper, letting the servant go “for a while” (compare Jesus’ required return to God) with too little money, which still buys a magic and highly significant object—a violin is a stock symbol of its owner’s soul in European folklore. That the young man is a Christ-figure is all the more obvious against the backdrop of the tale’s Ukrainian version, where the violinist is played by Saint Nicolas.62 Although the Jew assumes blame for stealing money, the only thief we do see in the tale is the stingy master, whose guilt for mistreating the hero remains unarticulated. The master’s negative side is projected upon the Jew, while his positive side is embodied by the gnome and the judge, who right the wrongs done by the master to the young man by letting him accede to and keep the Jew’s money. In tandem with his didactic defeat, the Jew’s usurped and coveted moneybag makes this donor both the Helper and the Opponent. The absence of any sense of injustice in the Jew’s seemingly unmotivated treatment suggests that the hero’s victory over the Jew does more than confirm Christian righteousness—it is also a vicarious victory over the old master. The trial scene with a judge who establishes the innocence of Christians and the guilt of “the jews” links this tale to the basic Christian story. In both narratives, the taboo hatred for God (the old master) who temporarily sends his son (the meek servant) into the world is projected upon “the jews.” Like Pilate, the tale’s judge sends the righteous hero to die at the insistence of “the jews,” and like Pilate, who implements God’s cruel will but is absolved by his belief in Jesus’ messianic claim, the judge finds the hero innocent. Drawing on Christian

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theology and myth, this folktale approximates the narrative structure of the basic Christian story as follows: Subject

Jesus

The young Christian

Object

Redemption

Righteousness

Sender

God

The old master

Receiver Humanity

The young Christian, all Christians

Opponent Satan, Judas, “the jews”

The Jew

Helper

The old master, the gnome, the judge, the Jew

God, Pilate, Judas, “the jews”

Informed by the Church teaching about “the jews,” homiletic, artistic, and folk discourses develop this hermeneutic abstraction into a stock eponymous actor suited for a variety of narratives. The following chapters will illustrate this process of narrative and descriptive elaboration, which relies heavily on analogical thinking, linking “the jews” to psychological archetypes, animal symbolism, and contiguous human types.

Tw o  Archetypal Elaboration

Two archetypes of the collective unconscious are paramount to the construction of the imaginary “jews”—the Wise Old Man and the Mother. As C. J. Jung shows, archetypes are experienced in a personified form and, by virtue of their essential dualism, have a positive and a negative side. Jung argues that in the psyche of Christian males Jesus embodies the most central of archetypes, the Self, whereas the positive and negative figures of the Wise Old Man are represented by God (“the good father”) and Satan (“the bad father”).1 To this we must add that for a female recipient of the male-dominated Christian narrative, the distribution of roles is more complex, since Mary stands both for the Self and for the positive face of the Mother archetype, whose negative figure is Eve. In this system of figures animating the archetypal logic of the Christian psyche, “the jews” can function as Satan’s or Eve’s substitutes (“the bad father” or “the bad mother”) and can also animate the negative side of the Self—the Shadow, in Jung’s terminology. As a result, this actor commonly appears in the following archetypally connoted situations: (1) A young hero confronts “the jews” in their quality of “the bad father” or “the bad mother.” The latter situation is less frequent than the former, but we do find it in a variety of narratives, from the medieval Miracle of the Virgin about a choirboy killed by a Jewess to the fin de siècle fantasies of feminine evil discussed in the third part of this study. Moreover, “the jews” can act as a Christian hero’s substitute parents (marked positively or negatively), symbolizing filial abnormality or strife in the hero’s life. We find this situation in Scott’s Ivanhoe, Pushkin’s Covetous Knight, Disraeli’s Coningsby, Dickens’s Oliver Twist,

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and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, to cite a few literary examples of young heroes who are disinherited, lost, or estranged sons and are functionally adopted by the “jewish” Helper-Opponent. (2) A male must overcome his “jewishness” (the Shadow) in order to be worthy of “the good father.” In this situation, the opposition of the Self and the Shadow parallels the motif of sibling rivalry between Christianity and Judaism in theological discourse. This situation plays out in homiletic and popular conversion narratives where “the jews” (typically young) become Christians through miracle or persuasion. Alternatively, the male hero may be a Christian sinner who behaves like “the jews” and needs to refashion himself in the likeness of Jesus. As we shall see, the spiritual trajectory of the eponymous protagonist of Gogol’s “Taras Bul'ba” replicates this situation; and so do the assimilation narratives written by Russian-Jewish writers, most notably by Isaak Babel', whose literary alter ego’s flight from “jewishness” is predicated on the archetypal logic of the Christian imagination. (3) A female must overcome her “jewishness” in order to become the “good mother.” This situation manifests itself prominently in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot, where the woman converts and marries her Christian suitor against the will of her “bad father,” thereby transforming herself into a Christian wife and mother. The last two situations are informed by the stories of Jesus and Mary as a paradigm of spiritual transformation. This paradigm constitutes, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest,” wherein Jesus and his mother successfully overcome the “jewish” beginnings of their earthly careers, exemplifying the Self ’s triumph over the Shadow.2 The archetypally connoted de-Judaization of Jesus and Mary punctuates Christian experience on all discursive levels. We find it in a fourteenth-century German painting that contrasts the nimbus of the child Jesus with the “jewish” hats of his peers; in east Slavic traditions claiming that “Judas was born to a Jewess, while Jesus Christ to the Mother of God” and that “Judas was a Jew, but Christ was a Russian”; in the Germanic and Slavic folk practice of calling not-yet baptized infants “the jews”; and in modern racial thought, which from Ernest Renan and H. S. Chamberlain to The Protocols of the Elders of

Archetypal Elaboration

Zion insists on Jesus’ “Aryan” descent. Thus, in 1878, Ivan Turgenev reports a clash with the count Orlov over Mark Antokol'skii’s sculpture of Jesus: “‘How could a Jew represent our God?’—that was exactly how he [Orlov] put it. Pointing out our God’s Jewish origin, I only perplexed him further. He may have taken my words for a blasphemy.”3 By virtue of embodying “the bad father” and “the bad mother” in the archetypal structure of the Christian imagination, “the jews” are homologous to Satan and Eve, whose qualities they share by analogy. This chapter explores the descriptive and narrative implications of these archetypal associations for the generative model of “the jews.”

The Devil In the system of traditional beliefs harking back to pagan religious praxis, the devil and “the jews” are the interchangeable figures of the Forefather—a life-giving yet sinister force that requires supplication. The custom of “hanging Judas,” whose “jewishly” dressed effigy is drowned or burned on Good Friday, is recorded all over Europe. This custom follows spring fertility rites in which “the jews” perform the same chthonic function of linking the worlds of the living and the dead as do other demonic effigies destroyed at Mardi Gras–style festivals. Similar ­fertility-related ritualism informs the east Slavic peasant custom of hosting Jewish visitors or “jewish” impersonators during the Christmas season; and the timing of agricultural tasks to coincide with or to avoid Jewish holidays. The fact that traditional cultures use “the jews” as a figure of the underworld (the Forefather) has much to do with the folk belief in the magic power of language—evil appears if called by name. To fend off this danger during the necessary commerce with the underworld, one employs euphemisms for the devil, “the jews” being one of them. This folk practice is echoed in medieval exempla and legends about “the jews,” who represent Satan in his dealings with Christians. And the same analogical treatment of Satan and “the jews” gives rise to folk traditions about King Solomon’s and Moses’ interaction with demons, including the popular recoding of Moses’ horns—symbols of power and glory in Christian iconography—into signs of satanic nature.4

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“The jews” possess all of Satan’s essential qualities. Having fallen from grace for defying God’s will, they share the fallen angel’s perversity, carnality, and omnipresence (through dispersion). They partake in his role as a mediator between the dead and the living and an unwitting servant of God’s designs. Naturally, their demonism can be undone through Christian intervention with baptismal implications, as in the east Slavic traditions about “the jews” seized by the devil on Yom Kippur and saved by a Christian armed with a sanctified object. Buttressed by archetypal parallelism, the theological metaphor of Satan’s kinship with the practitioners of Judaism was first literalized no later than the thirteenth century. This literal association persists in the popular imagination of post-Christian cultures.5 Since Satan is the parasitical exploiter par excellence, “the jews” embody his power on earth. This logic furnishes the common denominator for a series of traditions about the economic activity of “the jews”—from the medieval view of them as natural-born moneylenders; to German lore about the manipulative “jews” in positions of influence at the courts of European princes; to the east Slavic image of “the jews,” historically widespread among Ukrainian nationalist intellectuals, as ruthless estate managers and leaseholders. All of these traditions stress the negative side of the master-subject dynamic, wherein “the bad father” (either Satan himself or Satan-inspired princes and landlords) uses “the jews” as his proxy.6 That the economic activity of “the jews” is satanic in nature is confirmed by their special link to money as a symbol of carnality. This link is exemplified by Judas, whose avarice (Matt. 26:14–16; John 12:4–6; 13:29), medieval exegetes believe, is physically imprinted in the appearance of “the jews” through a discernible signum avaritiae that is akin to the mark of Cain. The association of “the jews” with money takes many forms: the round yellow badge worn by Jews in northern Europe until early modern times; Judas’s comic haggling with “the jews” in Western Passion Plays; the Russian chapbook and church images of Judas doling out cash to demons; east Slavic legends about “the jews” swapping the true faith for merchandise. But this association never loses its original meaning. Thus, if George Herbert argues that neglecting the spiritual, one “sells for money his dear Lord, / And is a Judas Jew,” A. K. Tolstoi,

Archetypal Elaboration

writing two centuries later, sees Russian-Jewish businessmen as “the same people who bought Christ for thirty silver coins.”7 Usury is the main form of monetary parasitism “the jews” practice with Satan’s help, subverting Christ’s teaching (“Lend freely, hoping nothing thereby” Luke 6:35) and assuming authority over Christians in a challenge to the servitus Judaeorum doctrine. The implications of this challenge are evident in the widespread tradition about the usurer who tries to reenact the Passion by demanding that insolvent Gentile debtors pay with their flesh. It is noteworthy that unlike “the jews,” Jews are far from the sole moneylenders in Europe. In the West, the ecclesiastic ban on usury is defied by Christian lenders who eclipse their Jewish rivals by the thirteenth century; and in the Orthodox East, lending on interest has always been legal. But the stereotype of usury applies, above all, to “the jews.” Catholic exegetes dub Christian usurers “the baptized Jews.” A Kievan chronicler describes the riot of 1113, which prompts a charter regulating usury, as targeting “the jews”—a term probably referring to the Christian economic elite, since Jewish presence in medieval Kiev is debated to this day.8 “The jews” assume the blame for the needed yet morally reprehensible service of moneylending the way they absorb the guilt of deicide. Linguistic usage reflects this amalgam of economy and religion. In the early Middle Ages, the verb judaizare denotes heresy; in the High Middle Ages, it becomes synonymous with usurare, even as the nouns usurer and Jew become equivalent in German and French usage. Their Russian counterpart, zhidomor (miser, usurer) casts “the jews” (zhid ) as an economic agent of death (mor).9 The associations of “jewish” economic activity with ill-gotten gain and physical harm link it to the motif of robbery. Not accidentally, Luther’s Book of Thieves (1528) derives the German criminal argot from the language of “the jews” it accuses of ruling the criminal underworld—a view that persists in German opinion through the nineteenth century. The same motif informs Dickens’s Fagin, who coordinates London’s thieves (Oliver Twist), and primes Timofei Granovskii’s audience to accept the Russian historian’s claim “that one should not think of the orthodox Jews as engaged exclusively in huckstering and in the robbery of their debtors, for there exist entire tribes of nomadic Jews in

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the Arabian desert who are reputed equestrians and can rob you with full military valor.”10 “The jews” making a living by gun and saber are in fact as familiar to the Russian imagination as to its German counterpart. In Pushkin’s Brat'ia razboiniki (Brother-robbers, 1821–22) and ­Lermontov’s Prestupnik (The criminal, 1829), we find ferocious “jewish” robbers who, unlike their romanticized Christian colleagues, abuse the weak and strive solely for personal gain. Economic exploitation is but one form of satanic pollution carried by “the jews,” who also use poison, sex, and murder to subversive ends. The fear of bodily corruption spread by “the jews” through spiritually unclean poisons peaks during the plague epidemics of the fourteenth century, but its religious connotations survive beyond that time. For instance, in Pushkin’s Skupoi rytsar' (The covetous knight, 1830), Solomon the usurer deals in poisons, and his ducats “smell of poison, like the silver pieces of his ancestor [Judas]” (VII:108).11 In the nineteenth century, vodka becomes the most common poison spread by “the jews”—a link buttressed by the popular association of alcohol with Satan and the tavern’s concomitant image as an antichurch and a liminal locus open to the underworld. In the Russian empire, the claim that “the jews” parasitized on peasants through vodka sales effectively replaced the medieval charge of usury. Aired in similar terms and to the same psychological ends, this claim displaced the guilt of the state and the gentry, who fashioned themselves as “the good father” of the peasantry all the while monopolizing and profiting from the distillation of spirits (a full third of the empire’s state revenue came from vodka sales). The observable fact that Jews partook in liquor trade in the Pale of Settlement only, whereas alcoholism was rampant across the empire, did not contradict the image of “the jews” as a polluting agent, since its rationale had little to do with empirical evidence.12 Patristic literature encodes another form of satanic pollution carried by “the jews”—sexual deviance—by endowing the devil and Judas with enormous penises and by arguing that “the jews,” in their licentiousness, “eclipse the most lecherous animals” (Chrysostom). The Theodosian Code consequently refers to “the jews” as perversi and describes their meetings as a sacrilegi coitus. And while the devil monopolizes sexual deviance in the imagination of Rus' and Muscovy, the Latin West casts

Archetypal Elaboration

“the jews” as debauchers who, among other things, spread syphilis and homosexuality and stage orgies parodying Christian rites. This sexual demonization is not just a symbolic aspect of otherness. A repository of doubt, “the jews” are a sexual foe by virtue of voicing the aporia of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. In a variety of texts—the Miracles of the Virgin, apocrypha (for example, Transitus), Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale”—they contest Mary’s virginity and attack her devotees. Hardly reflecting any real Jewish-Christian polemics, this motif displaces Christian doubt vis-à-vis the Immaculate Conception: Jewish thinkers rarely attacked the virgin conception per se, rejecting instead the idea that God could become incarnate by impregnating a virgin. Cultural secularization did not challenge the place of sexual deviance in the image of “the jews.” Voluptuousness and lasciviousness were simply recoded as biological qualities inherent in their “race.”13 The sexualized image of “the jews” lends itself to a variety of uses. On the one hand, in Polish and Ukrainian wedding customs, “the jews” mediate the bride’s mock purchase by the groom. The mediator’s requisite demonic dress suggests that “the jews” act as the devil’s proxy in the role of a supernatural donor (Forefather) ensuring the marriage’s fertility—the same chthonic role they play in Christmas and Easter folk rituals. On the other hand, east Slavic songs speak about “jewish” estate managers supplying landlords with female serfs for sexual exploitation. Belonging to the spring cycle, these narratives have all the trappings of sacrificial fertility rites with “the jews” mediating the appeasement of supernatural forces.14 Similar uses are found in high culture. “The jews” of nineteenth-­ century Russian writers facilitate romantic liaisons as messengers, matchmakers, or pimps. The motif of the lascivious “jews” enticing Christian girls into concubinage, prominent in eighteenth-century British art, mutates by the mid-nineteenth century into the pan-­European charge that “the jews” form the logistical backbone of “white slavery,” or prostitution. This conceptualization of “jewish” pimps and madams as slave traders resonates with the conditioned imagination of post-Christian Europe, harking back to the theological figures of Law as slavery and Grace as freedom (compare the vita of Evstratii). Like moneylending and liquor trade, the prostitution industry is imputed to

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“the jews” in a displacement of the collective guilt vis-à-vis the booming sex trade that accompanies Europe’s industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that “the jews” traffic in the girls whom they force into prostitution, this accusation further capitalizes on the “jewish” ritual murder plot with its motif of the kidnapping of innocents.15 Murder is the clearest expression of fear vis-à-vis the archetypal figure of “the bad father.” Placing the nominally positive face of the Wise Old Man—God the father—behind the death of Jesus, the basic Christian story projects God’s taboo guilt onto Satan and “the jews,” who like other mythical incarnations of “the bad father” are given to infanticide. In this respect, their archetypal role is best understood in the context of pagan mythology, where an ogre must ingest the male strength he sires lest it destroy him. Uranus and Saturn-Kronos exemplify the infanticidal paradigm informing “the jews,” who are occasionally compared to Saturn in medieval exegesis. The oedipal logic of the struggle between fathers and sons—with Saturn-Kronos castrating Uranus and suffering the same lot despite preventively eating all his sons but Zeus—fits the male-driven imaginative dynamic of the clash between Judaism and Christianity. The same logic allows Edward Gibbon, for instance, to write in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) that “under the reign of Constantine, the Jews became the subjects of their revolted children” (emphasis added).16 “Jewish” pollution by murder is expressed, variously, through the profanation of sacred objects; ritual cannibalism; and the onslaught of the Antichrist. All of these variations on the theme of “jewish” bloodthirstiness capitalize on the role of “the jews” in the basic Christian story. This story’s imaginative impact is manifest in east Slavic folklore and in early modern Russian and Ukrainian school drama whose graphic tales of Jesus’ suffering, complete with gory imagery and the message of the continuous deicidal guilt of “the jews,” undoubtedly inform the ritual murder narratives circulating in Orthodox areas.17 The deeper meaning of “jewish” bloodthirstiness is always the same: whether profaning sacred objects, martyring Christians, or forming the Antichrist’s army, “the jews” repeat Christ’s founding sacrifice, creating new instances of sanctity, which despite the passage of time since Jesus’ death, function as bonds of uninterrupted commerce between heaven and earth.

Archetypal Elaboration

In Catholic areas, “the jews” desecrate icons, crucifixes, and the Host; in Orthodox lands, they defile icons, churches, and Easter bread. These variations notwithstanding, Catholic and Orthodox desecration narratives serve the same purpose of confirming the dogmas of faith by showing how “the jews” unwittingly provoke miracles—the defiled objects bleed or turn into their referents (Christ, Mary).18 Differences in ecclesiastic history account for variations in targets. If Byzantine writers answer the heresy of Iconoclasm with icon desecration tales, Catholic Host profanation stories arise with the introduction of precepts and practices targeting the Cathar heresy, namely, the Elevation of the Host, the dogma of transubstantiation, and the feast of Corpus Christi. In contrast, the Host is not a primary profanation target in east Slavic desecration tales most probably because of the historical peculiarity described by Georgii Fedotov as Communion’s “practical inaccessibility or irrelevance” in Rus' and Muscovy. Finally, the Polish-controlled Ukraine develops its own desecration narrative reflecting the political tensions underlying contemporary Catholic-Orthodox relations. In this legend, “the jews” lease Orthodox churches, control their sacred contents, and oversee Orthodox worship, all this at Catholic prompting.19 Ritual murder is an equally effective means of attacking the symbols of Christianity. Russian and Western exegetes place in one category “the Jews who crucified Christ” and child-killers, equating deicide and infanticide as the signs of otherness inherent in Satan—the stock child-thief of European folklore. When, after being used by Romans against Christians and by Christians against heretics, the charge of infanticide is leveled against Jews in twelfth-century England, its goal is to make newly urgent the basic Christian story; hence, its timing— “the jews” are said to crucify Gentile boys at Easter. A century later, a new detail emerges in ritual murder and desecration legends: “the jews” extract Christian blood for medicinal purposes. Thus, like Satan, who enters Judas with the bread broken at the Last Supper (John 13:26–27), inverting its Eucharistic symbolism, “the jews” travesty Communion by replacing wine with Christian blood and the Host with matzo, often made with the same blood. The imaginative power of this anti-­Communion resides in its capacity to calm doubt vis-à-vis the dogma of transubstantiation, whose literalist enforcement by the

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Church coincides with the birth of the blood libel. If “the jews” value Christian blood for its healing qualities and use it like Communion wine, then this wine, like the Host from which they extract Christ’s blood, indeed contains his blood the way the wafer contains his body. As an added benefit, the “jewish” consumption of Christian blood absorbs the guilt of those faithful who cannot help seeing the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood as cannibalistic.20 The ultimate substitution of Passover for Easter as the usual time for the “jewish” anti-Communion—in other words, the casting of Passover as the anti-Easter (compare Passover’s description as the “Jewish Easter” [zhidovskaia paskha] in east Slavic folklore)—brings the blood libel legend in line with the deliberately anti-Judaic timing of the Christian calendar, in which the weekly commemoration of the Crucifixion clashes with Judaism’s joyous Sabbath observance; and its annual commemoration with Passover. The ritual murder accusation adds a final and logical touch to the exegetic encoding of the celebratory events of the Jewish calendar as anti-Christian manifestations and figures prominently in the Easter pogrom tradition persisting in Russia into the early twentieth century.21 Children—specifically boys—become the main target of “the jews” in the twelfth century, following the rise of the hitherto minor cult of the Virgin and child. The cult’s archetypal dynamic is conveyed by the new way of depicting Jesus’ circumcision in visual arts as an attack of the old, knife-wielding “jews” on the recoiling Mary and child. At this time, exegetes begin to view Jesus’ circumcision as the first shedding of blood homologous to the one during his Passion. Combined with the literal reading of transubstantiation, the cult of the child Jesus reinforces Communion’s kinship to cannibalistic infanticide—a taboo voiced in Catholic exempla and visual arts by the naïve and the unbelievers. A similar impact of the Virgin and child cult is manifest in east Slavic folklore, which describes the Passion from Mary’s point of view, often with diminutive suffixes (ruchki, little hands; nozhki, little feet), assimilating the crucified adult to infant Jesus. In keeping with this logic, “Herod the sinful Jew” is a stock actor in Russian folk songs about the Passion, which fuse the slaughter of the innocents and the Crucifixion in one event. Likewise, French popular traditions, includ-

Archetypal Elaboration

ing nursery rhymes, narrate the calvary of the child Jesus carrying the cross on his shoulder. Gleb Uspenskii’s sketch “V balagane” (In the fairbooth, 1865) provides an insight into the motif ’s archetypal logic. It describes a puppet show featuring “Herod the sinful Jew,” who devours infants much like Uranus and Saturn-Kronos.22 The presence of this archetypal logic in the image of “the jews” makes us question the opinion of some scholars that the ritual murder motif was imported into Russia after the partitions of Poland. This view disregards some five hundred years of the motif ’s Russian history—from the vita of Evstratii as an accomplished ritual murder tale; to the widespread medieval exemplum and derivative popular traditions about a “jewish” boy saved by the Virgin from his infanticidal father; to Russian folk songs that fuse the images of Jesus as an adult and Jesus as an infant at Golgotha. Russian accounts of the blood libel are extant in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts; the Russian ritual murder trials of 1702 and 1738 echo the seventeenth-century Belorussian ritual murder trials with their subsequently canonized Orthodox boymartyrs. One can speak about some details imported from the Catholic and Protestant West. But the very frequency of the ritual murder charge in nineteenth-century Russia suggests that a preexisting imaginative framework comes to life after Russian culture, acquiring a sizable Jewish minority, confronts the need to make sense of this alien group.23 While the desecration and ritual murder narratives focus on individual martyrdom, the ultimate expression of “jewish” pollution by murder—the onslaught of the Antichrist—implies a mass slaughter of Christians. The belief that “the jews” await the Antichrist as their messiah informs the widespread apprehension of their hidden hordes, which are ever ready to be unleashed on Christendom and are variously imagined as the legendary Ten Lost Tribes, Gog and Magog, the “Red Jews,” or the all too real Mongol and Ottoman invaders.24 This image of an apocalyptic “jewish” army is inherent in east Slavic folklore. Taking their cue from the motif of the holy family’s flight into Egypt, Russian folk songs narrate the flight of Mary and Jesus from a war waged by the “Antichrist-Jews.” In Russian epics, a monster-king from a “Jewish land” reconquers Jerusalem and torments Christians until Egorii (Saint George) spills his “Jewish, pagan blood.” Some of these epics fuse

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J­ erusalem with Constantinople, conflating “the jews” and the Turks; others identify the enemy as a dragon with “Jewish, evil, reptile blood” (compare the monster Chudo-Iudo [Wonder-Jew] of Russian folktales). While Russian epics convey the same theological fear of “jewish” revenge present in the Antichrist legend, their archetypal logic is manifest against the backdrop of homologous Bulgarian and Serbian epics. Here Christian knights fight “jewish” carnivore-giants who are said to belong to the generation of the Forefathers.25 Stripped of its theological furniture, the apocalyptic battle thus boils down to the archetypal clash of a son with his infanticidal “bad father.” The negative faces of the Wise Old Man archetype elicit both horror and laughter. A universal psychological defense mechanism, laughter also functions as a didactic tool. In medieval religious drama it illustrates the stupidity of evil’s hopeless rebellion and of its macabre yet risible inversion of the divine. This message is often stressed by stock dramatis personae, such as a Vice or a clown, who belabor Satan on stage, thereby preventing him from becoming a tragic hero. This practice is echoed in the coupling of Marlowe’s Barabas, Shakespeare’s Shylock, and Scott’s Isaac with servant-clowns Ithamore, Launcelot Gobbo, and Wamba, respectively. We also find it in east Slavic folk theater (vertep, Petrushka, Tsar Maksimilian), whose “jews” mirror Satan’s stage appearance and role as a sinister joker.26 In fact, folklore across Europe uses the devil and “the jews” as fully interchangeable objects of didactic ridicule. Thus, the widespread tradition about a mock debate between triumphant buffoons or children (Boy Bishop in medieval drama) and the learned “jews”—a situation inspired by the motif of the child Jesus’ disputation in the Temple—runs parallel to another widespread series of didactic and popular traditions about the foolish “jews” who challenge Christ with puzzles, a situation derived from the motif of Jesus’ temptation by Satan.27 In this dual response to “the bad father” through horror and laughter, the threat of “the jews” acquires a comic double. The Antichrist’s army, for instance, is mocked in an Erfurt Cathedral relief (circa 1400) showing the clash of a mounted knight with a “jewish” rider going into battle on a sow. To take another example, east Slavic folklore and religious drama share a plot wherein an armed expedition of the cow-

Archetypal Elaboration

ardly “jews” ends in a merry debacle.28 Indeed, the very demonism of “the jews” gives food for mockery. The title page of Luther’s pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) features Lucas Cranach’s drawing of horned Moses in a fool’s dress. Moses’ horns are stripped here of their original meaning of glory, functioning as a demonic marker. But horns also connote cuckoldry, as they do in the comic version of another sinister motif—the “jewish” denial of the Immaculate Conception—which casts Joseph as an impotent fool nonplussed by Mary’s pregnancy. This practice reaches genuine grotesquery in the tradition of “Joseph’s Troubles” (or “Joseph’s Doubts”), in French and German illustrated Bibles and in English Mystery Plays, where Joseph the dumb cuckold doubts Mary’s virginity, bringing comic relief into solemn narratives. Despite the lapse of time, this comic procedure is still urgent in Pushkin’s Voltairian poem “Gavriliada” (The epic of Gabriel, 1821), where Mary repeatedly cuckolds her impotent spouse.29

Mary and Eve The two sides of the Mother archetype—one is a nurturing and protective force; another is a power that stifles in its possessive embrace, seduces, and devours—are animated in the Christian psyche by the Virgin and the Church as “the good mother,” and by Eve as her negative double.30 In the male-driven Christian imagination, women have historically acted either as evil temptresses or as imitations of Mary the “new Eve.” Archetypal logic makes this clerical fear of women, who personify “the good mother” only in a desexualized state, consonant with the desexualizing ethos of the fear of “the bad father,” explicit in the myths narrating the castration of Uranus and Saturn-Kronos by their sons. The kinship of the negative figures of the Mother and the Wise Old Man in the Christian psyche does not end there. Like “the jews,” who engender Christianity and unwittingly help its spread, women engender humanity and ensure its continuity. Like Satan and “the jews,” women personify evil’s paradoxical necessity and share their trajectory from privilege to curse. Finally, if Eve’s expulsion from Eden and stigma of carnality are reversible through the emulation

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of Mary, “the jews” can also recover their lost status in God’s eyes through conversion. Eve’s structural kinship with the fallen angel and “the jews” informs the common theological allegory of Judaism’s divine rejection as a divorce that enables Christ to choose the Church as his bride in the unia mystica. Catholic visual arts and church drama personify the two faiths as women, opposing the blindfolded and humiliated “Synagoga,” her crown falling and staff broken, to the triumphant and crowned “­Ecclesia”; Ecclesia’s wisdom and purity collide with Synagoga’s foolishness and lechery, which are often highlighted by the presence of Eve or demons at her side. Although this imagery comes to Muscovy in the seventeenth century only, the allegorical representation of Judaism’s supersession by Christianity as a divorce has always been common in Russian exegesis, which thereby continues the tradition set forth by the Church Fathers.31 Characteristically, in Augustine’s canonical explanation of the unia mystica, Christ repudiates Synagoga as his carnal mother in favor of ­Ecclesia as his spiritual bride, who by this logic is a figure of “the good mother.” The more common theological view of Judaism as Jesus’ old wife, conveyed by the aforementioned trope of divorce, must then conceal a sexual taboo: appropriating “the good mother,” the son in fact challenges “the bad father.” The same oedipal ethos, already manifest in the routine exegetical (con)fusion of Mary and the Church—that very Ecclesia Jesus elects as his bride—marks the Russian epic in which a hero spills a dragon’s “Jewish blood” (in various versions, iudeiskaia krov' or zhidovskaia krov') to liberate his mother, forced to suckle the dragon’s progeny. And it also informs the widespread Miracle of the Virgin narrating the story of a “jewish” father who casts his son into flames only to see Mary save the child, whose mother then converts to Christianity, canceling the Jew’s (sexual) authority over her and over the baptized boy.32 The son’s sexually charged pact with “the good mother” against “the bad father” is, of course, part and parcel of archetypal logic. Like Zeus, who is saved from Saturn-Kronos by Rhea, the devouring father’s wife, Christians can be delivered by the Virgin from the mouth of hell into which they are thrown by the implacable God, whose taboo cruelty is displaced on “the jews.” Distancing the eter-

Archetypal Elaboration

nally young Mary from ­father-figures—be it her cuckolded or impotent husband Joseph, her seldom mentioned father Joachim, or God himself—the male-dominated Christian imagination gives the Virgin wholly to Jesus, who impersonates the archetype of the Self, and by this token to all Christian sons. This point is forcefully, albeit irreverently, made in Pushkin’s “Gavriliada”: the narrator all but identifies with the young archangel Gabriel, who sexually possesses Mary, whereas old and impotent Joseph is cast as a comic stand-in for the poem’s lustful and jealous God the father. Pushkin’s poem lays bare the logic disguised by the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. A basic narrative situation derived from the theological image of “the jews,” this masterplot obfuscates, with the help of pagan mythology, the taboo sexual dynamic in the Christian imagination’s archetypal structure. In pagan myths, “the bad father” (an ogre, Aeete, Minos) is ostensibly unrelated to the hero (Jason, Theseus) and embodies the negative side of the Wise Old Man archetype as the keeper of a desired female who euphemistically appears as his daughter (Medea, Ariadne) rather than wife. The daughter of “the jews” also belongs to an old father who has no spouse. She is, like Mary, nobody’s carnal wife but a mother-figure allied to a young man against “the bad father.” The outcome of the oedipal conflict in the masterplot echoes the resolution of its theological conflict, since the daughter converts to Christianity and realizes the trope of Judaism’s dispossession by eloping with paternal money (for example, Shakespeare’s Jessica). Her trajectory from Judaism to Christianity—that is, from Eve’s carnality to Mary’s spirituality—mirrors the Virgin’s trajectory in the basic Christian story, just as the “jewish” daughter’s flight from her old keeper to a young Gentile echoes Mary’s dissociation from father-figures in favor of Jesus and Christian sons.33 In this context, the idea that the male of “the jews” lives sexually with his female is an affront to the Christian Self. In archetypal terms, it asserts the power of “the bad father”; in theological terms, it belies Mary’s virginity. And since every marriage is informed by the unia mystica, “the jews” can form only an antimarriage that elicits ridicule, as in premodern religious art, or tacit anxiety and negation, visible in secular artistic discourse. If even the upright “jews” of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and

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Edgeworth’s Harrington are the unmarried guardians of secretly baptized daughters ultimately ceded to young Christians; if even Scott’s Rebecca (so overflowing with virtue that Chateaubriand imagines her as the new Mary, and Thackeray, as a crypto-Christian) stays celibate on Ivanhoe’s account; what more can we expect from their less adventurous Russian colleagues whose artistic imagination never challenges the logic of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot?34 And what of a woman who, like Eve, does not follow Mary’s road from carnality to spirituality and from “jewishness” to Christianity, thus personifying “the bad mother”? If she is Christian, her weapons are witchcraft and sexual deviance. She supplies “the jews” with sacred objects for profanation and with boys for murder. If she is “jewish,” she practices ritual murder and is Mary’s antipode by virtue of sharing the Witch-figure’s physique and sexual energy. These connotations of the unbaptized “jewesses” are articulated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which equates a Christian’s sexual union with a “jewish” female to bestiality—an equation whose echo we find in the panEuropean folk tradition about Jesus’ transforming a “jewish” mother and her children into a sow and piglets.35 The depiction of the unconverting Rebecca in Ivanhoe as beautiful and virtuous was so unusual and illogical in Walter Scott’s day as to have no artistic emulators. Thus, Russian writers reserve an unenviable lot for “the jewesses” evading the salutary benefits of baptism: from sexually desirable Mary-figures they turn into repulsive carriers of animalistic carnality whose “jewish” way of life Russian imperial ethnographers describe, much like their artistic counterparts, as physically unclean and aesthetically offensive. Incidentally, the cliché of the overbearing “jewish” mother who possessively stifles her children like a kid-eating sow is a byproduct of the Gentile image of the unconverting “jewesses.” Historically, assimilated Jewish males internalized and used this image to displace the hostility directed at them in majority cultures—a prominent procedure, as we shall see, in the writings of Isaak Babel'.36 The exegetical treatment of women and “the jews” as the homologous symbols of carnality, and the resulting sexualization and feminization of the “jewish” male, blurs gender boundaries between him and his unconverting female. The effeminate “jews” and their not-so-feminine

Archetypal Elaboration

“jewesses” look like cross-dressers and have many physiological affinities: witness the medieval belief in “jewish” male menstruation, which peaks, instead of abating, in eighteenth-century Western medical discourse. The next century increasingly encodes “jewish” difference in misogynist terms. Intellectuals and scientists, from Kant and Prud'hon to Freud and Weininger, passing by Nietzsche and Charcot, mark “the jews” and women as a species apart by virtue of unmasculine irrationality and unproductivity; unbridled sexual desire; inaptitude for military service; and shared psychological afflictions, hysteria above all. In ­Vasilii Rozanov’s view, “the Yid [zhid] is essentially a woman (an old one), for whom anything masculine is ‘inappropriate’.” Thus, as far as their archetypal roles go, “the jews” furnish the negative figures of the Wise Old Man and the Mother (compare Rozanov’s “old woman” in contrast to the ever-young Mary) without much gender distinction.37 Since the unbaptized and unbaptizing “jewesses” are vested with Eve’s power, their sexual appeal is akin to that of a prostitute—an association whose expressions range from the dress code imposed on Jewish women in fifteenth-century Italy; to the sexually desirable tavern keepers of east Slavic folklore; to the figure of the Orientalized harlot or courtesan (for example, the belle juive of French writers) popular in European literatures in the late nineteenth century.38 But even as exotic whores, “the jewesses” are functionally identical to their male counterparts. We see this in Cesare Lombroso’s insistence on the typological kinship of female prostitutes to religious traditionalists among the male “jews.”39 The sexual appeal of the unconverting “jewesses,” these anti­ standards of purity and beauty, is dictated by the Christian imagination’s archetypal logic: the implied humiliation of the old man to whom the “jewish” harlot used to belong as a daughter or a wife is the ultimate, albeit unarticulated, connotation of her exclusively Gentile clientele in the modern European imagination. The aforementioned charge that “the jews” prostitute Christian girls all over Europe chronologically overlaps with the popularity of the sexually promiscuous “jewesses” in modern European literatures and is the reverse side of the same archetypal struggle in which a female is but a means in a young man’s fight against paternal authority. Theseus deserts Ariadne upon stealing her from Minos; Jason cheats on Medea after

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“The jews” are no longer God’s chosen people

“The jews” are enemies of the truth

“The jews” are divinely proscribed

They are Christ’s original enemy

“The jews” are the Other

Christians are the new Israel

Christianity supersedes Judaism

They kill Christians (the motif of infanticide) They parasitically prey on the living (the motif of exploitation)

“The jews” are undead

They live in a visible state of infamy (the pollution motif)

“The jews” are a negative father-figure (the Uranus motif)

“The jews” are of old or indefinite age Their living environment is decrepit

They usurp desirable objects (the divine covenant, the Bible, knowledge, money, women, etc.)

“The jews” are spiritually and physically unfit/infertile

Christ fulfills God’s covenant with Israel

They parody/corrupt human speech (the pollution motif)

They are slanderous They speak the anti-language

They misinterpret the Bible

They link the dead and the living

They make newly urgent Christ’s Passion, bridging past & present

Their state confirms the truth of Christianity

Christians appropriate the objects preserved for them by “the jews”

Same as above

They serve as a negative example and as objects of didactic laughter

They parody/corrupt human nature (the pollution motif)

They are spiritually deficient (the motif of impaired sight) They are mentally deficient They are mad, like animals

They have make-believe worship

Christians expose/outwit them; “the jews” convert or lose property/life

Christians triumph, confirming the true faith; “the jews” convert or lose property/ life

They always plot against Christians

They challenge Christians to a contest

Christians triumph in this battle; “the jews” convert or perish

They expect the false messiah (the Antichrist) to wage the final battle

They are objects of didactic laughter

in a necessary redemptive sacrifice mandated by God

They reject and kill Jesus

They pervert/parody Christian worship (the pollution motif)

as part of God’s plan to test the faithful

They tempt Christians

They are immoral, like women: Carnal/materialistic/sexually deviant Stubborn and rebellious

They practice the anti-religion

They serve Christians

They confront Christians

They are visitors from profane space (the motifs of exile, travel, and pollution)

“The jews” as the Helper

“The jews” as the Opponent

Manifestation

They deny that Jesus is the Messiah

They defy God’s will

Theological Reason

Quality

Table 1. The Basic Structure of the Generative Model of “the jews”

Archetypal Elaboration

taking her from Aeete. “The jewesses,” likewise, exist as mere extensions of their original keepers. Their sexual or religious appropriation through marriage or carnal possession by a young Christian indicates, at once, the archetypal defeat of “the bad father” and the theological defeat of “the jews.”40 ❊ The schema shown in Table 1 sums up the invariant situations and motifs arising from the theological and archetypal structure of the “jewish” image discussed in this and the preceding chapter. These situations and motifs are the core narrative and descriptive features of the actor called “the jews.”

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Th re e  Animal Symbols and Human Types

Exploring the place of animal symbolism in the generative model of “the jews,” we must bear in mind that in the traditional religious worldview, “the jews” are much closer to beasts than to humans, devoid as they are of the spirituality and reason proper to Christians. Accordingly, medieval law codes classify sexual unions with “the jews” as bestiality, while exegetes treat them as the occupants of the middle ground between people and animals. As such, “the jews” have a fixed set of animal symbols, many of which were initially elaborated in medieval theological works as well as in zoological compendia and bestiaries classifying and describing animals as moral types.1

The Tamed Foe: The Dog, the Wolf, and the Hyena

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As a term of abuse signifying spiritual impurity, the canines are common markers of out-groups. The Russian for dog (pës, sobaka), for example, historically denotes infidels, in tune with the Russian ecclesiastic ban on the animal in sacred spaces. “The jews” stand out among infidels, however, thanks to their special bond with the canines, as seen in medieval papal texts, which apply the term for barking, ululare, to the synagogue service; and in Byzantine Psalters, whose illuminations feature Christ hounded by the dog-headed “jews.” Like “the jews,” the canines have a dual narrative function, acting as the Opponent and the Helper. In European folklore, their trajectory from paradise-dwellers to cursed creatures echoes that of “the jews,” and they frequently appear as Satan’s

Animal Symbols and Human Types

familiars. The exegetical use of the canines as the Opponent-Helper is codified in the Simon Magus episode of the apocryphal Acts of Peter. Realizing the metaphor of Law and Grace as bondage and freedom, Peter unchains Simon’s dog and makes it speak, turning the hostile animal into a witness to the true faith; later he makes Simon’s ravenous dogs disappear with blessed bread. Echoing the story’s logic, Christian exegetes liken the witness-people of “the jews” to the canines, whose hostile energy is harnessed for the defense of the Church. This trope treats dogs and wolves as two faces of the same animal, who can symbolize either a shepherd or a foe of Christ’s flock (in Belorussian incantations wolves are actually called “the jews”).2 Capitalizing on the exegetical association of the canines with “the jews,” medieval bestiaries interpret the hyena as a symbol of the synagogue, drawing a parallel between the contemporary belief in the animal’s bisexuality and the double-mindedness of “the jews” as Christianity’s Opponent-Helper. Such analogical treatment of sexual and spiritual ambiguity shows that the trope of “jewish” male menses, discussed in the preceding chapter, originally implied religious difference. Equally instructive is the bestiaries’ suggestion that the carrion-eating hyena is, like “the jews,” a type of the undead who haunts cemeteries and steals corpses. This simile literally implements the theological metaphor of Judaism as a dead faith whose adherents inhabit, at once, the worlds of the dead and of the living.3 Canine symbolism follows “the jews” into the modern age. If Shakespeare’s Shylock is characterized as a “cut-throat dog” (I.iii.106) whose desires are “wolvish, bloody, starv’d and ravenous” (IV.i.137–38), centuries later Scott’s Isaac is uniformly described by canine metaphors, albeit disowned by Ivanhoe’s liberal narrator. In France and in Germanic lands, the same symbolism informed the custom of hanging upside down and in the company of dogs those Jewish thieves who did not wish to convert before death. Although the practice waned in the eighteenth century, the imaginative pairing lived on, as testified by the signs “No Jews or dogs allowed” that Napoleon’s troops took down after entering Frankfurt.4

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The Devil’s Beasts: The Billy Goat, the Pig, and the Monkey The symbolic association of these animals with “the jews” is driven by their shared kinship with the devil. The billy goat symbolizes Satan and the sexually deviant “jews” in patristic literature. The same practice is extant in Catholic and Protestant visual arts and in folk traditions across Europe, including Polish and east Slavic areas, where the symbolic association of “the jews” with the demonic and lecherous billy goat is extended to goats in general.5 Similar logic rules the porcine symbolism in the image of “the jews.” Appealing to the story of Christ’s exorcism of demons into swine (Luke 8:32–36), medieval exegesis treats the pig as a symbol of spiritual pollution. In bestiaries, the pig stands for luxury and greed, resonating with Chrysostom’s view of the carnal “jews” as “no better disposed than pigs and goats.” As an added benefit, the pig’s enduring association with “the jews” in art and folklore mocks Jewish dietary laws—witness the Judensau motif (“the jews” drink a sow’s milk and eat her feces), widespread in German visual arts; as well as the premodern legal praxis requiring Jews to give oath standing barefoot on sow skins (more rarely on goatskins).6 The simians represent in medieval thought “the very person of the devil” by virtue of their appearance and their profane imitation of men as beings created in God’s image. Regarding Satan as the supreme simia Dei, exegetes treat apes and monkeys as demonic pretenders who are avaricious and lecherous, that is, akin to “the jews.” The simians stand for “the jews” in European visual arts, from medieval illuminations to William Hogarth’s print A Harlot’s Progress (1732). This symbolism is echoed in The Merchant of Venice, where Jessica swaps her mother’s wedding ring for a monkey, mocking Shylock’s marriage; and in the custom of hanging monkeys, instead of dogs, alongside Jewish thieves.7 But the logic of didactic religious laughter at Satan and his proxies also makes the simians and “the jews” interchangeable figures of amusement. Maria Bashkirtseva, for instance, records in her diary (August 18, 1876), “We fired a couple of rockets and made a Jew talk funny. The Jew in Russia is midways between a monkey and a dog.” A similar

Animal Symbols and Human Types

symbolic association is implied in Fedor Dostoevskii’s novel Zapiski iz ­mertvogo doma (Notes from the house of the dead, 1860), where inmates tease a “jewish” convict, Isai Bumshtein, “just for laughs, the way one has fun with a little dog, a parrot, [or] trained little animals” (IV:94). Likewise, the “jewish” hero of Aleksandr Kuprin’s story “Gambrinus” (1907) “looks like a shabby monkey” and is accompanied by “a little white dog” (IV:157–58). Kuprin’s case, however, shows the subversive potential of the lexicon of “jewish” difference, which can take on a life of its own, belying advertised authorial intent. “Gambrinus” is an ostentatiously Judeophile text whose author bows to the liberal ideological fashion of the day (see Chapter 13). But drawing on the generative model of “the jews” to describe his protagonist, Kuprin (dis)misses the full significance of the model’s elements (clear to his interpretive community), willy-nilly undermining the story’s explicit political agenda.8

The Sparrow and the Goose With a few exceptions in Polish and east Slavic folklore, the bird symbols proposed by medieval exegetes for “the jews” as Christianity’s rejecting parents (the parasitical cuckoo) who lack spiritual vision (the blind owl) have not withstood the test of time.9 The bird symbols of “the jews” that, in contrast, do flourish and persist in modern times owe their imaginative durability to the conceptualization of economic activity in mythical terms proper to those agrarian societies of central and Eastern Europe that are removed the farthest from, and resistant the longest to, the impact of the industrial and urban revolutions. Thus, even though its reputed lechery made the sparrow homologous to the devil and “the jews” in medieval thought, it is its role as an agricultural parasite that earns the bird a special place in east Slavic folklore, where it is conceptualized as Jesus’ enemy who helped “the jews” at Golgotha. The logical progression from agriculture to myth is clear, for instance, in the folk belief that sanctified pig fat on a peasant’s hands protects freshly sown seed from sparrows who, “like the devil and the Jews, hate salo [pig fat].” Contiguous traditions build symbolic equivalency between a gathering of sparrows and that of “the jews”;

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establish the bird’s genealogy from goat feces warmed up by “the jews”; and attribute the jumping motion to the invisible chains the sparrow wears for its role in the Crucifixion, much like “the jews” of medieval iconography, whose chains symbolize the servitus Judaeorum doctrine. The symbolic association of “the jews” with the sparrow transcends the geography and media of the properly peasant environment and is found not only in literature but also in the urban lore of Russia and Ukraine, as I have personally witnessed.10 A similar, albeit more complex, combination of myth and lifestyle underlies the goose as a “jewish” symbol. The bird’s image in Christian cultures was initially informed by its role in pagan mythology as an oracle as well as a symbol of fertility associated with mother goddesses. Given Christianity’s ambivalence toward sexuality, the latter association brought about the casting of the goose both as a sign of virility and that of sexual temptation. On the one hand, the goose traditionally functioned as an actor in wedding rituals and as a dish for the feasts linked to seasonal fertility rites (Michaelmas, Martinmas, Christmas). But it also showed up in the Bedford Book of Hours (1423) at Eve’s side during her expulsion from Eden; and witch-hunters claimed that Satan took the goose’s shape when copulating with heretics. By the same token, prostitutes were known as “geese” in Elizabethan England; and “the bad mother” of east Slavic folklore, Baba Iaga, uses geese to kidnap children. This dual image of the amphibious bird inhabiting antithetical elements echoes that of “the jews,” who also straddle antithetical worlds, those of the dead and of the living—a parallel the English scholar Gerald Cambrensis points out in 1186.11 The bird’s place in the economic life of Ashkenazi Jews reinforced its symbolic kinship with “the jews.” Poultry-rearing, including the fattening of geese, was a traditional Jewish occupation in central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the goose held a place of honor in the Ashkenazi home. In contrast to the commonly served chicken, its meat and rendered fat (schmaltz) were prized as delicacies and used on special occasions. The goose was also a traditional source of bedding feathers, functioning as a symbol of fertility and intimacy. In this quality, it figured prominently in the bride’s dowry: Jewish girls started to “pluck for the wedding” as soon as they could.12 The Christian imagination

Animal Symbols and Human Types

sees these customs as indicative of the amphibiousness of “the jews” (in Slavic traditions, goose bedding facilitates the passage of “the jews” into the world of the dead) and of their sexuality. A well-known sixteenth-century German drawing of a “jewish” woman with a goose (Figure 1) most probably implies the sexual temptation she represents rather than her trade, since poultry-rearing has never been a specifically female occupation among Ashkenazi Jews. Abiding by this symbolism, the Cossacks of east Slavic folklore steal geese from under the sleeping “jews” in a variation on the daughter of “the jews” masterplot; and Russian writers use the goose, whose

Figure 1. “The Jews of Worms” (detail). Germany, 16th century. In: Alfred Rubens, A History of Jewish Costume. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p. 86, plate 113.

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feathers fill “jewish” mattresses, as a marker of the “jewish” antimarriage (see Chapter 2). It is in this quality of a polysemous negative symbol—of “jewishness” and of sexual danger—that the goose functions, as I will show, in Gogol’s “Taras Bul'ba.” But the most striking feature of the construction of the goose as a “jewish” symbol is its gendering, wherein the signifier’s sex has little bearing on its signified. Russian literature and folklore do not distinguish between the gander (gus') and the goose (gusynia) as symbols of “jewish” sexuality, which is consistently imagined as female but is equally consistently denoted by the gander. Such usage suggests that the symbol refers not only to the profane nature of sexuality in general, accordingly marked as “jewish,” but also to the perverse effeminacy of the male of “the jews,” since sexuality is, by definition, Eve’s domain. Following this logic, the stock depiction of a pogrom in Russian literature includes flying bird down extracted from “jewish” mattresses and symbolizing the invasion of the “jewish” home. This element of the lexicon of “jewish” difference implies both the sexual violation of “the jewesses” and the concomitant emasculating humiliation of their males. Symptomatically, in Vasilii Rozanov’s view, “jewish” males, like women in general, “do not dislike” physical abuse and protest against it for appearances’ sake only, “pretending to be male and European.” Thus, the male “jews” of fin de siècle Russian art are uniformly described by bird metaphors (some are literally covered in bird down), with goose symbolism conveying their passive, sexualized victimhood and sparrow symbolism emphasizing the agility and loudness of the effeminately neurotic “jewish” body.13 ❊ As the original but certainly not the only human embodiment of Satan, “the jews” lend their qualities to Christianity’s other anthropomorphic outcasts, receiving in return the traits of their demonic counterparts. The Fool-figure, thanks to its complex mythical roots, is by far the most important in this group of contiguous human types. Other types include the Muslim, the Leper, the Prostitute, the Heretic, the Witch, and the Undead.

Animal Symbols and Human Types

The Fool Students of the Fool-figure in the European imagination insist that its various manifestations, from Harlequin and Punch to the court jester and the ambulating mime, are invested with demonic connotations that become more obvious the farther back one traces the Fool’s genealogy in myth and folklore. As for Christian exegetes, they interpret the Fool as a figure of madness expressed in the denial of God. As such, the Fool shares Satan’s quality of a blasphemer and a simia Dei—he parodies humans, created in God’s image. This equivalence of demons and buffoons in Christian thought informs the ecclesiastic struggle against the vestiges of pagan carnival practices in Rome and Byzantium. The same struggle is prominent in Greek and Russian medieval law codes, as well as in the Orthodox tradition of holy foolishness, all of which stigmatize carnival-style revelry, professional jesters, and instrumental music as profane and devoid of positive religious significance. Russian folk traditions echo this negative view of the Fool, equating laughter with sin, and mimes (skomorokhi) with Satan, who is euphemistically known in Russian as shut (jester).14 The image of a denier of God links the Fool to “the jews.” If ­patristic literature sees “the jews” as fools worshipping in theaters, medieval iconography casts them as buffoons who jeer at and taunt the suffering Christ. As contiguous types, the Fool and “the jews” share a number of traits. Both are untouchables engaged in reprobate activities and dependent on those they serve; both are professional swindlers; both have exaggerated sexuality and are reputed for lewdness. In visual arts, “the jews” and buffoons often share the same headgear, colors of infamy, and facial markers of demonism. The jester in Bosch’s painting The Ship of Fools wears a Jew-badge. Muscovite authorities humiliate “Judaizing heretics” by dressing them as jesters. And Dickens, in Oliver Twist, calls Fagin “the merry old gentleman,” using Satan’s euphemism equivalent to the Russian shut. In fact, the persistence of the association between the Fool and “the jews” may reveal the fuller implications of the stock nineteenth-century link of “the jews” to music, discussed in the third part of this study. This link not only reflects the newfound prominence of Jews as composers and musicians but also denounces it against the

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backdrop of Christian ambiguity toward profane music, manifest for instance in the traditional iconographic use of such “jewish” symbols as the ape and the sow in the role of jester-musicians, as well as in the image of horned Moses, dressed like a fool and playing a keyboard instrument, on the cover of Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies.15 In mythical and narrative terms, the Fool and “the jews” play the same role as the Opponent-Helper, who deliberately or unwittingly exposes the sins of a community and mediates its cleansing in the role of a scapegoat. It is in this role that the Fool, “the jews,” and Satan often confront one another or clash with Christians in the narratives that strive to affirm communal virtues through didactic laughter, which lays bare the superiority of the faithful and the foolishness of sinners. In the commedia dell’arte, Pulchinello impersonates or confronts a rabbi; “the jews” and demons of east Slavic folklore are often outwitted by Foolfigures—a dumb peasant, a drunken Cossack, Petrushka, a skomorokh (mime); literature and drama couple “the jews” with buffoons (Marlowe’s Barabas-Ithamore, Shakespeare’s Shylock-Launcelot, Scott’s Isaac-Wamba) or fuse them in one demonic personage, like George Du Maurier’s musician and sinister joker Svengali (Trilby, 1894).16 The association with the Fool highlights the dependence of the imaginary “jews” on the universal mythical trickster paradigm. Like “the jews” and the Fool, the comic and sinister trickster of world mythology is a creature that shuttles between sacred and profane spaces and combines cunning and stupidity in one persona (compare the “jewish” appearance of Loki, the trickster of Norse mythology, in Ludwig Jacobowski’s eponymous 1898 novel). The trickster acts as the hero’s foil, comically aping and plotting against him. He is often the ­hero’s jealous and murderous sibling, in tune with the theological trope of “the jews” as the Cain-like sibling of Christians. “The jews” and the Fool abide by the same mythical logic as the trickster, who both opposes the (often divine) hero and unwittingly acts as an instrument of the hero’s self-fulfillment. They share the trickster’s narrative role of the initiator of dramatic action, which begins with his crossing the boundary between the orbis interior and the orbis exterior; and the trickster’s status of a detached observer who didactically exposes societal flaws. Finally, “the jews” and the Fool share the trickster’s function of comic relief, which

Animal Symbols and Human Types

provides a break from the intensity of dramatic action in a narrative while introducing implicit or explicit commentary on the narrative’s system of values.17

Visible Pollutants: The Muslim, the Leper, and the Prostitute During Christendom’s initial encounter with Islam, “the jews” mediated the imaginative construction of the Muslim, passing on to him many of their own features. As a result, the Muslim often rivals “the jews” in medieval visual arts as Jesus’ persecutor and the Antichrist’s follower, while his spiritual difference is frequently symbolized by the attributes of dress and physique proper to “the jews” of Christian iconography. By the twelfth century, however, as Christian Europe familiarizes itself with Islam in the era of the Crusades, “the jews” trade their quality of a springboard for classifying and describing the Muslim for that of a subspecies in the larger species of the infidel. This facilitates the reciprocal transfer of features between Christianity’s monotheistic Others, expanding the “jewish” vocabulary of difference to encompass the darker complexion and Oriental dress of the Arab and the facial traits of the Moor. The importance of Orientalism in the image of “the jews” has traditionally depended on Muslim-Christian dynamics, peaking during the historical nadirs in Europe’s relations with Islam. Thus, if “the jews” of late medieval iconography can have the facial features or dress of the Moor, in the fifteenth century, at the time of the Ottoman expansion, they wear Turkish attire. Modern intellectual fads also capitalize on the symbolic link between “the jews” and the Muslim. The two figures all but merge in Romantic art and thought, subsequently enabling Benjamin Disraeli to describe Arabs as little more than “Jews upon horseback” (Tancred, 1847).18 In the age of the Crusades, even as Latin Christendom’s drive for internal religious purity coincides with its external struggle against Islam, “the jews” become central to the conceptualization of the tolerated spiritual pollutants living in the midst of Christians, namely, the Leper and the Prostitute. Commonly interpreted as a figure of punishment for the sins of blasphemy and (sexual) immorality, leprosy easily lends itself to

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the paradigm of alterity embodied by “the jews.” And so does prostitution, which is closely related to the sexualized and effeminate image of “the jews” as an acme of carnality and an essentially “jewish” occupation that, like usury or deicide, is socially necessary yet reprehensible. The Leper and the Prostitute share the dualism of the “jewish” image, appearing at once as necessary elements of Christian piety and as carriers of evil. On the one hand, following Francis of Assisi’s example, exegetes place the Leper among the pauperes Christi, side by side with hermits and monks. Love of lepers functions as a sign of sanctity, all the more so because cured lepers, like the converting “jews” and penitent prostitutes, bear witness to the true faith in general and to the righteousness of those who bring about the salutary transformation. On the other hand, medieval and Renaissance legislation across Europe treats “the jews,” the Leper, and the Prostitute as variants of the same spiritual aberration and subjects them to similar segregation measures. Furthermore, all three are said to share a distinct smell and to carry the same contagious diseases, which visibly mark their bodies in a didactic reflection of their diseased souls. This association with a contagious and visible illness reflective of spiritual flaws survives in the figures of “the jews” and the Prostitute in modern times, long after the demise of the medieval image of the Leper.19

Invisible Pollutants: The Heretic, the Witch, and the Undead The inclusion of “the jews” among heretics is a late medieval phenomenon reflective of Christendom’s intensified drive for internal purity. Originally, the theological view of infidels differed from that of heretics, since heresy denoted a Christian’s violation of the dogmas of his faith or his outright apostasy. Kievan and Muscovite polemicists often use the phrase “Jews and heretics” (zhidy i retiky, zhidove i eretitsi), which distinguishes between Orthodoxy’s foes. In Russia, the fusion of the two types occurs only during the Church’s struggle against the “Judaizing heretics.” In the West, this fusion takes place earlier, against the backdrop of the Latin Church’s growing awareness that rabbinic Judaism has nothing to do with the dead cult of the imaginary “jews,”

Animal Symbols and Human Types

tolerated for its didactic value of a negative example. The regular burnings of the Talmud, from the 1242 auto-da-fé in Paris to the 1553 one in Rome, and the periodical papal condemnations of rabbinic Judaism as heretical institutionalize the merger of “the jews” with the figure of the Heretic, leading to their reciprocal exchange of descriptive and narrative features. As part of the larger fear of spiritual pollution, Western Talmudophobia becomes deeply ingrained in Russian culture and informs nineteenth-century debates on the civic status of the empire’s Jewish subjects.20 The Heretic’s identification with “the jews” is all the more pertinent because heresy is a figure of treason exemplified in the Christian imagination by Judas. As a secret apostate, the Heretic is an invisible pollutant sapping the community from within. Kinship with this secret traitor all but reinforces the association of “the jews” with external enemies whom they assist as spies and subversives. This imaginative pattern is present in the Christian cultures that have faced infidel invaders (Mongols, ­Saracens, Turks), as well as in the conceptualization of modern conflicts. The image of “the jews” as the enemy’s secret agents haunts the warring sides during the Napoleonic campaigns and the Polish uprisings against Russian rule. It also informs the Dreyfus affair and the decision of the Russian authorities to expel Jews from the empire’s western regions during the First World War. Yet for those who can put them to good use, “jewish” spies are an invaluable, albeit despised, resource. This logic informs Walter Scott’s novels, whose typical hero freely changes sides between warring factions without bearing the permanent stigma of treason, whereas his “jewish” helpers are treated as traitors and spies by all the parties, despite their faithfulness to the hero. “The jews” thus absorb the negative associations arising from the wavering hero’s conduct. Chronologically, the Witch’s materialization as a subspecies of the Heretic comes on the heels of the elevation of “the jews” to the same status. As a result, Catholic clergymen construct witchcraft with the help of the “jewish” vocabulary of difference. From the outset, inquisitors dub the secret meetings of the witches synagogue and sabbath, and trace their ritual practices to the Talmud. Legislation against witchcraft often figures in premodern law codes among the laws regulating the status and treatment of Jews. Not surprisingly, “the jews” share the skills and

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practices ascribed to the Witch—from medicinal to supernatural. As sorcerers by default, they occupy a place of honor in European witchlore, a place they retain in Slavic folklore well past the Second World War.21 In Russian literature, this merger of the figures of the Witch and “the jews” is echoed in the comic and lugubrious scenes of “jewish” Friday-night prayers. To mark their weekly Sabbath, “the jews” of the Russian imagination stage a chaotic and noisy debauch in inauspicious places (crossroads, secluded taverns, unkempt synagogues)—a happening implicitly or explicitly likened to a witches’ sabbath.22 Like the ritual practices of “the jews,” the satanic rites of witches travesty Christian worship in its main symbolic aspects. Both groups engage in sexually deviant behavior; in the profanation of sacred objects; and in ritual murder. The Satan-worship of “the jews” and of the witches has the same temporal symbolism: more often than not, the weekly and annual times for a witches’ sabbath coincide with the joyous Jewish services of Friday evening and Passover, which as already mentioned, appear in the Christian imagination as anti-Christian events. Lastly, the kinship of “the jews” and the Witch-figure has clear archetypal connotations in the context of the pronounced misogyny of the inquisitors and secular witch-hunters. Infanticidal female witches embody “the bad mother” and, in this quality of a rejecting parent, are homologous to “the jews.” This point is conveyed by the iconographic link of “the jews” and female witches to Saturn in premodern visual arts.23 “The jews,” heretics, and witches of the popular imagination engage in vampirism before and after their physical death. East Slavic traditions use a series of terms derived from heretic (eretik, eretitsa, erestun) and Judas (iudash, iudikha) to denote various types of the satanically empowered undead parasites who can be effectively neutralized with the help of an aspen stick. The last detail buttresses the link of “the jews” to other vampiric undead, since an attendant set of east Slavic legends designates the aspen as a tree cursed for letting Judas use its branch to commit suicide. But if we take away its vampiric aspect, the folk image of the undead “jews” stalking Christian villagers is traceable to the east Slavic traditions about “the jews” who eternally wander the earth or guard the Holy Sepulcher in punishment for their role during the Crucifixion. These traditions, in turn, derive from the medieval legends of

Animal Symbols and Human Types

Judas as an eternal wanderer and of the Wandering Jew—two variations on the biblical story of Cain. In these legends, Judas and Ahasuerus embody the witness-people of “the jews,” providing the Christian faithful with a didactic negative example that is no less useful in fighting spiritual pollution than an aspen stick in fighting the undead, who are the literal realization of the theological metaphor of pollution.24

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Fo u r  The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

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This chapter addresses the encoding of physical alterity in the generative model of “the jews.” The notion that “the jews” have an ethnically or racially distinct appearance is alien to the religious imagination. The medieval enforcers of “jewish” vestimentary laws, for instance, motivated their actions by the lack of observable dissimilarity between Jews and Christians. In premodern visual arts, likewise, “the jews” are more often designated by dress items or religious objects than by special physical traits; the same approach is manifest in early modern painting. Nonetheless, the depiction of “the jews” by medieval and Renaissance artists, both Latin and Orthodox, includes signs of physical otherness denoting their kinship with Satan and his minions (especially the Muslim). But as long as “the jews” remain primarily a religious symbol, their bodily alterity implies spiritual difference curable by baptism. The secularization of European societies inevitably problematized the idea of “jewish” physical difference. It is at this time that Europe’s cultural elites become engaged in the process of recoding the initial theological rationale of the “jewish” body in ethnic and racial terms, casting “the jews” as a negative referent for post-Christian identities.1 Drawing on the iconography of Pan and Bacchus, early churchmen construct the devil with an eye on the equivalence of bodily and spiritual flaws codified by Leviticus (21:16–20), which singles out skin, eyes, nose, and limbs as significant loci. Accordingly, Satan has a flawed complexion: his skin is red, black, or deathly pale; his eyes are bulging, brilliant, or dark; his nose and mouth are large or distorted; his limbs are crooked; and he emits a vile odor. From pagan deities, he inher-

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

its hooves and horns; a tail and a goatee; unruly hair; a large phallus; and a restlessness that contrasts with the monastic ideal of serenity. The same logic informs the initial construction of Judas, who is authoritatively described by Papias, Chrysostom’s pupil, as a man with exaggerated eyelids and penis; rotting flesh; and a vile odor he himself cannot smell because of his abnormal nose. Latin and Orthodox exegetes elaborate on Papias’s description, still cited in early modern Muscovy and Ukraine, giving Judas and “the jews” all other features of Satan’s physique. And in the eighteenth century, the very same loci of “jewish” physical difference begin to receive secular motivation at the crossroads of medicine and anthropology. The German scholar Johann Schudt augurs this process of reinterpretation in 1718, arguing that “God marks the Jews with certain characteristic signs [. . .] no matter how hard they try to disguise themselves.”2 Modern artists and thinkers construct the “jewish” body on the basis of the traditional satanic corporeal traits put at their disposal by the generative model of “the jews.” In the nineteenth century, the reinterpreted signs of religious alterity come to form a common code of “jewish” physical difference making redundant explicit designations of “jewishness.” Richard Wagner’s characters—Beckmesser in The Master­ singers of Nuremberg, Alberich and Mime in The Ring of the Nibelungs— are cases in point. In addition to the “jewish” narrative function of the Opponent-Helper, all these personages are endowed with the “jewish” physique. And while the composer’s interpretive community need not associate them with “the jews” literally (there is enough historical evidence, however, to argue for such an association in Beckmesser’s case), their bodies refer to the spiritual aspects of “jewishness” informing Beckmesser’s, Alberich’s, and Mime’s roles in the operas that allegorically convey Wagner’s ideology, wherein “the jews” are the Other of the German identity.3

Hair Ancient bias against red hair, manifest in the flaming hair of SethTyphon and in the red-haired slave-figure of the classical comedy,

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­ ersists in medieval and Renaissance drama and visual arts, as well as p in European folklore, where red hair symbolizes the fires of hell and the demons stoking them. As a result, English, German, French, Polish, and east Slavic popular cultures designate red hair and freckles as peculiar to Judas and “the jews.” The same association runs in high culture, from the Spanish Inquisition’s view of red hair as “jewish” by default to Dickens’s vision of London’s Hollywell Street (Sketches by Boz, IV:76) as full of “redheaded and red-whiskered Jews”—a demonic trait in the writer’s opinion, if we were to judge by Fagin’s “matted red hair” (Oliver Twist, III:63) framed by fire in the villain’s backdrop; and a toasting-fork in his hand. The same demonic quality is proper to the (most frequently red) beards of “the jews,” whose shape often alludes to the beard of the lascivious billy goat. In addition, “jewish” hair and beards may be unruly or damaged, like those of the restless devil. Incidentally, in east Slavic folklore, hair and beards are the primary targets of the emasculating Gentile violence accompanying the defeat of “the jews,” who come out of various contests looking like “grazed sparrows.” Thus, in Gogol’s “Taras Bul'ba,” the violent extrication of hair is described as a “jewish” professional hazard.4 Although equally endowed with demonic connotations, dark hair is not used in “jewish” iconography as frequently as red hair until the secular recoding of the “jewish” physique in Orientalist terms, which begins in earnest in the late eighteenth century. And while the premodern image of “the jews” occasionally draws on the figure of the Muslim Moor, whose skin color and facial features the Christian imagination derives from those of the devil, the association between “the jews” and the African becomes routine only in the nineteenth century. Increasingly described as an Oriental people with physical features similar to those of the Arab and the African, “the jews” become by the late nineteenth century a group of light-colored mulattoes believed to have been historically interbred with Africans. Artists and intellectuals, their nationality and politics notwithstanding, routinely invoke this racially motivated and Orientalized image of “the jews,” whose standard features now include—in addition to curly dark hair—black eyes, thick lips, and a dark complexion.5

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

Complexion and Skin The often peculiar coloration of the “jewish” skin in premodern iconography, where it can have a ruddy, swarthy, dark, or yellow aspect, is traceable to Satan’s complexion and bears the connotations of Cain’s mark. Churchmen treat the flawed skin of Judas and “the jews” as a sign of divine proscription homologous to the stigma on the Wandering Jew’s brow, to the Leper’s sores, and to the marks sought by inquisitors on the bodies of suspected witches. By the seventeenth century, the spiritual stigma imprinted on the epidermis of “the jews” finds its parallel in the belief that they suffer from contagious scabs curable through the application of Christian blood. These are called Plica polonica in Western Europe; Judenkratze and Parech in Germanic lands; parch in Poland; parsha and koltun in Russia. This belief owes much to the symbolic link of “the jews” to the dog, whose mangy coat is traced by folk traditions to the animal’s divine curse. Characteristically, the Russian term parsha denotes both canine mange (parshivyi pes) and the scabby “jews” (parkhatyi, parkh). This polysemy allows Nikolai Leskov, for instance, to describe “the jews” as people “covered with some sort of malignant mange no Russian dog has ever known.” Ultimately, modern scientists motivate the peculiar complexion and skin ailments of “the jews” as the tokens of their deficient hygiene, congenital syphilis, and miscegenation with Africans.6 In symbolic terms, however, the unclean skin and complexion of “the jews” signify pollution, spiritual or otherwise, and are therefore homologous to dirt—the universal symbol of disorder. Stressing dirt in the appearance and habitat of “the jews” is a standard method of contrasting them with civilized (Christian) Europeans in modern art and thought. But even at the end of the nineteenth century, the original religious implications of dirt in the “jewish” image are far from forgotten, as illustrated by Du Maurier’s Svengali. This “filthy black Hebrew sweep” never washes and is perplexed by the Sunday bathing ritual of his Gentile acquaintances—a calendar choice with unmistakable Christian connotations.7 It is tempting to take modern literary and ethnographic accounts of filth in the appearance and living environment of “the jews” at face

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value, as a reflection of the indisputable economic distress of the mass of Eastern European Jews (even admitting, as Mikhail Vaiskopf does, that Russia’s peasantry was itself hardly the paragon of hygiene). But the very continuity of dirt symbolism in the “jewish” image belies easy sociological explanations. A case in point is the association of “the jews” with excrement, which persists on all discursive levels from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, extending to the “jewish” body (in France and Germany freckles are traditionally called “Judas’s crap”); diet (“the jews” eat feces in the Judensau images); child-bearing (in east Slavic traditions “the jews” are born through the anus); and religious rites. The obvious symbolic value of this association is further buttressed by the strong psychological link of excrement to money—another sign of demonic pollution that is part and parcel of the “jewish” image.8

Eyes As already mentioned, the metaphor of “jewish” spiritual blindness, realized in premodern visual arts where Synagoga and “the jews” wear blindfolds, posits the eyes of “the jews” as a locus of difference. Little wonder then that Satan’s eyes—large, goggled, dark, or fiery—figure prominently in “jewish” iconography. In popular culture, from Britain to Ukraine, the “jewish” gaze is endowed with malignant supernatural power akin to that of the Witch’s evil eye. This motif is echoed in the hypnotic eyes of M. G. Lewis’s Ahasuerus (The Monk, 1796) and in Svengali’s mesmerizing glance. The gaze of “the jews” also preoccupies the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton; and convinces psychiatrist Henry Meige of the innate psychological instability of “jewish” males. Not to be outdone, ethnographic and medical authorities in fin de siècle Russia and Britain insist on the special susceptibility of “the jews” to eye diseases as a result of their peculiar lifestyle and biological predisposition.9 The same process of motivational recoding is manifest in the physical representation of the “jewish” eyes. Initially markers of satanic kinship, the goggled, fiery, and dark eyes of “the jews” are subsequently reinterpreted in Orientalist terms. If a 1753 English pamphlet still cites the

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

“malignant blackness” of the “jewish” eyes as evidence of deicidal guilt, Johann Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa (On the natural varieties of mankind, 1775) already argues that “the Jewish race can easily be recognized everywhere by the eyes alone, which breathe of the East.” In the following century, this Orientalist reading gradually acquires racial connotations. Ivanhoe’s Isaac has “piercing black eyes” that are “marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race” (69). An Irish author writing in 1843 includes, in a typical “jewish” look, “Oval phiz, high, pale forehead, dark, protuberant flashing eye.” And Russian writers, in the latter part of the century, dwell on the “peculiarly semitic,” black, and oily eyes, in whose brilliance informed readers can still see the devil’s fiery gaze.10

Nose and Odor A grotesquely large or misshapen (often hooked) nose is among those readily recognizable features of the devil that pass on to the images of “the jews” and the Fool. We find this feature, for instance, in medieval visual arts, as well as in the early modern English theater, where the actors playing Satan and “the jews” wear grotesque artificial noses. With time, Christian iconography bestows the distorted nose upon other antithetical types: the Muslim, the Heretic, and the Witch. But it is noteworthy that as a marker of alterity the exaggerated nose has never been just a sign of satanic nature; for it is also a common index of abnormal sexuality. If the devil’s nose euphemistically stands for his grotesque phallus, the same is true for the oversized “jewish” nose, whose sexual connotations persist in the modern imagination. Finally, the peculiar nose of the devil and “the jews” stands for their shared odor, that very stench of disbelief that holy waters alone can wash away, according to medieval exegetes. Initially a theological metaphor, the foetor judaicus motif is literalized by the twelfth century. But while its satanic significance remains intact, opinions of its exact nature vary. Exempla and folk traditions derive the odor of “the jews” from that of the goat; from the stench of excrement (the devil and “the jews” bathe in feces to counter baptism); and from the kinship of “the jews” with the rotting Leper and the Undead.11

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The onset of secularization did nothing to challenge the centrality of the exaggerated nose in “jewish” iconography or the attendant tradition of the foetor judaicus. Both are rationalized in ethnographic, hygienic, medical, and biological terms as distinctive properties of the “jewish” body. For Gentile writers, moreover, the peculiar nose and smell of “the jews” are not mere indices of biological difference—they are props establishing the true origins of those “jews” who hide under the cloak of acculturation. The importance of this semiotic function, which the “jewish” nose and odor perform in Judeophile and Judeophobe discourses alike, cannot be underestimated; for it ensures the permanence of the “jewish” Other in the face of the galloping acculturation of Europe’s Jews.12 The continuity of the foetor judaicus motif is at its clearest in the association of “the jews” with plants of the genus Allium, garlic in particular, despite the fact that the Ashkenazi cuisine is not any more garlic-crazed than the traditional cooking of many Christian cultures. A sixteenthcentury German drawing (Figure 2) suggests that a culinary explanation cannot fully account for this symbolic link. The drawing features the male of “the jews” holding garlic, whereas cooking is a traditionally female job. That garlic here refers to something beyond diet is obvious from the correspondence of its shape to the moneybag in the man’s other hand. The bag alludes to Judas’s blood-money and is a common index of perverse “jewish” carnality. To shed light on this symbolic link, then, we must explore the consonance of garlic’s mythical connotations with the logic of the generative model of “the jews.” In European cultures, strong-smelling plants of the allium group— chives, leek, garlic, onion—are associated with the underworld and function as mediators between the dead and the living, being suitable for enlisting or repelling supernatural forces. This semantic aura links allium plants to fertility concerns. Used as a sexual stimulant by the Romans, garlic is cited by Christian dieticians as a male aphrodisiac. The same attribution exists in the Jewish tradition. The Mishnah (circa 200 c.e.) states that the expression “garlic eaters” is a designation for Jews. Talmudic commentators further explain this designation as a reference to a religious ordinance requiring Jews to eat garlic on Friday night as a way of enhancing marital lovemaking, which is an essential part of Sabbath

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

observance. As such a symbol of proper observance, garlic (shum in Hebrew) might even inform the name of the medieval Jewish communities (kehillot) in the Rhineland—kehillot Shum. Shum is the Hebrew acronym of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, but it can also be read as “garlic.”13

Figure 2. “The Jews of Worms” (detail). Germany, 16th century. In: Alfred Rubens, A History of Jewish Costume. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p. 86, plate 113.

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Symbols of fertility easily acquire negative connotations in Christian cultures that stigmatize and repress sexuality. Geoffrey Chaucer thus characterizes his Summoner’s spiritual deformity in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “Wel loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes.” This dietary preference makes the Summoner akin to “the jews,” whose moral corruption homiletic literature illustrates by the episode in Numbers (11:5) where the Israelites, bored with manna, long for their Egyptian prison food—leeks, onions, and garlic. Following this logic, early modern didactic works insist that when they eat garlic, “the jews” engage in deliberately anti-Christian behavior. By the same token, folk traditions hold “the jews” responsible for eating garlic on Christmas in order to mock Christ, as well as for rubbing Christ’s body with garlic during the Passion. A series of other legends traces the origin of strong-smelling plants, including onion and garlic, to Judas’s corpse.14 The absence of alliums from the image of another ur-symbol of immorality—women—suggests that their link to sexuality is not the only factor in the plants’ assignment to the lexicon of “jewish” difference. Indeed, as the history of the secular recoding of the foetor judaicus motif shows, these plants become crucial signs of “jewishness” at the time when Jewish assimilation saps the image of Europe’s paradigmatic Other. In the early eighteenth century, Johann Schudt already decries the assimilation of Jews who adopt the German ways but eschew baptism: “Palaces of the Jews may be most elegant,” he writes, “with exquisite furniture and delicate decorations, but upon entering one finds the Jews smelling of garlic there.” A century later, even baptism does not do. From now on, according to Ukrainian folk wisdom, “A Yid will always stink like a Yid”; and even “Baptism cannot kill the Yid smell.” And while the baptized Heinrich Heine duly notes on his trip to Poland that the local “jews,” unlike his acculturated self, smell like garlic, a rival German poet, August von Platen, writes that one can be Heine’s friend but not his lover, “for his kisses exude the smell of garlic.”15 By the mid-century, alliums become standard markers of hidden “jewishness.” In Vladimir Dal’s collection of Russian proverbs (1863– 66), the phrase “he smells like onion and garlic” denotes “a person of Jewish origin.” And in her 1912 novel about the worldwide “jewish” conspiracy, Elena Shabel'skaia puns on the German for civilized (­zivilisiert)

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

and the Ukrainian and south Russian for onion (tsybulia) to describe the sinister acculturated “jews” as tsibulizirovannye.16 Not accidentally, garlic is a major marker of “jewishness” in Anton Chekhov’s imaginary universe, as I show in the third part of this study.

Mouth and Speech The devil’s exaggerated mouth with fleshy or pouting lips finds its way from premodern “jewish” iconography into nineteenth- and twentiethcentury antisemitic caricatures by way of the Orientalist recoding of “the jews” as a race interbred with Africans. Like other features of their physique, the mouth of “the jews” initially denotes religious difference, referring to their aberrant reading of the Scripture, which makes all their utterances profane and libelous. This quality of “jewish” speech historically informs, on the one hand, the special oaths Jews take in Byzantine and medieval Catholic courts; and on the other, the focus of the homiletic literature and derivative popular traditions on the mouths of “the jews,” who regularly lose the capacity to speak during theological confrontations with Christians.17 The same idea underlies the motif of spitting by which “the jews” express their rejection of Jesus in the Gospels (Mat. 26:67; Mark 14:65), in visual arts and church drama, and in folklore. This motif is all but reinforced by the historical place of spitting in the concluding prayer of the daily Jewish liturgy, the Alenu, which excoriates idol worship. Although predating the birth of Christianity, the Alenu was interpreted by Christian exegetes as an attack on Jesus—a charge that ultimately forced rabbis to modify the prayer’s text and the manner of its recital. Thus, in response to Johann Eisenmenger’s anti-Judaic tract, Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism unmasked, 1700), which described spitting during the Alenu as a show of contempt for Jesus, the Ashkenazi rabbinate dropped the practice as indecorous (spitting during the Alenu persists in the Hassidic rite). Originating in the mouths of “the jews,” spitting is an anti-Christian act equivalent to profane verbal utterances; hence, the pairing of “the jews” with the venomous toad, the devil’s familiar, in the accounts of the witches’ sabbath, as well as the motif of spitting as

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a required part of all “jewish” prayers, common in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The same notion of profane “jewish” speech informs the modern image of journalism as a “jewish” occupation because of its low stylistic register and dubious content produced by a hired, and therefore dishonest, pen.18 The stigmatization of the newspaper style as “jewish” by nineteenthcentury critics of European cultural life had more to do with the linguistic attributes of “the jews,” vehicled by their generative model, than with the newfound prominence of assimilated Jews in journalism and publishing. Like the devil and the Antichrist, “the jews” speak all languages, but none properly; for God does not speak through their mouths. Polyglots out of necessity, “the jews” use the languages of the host cultures into which they are exiled, all the while corrupting these languages by the profane content of their utterances (compare the Russian ecclesiastic ban on foul language as “jewish”). Moreover, “the jews” flounder even in their own language, since otherwise they could heed the Christian message of the Hebrew Bible.19 The notion of the spiritual corruption of “jewish” linguistic usage is literalized in a variety of narratives, from medieval drama to modern art to folklore, where the language of “the jews” is a burlesque mix of foreign and nonsense words exacerbated by botched syntax and pronunciation, all of it evoking the cant of thieves and prostitutes. This “jew-speak” does not really strive to reflect the linguistic competence of Jews in any historical period or geographic location—it is, above all, a marker of spiritual difference. Witness the frequent coexistence within one and the same European culture of numerous and contradictory ways to convey the defective speech of “the jews.” Furthermore, there exists a clear historical correlation between the success of Jewish assimilation in Europe and the increasing prominence of defective speech in the contemporary image of “the jews.”20 The secularization of European cultures entailed the elevation of language to the status of a post-Christian identity tool, whereby a national community’s shared tongue assumed the connotations of its formerly shared religion. In this context, “the jews” were denied the mastery of national languages because they were denied admission into the cultural body of the nation. From the mid-nineteenth century on, assimilated

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Jewish writers and intellectuals faced the stigma of linguistic deficiency and subversiveness, since the improper use of a language undermined the spiritual values of the national community it symbolized. As I argue in the fourth part of this study, this linguistic othering must be taken into consideration when we examine the artistic oeuvre of assimilated Jewish writers.21

Foot and Gait Christianity shares with many other mythological systems the view of an afflicted leg (and the resulting imbalance of gait) as symbolic of its owner’s commerce with or relation to the supernatural. In this respect, Jacob’s dislocated thigh, traced in Jewish mythology to the patriarch’s struggle with an angel, is a phenomenon of the same series as Satan’s lameness, explained in Christian mythology by his fall from heaven and his need to conceal hooves within shoes. In the Middle Ages, the devil’s deficient foot and gait were extended to “the jews.” The idea that “the jews” had peculiar feet and posture survived the test of time, appearing in such different narratives as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1652) and east Slavic legends about lame “jewish” tavern-keepers. The spiritual implications of a flawed gait, which in the case of the devil and “the jews” is often conveyed by agitated jerkiness, are clear against the backdrop of the monastic ideal of saintly serenity. Characteristically, clerics treat the jerky movements of the deicidal “jews” as a mark of Cain, a view still extant in the eighteenth-century English debates about Jewish naturalization and in the aforementioned east Slavic tradition about the invisible chains hampering the sparrow’s movements in punishment for its complicity in the Crucifixion. The same implications of spiritual deficiency inform the image of the praying “jews” in modern literature and drama, which cast “jewish” worship as ludicrous by virtue of excessive gesticulation and frantic movements.22 Orientalism gives a new raison d’être to the jerky restlessness of the “jewish” body as a biological marker. For example, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opinion, the Africans and “the jews” share one “oriental character,” which disposes them to “outward expression, violent gesticulations,

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and agitating movements of the body.” Concurrently, the foot and gait of “the jews” preoccupies Europe’s medical and psychiatric establishments, which postulate the congenital gait-inhibiting weakness of the “jewish” foot (claudication intermittente) as a symptom of hysteria and neurasthenia. This diagnosis buttresses the image of the male “jews” as inherently effeminate because unfit for military service. Made at a time when the foot soldier and the popular militia are the hallmarks of political liberalism and the symbols of a nation-state, such scientific discoveries confirm the image of “the jews” as bad soldiers, providing grist for the opponents of Jewish civic equality. Orientalist and medical narratives are in fact complementary. Modern Russian writers, Judeophile and Judeophobe alike, use them simultaneously to motivate their uniform depiction of “the jews” as jerky and restless creatures with ostensibly flawed postures and violent gesticulation, in stark contrast to the build and composure of the Russian characters with whom they interact.23

The Semantics of Obsolescence Conceptualized as a parent-figure in Christian theology and myth, the male of “the jews” tends to be of old or indefinite age. Modern writers seem as dependent on this symbolic logic as the playwrights of Elizabethan England or medieval homilists. Consider the sixty-yearold protagonist of Evgenii Chirikov’s Judeophile play Evrei (The Jews, 1906), who is described as “an old man [starik] . . . resembling a biblical patriarch.” His job reinforces the significance of this “advanced” age: he is a clock-maker, who “stares into watches from morning till night” and fears the invention of a clock with perpetual motion. In other words, he is a figure of the Wandering Jew contemplating Time and dreading the eternity of his divinely mandated exile. Furthermore, the theological view of Judaism as an outlived religion translates into visible physical decline and nervous disorder in the male “jewish” body, which thereby appears aged even if its owner is nominally young. And the same is true for the “jewish” living environment. Witness, for example, the common portrayal of the synagogue in premodern visual arts as a decrepit structure; and the uniform depiction of “jewish” streets and

The Semiotics of the “jewish” Body

households in modern Russian letters as decrepit and decomposing, in addition to being filthy and malodorous, as discussed above.24 It is within this original theological context marking Judaism and its adherents as the dead among the living that one fully appreciates the use of “the jews” as the epitome of civilizational decline in fin de siècle Europe. “Jewish” spiritual and physical obsolescence strikes a sensitive chord with those critics of modernity who conceptualize their age in the terms of physical and cultural decadence resonating powerfully with the perennially ailing and neurotic—thus, essentially modern— “jewish” body. As I will show, this imaginative logic is crucial for our understanding of “the jews” in Chekhov’s and Babel’s writings. Finally, only the theological and archetypal dynamic informing the generative model of “the jews” can explain, if not reconcile, the other­ wise glaring contradiction between, on the one hand, the successful striving for material gain imputed to “the jews” and, on the other, the equally common image of their dilapidated and decrepit environment. And the same context helps explain the lack of logic in the coexistence of such contradictory features in the male “jewish” persona as dangerous lasciviousness and a body so frail that it can hardly pose a sexual threat. The fact that most modern carriers of the “jewish” image—be they of Gentile or assimilated Jewish stock—seem undisturbed by its logical incongruities speaks volumes about the imaginative power of religious patterns in the nominally secular cultures of post-Christian Europe.

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Fi v e  “Taras Bul'ba” in Context

Although shaped by the same imaginative mechanisms in all European cultures, “the jews” do not have a uniform history in national literary traditions owing to the trend-setting influence exercised by individual authors and texts in secular art. If in French and German letters no single artist gives an authoritative example for the depiction of “the jews,” Shakespeare’s Shylock is such an exemplar in English literature, where his authority is disputed only by Walter Scott’s Isaac. Shylock’s success has little to do with his creator’s innovative treatment of “the jews”; for there is nothing original or iconoclastic in the portrayal of The Merchant of Venice’s “jewish” villain. It is Shakespeare’s unmatched ability to manipulate his audience’s conditioned imagination by animating a stock literary type with the power of artistic persuasion and mythical appeal that makes Shylock such a historically important expression and vehicle of the generative model of “the jews.” The peculiarity of secular Russian literature resides in the fact that unlike its French and German counterparts it develops a “jewish” type of its own. By the mid-nineteenth century, this type makes foreign literary examples of “the jews” largely irrelevant for Russian artists. The (dubious) honor of this coup de force belongs to Nikolai Gogol’s longer story, “Taras Bul'ba” (1835–42), a hybrid of historical romance and heroic epic set during the Ukrainian Cossack wars with Poland. The story’s main “jewish” figure, Iankel', is named after the patriarch Jacob, who received from God the name of Israel and engendered Israel’s twelve tribes. Although Iankel' is not the story’s only manifestation of “the jews,” he effectively overshadows and absorbs all other “jewish” figures in Gogol’s narrative, thereby coming to occupy a singular place

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in the Russian artistic imagination. For instance, the “jewish” personage in Dostoevskii’s Notes from the House of the Dead is explicitly linked to Iankel' (IV:55), even though his appearance is modeled on two other “jewish” characters from “Taras Bul'ba.” Dostoevskii, moreover, might not have been aware of this conflation.1 Like Shylock, Iankel' is far from being an iconoclastic figure created to challenge contemporary cultural assumptions. Furthermore, if popularity in the literary marketplace alone were the gauge of a text’s imaginative power, Iankel' should have been humbled by other “jewish” figures in modern Russian letters, especially by Movsha in Faddei Bulgarin’s bestselling novel, Ivan Vyzhigin (1825–27). And yet despite the unoriginality of Gogol’s “jews” and the relatively limited success of “Taras Bul'ba” in its author’s lifetime, it is Iankel' who becomes the main reference point for the depiction of “the jews” in Russian literature. In my view, this happens because Gogol’s oeuvre relies on a blend of myth, religion, folklore, and archetypal logic that is unique in contemporary Russian art. The dependence of Gogol’s imagination on east Slavic folklore and dualist mythology; his mystical and utopian mind-set; his familiarity with patristic literature; and his tremendous emotional investment in the Christian myth logically lead the writer to view “the jews” as an embodiment of otherness. But his choice of actors appears particularly significant when we take into account the place of “Taras Bul'ba” in Gogol’s spiritual trajectory. The story’s creation coincides with major spiritual crises in Gogol’s life— one in the year of its initial completion (1834) and another at the time of its rewriting (1839).2 In this part of my study, I examine Gogol’s Iankel' with an eye on the uses to which an individual artist can put the generative model of “the jews” in the process of negotiating his psychological and emotional idio­syncrasies in a specific literary-historical context. Gogol' initially conceived “Taras Bul'ba” as part of a larger, ultimately unrealized, project devoted to the history of his native Ukraine. Published in the second volume of his Ukrainian tales, Mirgorod (1835), the story held such importance for the author that he continued to work on it, doing the bulk of the rewriting in 1839, concurrently with the composition of Mertvye dushi (Dead souls, 1842). Published in 1842, the revised

“Taras Bul'ba” in Context

text further sharpened the identification of Ukrainian Cossacks with the Russian Church and state, effectively elaborating on the ideas already gestating in the earlier redaction.3 Gogol’s treatment of Ukraine’s historical past was mediated by several factors in the literary and political environment of his Petersburg milieu. First of all, exploring an episode from the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the wake of the failed Polish uprising against the Russian rule (1830–31), the budding Russian writer Nikolai Gogol'-Janovski could not afford to sound a dissonant note in the anti-Polish chorus of Petersburg patriots. Whatever misgivings about the official Russian discourse about Poland and Ukraine he may have privately entertained, they did not prevent Gogol' from dropping the Polish-sounding part of his family name as unsuitable for a career in Russia’s imperial capital. Second, Gogol’s historical project resonated with the pan-European Romantic drive for the rediscovery of the national past. “If only we had a Ukrainian genius like Walter Scott, I am sure Ukraine could be a wellspring for historical novels,” wrote in 1830 a member of the circle of ­Izmail Sreznevskii, whose collection of mostly counterfeit Ukrainian folk songs Gogol' admired and used as a documentary resource. In fact, with Ukrainian historiography in its infancy, Gogol’s vision of Ukraine’s past relied largely on forged historical documents, uniformly anti-­Polish and anti-Jewish in tone, that flooded Russia’s book market in response to the Romantic valorization of the vestiges of the national past. One such canard, Istoriia Rusov (A history of the Russians), equipped Gogol' and his colleagues with a story of the Orthodox Ukraine’s long-desired (re)union with Russia in the face of Catholic and “jewish” oppression. The various other texts informing Gogol’s historical vision—mostly apocryphal Cossack chronicles; largely counterfeit ethnographic collections; and recent historical treatises based on the same dubious sources—closely approximated the narrative of Istoriia Rusov. Characteristically, Gogol' was so confident in his story’s conformity to the Russian imperial discourse regarding Ukrainian-­PolishRussian religious and political dynamics that he used “Taras Bul'ba” in 1837 to secure financial assistance from emperor Nicholas I.4 The Romantic construction of history encouraged Gogol’s contemporaries to accept dubious sources for the sake of their emotive power.

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This attitude informs the reliance of Walter Scott’s historical novels on legends at the expense of documents; it underlies the high esteem in which Pushkin holds Istoriia Rusov as a work of great “poetic freshness”; and it validates Gogol’s own use of ethnographic collections as trustworthy historical documents because, as the writer puts it, “a song speaks more eloquently about the past” than a witness account. With historical precision thus devalued in favor of imagination and eloquence, the qualifier “historical” in the identification of “Taras Bul'ba” as a historical romance should be taken with a grain of salt. Gogol' is ostentatiously careless in his handling of historical details. Stating that the scene of “Taras Bul'ba” is laid in the late sixteenth century (1835:99/1842:7), his narrator then makes Taras Bul'ba “a man of the fifteenth century” (1835:100/1842:8), all the while sending Taras’s sons to the Kievan Academy, which was founded only in the seventeenth century. Characteristically, this lack of historical precision does not bother Gogol’s contemporary readers, who praise the writer’s historical intuition, favorably comparing him to Walter Scott. And given the historical romance’s preeminence in the Russian prose of the 1820s–30s, this parallel was a stamp of supreme approval.5 According to Gogol’s secretary, the writer knew his Scott well. Familiarity with the Waverley Novels was in fact indispensable for any author dabbling in the genre of historical romance, which Scott’s oeuvre codified in Gogol’s day. Scott offered his admirers and emulators a set of stock plots and characters, wherein “the jews” loomed large thanks to Ivanhoe’s success with readers all over Europe. Following Scott’s literary recipe, as jocularly summarized in 1827 by critic Mikhail Pogodin, a historical romance had to count among its personages “a fictional or supernatural one. [. . .] A sorcerer, a Gypsy, or, best of all, a Jew.” According to the critic, “these descendants of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Scott’s Isaac” were both fashionable and central to a novel’s narrative structure. Ubiquitous by definition, they “appeared anywhere, like deus ex machina, tying or undoing all the story knots.” Despite their fabulous omnipresence, “the jews” reinforced the historical romance’s realist illusion, replacing openly supernatural helper-figures and impressing the Russian reader, protected from Jews by the Pale of Settlement, with “jewish” ethnographic details.6

“Taras Bul'ba” in Context

Among other things, “the jews” thus contributed to the creation of historical and geographic exoticism, much valued by the producers and consumers of Romantic fiction. And if a contemporary French-Jewish critic finished his survey of “the jews” in the writings of the French Romantics by exclaiming, “God save us from the couleur locale of these gentlemen,” a Russian reviewer of “Taras Bul'ba” concurrently extolled the story’s couleur locale. Russian critics admired “Taras Bul'ba”’s realism (“Everything is captured with amazing resemblance,” writes one; “What truthfulness in character depiction!” exclaims another), deeming the story’s “jews” particularly lifelike. To be sure, everything in “Taras Bul'ba” looked realistic, because it corresponded to the aesthetic and cultural expectations of Gogol’s interpretive community, shaped by Scott’s Waverley Novels and, as far as “the jews” were concerned, by their centuries-old generative model.7 ❊ Taras Bul'ba is a Cossack patriarch, who takes his sons, upon their return from the Kievan Academy and against his wife’s will, to the fortified Cossack camp of Zaporozh'e, where he instigates a looting raid to show the young men some military action. Preparing to attack the Turks, the Cossacks learn about the oppression of Ukraine’s Orthodox population by Catholics and “the jews” and change their bellicose plans. After a pogrom in Zaporozh'e, during which Taras saves Iankel' for lending his brother Dorosh ransom money while in Turkish captivity, the Cossacks attack Poland and besiege the city of Dubno. The daughter of Dubno’s governor has bewitched Taras’s younger son, Andrii, back in Kiev. Learning of her presence in Dubno, Andrii defects to the Poles. Iankel' informs Taras about this betrayal. In the ensuing battle, Taras finds and executes Andrii, while his older son, Ostap, is taken prisoner. Having recovered from wounds with “jewish” help, Taras asks Iankel' to smuggle him into Warsaw. There he stays with “the jews,” who try to free Ostap but manage only to set up the father’s meeting with his son on the eve of Ostap’s execution. The meeting fails because of Taras’s religious intransigence. Iankel' guides Taras around Warsaw until the Cossack vanishes from Ostap’s execution site after giving a word of encouragement to his agonizing son. The Cossacks then

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mount another anti-Polish campaign, during which Taras is captured and executed. The dying Cossack calls on his comrades to fight on—in the 1835 edition, because the Poles do not deserve any better; and in the 1842 edition, because their fight is part of the divine scheme that will see the Russian tsar spread Orthodoxy all over the world. “Taras Bul'ba” was initially read through the prism of the Waverley Novels despite its visible break with the main tenets of Scott’s novelistic formula, which Gogol' violated by relegating the love intrigue to secondary position and eschewing historical personages. But his story does echo one crucial aspect of Ivanhoe—its concern with filial bonds. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, Cedric the Saxon’s only son, is banished and disinherited, nominally for allying himself with the Norman king Richard but actually for “lifting his eyes in the way of affection towards” Lady Rowena, the wifeless Cedric’s charge and the household’s de facto mistress. In the course of his adventures, Ivanhoe is functionally adopted by “the jews”—the wifeless Isaac and his daughter Rebecca—who form a couple mirroring that of Cedric and Rowena. Enamored with Ivanhoe, Rebecca stays faithful to her religion; and Ivanhoe, while fancying Rebecca, remains faithful to his Lady. Scott thus complicates the daughter of “the jews” masterplot by splitting the figure of its pre- and postconversion heroine: the Christian woman Ivanhoe eventually marries despite her old keeper’s resistance is an equivalent of the converted and eloping daughter of “the jews,” as confirmed by Rebecca’s donation of the symbols of her femininity, her jewels, to the newlywed Rowena. Making Ivanhoe’s father the keeper of Rowena, who is a transparent Mary-figure, Scott comes close to laying bare the oedipal implications of the Virgin cult traditionally displaced on and obfuscated in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot (see Chapter 2). But this masterplot itself is radicalized by the liberal author, who places it outside the intolerant conversionist paradigm. As I have already indicated, Rebecca conspicuously departs from the time-hallowed imaginative pattern by virtue of being the daughter of “the jews” who is at once unconverting and sexually desirable yet virtuous. To be sure, Ivanhoe still triumphs over “the jews” by winning Rebecca’s heart; and his union with Rowena is a reward for withstanding temptation by a religiously proscribed sexual object. And as if to confirm the danger of Rebecca’s taboo charms,

“Taras Bul'ba” in Context

her sexual appeal is the undoing of another knight, the Templar, who is ready to defect to Saladin in exchange for Rebecca’s love and whose ignominious death is homologous to the demise of Gogol’s Andrii.8 At first sight, then, the system of filial bonds in “Taras Bul'ba” differs from that in Ivanhoe. Taras has a wife and two sons; both parents of Andrii’s beloved are alive, albeit never shown; and even Iankel' has a wife, although they appear to be childless. Taras’s own parents, however, are never mentioned, and we soon learn the reason for this anomaly: the Cossacks are prodigal sons by definition; like Ivanhoe, “they willfully [. . .] flee from paternal homes” (1835:112/1842:21). This detail is crucial for our understanding of Taras’s spiritual journey; for the prodigal son’s story functions in the Christian imagination as a parable of personal conversion describing God’s mercy toward sinners.9 And although Taras’s parentage is passed in silence, we do get an inkling of his family’s past when we learn that Iankel' knew Taras’s late brother, Dorosh, whose name outweighs the religiously motivated bloodthirstiness of the pogrom in Zaporozh'e. It is also significant that “the jews” functionally adopt Taras rather than his wayward son ­Andrii, in contrast with their adoption of Cedric’s banished son Ivanhoe (the analogy with their own status of rejection and exile is intended). The reason is visible in the story’s title. Like Ivanhoe, “Taras Bul'ba” is named after its protagonist—it is the fatherless knight Taras Bul'ba, and not his sons, who is the equivalent of the disinherited knight Ivanhoe. It is also Taras who plays the Subject in the story’s narrative structure and impersonates the Self in its archetypal structure. Scott splits the female object of desire in Ivanhoe into two personages—the unconverting Rebecca as Synagoga and the Christian bride Rowena as Ecclesia. And so does Gogol', who splits it into Taras’s Ukrainian wife and Andrii’s Polish lover, ignoring Scott’s innovative treatment of the daughter of “the jews.” But if the prodigal Ivanhoe amalgamates in one persona defiance and obedience toward his father, Gogol' prefers to literalize Ivanhoe’s internal conflict: the obedient Ostap and the rebellious Andrii embody the two sides of Taras’s contradictory personality. For twenty years, Gogol’s narrator informs us, Ostap and Andrii “have been growing up together, splitting everything halfway” (1835:126). Like Taras, Ostap is all about warfare and male ­camaraderie (1835:105/1842:14).

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Yet Taras has much in common with Andrii, for he has also known amorous passion and played the role of a “seducer” to his future wife (1835:102/1842:11). Like Ostap, Taras takes martyrdom from the Poles. But he does so only after duplicating ­Andrii’s conduct: in the course of the story, Taras, like his unfaithful son, changes into foreign clothes and takes an underground trip in a Polish city—both actions, as I will argue, abounding in signs of religious apostasy. The parallelism of brother couples—Ostap and Andrii, on the one hand, Taras and Dorosh, on the other—suggests a kinship of fate between them. Like Andrii’s crime and punishment, Dorosh’s story may be of an unsavory nature, hence the mystery surrounding his life and death. Taras’s troubled past, as conveyed by his missing parents and shadowy dead sibling, remains unexplained by the narrator. But the Cossack’s present does follow the general pattern in Gogol’s oeuvre, pointed out by Andrei Belyi: a family member’s crime initiates the process of filial disintegration symbolized by the alliance of other family members with the forces of the orbis exterior—the devil, “the jews,” and other outsiders.10 What crime might be haunting Taras’s family? The tales framing “Taras Bul'ba” in the Mirgorod collection suggest an answer. In “­Strashnaia mest'” (Terrible vengeance), a Cossack returns from an infidel land, adopting its “jewish” ways (I:254–55). He strives to possess his own daughter sexually; joins with the Poles; and kills his grandson. His deeds reflect the filial curse for the fratricide previously committed in the family. Taras’s family curse may similarly arise from apostasy and fratricide (real or symbolic, such as the brothers’ mutual renunciation), the former possibly provoking the latter. We know, for instance, that Iankel' helps Dorosh out of Muslim captivity. This scenario may violate proper Christian conduct in the story’s all-male Cossack community, as exemplified by another member of a male brotherhood, the Kievan monk Evstratii (see Chapter 1). Evstratii’s captivity in Chersones, which at the time of the Polish-Cossack wars is in Muslim hands and can thus resonate with Gogol' as a place of Dorosh’s detention, ends with the monk’s Christlike martyrdom for refusing the food of his “jewish” owner and asserting a Christian’s freedom from the Law. Dorosh, on the contrary, accepts “jewish” help in the form of the ransom money Iankel' lends him, symbolically purchasing the Cossack the way “the jews” purchase Evstratii. Dorosh thereby relapses into

“Taras Bul'ba” in Context

the unredeemed “jewish” state, losing the privileged theological status defined in Evstratii’s vita as that of God’s “son and heir.” In subordinating the love intrigue in “Taras Bul'ba” to a story of religious doubt, Gogol' downgrades the oedipal conflict for the possession of a female (which Scott filters in Ivanhoe through the daughter of “the jews” masterplot) in favor of the spiritual conflict of two brothers—the standard theological trope casting “the jews” as the older man who loses God’s favor to his younger sibling. In fact, the reversal of the curse that has made a Cossack (Dorosh) equal to “the jews” is so important in the story’s economy that Gogol' deliberately distorts the text of the Gospels in order to indicate to his reader the successful completion of this task by Dorosh’s brother Taras. While the dying Jesus never gets an answer to his question, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mat. 27:46), the dying Ostap does hear Taras’s paternal praise, which functions as a sign that the divine link compromised by Dorosh has been reestablished. “Father! Father! Where are you? Do you hear?” asks the martyr. “I hear! A voice resonated from the universal silence, and the people, in their entire million, simultaneously shuddered” (1835:145/1842:90). To reverse the family curse, Taras must relive Dorosh’s travails vicariously, through Ostap and Andrii, and literally, not only resisting the temptation to which his brother and younger son succumb but, ultimately, emulating Evstratii’s and Ostap’s martyrdom informed by Christ’s Passion. “The jews” are an integral part of this scenario, acting as theological and sexual tempters. If in Ivanhoe “jewish” sexual temptation is key to a Christian’s progress toward righteousness, in “Taras Bul'ba” sexual temptation is one in a series of “jewish” trials; for although the temptress is Polish, it is through a veiled theological debate with Iankel' that Taras condemns and rejects Andrii’s sexual choice and the concomitant religious apostasy. Let us recall that Pogodin’s recipe for a historical romance leaves Russian writers with a choice of actors—a sorcerer, a Gypsy, “the jews”—for the narrative function of the ­Opponent-Helper. However, the religious dynamic of “Taras Bul'ba,” whose full meaning, I will argue, is rooted in Gogol’s spiritual, psychological, and emotional peregrinations, leaves the writer with no choice but Christianity’s paradigmatic Other.

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S i x The Theology of Archetypes

in “Taras Bul'ba”

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Taras amalgamates both faces of the Wise Old Man archetype. While Andrii suffers the wrath of an infanticidal Saturn-Kronos, Ostap experiences Taras as a loving father; so loving, in fact, that Gogol' must bend the Gospels to play down the Christian myth’s implicit animosity toward the cruel God who sends his son Jesus to martyrdom. The story opens with the clash of “the bad father” with his sons, whose homecoming Taras marks by challenging his progeny to a fight. Already in this first scene, archetypal logic overrides verisimilitude. Ostap and Andrii are in their twenties, yet the narrator tells us that their faces are “covered with virginal down still untouched by a razor” (1835:98/1842:6). This detail accentuates their youth, projecting their clash with Taras on the archetypal image of a young male menaced by his father; and on its Christian variant—Isaac under Abraham’s knife as a prefiguration of Christ’s Passion.1 The razor’s invocation is especially sinister considering that, like Isaac before the blade-wielding Abraham, Ostap and Andrii are motionless and passive in front of Taras (1835:97/1842:5). In his last moments, Andrii assumes that same submissive posture “before his terrible father,” whose designs he follows with “childlike obedience” (1842:75). Gogol’s unfinished historical tale “Get'man” confirms the archetypal logic of the father-son dynamics in “Taras Bul'ba.” Here a Cossack home is decorated by a picture of “Abraham aiming his pistol at Isaac” (III:294)—an image reiterated in the scene of Andrii’s execution. Similar sacrificial symbolism informs the story’s next episode, Taras’s dinner with his sons in a hall “recalling ancient churches.” They feast on lamb, which evokes sacrifice in general and Jesus’ death in particular;

The Theology of Archetypes in “Taras Bul'ba”

and drink vodka, which Taras sees as a religiously marked beverage, the Cossack wine of Communion (“What is gorelka in Latin? See, sonny, your Latins were fools: they had no idea about gorelka” [1834:98– 99/1842:6–7]). This festive meal fuses Last Supper imagery, wherein bread and wine signify Christ’s body, with the metaphor of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. The same conflation marks the portrayal of Andrii’s execution. The slain son falls “like a bread sheaf cut by a sickle [compare the aforementioned razor image], like a young lamb”—admittedly, a strange way to describe a traitor’s demise (1835:126/1842:75; emphasis added). A comparison of “Taras Bul'ba” ’s two redactions shows that initially, archetypal logic may have prevented Gogol' from unequivocally condemning Andrii. Among the things he purges from the story’s second edition is the doomed Andrii’s call for help as he flees from the vengeful Taras, “desperately reaching out with his arms and crying, ‘Help me!’” (1835:126). This call cannot but remind us of Ostap’s Christlike entreaty during his public execution under Taras’s approving gaze. As the negative side of the Wise Old Man is commonly played by Satan, Taras “the bad father” is steeped in demonic associations. His vodka “hisses like a demon” (1835:98); he rides a horse named Devil (1835:103/1842:12); and pursuing Andrii, he looks like “the devil incarnate” (1835:126). But a transmutation occurs after Andrii’s slaying, as if the sacrifice mollified “the bad father,” conjuring up his opposite with a suddenness that may have displeased Gogol', for the writer smoothened Taras’s transformation into “the good father” in the second edition. But in the 1835 version, we read that right after the infanticide, Taras “burns with desire to avenge his son’s death” (127), as if he were not Andrii’s slayer. Thus, having devoured his progeny, Saturn-Kronos becomes “the good father” who needs a secondary scapegoat to blame for the primary scapegoat’s death. In the Christian myth, “the jews” are the secondary scapegoat. In “Taras Bul'ba,” this role is given to Andrii’s Polish beloved, whose sexual hold on the young Cossack “the jews” try to justify in Taras’s eyes. Even though Gogol' follows the archetypal opposition of old and young males, willy-nilly casting both sons as innocent victims in the first redaction, it still befalls Ostap to be an explicit Christ-figure and to “drink the heavy cup” (1835:144/1842:89) under the gaze of “the good

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father.” This second sacrifice, abhorred and approved by Taras, who thus emulates the paradoxical God of the Christian imagination, reconciles the Cossack’s conflicting halves. With both sons gone, Taras himself becomes a son, since his end is modeled on that of God’s son Jesus. Hands nailed to a raised log (1835:148/1842:93), Taras “resembles a spirit that rises to prevent something with supernatural power but sees its own inferiority” (1835:148). In other words, he sees that his fate is in God’s hands. Taras conveys this realization by an exclamation that functions like Jesus’ final words, casting the Cossack’s execution as the breaking of the Eucharistic bread and thereby prophesying his assent to the heavenly Father: “I know they will cut me up alive into pieces and not a single piece of my body will be left on earth” (1835:149). Replacing these words in the second edition (1842:94) with a prophecy about Orthodoxy’s universal triumph, Gogol' takes Taras’s redemptive martyrdom to its successful conclusion. He might not have removed the Eucharistic allusion had he been unsure about the reader’s ability to see the subtext of Taras’s death in Jesus’ Passion. Yet another detail, namely that the nailed Taras is to be burnt, completes the referential nexus, evoking the firewood on which Isaac, a Jesus-figure of Christian theology, is to be sacrificed. “The bad father”’s confrontation with his sons is mediated by “the good mother,” who sides with her progeny (1835:98/1842:6). This archetypal schema holds such powerful sway over Gogol’s imagination that, as Simon Karlinsky notes, he does not even bother to give a name to Taras’s wife, who is designated only by her function as the positive side of the Mother archetype. She is called dobraia mat' (1835:98/1842:6), a phrase meaning both a kind and a good mother. Commenting on Taras’s brutal treatment of his wife, which the narrator motivates by the mores of the age (1835:102/1842:11), today’s critics conclude that Gogol' knew little about the history of marriage in early modern Ukraine, where women had more social freedom than in Gogol’s own day.2 The writer, however, saw little use in historical precision, overshadowed as it was for him by archetypal logic and theological concerns. Taras’s mistreatment of “the good mother” follows the standard archetypal schema and symbolizes the mother’s appurtenance to her sons rather than her old keeper. Accordingly, the father-son rivalry in “Taras Bul'ba”

The Theology of Archetypes in “Taras Bul'ba”

develops against the backdrop of the oedipal confusion of “the good mother” and of Andrii’s Polish seductress. In this light, Taras’s desire to abuse Andrii’s Polish panna (lady) for bewitching his son emphasizes the oedipal tension between the old keeper of females and his male progeny. Characteristically, the maternal attempt at shielding the sons from “the bad father” focuses on ­Andrii rather than Ostap. As Taras takes his sons to Zaporozh'e over his wife’s objections, the mother’s farewell embrace, “too passionate for her age,” makes Andrii think of his panna, who subsequently lures the young Cossack into Dubno “in the name of his old mother” (1835:104, 107/1842:12, 16, 38). Incidentally, the necessarily desexualized image of “the good mother” in the Christian imagination forces Gogol' to describe Taras’s wife as a starushka (little old woman). But given her sons’ age and the custom of early marriage, she cannot be older than the perennially young Mary at the time of Jesus’ death. The oedipal connotations of the father-son rivalry in “Taras Bul'ba” are especially clear against the backdrop of other stories in Gogol’s two Ukrainian cycles. Andrii’s rendezvous with the panna in Dubno, for instance, echoes a scene in “Noch' pered rozhdestvom” (The night before Christmas) where a Cossack entreats his beloved in the following terms: “What do I care about my mother? You are my mother and father and everything I hold dear” (I:209). Thus, when Andrii finds himself in yet another passionate embrace proffered by yet another nameless woman (the panna, like “the good mother,” has no name), they discuss his comrades and father, but not his mother (1835:124/1842:49). The mother is also excluded from his message to the Cossacks: “I no longer have a father, I no longer have a brother” (1842:54). It is as if by leaving Taras for the panna, Andrii took his mother’s side. The 1842 version sharpens the conflict between “the bad father” and “the good mother” informing Andrii’s defection to the Poles. “I have three villages,” he tells the panna, “half of my father’s herds belong to me; and all that my mother brought him [as dowry], and even what she is hiding from him, is mine!” (47, emphasis added). Conflating the image of Taras’s wife with that of Andrii’s beloved, Gogol' follows the oedipal dynamic of the Christian myth, manifest for instance in Ukrainian church drama, which is part of his cultural

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baggage and which calls the Virgin Mary panna and panianka (lady), as well as matka i panna (mother and lady). By solving the archetypal clash in the old man’s favor, in contrast to the young man’s standard victory in world mythology, Andrii’s death shows that Gogol’s imagination is tempered by theology, no doubt by way of Ukrainian Passion Plays. In these texts, Mary laments Jesus’ imminent martyrdom, supplicating God with tears and a charge of Herod-like cruelty. Her opposition to God’s will and eagerness to protect Jesus, and the rebuke she receives from her son for defying the divine scheme, recall the tearful night Gogol’s “good mother” spends with her sons and Taras’s consequent rebuke: “Enough wailing. [. . .] If you had your way, you’d hide them under your skirt” (1842:6). Giving an unwitting insight into Andrii’s first rendezvous with the panna, who playfully covers the Cossack with her chemisette (1835:107/1842:16), Taras’s words echo Mary’s suggestion, in the Passion Play Dialogus de Passione Christi, that Jesus should return to her womb (“Vstupi tedy, o synu, do moei utroby”) as a hiding place from God.3 Attuned to Ukrainian religious culture and to larger Christian mythology, Gogol' casts the archetypal conflict of young and old males in the terms of Mary’s opposition to the cruel God of “the jews.” This opposition is symbolized by the icon pendants (presumably of the Virgin and Child) “the good mother” gives her departing sons even as Taras pulls them away. The same motif is accentuated in the 1842 edition, where the actions of the Cossack army are assimilated to those of Herod’s soldiers (Gogol' uses the idiomatic phrase for the slaughter of the innocents—izbienie mladentsev [34]); and “the good mother” dispatches another set of icons to her sons but sends none to Taras (36). “The good mother,” the story’s narrator tells us, is “weak like any mother” (1835:103/1842:12). Contrary to Rhea, who protects her son Zeus from the devouring father Saturn-Kronos, she fails to shield Ostap and Andrii. And even more importantly, like Mary in Ukrainian religious drama, she selfishly ignores the full import of paternal designs. In this light, Andrii’s flight from Taras to the Polish panna realizes the hypothetical situation, impossible in religious drama, whereby Jesus would agree to Mary’s supplication to save his life despite God’s will. Unlike the Christlike Ostap, and unlike Jesus in the discussed Passion

The Theology of Archetypes in “Taras Bul'ba”

Play, Andrii disobeys paternal authority (1835:106/1842:14). On his way into Dubno, with the Cossack camp and his terrible father safely behind him, the renegade sees a Polish icon representing “the Catholic Madonna.” Her image subsequently reemerges in the form of the “statuesque” panna, who greets Andrii in Dubno and whom the narrator calls deva (maiden, virgin) throughout the episode (1842:41, 48–49). Andrii’s defiance of paternal authority is therefore synonymous with religious apostasy. The Cossack takes refuge with the Catholic Mary after the Orthodox one failed to protect him from “the bad father.” As a symbol of apostasy, the panna is steeped in negative imagery. Her construction as “the bad mother” begins long before Andrii’s defection to the Poles. Their first encounter in Kiev culminates with Andrii’s fall into mud. The Cossack’s subsequent visit to the Polish beauty through a smoke chimney is again associated with pollution, physical and spiritual, in stark opposition to the tidiness of “the good mother”’s habitat, whose very name, svetlitsa (light room), contrasts with the nocturnal obscurity of Andrii’s amorous expeditions in Kiev and in Dubno (1835:99, 107/1842:7, 15–16). As befits “the bad mother,” the Polish beauty is a witch figure. Students of Gogol’s art point out that she is practically indistinguishable from the witch—known only as a pannochka (young lady)—in another story ( “Vii” ) of the Mirgorod cycle. Appearing as both an old woman and a young beauty to the Cossack and Kievan student Khoma—whose background recalls that of Taras’s sons and whose surname (Brutus) echoes Andrii’s unfaithfulness—the pannochka sexually tempts and exploits Khoma, eventually bringing about his demise.4 Andrii’s pannochka (a term used in the 1842 edition only) is not explicitly called a witch. But her “mighty eyes” and the “brilliant force of her beauty” act upon him the way the witch’s gaze acts upon Khoma: Andrii is immobilized, and his seductress does with him as she pleases (1835:107, 123/1842:16, 46). It is worth recalling that Taras has the same immobilizing and subjugating effect on Andrii, who thus appears as an object of power struggle between the story’s father- and mother-figures. In reworking “Taras Bul'ba,” Gogol' purged a revelatory line. In the final version, Taras prefaces Andrii’s slaying with the words, “I begat you and I will kill you” (1842:75). In the 1835 version, however, the same statement

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follows another one illustrating the role of paternal jealously in Andrii’s fate: “You did not think that I would yield my own child to someone else?” (126). In this power clash of the father- and mother-figures, the panna’s role of “the bad mother,” ostensibly motivated by her negative religious status, is but a pretext validating Taras’s assertion of his paternal authority through infanticide. In Gogol’s artistic universe, a Cossack’s deadly encounter with a witch is not a mere realization of the metaphorical equation of sex and death—unlike, for instance, in Somov’s story “Kievskie ved'my” (Kievan witches, 1833), where a Cossack and his witch die in a “sweet embrace.” 5 For Gogol', such sexual encounters are all about power struggle. Like the pannochka who violently rides Khoma in “Vii,” the panna in “Taras Bul'ba” gloats at the sight of Andrii’s submissiveness: “He threw himself at her feet, clung to them and looked into her mighty eyes. A joyful smile touched her lips” (1835:123). The same sadistic ethos informs Taras’s fantasies about an encounter with the panna, full of the sexualized imagery of physical abuse (1835:127/1842:60) that evokes Khoma’s murder of his witch after a night of sexualized “riding.” And while Andrii’s panna remains out of Taras’s reach, her abuse is realized vicariously: Taras vents his fury at all the Polish beauties in his path, killing them in the Catholic churches and “at the very altars” where they hide (1835:147/1842:92)—another allusion to ritual sacrifice. Functionally replacing Taras’s wife, who starts the female revolt against paternal authority, the panna thus serves to channel Taras’s wrath away from “the good mother,” who vanishes from the story, maintaining a token presence through gendered yet desexualized inanimate objects—a saber, a pipe, the fortress of Zaporozh'e.6 The panna’s and Taras’s power struggle culminates during Ostap’s Warsaw ordeal. Even as Taras and a “multitude of old crones, young girls, and women” relish Ostap’s physical torment (1835:144/1842:87– 89), one Polish beauty, a spitting image of the panna, throws pastry and fruit into a crowd of hungry knights. Laden with sexual and sacrificial symbolism, her playful feeding of the crowd travesties, at once: Jesus’ feeding of a multitude with bread loaves (Mat. 14:17–20; Mark 8:5–8); Ostap’s public quartering; and Taras’s casting of his own death as the breaking of the Eucharistic bread. This demonic mockery final-

The Theology of Archetypes in “Taras Bul'ba”

izes the negative status of the story’s mother-figure, condemned for her selfish ignorance of the paternal/divine scheme. Although Taras, like the Polish crowd, approves of Ostap’s suffering, for him it has a different, redemptive, meaning. Confirming Taras’s vision, Ostap dies thinking about his father—unlike Andrii, whose last words evoke the panna. The exclusion of empathetic females from Ostap’s and Taras’s executions violates traditional Crucifixion imagery. In Ukrainian Passion Plays, for instance, Maria Panna “stands under the cross and sheds tears looking at [Jesus’] death.”7 But in “Taras Bul'ba” ’s economy, the quest for redemption through sacrificial death transforms “the good mother” into her opposite, once she finds herself in the way of (God) the father’s will. The jealous Taras of the story’s first redaction buries Andrii secretly in order to prevent the panna from visiting his grave. In the later variant, Andrii’s body is abandoned to “other mourners and lamenters” (76), but the actual mourning is never shown. We learn the reason for this omission soon enough: calling out to his father, the agonizing Ostap “does not want to hear the wailing and lamentations of a weak mother or the crazy screams of a wife” (89–90). In “Taras Bul'ba,” the (divine) father-son relationship suffers no female rivals or interlopers.

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S ev e n  The Opponent

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Women should then personify the Opponent in Gogol’s story. This conclusion is indeed suggested in Simon Karlinsky’s study The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which downplays the theological dimension of “Taras Bul'ba.” However, the Cossack crusade has several ostensible targets, among which women are overshadowed by “the jews” as Christ’s original enemy, and by the Catholic clergy as the figure of the Heretic (compare Taras’s phrases “unclean Catholics” and “Catholic infidels” [nechestivye katoliki, 1835:134; katolicheskie nedoverki, 1842:68]). In the 1842 text, the advance of the crusading army puts to flight the “multitudes of monks, Jews, [and] women” (34); whereas the 1835 text excludes women altogether from “the fleeing multitudes of monks, soldiers, [and] Jews” (120). In both texts, moreover, Polish soldiers, who should have the lion’s share of attention, are barely visible until the battle for Dubno, and distinguish themselves mostly by (effeminate) cowardice, vanity, and penchant for luxury. The Opponent, therefore, is played by several actors with shared female attributes. Like Polish soldiers, “the jews” and Catholic clerics are akin to women in dress and behavior—they wear movement-impeding garments and run away from danger instead of confronting it. And the same assimilation to women is implied in Taras’s taunt to his sons, fresh from studying both the Orthodox and Catholic traditions: “What long coats you have! [. . .] Let’s have you run and see if you fall” (1835:97/1842:5). In 1838, Gogol' wrote to his sisters from Rome, “Have you seen how the Catholic clergy dresses? Priests and abbots wear triangular hats, frocks, black stockings and boots [v chernykh chulkakh i bashmakakh]. [.  .  .] Dominicans dress just like women, particularly like little old

The Opponent

women: their dark and black overcoats reveal white undergarments, also female. Some even wear pelerines just like yours” (XI:177). The same effeminate dress marks his “jews.” During the pogrom in Zaporozh'e, as the Cossacks drag their screaming victims to their place of execution in much the same way Taras would like to drag Andrii’s panna, Gogol' draws our attention to the dangling “jewish” legs encased in stockings and boots (v bashmakakh i chulkakh), which echo those of the effeminate Catholic clergy in his letter cited above. Likewise, stockings suspended from drying racks next to underpants are prominent markers of effeminacy in Warsaw’s “jewish” district (1835:137/1842:82). And while Gogol' contemplates the Catholic clergy’s undergarments, his narrator obsessively undresses “the jews.” In emergencies, Iankel' loses his caftan (1842:31, 52). In moments of excitement, Mardokhai raises the skirts of his vest, revealing nasty pants (1835:138/1842:83). Retiring for the night, Taras’s Warsaw landlord sheds his caftan and shows his “stockings and boots,” looking “somewhat like a chick” rather than a man (1835:139–40/ 1842:84). The same undressing motif informs Cossack violence directed at women. This voyeuristic drive to lift the skirts of the Opponent’s outer garments amalgamates strong revulsion for sex, which is implicitly designated in Gogol’s story as both female and “jewish” in nature, with equally intense revulsion for femininity and for all religious praxis outside Orthodoxy; hence, Taras’s initial taunt to his sons, who had no time to exchange their academy clothes for a Cossack garb: “What are those priestly undergarments you are wearing?” (1835:97/1842:6). In this light, the accusation serving as a pretext for the pogrom in Zaporozh'e, namely, that “the jewesses” wear skirts tailored from the habits of Orthodox priests (1835:117/1842:29), encapsulates the story’s overriding preoccupation with sexual and religious pollution as indistinguishable phenomena embodied by women and “the jews.” Mikhail Vaiskopf argues that the cowardice of “the jews” in “Taras Bul'ba” and in the writings of Gogol’s colleagues is a theologically motivated obfuscation of Jewish resistance to Christian persecution and of the historical participation of Jews in European warfare. This obfuscation, Vaiskopf suggests, is inspired by Leviticus, where God threatens to “send the faintness into the hearts [of the Hebrews] in the lands of their enemies” (26:17, 36). But such precise referencing of lesser-known

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biblical passages, although possible for a connoisseur like Gogol', would be unusual among his contemporaries with their generally cursory familiarity with the “Old Testament.” The suppression of the image of “the jews” as courageous and skillful soldiers indeed obfuscates history, since documents regarding the armed participation of Jews in Poland’s military conflicts were available in Gogol’s day.1 But it is more probable that since cowardice is marked as a female quality, the motif of “jewish” pusillanimity originates in the generative model’s conflation of “the jews” and women as homologous satanic pollutants (see Chapters  1 and 2). Biblical subtexts may provide posterior motivation for “jewish” traits but are rarely the sources of such traits. Characteristically, unlike “the jews” and women, the Catholic clergy in “Taras Bul'ba” never shape up as individual characters; the figure of the Heretic appears to be added to the original satanic pollutants only as a token historical detail. Gogol' is not alone in such representation of the Opponent. Consider Bulgarin’s Mazepa (1833), which insists that Catholic Europe is run by “Jews, the clergy, and women,” although only “the jews” and women materialize as the Opponentfigures in the novel.2 By the same logic, the heretical Catholics are absent from the Cossack orbis interior in Gogol’s story, unlike “the jews” and women, who are temporarily tolerated. “The jews” in fact engage in mercantile activities inside Zaporozh'e, whereas women populate Cossack households back home but “do not dare show up even in the environs” of the Cossack base (1835:113/1842:22). According to a revelatory slip, from among several logical blunders shedding light on Gogol’s imagination, “the poor sons of Israel” react to the outbreak of the pogrom in Zaporozh'e by “losing all of their altogether slim courage” and “hiding in empty vodka barrels, in ovens, or even crawling under the skirts of their Jewesses” (1835:117/1842:30). How are we to understand the last detail? Either there are women in Zaporozh'e after all, but being “jewish,” they do not count because “the jews” are effeminate anyway and the lines between their males and females are fluid; or “the jews” must be outright androgynous. Both readings make “jewish” males and females overlap in a special kind of ambiguous and amphibious sexuality, wherein the masculine element, which is of supreme value in the Cossack all-male sacred space, is dan-

The Opponent

gerously diluted and polluted by the feminine one. Gogol' thus literally follows the generative model’s fusion of “the jews” and women. This imaginative logic explains Gogol’s repudiation of Scott’s liberal revision of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. Gogol’s “jewesses,” for whom the possibility of conversion never arises, epitomize sexual and religious pollution. In Warsaw’s “jewish” street, Taras sees the “passably cute little face of a Jewess” peering from an “ancient [vetkhoe] little window” and adorned with “darkened beads” (1835:137/1842:82). Every detail in this account is significant. Choosing the word vetkhii (old, ancient, dilapidated) over its synonym staryi, Gogol' transforms the window into a metaphor for the limitations of the “Old Testament,” or “Vetkhii Zavet.” Since the account of Iankel’s wife also includes her looking at Taras through the window of a dilapidated (thus, vetkhii ) house, we can presume that Gogol' alludes to Shakespeare’s Jessica, whose name is traditionally glossed by commentators as “she that looks out” and who is instructed by Shylock not to peer into the street lest she fancy a Christian (II.5.28–33, 40–42). In Gogol’s day, the image of Jessica at her window symbolized the triumph of a young Christian over a “jewish” ogre. But in “Taras Bul'ba,” “the jewesses” are not worth expropriating from their keepers. This point is conveyed by a recurring detail of their costume: the Warsaw woman wears darkened beads; darkened pearls also decorate the head of Iankel’s wife; and “pearls or beads” adorn the head of the dead “jewish” woman Andrii sees in Dubno (1842:44, 79). The persistence of this feature in the image of Gogol’s “jewesses” suggests that it is not a mere reflection of the Ashkenazi custom to decorate feminine headgear with pearls or beads. Since the habitat of “the jewesses” in “Taras Bul'ba” is consistently dirty (Warsaw’s “jewish” street is known as the Filthy Street), this vestimentary detail appeals to the reader’s cultural competency. It conflates the biblical trope of “throwing pearls before swine” with the porcine symbolism encoded in the generative model of “the jews” and manifest, for example, in the widespread folk tradition about a “jewish” woman and her children transformed by Christ into a sow and piglets (see Chapters 2 and 3). Lastly, windows literally frame the heads of “the jewesses” in Gogol’s story, travestying Christian icons, particularly that of Mary, which are often adorned with

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pearls. These “jewish” anti-icons are the extreme expression of Taras’s fear of the sexual and religious pollution carried by the “Catholic Madonna,” whose icon Andrii sees on his way to the panna.3 The logical blunder in the pogrom scene suggests that the Cossacks engage in sexual violence when looking for “the jews” under the skirts of their females, whose fate is passed in silence. The pogrom then targets both religious and sexual pollution. The effeminate “jews” are functionally baptized by drowning, and their screams prefigure those of the “white-breasted fair [Polish] maidens” killed by Taras in a vicarious realization of his fantasy about the panna’s sexualized abuse (1835:118/1842:31, 92). But the pogrom scene is not the first time the motif of hiding under a skirt appears in the story. Taras invokes this image to describe “the good mother”’s protectiveness. Their archetypal clash thus continues on the theological plane, casting as “jewish” the mother’s rejection of the paternal scheme. We find the same logic in a Ukrainian Passion Play that likens the Virgin’s defiance of God’s will to Jacob’s struggle with an angel. “I would wrestle with the Angel,” Mary Panna says; “I would take away the cup [of suffering], but I am not Jacob, I would probably lose.”4 Jacob, in the form of Iankel', first appears in “Taras Bul'ba” during the pogrom, but he is also “not Jacob.” Unlike Jacob, who struggles with God and men and prevails (Gen. 32:28), ­Iankel' fails to avert the pogrom by reasoning with the mob. This is because, after the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah, Jacob-Israel’s struggle with God is expressed in the “jewish” rejection of Christ and is an act of disobedience similar to Mary’s rebellion against God’s designs. Andrii’s preference for female company over Taras’s all-male community results in his assimilation to all of the story’s Opponent-figures— women, “the jews,” and Catholics—because there are only two modes of conduct for a Cossack: he either expires on a battlefield alongside his comrades, with whom he shares “one [death] bed, like bride and groom”; or ends up in “a woman’s bed,” becoming a “heretic mounted by Polish priests” (1842:92). In Gogol’s Ukrainian cycles, the faces of the Opponent morph effortlessly. A demon mounts Cossack Vakula after he submits to his cruel beloved (“Noch' pered rozhdestvom,” I:224). Demons besiege Khoma after his sexualized ride with a witch. The panna symbolically mounts Andrii by throwing her chemisette over

The Opponent

him and thereby making the Cossack woman-like and Catholic-like (similar chemisettes are worn by Catholic altar boys with “thin, girlish voices” [1842:43]). But the association with women also makes Andrii akin to “the jews.” Iankel' loves Andrii’s new Polish garb (1842:53). And he knows a thing or two about clothes. In Gogol’s artistic universe, “the jews” are expert tailors of demonic habits, be it the skirts made of priestly vestments or a vest made of “the most fashionable material called wife” (“Shpon'ka” I:307). Similarities between Iankel'-Jacob and Andrii go beyond their shared taste for profane clothes. Andrii’s family dynamic has much in common with that of the biblical Jacob. The mild Andrii is, like the mild Jacob, his mother’s favorite. In contrast, Taras prefers the rough Ostap, while Isaac favors Jacob’s rough older twin, Esau (Gen. 25:27–28). And as the panna’s hold on Andrii tightens, the Cossack acquires more and more of Iankel'-Jacob’s features. Jacob fears physical confrontation with Esau, while the cowardly Iankel' takes flight at the slightest possibility of such a confrontation with Cossacks or Poles. But so does Andrii when he indecorously flees from the panna’s servants in Kiev; or runs from the furious Taras on the battlefield and, “like an ignominious coward,” hides behind effeminate Polish soldiers (1835:125), not unlike “the jews” hiding under the skirts of “the jewesses.” This detail is slightly mollified in the story’s second redaction. Having lost his courage at the sight of his terrible father, Andrii only trembles before Taras like a schoolboy (1842:75) and, let us add, like “the jews” before the Cossack mob in the pogrom scene. Taras qualifies Andrii’s conduct as “jewish,” bringing Iankel' and ­Andrii to the common denominator. “You are mistaken, damn Judas!” he replies to Iankel', who informs him about Andrii’s defection; “A baptized child cannot sell his faith” (1835:124). The 1842 redaction employs heavier artillery. As Iankel' relays Andrii’s challenge to the Cossacks, Taras invokes the Crucifixion: “You lie, devil’s Judas! [. . .] Besides, you crucified Christ, you God-damned creature” (1842:54). The implications of this remark are clear. After Jesus’ revelation as the Messiah, Jacob’s struggle with God “prefigures” Iankel’s rejection of Christ, by which “the jews” continuously reenact the Crucifixion. Judas symbolizes this rejection. Andrii’s crime is akin to that of Judas as an instance

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of treason and because “the jews” defy God in the same way Andrii defies paternal authority. In fact, with the pusillanimous Iankel' fleeing the scene, Taras admits to wasting his invectives on the wrong man (1842:54). From now on, Andrii will be known as “Judas” (1842:60) and “the devil’s child” (1835:125/1842:74; compare Iankel' as “the devil's kin” [1835:124]), who will “vainly beg God for redemption, because such a deed is never forgiven in heaven” (1835:126). This verdict links Andrii’s damnation to that of “the jews”—the only sinners who cannot be freed from hell because even Mary cannot intervene on their behalf, as stated in the apocryphal tale The Descent of the Virgin into Hell (see Chapter 1), which Gogol' and his readers know from childhood.

E i g h t  The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

The curse plaguing the house of Bul'ba is articulated in Taras’s view of Andrii as “born of the devil to put our entire kin to shame” (1835:125). The story’s second redaction makes Taras’s problematic position more explicit, squarely blaming the Cossack for “bearing such a son to his own shame” (1842:50). But the curse is not limited to his kin, afflicting the larger group Taras symbolizes, the Cossacks, who bear an unmistakable demonic imprint. To be sure, Russian writers of Gogol’s day tend to treat the Cossacks as inhabitants of the orbis exterior, often linking them to witchcraft, unfaithfulness, and rapacity (for example, ­Garkusha in Somov’s “Gaidamak”; Kirsha in Zagoskin’s Iurii Miloslavskii; Patsiuk in Gogol’s “Noch' pered rozhdestvom”). Accordingly, Gogol’s Ukrainian cycles and unfinished historical tales treat the Cossacks as people with one foot in the profane Catholic world and another in the divinely sanctioned Orthodox sphere. As a “border nation” (“Krovavyi bandurist” [The bloody bandore player, III:304]), they inhabit liminal space with fluid lines between the sacred and the profane. In “Strashnaia mest',” Cossack Danilo’s estate is within a short ride from a border tavern, where “the dregs of all sorts” unite in an impure feast to mock Orthodoxy (I:264–65). It is then hardly surprising that Taras’s curse extends to the Cossack capital of Zaporozh'e. The fact that this Orthodox fortress has neither a fixed location (it moves from island to island) nor very effective protection is symptomatic of this satanic curse. As critics point out, in Gogol’s artistic universe, bounded space represents an ideal, and rootless mobility is always demonic. Moreover, Zaporozh'e is a far cry from the allegorical Fortress of Faith—a traditional trope of theology, church drama, and visual arts.

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In Ukrainian religious drama, this walled Fortress harbors a Christian army that defeats Satan’s troops spearheaded by “the jews.” Yet the fortress of Zaporozh'e has no walls and is infiltrated by polluting agents, namely, “the jews,” whose presence invariably marks the places Gogol' dislikes. (In his letters, the writer decries Moscow’s and Frankfurt’s pollution by “jewishness,” but keeps mum about his beloved Rome with its large Jewish ghetto.) In a sign that satanic pollution touches the core of the Cossack sacred space, Zaporozh'e’s only church is in a “sinful” state, not unlike the demon-infested church Khoma finds on the witch’s Cossack estate in “Vii.” Ignoring their spiritual duty for the sake of carnal delights, the Cossacks have no interest in the church’s upkeep. The sinister significance of their indifference is highlighted by the contrast between the “jewish” appropriation of Orthodox priestly vestments and the sorry state of the church’s icons, which lack appropriate silver vestments (1835:115/1842:27).1 The exposed fortress of Zaporozh'e is the very opposite of the walled Dubno. But if we were to project Dubno’s siege on the Fortress of Faith allegory, the Cossacks would clearly find themselves on the wrong side of the city’s walls. As a writer versed in Christian theology and symbolism, Gogol' could not have missed this point, especially while working on the second edition of “Taras Bul'ba”—by that time the Fortress of Faith allegory had been used in Zygmunt Krasiński’s Nie-Boska ­komedia (Un-divine comedy, 1835), whose depiction of the siege of the Trinity fortress by “the jews” Gogol' discussed with exiled Polish clerics in Rome.2 We can then assume that when he contrasts Zaporozh'e to the heavily fortified Dubno, Gogol' may have another theological trope in mind, that of the Last Days, when the Antichrist seduces many inside the ultimate Fortress of Faith, Jerusalem, and the remaining faithful must reconsecrate, rather than protect, Christendom in the final battle with the Antichrist’s army.3 And this is precisely how the Cossacks set out, in an outward thrust, to purge Ukraine of satanic pollutants, beginning in Zaporozh'e—their Orthodox Jerusalem. When read in these eschatological terms, the Cossack crusade in “Taras Bul'ba” must be measured by its spiritual rather than military triumph, which is ultimately contingent on the crusaders’ successful reenactment of Christianity’s original redemptive sacrifice. Thus,

The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

instead of setting out to restore the physical structure of the church in Zaporozh'e, the Cossacks answer the news of its “sinful” state by promising to die for their faith (1835:115/1842:28). Such self-sacrificial death constitutes the proper way to reaffirm their status as God’s “sons and heirs,” per Evstratii’s hallowed example. The dilapidated church symbolizes the need to reconsecrate the bond between God and Taras Bul'ba’s curse-stricken Cossack family. This is all the more evident against the backdrop of Ukrainian religious drama, which allegorizes the birth of Christianity as the erection of a church whose stages coincide with those of the Crucifixion. Here Christ “gives his life to build the new Church”; “lies on the ground to be the foundation on which the Church stands”; “spreads on the cross even as the Church’s walls spread”; and is wrapped in a funeral shroud, while “the Church is finished and beautifully decorated.”4 These must be then the spiritual walls Gogol’s Cossacks long to erect in contrast to the material fortifications of Polish cities. Divorced from this theological context, which is familiar and comprehensible to Gogol’s interpretive community, the motivation provided in “Taras Bul'ba” for the Cossack war on Poland strikes today’s reader as inadequate. It is in fact almost risible, unless we bear in mind that the real goal of this unprovoked war is neither the defeat of the Polish foe, whose soldiers are hard to come by until the epic battle for Dubno, nor the liberation of Orthodox Ukrainians from the Catholic and “jewish” yoke, since no oppressed masses are ever shown in the story. The true objective pursued by Taras and his comrades-in-arms is redemptive self-sacrificial death. Their exploit will cleanse and renew the divine covenant, transporting Cossack souls to Christ’s throne (1842:73). It will also bring closer the day of the ultimate triumph of the Russian tsar’s divinely ordained task to defend and spread Orthodoxy worldwide along with his own power, as dictated by the “realized ­eschatology” of Byzantine theocratic thought, in which Christian universalism overlaps with the universal empire.5 Not accidentally, Gogol’s source texts cast in a uniformly eschatological light the main historical event underlying the Cossack-Polish conflict in “Taras Bul'ba” (1835:99/1842:7)—the Union of Brest, or the Unia, which formalized in 1596 the submission of the Ukrainian

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­ rthodox bishops to papal authority. Istoriia Rusov, for example, insists O that the Unia made Orthodox Ukrainians slaves to Catholic priests, enabling “the jews” to levy “an apocalyptic tax from the days of the Antichrist” on Easter bread and to dispose of churches and sacraments. Taking his cue from Istoriia Rusov, Gogol' invokes the Unia to extend the “sinful” state of Zaporozh'e’s church to all the churches in Ukraine as a land afflicted by the decay of the Last Days. Characteristically, the centrality of the “jewish” desecration narrative in Ukraine’s apocalyptic downfall earned Istoriia Rusov its most ardent admirers. Indeed, in his literary magazine, Pushkin reprinted Istoriia’s account of Ukraine’s “last sacking and exhaustion,” when “the Lord’s church [was] in the hands of Judas dealing in the Holy Communion.” And Gogol' was captivated enough by the same desecration motifs to cite them verbatim, first in an unfinished historical tale (“Get'man,” III:277–80) and then in “Taras Bul'ba,” thereby enhancing the story’s eschatological message (1835:116/1842:29).6 Aware that Polish writers level similar charges against the Cossacks, whom they lump with “the jews” as a group bent on the desecration of Catholic churches, Gogol' promotes Ukrainian-style desecration narratives.7 In the economy of “Taras Bul'ba,” his choice is all the more logical because the image of Easter bread defiled by “the jews” challenges the very ethos of the Cossack army preoccupied with the emulation of Christ’s martyrdom. On the eve of the final battle for Dubno, the crusaders eat a Communion-style supper and drink a special (read sanctified) wine Taras ships from home (1842:65–66). Andrii’s defection with Cossack bread accentuates the feast’s Eucharistic symbolism: suffice it to recall the traditional Orthodox polemics against the Eucharistic use of unleavened bread by Catholics in contrast to the ordinary bread of the Orthodox service. Stealing Cossack bread and taking it to the starved panna, Andrii the effeminate traitor acts like the Christian women of medieval desecration narratives, who sell Christ-symbols to “the jews.”8 The assimilation of Andrii’s Judas-act to the Host profanation narratives is complete in the story’s second edition. Even as Andrii defects to the Poles through a hole in the earth that is “no bigger than the doorway of a bread oven” (1842:41)—the reader is reminded of

The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

the bread ovens “the jews” use as hiding places during the pogrom in Zaporozh'e—Polish scouts take several Cossacks prisoner, among them one named Khlib, or “bread” (55). And as in medieval desecration narratives, where sacred objects often resist profanation, a starved Pole dies after eating Andrii’s bread (44). The traitor must therefore administer the stolen bread to the panna himself, fearing that she ignores its proper use (47). Universal religious pollution is not the only sign of Ukraine’s Last Days drawn by Gogol' from his historical sources. Another such sign is the land’s socioeconomic disorder, whose metaphysical connotations are transparent in the motif of Orthodox serfs being leased to “the jews” by their Polish masters. Evocative of the “jewish” theological coup Evstratii fights off in the Kievan Paterikon (see Chapter 1), this motif is prominent in eighteenth-century Ukrainian drama, where Cossacks save “Christian blood” by freeing peasants encaged by “the jews.” The same fusion of economic and religious exploitation, and similarly steeped in ritual murder motifs, marks the Russian literary fiction of Gogol’s day, which treats the business activity of “the jews” as enslaving and parasitical and presents the violent expropriation of “jewish” property as morally and theologically justified.9 Such implications of “jewish” economic activity are so self-evident for the original readership of “Taras Bul'ba” that Gogol’s narrator initially contents himself with a cursory picture of Iankel' the businessman (1835:135). Intensifying Ukraine’s apocalyptic atmosphere in the story’s second edition, however, Gogol' elaborates on the image of Iankel' as an economic vampire whose business activity causes universal “crumbling and aging” (1842:79), in keeping with his status as a carrier of an obsolete and barren spirituality. Citing the paucity of reliable sources illuminating the economic and political life of early modern Ukraine, today’s historians justly argue that Ukrainian historiography has traditionally paid disproportionate attention to “the jews.” But their critique falls short of accounting for the symbolic power of “the jews.” The historical facts of Jewish life in Ukraine notwithstanding, “the jews” of Ukrainian historiography are, above all, a rhetorical device for demonizing the enemy.10 That is why the stock situation of Ukrainian and Russian literature and drama, depicting a Cossack intervention on behalf of the Orthodox victims of “jewish” and

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Polish oppressors, is not just an east Slavic variant of the Robin Hood motif. It replicates the plight of Christians in ancient Rome, as spelled out by Timofei Granovskii in the year of “Taras Bul'ba” ’s publication. According to the historian, Romans used “the jews” to hound Christians. The Poles of Ukrainian historiography likewise sic “the jews” on the Orthodox. Ultimately, the Polish-“jewish” compact evokes the collusion of Romans and “the jews” in Jesus’ death; witness the east Slavic legends in which Christ transforms Ukrainians into Cossacks thanks to their desire to save him at Golgotha.11 Living in the Last Days, Taras and his comrades experience the fate of Christ and his followers in the Roman empire. The stage is thus set for the replication of the original redemptive martyrdom, which will renew their covenant with God and reconsecrate Ukraine, their orbis interior. Rising to their final battle “in defense of Christ’s faith” (1835:103/ 1842:12), the Cossacks purge Ukraine of the Antichrist’s followers. The Poles are baptized by fire and sword (Gogol' describes their pummeling with the verb krestit', to baptize [1842:71]); “the jews,” by water. Echoing many such scenes in contemporary Russian literature, Gogol’s Cossacks hesitate between drowning “the jews” and hanging them as befits Judas’s kin.12 Drowning is the preferred mode of doing away with “the jews” in the Christian imagination. The widely distributed folktales about “the jews” who fall through the ice or are swept away by a stream inform Luther’s jibe about baptizing “the jews” in the Elbe with a rock on the neck; and resurface three centuries later in count Vitte’s jocular remark to Alexander III that a mass drowning would solve ­Russia’s “Jewish question.” In this light, the drowning of the ­Polotsk Jews by the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible (1563) and of the Kiev Jews during the 1594 city riot are typologically akin to Il'ia Erenburg’s narrow escape from a Cossack eager to throw him into the baptismal fount of the Azov Sea during the Russian civil war.13 Opting for water during the pogrom in Zaporozh'e (1835:118/1842:31), Gogol’s Cossacks celebrate their theological triumph by laughing at their drowning victims. Their merriment harks back to the religious laughter of church drama, as in one Ukrainian play, which shows how Christ’s army sprays Satan’s minions with holy water, making the demons scream comically in Yiddish and Ukrainian. The same religious

The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

ethos informs the cheerful abuse of “the jews” in the vertep theater and in the Russian literature of Gogol’s day. So important in fact is the theological meaning of this gaiety that Gogol' eliminates from an early draft of “Taras Bul'ba” a remark about the pogrom mob—“The callous souls of the Cossacks accompanied all this with laughter”—no doubt for fear of implying that one should show more sensitivity to the suffering of the demonic “jews.”14 We understand better the implicit logic of the pogrom mob’s laughter by reading Gogol’s story in the context of its historical sources and of contemporary Russian literature. Both describe the anti-Polish Cossack leader Bogdan Khmel'nitskii—one of Taras Bul'ba’s prototypes—as “Moses, savior, and redeemer,” thereby projecting the plight of Orthodox Ukrainians under Polish rule upon that of the Hebrews in Egypt.15 Since Moses is a Jesus-figure in Christian exegesis, this trope couches the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in messianic terms. The new Moses, be it Khmel'nitskii or Bul'ba, leads his God-chosen nation in its rebellion against the yoke of Poland’s “jewish” laws, in the same way that the Christ of substitution theology helps liberate the slaves of the Mosaic Law. But since there cannot be two divinely chosen nations, Cossack joy at the sight of the drowning “jews” indicates the successful removal of a rival claim to God’s exclusive favor. The chosen Cossack nation, like the formerly chosen “jews,” is led out of slavery, not because it is flawless but rather despite its sins. Puzzling today’s critics, Gogol' bestows messianic righteousness upon a group of notorious bandits and disloyal rascals (1835:119). Arriving in Zaporozh'e, for instance, the Cossack carriers of apocalyptic news from Ukraine look haggard because they may have partied too hard (1835:116/1842:29). But this irony hardly indicates the narrator’s skepticism vis-à-vis the charges the new arrivals level against “the jews,” as one critic suggests.16 A quest for redemptive martyrdom is predicated on the existence of sins to expiate. Since “God wants [Ukraine] to suffer indignity for its sins” (“Strashnaia mest',” I:264), the monk-warriors of “Taras Bul'ba” simultaneously carry these sins and atone for them. It is telling that Gogol' ultimately removes, no doubt as too explicit, Taras’s view of Ukraine’s distress as a convenient opportunity to combine habitual Cossack banditry with a redemptive act that atones for this very habit

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by “earning him a wreath of martyrdom after death” (1835:118). Joining the right side in the apocalyptic battle is enough to transform the murderous and plundering Cossacks into “innocent people” (1842:51). Finally, the eschatological dynamic of “Taras Bul'ba” inverts the messianic interpretations of Ukrainian history in the poetry of Bohdan Zaleski, Gogol’s Parisian interlocutor, who imagines the Cossacks as Poland’s allies against Russia; and in Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poems Dziady (Forefathers’ eve, 1823–32) and Pan Tadeusz (1834), which Gogol' discusses with the author and other Polish exiles before rewriting “Taras Bul'ba.” The historical digression in Dziady, Part III, assimilates tsar Peter the Great to ancient tyrants and makes an apocalyptic prophecy about the fall of Russia’s “Assyrian throne” oppressing Poland and Ukraine (III:265–83).17 The 1842 text of “Taras Bul'ba” turns the tables on Mickiewicz by enhancing the apocalyptic tableau of the Polish-controlled Ukraine and casting Poland in the role of an ancient slave driver, the new Egypt, whose slaves, like the Hebrews in Egypt, make bricks and build towns. This is one implication of Taras’s trip to Warsaw in a carriage transporting bricks—a hot item in Poland, where “they build fortresses and castles all over the place” (1835:136/1842:81), erecting the very walls that are, like Dubno’s fortifications, spiritually inimical to the Cossacks. Gogol’s treatment of the Last Days trope subverts Mickiewicz’s pet idea of Poland as a divinely chosen Christ-nation. The apocalyptic Cossack war prepares the coming of the Messiah, who in the 1842 text shapes up as a Russian tsar, in contrast to the messiah proposed in Pan Tadeusz—the leader of the Polish Legion, Henryk Dąbrowski. Significantly for Gogol', it is Iankel’s namesake in Pan Tadeusz, Jankiel, who likens Dąbrowski’s arrival in Poland ahead of Napoleon’s army to the coming of the messiah awaited by “the jews” (IV:357). Having denied “the jews” the divinely chosen status and bestowed it upon the Polish nation in his Books of the Polish Nation and Pilgrimage (1832), Mickiewicz logically turns to millenarian Judeophilia in Pan Tadeusz. Thanks to their role as a witness-people, he argues, “the jews” can confirm Poland’s chosenness by accepting baptism en masse. For what else, reasons the poet, should its large Jewish population mean if not Poland’s destiny to be the place of the Second Coming?18 This millenarian Judeophilia

The Eschatology of “Taras Bul'ba”

was alien to Gogol'. In light of “Taras Bul'ba” ’s eschatology, Jankiel’s description of Napoleon’s protégé Dąbrowski as the messiah expected by “the jews” places the Polish foe of the tsars squarely into the host of the Antichrist, who is traditionally designated as the pseudo-messiah of “the jews” and officially identified with Napoleon by the Russian Holy Synod in 1806.

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The task of (re)gaining divine favor by defeating satanic temptation is central to the prodigal Cossacks’ return journey to their heavenly Father. Taras’s own path runs through Dorosh’s dilemma, which he must revisit to remove the curse Dorosh’s blasphemous actions have cast upon his kin (Andrii) and larger family (the Cossacks). Dorosh’s fall from grace, we recall, is rooted in a theological compromise: transacting with “the jews,” he violated monk Evstratii’s hallowed example. Moreover, Taras’s grumblings suggest that in finding freedom from Turkish captivity with Iankel’s help, Dorosh stayed on the road of compromise. The story’s scene is laid “in the early days of the Unia” (1835:99/1842:7), which convinces many Cossacks to “adopt the Polish ways” and to “favor Warsaw,” making them, in Taras’s words, “Polish serfs” (1842:9–10). The last phrase has a transparent theological message placing Dorosh and his likes into the unredeemed (“enslaved”) state from which Jesus’ redemptive martyrdom delivers Christians. The fact that Taras never mentions Dorosh either before or after Iankel' invokes him confirms the state of broken relations between the brothers. Ostap and Andrii mirror this situation. Like that of Dorosh, Andrii’s name becomes taboo after his death. The taboo is intensified by the fact that Dorosh and Andrii have no progeny, leaving it up to Taras and Ostap to correct the wrongs committed by their infidel and renegade siblings. In “Taras Bul'ba,” the Unia—a union of the Latin and Greek traditions—is but an apostate’s road to Catholicism symbolized by the Cossack’s Polish attire and embodied by Andrii’s union with the panna. Their imminent marriage evokes the theological trope of the unia ­mystica, the model for all earthly marriages, with Ecclesia as Christ’s cho-

The Temptation of Taras

sen bride and Synagoga as his rejected “bad mother” (see Chapter 2). Only, ­Andrii’s union with the panna travesties the unia mystica, being an equivalent of Ivanhoe’s hypothetical marriage to the unbaptized Rebecca, impossible even for a liberal like Scott.1 In all logic then such Christ-figures as Ostap and Taras should counter Andrii’s profane conduct with a proper example of the unia mystica’s earthly incarnation. But as we have seen, the overarching misogyny of Gogol’s artistic universe trumps traditional theology in “Taras Bul'ba.” Instead of showing a hero’s divinely sanctioned union with a woman, like that of Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena, Gogol' focuses on the unia mystica’s evil twin—the “jewish” marriage. The “jewishness” of Andrii’s marriage is symbolized by its herald. As Iankel' breaks the news to Taras, “the jews” become an agent of temptation that Taras fights to atone for Dorosh’s sins. It is the temptation of compromise that he must defeat, time and again, through religious zeal and intransigence. Iankel' the sexual mediator extols Andrii and the panna as a great match (1842:53–54). Yet the matchmaker’s eloquence targets Taras rather than the future spouses. It is as if Iankel' has arranged Taras’s own marriage by cajoling him to approve of ­Andrii’s choice. Iankel' argues that the Cossack’s travesty of the unia mystica through marriage to a Polish noblewoman is profitable financially and socially. Rejecting his logic, Taras wins the first round of temptation. Their exchange shows what is truly at stake here: “And you did not kill him on the spot?” exclaims Taras, while the perplexed Iankel' cannot grasp why Andrii should pay with his life for sensible behavior (1842:54). This exchange disguises a clash of theological perspectives on the situation, which as we know, informs Taras’s infanticidal intent— Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Exegetes use the contrast between God’s intercession on Isaac’s behalf and the sacrifice he requires of Jesus to illustrate the difference between the covenants. With the old covenant void, Taras follows the new mode of action but projects upon “the jews” his guilt for the sacrifice (“You crucified Christ, you God-damned creature” [1842:54]) despite Iankel’s disagreement with ­Andrii’s proposed slaying. What matters then is not the murder but its correspondence to divine will. Spurning the idea of killing ­Andrii,

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Iankel' follows Abraham’s outlived covenant with God and is thus guiltier than Taras, who shares in the infanticidal intent of the God of the Christian imagination. Such preemptive projection of Taras’s guilt allows the Christlike Ostap to appear immediately after Andrii’s slaughter to embrace the dead traitor, returning Judas’s kiss, and to bemoan paternal cruelty (1835:126/1842:76). Ostap thereby opposes the forgiving Grace to the cruel “jewish” Law whose rejection of human sacrifice is as obfuscated in Christian theology as Iankel’s rejection of Andrii’s sacrifice in “Taras Bul'ba.” Theology, however, is only one facet of the story of Taras’s temptation, which encodes Gogol’s doubts vis-à-vis his own religious and cultural identity. Acutely aware of his humble social origins in Petersburg, Gogol' subscribed to the genealogical legend created by his grandfather Afanasii, according to whom the Gogol' family descended from the Cossack nobility.2 But in the climate of the anti-Polish backlash following the failed uprising of 1830–31, this legend was not without its problems. The writer’s alleged source of nobility, the seventeenth-century colonel Ostap Gogol', had gone over to the Polish king after serving Moscow and had curried favor with the Turks. Some sources claimed that this lavishly rewarded renegade (from the Russian point of view) had adopted Catholicism. As if to confirm this, Afanasii Gogol’s official petition establishing the family’s nobility stated that his ancestors by the name of Gogol' had been of “Polish nationality.” To make matters worse, Ostap Gogol’s story was disseminated in Nikolai Gogol’s day by the most authoritative Russian histories of Ukraine, which, incidentally, specified that the traitorous Cossack had served under the command of another renegade colonel, one Doroshenko (“the son of Dorosh”). The plot grows thicker yet, considering that the Gogol'-Janovski family traced the second part of its surname to a Ukrainian Orthodox priest known only as Jan Iakovlevich, that is, Jan the son of Jacob. Jan’s son Dem'ian, Nikolai Gogol’s great-grandfather, went by the last name of Janovski (the son of Jan). And it was only his own son Afanasii, Nikolai Gogol’s grandfather, who added Gogol' to Janovski in order to argue that his grandfather, Jan, had been a grandson of colonel Ostap Gogol' and a son of one Prokop Gogol'. Afanasii made this argument in blatant disregard of the fact that Jan’s patronymic was Iakovlevich, not

The Temptation of Taras

Prokopovich. Besides this error, Afanasii made another blunder in his petition, calling colonel Gogol' Andrei, instead of Ostap or Astafei, as he was known in historical documents. Leon Stilman suggests that the motif of treason punctuating Gogol’s historical fiction betrays the writer’s awareness of Ostap Gogol’s career.3 In 1830s Petersburg, the disloyal colonel may have been an unflattering foundation for nobility claims. As a result, art became a ground for psychological projection. Like Ostap Gogol', Taras Bul'ba “comes from a long line of colonels” (1842:9), and his son Ostap “will make a fine colonel one day” (1842:34). The renegade part of Ostap Gogol' is absorbed by his double, Andrii, who made his phantom debut as colonel Andrei in the document establishing Nikolai Gogol’s nobility. Taras’s brother Dorosh shapes up against the backdrop of the traitorous colonel Doroshenko, Ostap Gogol’s accomplice and superior. But the reworked tale of treason has an even more intimate dimension for Nikolai Gogol', who commits treason of his own by truncating his surname as too ­Polish-sounding. To be sure, this was common at the time; witness ­Faddei Bulgarin’s modification of his original Polish cognomen. Yet, banishing the surname of Janovski, Gogol' rejected his roots in Jan Iakovlevich, an Orthodox priest with a Polish name—a betrayal echoed in Andrii’s renunciation of his father for the opposite purpose of becoming a Pole. But the rejected family name could not be entirely suppressed, since Jan’s patronymic continued to belie Gogol’s claim to nobility. Jan Iakov­levich thus personified doubt (the Opponent) in Gogol’s quest for social standing in Petersburg. This Opponent materializes in “Taras Bul'ba” as Iankel', whose name is a Cyrillic transcription of Jankiel. This Jankiel-Jacob is graphically and semantically present in Jan Iakovlevich, a coincidence that may have been as important at the time when Gogol' was choosing a name for the story’s “jewish” repository of doubt as the name’s biblical implications. Gogol’s dramatic spiritual evolution at the turn of the 1840s is another factor informing “Taras Bul'ba.” Shortly after the story’s initial publication, the author moves to Rome, where he worships in Catholic cathedrals; befriends princess Z. A. Volkonskaia, a Catholic convert and proselytizer; and fraternizes with exiled Polish clerics, informing his Russian correspondents that Rome is his spiritual motherland.

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During his trips to Paris, Gogol' socializes with Polish émigrés who hear him contrast, seemingly unfavorably, Russian barbarity to the civilized West.4 Coming from the author of “Taras Bul'ba,” such conduct stirs rumors of his imminent conversion to Catholicism. Gogol’s mother queries the writer about these rumors in 1837, provoking another brazen gesture: the son explains that “our faith and the Catholic faith are perfectly alike [. . .] both are true,” so that no formal conversion is necessary. Students of Gogol’s art argue that this conciliatory religious attitude predated the writer’s Roman sojourn, drawing its inspiration from the utopian expectation of the imminent preapocalyptic unity of confessions, which was the salient feature of the millenarian thought in Petersburg’s intellectual circles ever since the reign of Alexander I.5 Thus, if Gogol’s initial openness to Catholicism clashes with the antiCatholic ethos of “Taras Bul'ba,” the roots of this ethos may reside not in the author’s evolving vision of Catholicism but in his interpretation of the spiritual mission of the story’s Orthodox knights. Gogol’s Polish interlocutors were attuned to the rhetoric of the Western critics of Russia’s rule over Poland, who commonly likened this rule to an onslaught of Cossack barbarians.6 Gogol’s vision of Russia as Europe’s barbarian, aired in his exchanges with Polish exiles, may have suggested to them the author’s pro-Catholic sympathies. But outside the Polish camp’s logic, Gogol’s rhetoric shows no inconsistency with the valorization of Orthodoxy in “Taras Bul'ba.” Already in the first redaction, the narrator conflates religion and ethnicity, calling Ukrainian Cossacks “Russian.” He also depicts their barbaric and “Asiatic” nature as qualities that do not make Cossacks inferior to Poles—their redemptive martyrdom is predicated on progress from an unredeemed (barbaric) state to that of a new chosen people. Gogol' reapplies here the trope tested in Pushkin’s poetic answer to the critics of Russian imperialism (“Klevetnikam Rossii” [To Russia’s slanderers], 1831) justified by the Russian blood spilled to redeem enslaved Europe from Napoleon’s yoke (III.1:270). Following the same logic, the first redaction of “Taras Bul'ba” depicts its Cossack barbarians as a spiritually young (“new”) people whose clash with the civilized (“old”) Catholic Poles targets not the universal triumph of Orthodoxy,

The Temptation of Taras

as stated in the story’s final version, but the universally beneficial renewal of the divine covenant and the consequent realization of Christian millenarian aspirations. Incidentally, Cossack antipathy for artificial fortifications highlights the positive nature of their barbaric status. Consider Edward Gibbon’s widely read treatise, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), from which the author of “Taras Bul'ba” could learn that the barbarian invaders coming to rejuvenate the decaying Rome “abhorred the confinement of walls,” favoring natural fortifications.7 What then makes Gogol' abandon his conciliatory religious tone in favor of the Orthodox triumphalism in the story’s final edition? I see the roots of this spiritual evolution in Gogol’s sentimental crisis of 1839. That year the writer developed an intense attachment (homoerotic, in Karlinsky’s opinion) to count Iosif Viel'gorskii, a consumptive young man hosted by princess Volkonskaia at her Roman villa. Becoming Viel'gorskii’s nurse and confidant, the jealous Gogol' saw Volkonskaia’s overtures at converting the patient to Catholicism as a rival claim to affective attention. The situation exploded in June, when Gogol' and Volkonskaia brought for the dying Viel'gorskii’s last rites Orthodox and Catholic priests, respectively. After the Catholic abbot refused to convert the agonizing man, the princess whispered something over Viel'gorskii, later insisting that “when his soul left him, it was Catholic.” At this point, the parties no longer dissimulated mutual hostility. Gogol' subsequently broke off contacts with his Catholic interlocutors in Rome and Paris.8 The conflict with Volkonskaia finds its echo in the intensified misogyny of the final redaction of “Taras Bul'ba,” where Catholicism is unequivocally a female force antithetical to brotherhood. Describing his bond with Viel'gorskii as “close, unbreakable, and brotherly” (letter to A. S. Danilevskii [5.VI.1839, XI:234–35]), Gogol' echoes Ostap’s and Andrii’s lifestyle of “splitting everything halfway” (1835:126), ruined by the panna. The religious implications of Andrii’s sexual seduction are boosted in the second redaction by the new motif of Catholicism’s aesthetic appeal, which reiterates Gogol’s musings, predating his sentimental crisis, about the beauty of Catholic cathedrals. And as for the ecumenical spirit of Gogol’s former religious attitude, it is encoded in the 1842 text as indifference resulting from satanic temptation by “reasonable

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and sensible compromise,” to cite Merezhkovskii’s description of Gogol’s new pet idea that evil resides in spiritual mediocrity.9 By this logic of religious zeal, those leading a socially sensible but religiously “lukewarm” (Rev. 3:15–16) life are bigger sinners than the criminals who ultimately die for the true faith. Significantly, Gogol’s reworking of “Taras Bul'ba” coincides with his writing of Dead Souls, whose ideology rests on the maxim “For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified” (Rom. 2:13). Lukewarm religiosity becomes homologous to religious doubt and is embodied by “the jews,” who transgress their own religious laws in pursuit of venal lucre (“Vii” II:190). It is as such a symbol of doubt that “the jews” spring up at the side of spiritually tempted Gentiles. The omnipresent Iankel' flanks Andrii and Taras but never comes near the unwavering Ostap. The very fact of seeking Iankel’s assistance for a trip to Warsaw assimilates Taras’s attempt at liberating Ostap from captivity to the slippery slope previously traveled by Dorosh. Entrusting his and Ostap’s fate to “the jews,” Taras shows lack of faith in divine providence and, like “the jews,” defies God’s will. Thus, left alone in a “jewish” house in Warsaw, Taras finds himself “in a strange, unfamiliar state: for the first time ever he is anxious. His soul is feverish. He is no longer his former indomitable, unwavering, oak-strong self; he is timid; he is weak. He shakes at every sound.” Gogol' promptly points out the source of the Cossack’s weakness by placing him at a “small window overlooking the street” (1835:139/1842:83)—one of those “jewish” windows that as we have seen, symbolize the limitations of the “Old Testament” and of its effeminate adepts. Much like Andrii, then, the doubting Taras is conflated with “the jews” and women. His transformation culminates in the donning of the German clothes that “the jews” bring to the old Cossack, the way they previously brought Taras the news of Andrii’s switch into Polish wardrobe. Now, the narrator tells us, even his friends would not recognize Taras (1835:140/1842:84). And since Gogol' consistently uses the term “German” as a code name for foreignness and demonism (“Noch' pered rozhdestvom,” I:202; “Propavshaia gramota” [The missing epistle; hereafter “PG”], I:188), Taras’s metamorphosis at the hands of “the jews”—themselves, as we shall see, a spitting image of Gogol’s

The Temptation of Taras

demons—accentuates the symbolism of doubt and apostasy framing his journey to Warsaw. This journey is informed by folklore logic that commonly assimilates a hero who visits the underworld to its inhabitants.10 As in Andrii’s union with the panna, the fare of Taras’s alliance with “the jews” is his soul. Arriving at Iankel’s to solicit “jewish” help, Taras enters just in time to see the praying Helper “spit in accordance with his faith” (1835:135/1842:79)—an act that marks “jewish” worship as deliberately anti-Christian (see Chapter 4). Finding Iankel' thus satanically empowered, Taras makes a pact: “Get me there [Warsaw] on the devil, if you must, only get me there,” he says, offering a sum superior to the Polish bounty on his head (1835:137/1842:81). Since they “can do anything,” Taras later offers “the jews,” in exchange for Ostap’s freedom, all his visible and hidden property (read life and soul) down to “the last thread of clothes,” which he will indeed swap for the German garb, and “a life-long contract to split halfway [his] future booty” (1835:138/1842:82). This offer recalls Andrii’s renunciation of his visible and hidden possessions for the sake of the panna (1842:47), revealing the bargain’s full significance, for Andrii gave up his family, comrades, and faith. Taras’s sorry state in the “jewish” home must result from the same spiritual transgression. Putting Ostap’s fate in the hands of “the jews,” rather than those of God, Taras reaches the nadir of doubt, resembling not only Andrii but Dorosh, since his unmentionable brother had a similar deal with ­Iankel'. Moreover, Taras’s proposal to go halves with “the jews” harks back to Ostap and Andrii’s life of “splitting everything halfway.” It is as if the doubting Cossack tried to reunite with his proscribed dead brother by replacing him with Dorosh’s spiritual equivalents, “the jews,” who insolently claim during the pogrom in Zaporozh’e that they are indeed the Cossacks’ brothers (1835:118/1842:31). All this clearly marks as impure Taras’s Warsaw scheme. By saving the captive Ostap’s life, he yields both his and Ostap’s souls to the demonic “jews,” the way Dorosh yielded his soul to them in Turkish captivity. Given the aforesaid archetypal implications of Andrii’s union with the panna as the merger of the mother and the temptress, Taras’s quest for Ostap represents the father’s attempt to get even after the loss of Andrii to a mother-figure. But just as “the good mother”’s drive to shield her sons from paternal/divine will

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makes her akin to “the jews,” Taras’s striving to save Ostap in contravention of divine will is encoded as “jewish.” Taras’s “jewish” side reflects that of his larger Cossack family. Inhabiting liminal space, the Cossacks, like “the jews,” straddle the sacred and the profane spheres. Outlaw lifestyle makes “the jews” their natural business partners.11 A mirror is placed in front of Taras during the chaotic council of “the jews” in Warsaw, which ends with a loud appeal to the wise Mardokhai’s authority, echoing the raucous Zaporozh'e council, described by the Yiddish term gvalt and capped by a loud appeal to a Cossack sage (1835:128, 138/1842:25, 83). Both councils recall the final night Khoma spends in a profaned church (“Vii”) as the rowdy gathering of demons appeals to their own supreme authority. “The jews” insist on this kinship, spuriously claiming that they are the Cossacks’ brothers, despite Ukrainian church drama’s opinion that “having betrayed their father, the people of Israel” are “Judas’s sons and ­brothers”—as often repeated by Russian writers in Gogol’s day.12 “Jewish” brotherhood claims remind the Cossacks of the Judas-figures in their midst, exposing the cracks in the fabric of the Cossack family, the way Iankel' reminds Taras of Dorosh’s behavior and reveals Andrii’s treason. Here the contrast between Scott and Gogol' is stark. The Judeophile logic of Ivanhoe insists that “in wounds and in misery, the Gentile becometh the Jew’s brother” (305). “Taras Bul'ba,” to the contrary, is bent on stressing a Gentile’s dissimilarity from “the jews” as a quality that matters the most in the story’s economy. Doing their usual part of exposing the fault lines of Christian society (see Chapter 3), “the jews” highlight the doubting Taras’s status as God’s prodigal son. They do so by functionally adopting Taras and by mediating the loss of his sons—Ostap, Andrii, and the Cossacks, who call him bat'ko (father, 1842:71) but could not recognize him in German garb. “The jews” clothe, house, feed, and escort the metaphysical orphan on his Warsaw trip. The sage Mardokhai even shows paternal condescension (1835:138/1842:83), assuring Taras that “when we and God want to accomplish something, it will be done right” (1835:138). Coming from “the jews,” this statement sounds so sacrilegious that Gogol' modifies it in the 1842 text, removing God’s mention (83). Nonetheless, transacting with “the jews,” Taras is mired in spiritual compromise. He trades

The Temptation of Taras

his faith for the wisdom of “the jews” with its satanic pretension and travesty of the true wisdom achievable in Christ.13 The comic sage Mardokhai, for example, is awaited so eagerly and treated so reverentially that the reader cannot help seeing in him a parodic “jewish” messiah (1835:138/1842:83). Putting his faith in this pseudo-messiah, Taras is assimilated to the effeminate “jews,” repeating Andrii’s downward journey toward the final temptation in the company of Iankel', Satan’s minion. Taras effectively relives Andrii’s experience, symbolic of Dorosh’s downfall, in order to test his own faith by defeating the temptation that awaits him on his hellish journey.14 Andrii’s trip starts with the apparition of the panna’s Tatar maid, cast as a visitor from the dead, who shows him a tunnel under a wagon. In the 1842 text, the tunnel is undisguised, but Andrii hides the maid under a wagon, enhancing the kinship of his demonic helper to Iankel', whom Taras hides under a wagon during the pogrom; and it is also in a wagon, under a load of bricks, that Iankel' takes Taras to Warsaw. In Gogol’s imagination, this demonic carriage (chertovskaia tarataika, “PG” I:187) is equivalent to all other hellish transporters—“the jews”; the Tatar maid; the horse’s skeleton a Cossack rides home from hell (“PG” I:190); or the devil another Cossack rides to Petersburg (“Noch' pered rozhdestvom,” I: 232). This wagon functions like the chariots taking mythical heroes to the land of the dead.15 Funeral symbolism permeates Andrii’s trip. The tunnel harboring coffins and bones leads him past pale guards into Dubno, where he cannot tell the sleeping from the dead (1835:123/1842:42–43). A similar corridor under Warsaw’s prison castle takes Taras and Iankel' from a hall in which “nearly a thousand people sleep together” to the door of Ostap’s cell (1835:140/1842:85). At the end of the tunnel, a Catholic monk unlocks a door and lets Andrii into Dubno at the Tatar’s prompting. The passage into Ostap’s cell, however, is barred by a monstrous-looking Pole (1835:140/1842:85), who defies Iankel’s prompting. To reach his destination, Taras must openly betray his faith. This final temptation is initiated by the monstrous sentry, who berates Orthodoxy before the disguised Cossack. But rather than temper his religious zeal, Taras blows his cover. “How dare you say that our faith is not respected? It is your heretical faith that is contemptible,” he retorts (1835:141/1842:86). The trial culminates

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in the sensible advice proffered by Iankel'. “Why court trouble? Let the dog curse,” whines the demon, once again intimating the option of reasonable compromise (1835:142/1842:87).16 Ignoring the tempter’s logic, Taras must either turn back or fight his way into Ostap’s cell. He chooses the former, because the true meaning of his journey to Warsaw has little to do with Ostap. This journey is about Taras’s own status as the doubting and prodigal son who must learn how to submit to the will of his heavenly Father. Turning back, as if enriched by some knowledge, Taras meekly accepts God’s designs and goes to see his son’s martyrdom. What knowledge is hidden behind the closed door to Ostap’s cell? An answer is suggested by a motif originating in the Gospel of Matthew (28:11–15) and running from the Kievan Primary Chronicle (circa 1113) to early modern Ukrainian drama: the story of “the jews” who hire or bribe Roman sentries to watch over Jesus’ tomb and deny resurrection claims.17 Taras’s desire to see his son despite the assurances of “the jews” that Ostap cannot be helped (1835:139, 143/1842:84, 87), in other words, that he should be considered dead, recalls Christian disbelief vis-à-vis the “jewish” claim that Jesus is dead for good. The parallelism of these situations is highlighted by Ostap’s guards, who are engrossed in “some game” (1835:140/1842:85), evoking a stock image in European art—soldiers gambling by Christ’s cross and tomb. As discussed above, Gogol’s readership sees the Polish-“jewish” alliance against Orthodox Ukrainians through the lens of the Roman-“jewish” anti-Christian compact. In this light, the bribing of Polish guards by “the jews” is part of Iankel’s theological duel with Taras; for rather than let Taras in, the bribed sentry tries to dissuade him from entering Ostap’s cell, implicitly confirming the “jewish” claim that the martyr is as good as dead. Thus, Taras’s sudden decision not to see Ostap in his cell but to observe his immortalizing martyrdom shows the Cossack’s newfound understanding that to defeat the “jewish” logic, he must submit to God’s scheme and then follow his son’s example. Iankel' vanishes from Taras’s side once the Cossack announces his acceptance of divine will. As Taras’s approval of Ostap’s martyrdom resonates in the Polish crowd, Iankel' turns deathly pale (1835:145/1842:90) and stays in the orbis exterior, whereas the Cossack is magically trans-

The Temptation of Taras

ported to Zaporozh'e. The sudden disappearance of “the jews” and Taras’s unexplained return to the orbis interior follow an established pattern. The fifteenth-century vita of Ioann of Novgorod relates the story of the saint’s temptation by a demon, whose defeat provides Ioann with a transport to Jerusalem. Once the trip is over, the saint makes the sign of a cross over the instantly vanishing demon. Before incorporating it into “Taras Bul'ba,” Gogol' used this plot in “Noch' pered ­rozhdestvom” and “Propavshaia gramota,” whose Cossack heroes turn the Opponent into the Helper, using their subdued devils as vehicles before disposing of them in the last show of righteousness. Neither the vita nor the stories describe the hero’s trip home, stressing the spiritual exploit rather than its reward.18 Taras’s journey to Warsaw, facilitated by his “jewish” OpponentHelper, follows this logic. It echoes the dual meaning of the Russian noun podvig—an arduous journey and an exploit—treating as self-­ evident the theological meaning of Iankel’s exit; the contemporary Russian literary parodies of vanishing “jewish” helpers suggest that Iankel’s disappearance is a literary procedure common enough not to require further motivation.19 Besides, in Russian Romantic fiction, “the jews” often facilitate a jailed hero’s release or rendezvous with a relative. Like Iankel’s disappearance, then, Taras’s trip to the prison castle is a literary commonplace. However, its funereal symbolism sheds light on the deeper meaning of the Cossack’s journey to Warsaw. This symbolism evokes Slavic folk laments describing a burial as a visit paid by the deceased to his dead relatives.20 Visiting a relative in the land of the dead (compare his German tourist disguise in Warsaw), Taras proves that he has the strength to come back to the world of the living (Zaporozh'e), accomplishing a mythical feat and bringing back a reward: the knowledge he needs to lift his family curse. Taras’s journey through temptation parallels the crusade, whose initial venture outside Zaporozh'e fails because the Cossacks are not spiritually ready for an exploit, as illustrated by Andrii’s Judas-act. Taras rejects Andrii’s compromise, blessed by “the jews,” but learns only in Warsaw that divine chosenness is attainable through martyrdom. As a result, the second crusade, launched upon his return to Zaporozh'e, is a success. Taras eschews all compromise with the foe, becoming the

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leader of a group of zealots and a martyr who saves his followers by indicating their escape route even as he is being executed. His martyrdom is an emulation of Christ and a salvific event for those putting faith in him. This event contrasts with previous Cossack failures, lifting the curse that weighs over Taras’s kin and larger Cossack family. Redeeming Andrii’s and the Cossacks’ fiasco at the “oak city” (Dubno’s literal meaning), as well as the loss of his own “oak strength” in Warsaw, Taras takes martyrdom on a tree trunk—a common metaphor of the Crucifixion in the New Testament.21 The martyr can see from his elevation a young Polish colonel, the panna’s brother, tumble off a precipice (1835:149/1842:94). This personal vindication catches us by surprise, since the existence of the panna’s sibling is not hitherto mentioned. But his end is virtually identical to the punishment of the Cossack renegade in Gogol’s “Strashnaia mest'.” The victim’s rank, reminiscent of the line of colonels from which Taras and the trouble-maker Dorosh descend, as well as his age, evocative of ­Andrii’s youth, give symbolic closure to Taras’s quest for reconciliation with God, as the traitor-figure bedeviling his life goes to hell.

Te n  The Helper

Sparing Iankel' temporarily during the pogrom in Zaporozh'e, as “there’s always time to hang a Jew” (1842:31), Taras abides by the logic of the witness-people myth. Christians need “jewish” knowledge and services until the new covenant is reconfirmed in the Second Coming (see Chapter 1). Gogol' highlights this feature of Christian theology in his early essay, Obozrenie vseobshchei istorii (A survey of universal history), which describes “the jews” as the carriers of the memory of sacred history who “preserve for the future and for other peoples the most ancient yet true facts and didactic notions.” Not surprisingly, then, “the jews” in his story are keepers of knowledge and traffickers of information, and by this token, natural-born spies. For them, information is not only a commodity but a weapon: Iankel' tries to stop the pogrom by promising to “announce something unheard of, something so important one doesn’t know where to begin” (1835:118/1842:30). As the keepers of desired objects (see Chapter 1), “the jews” instruct and equip Gogol’s war-bound Cossacks. We find the same stock motif in Ukrainian folk songs and in contemporary Russian letters, whose “jews” are ever available to serve Gentiles, appearing miraculously whenever a hero needs information or assistance (1835:124/1842:52).1 Taras readily admits that he cannot undertake his journey without “the jews” (1835:136/1842:80). Such “dependence on the dispersed children of Zion,” as Rebecca describes the “jewish”-Gentile dynamic (Ivanhoe, 134), is not without its drawbacks; for the master must constantly emphasize his indispensable servant’s inferiority—through familiar personal pronouns, verbal and physical abuse, and so on—in order to assert the power hierarchy prescribed by the servitus Judaeorum doctrine.2 This

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master-servant logic is accentuated by the canine similes that cast “the jews” as dogs serving their owner: such is, for instance, the implicit meaning of the night Iankel' spends on the floor by Taras’s bed (1835:116, 139–40/1842:29, 53, 80, 84).3 To convey the demonic nature of the “jewish” Helper-figure, Gogol' draws on the descriptive vocabulary furnished by the generative model of “the jews.” Foremost among such markers of alterity is the language spoken by Iankel' and his kind. The Cossacks and the Poles share the same unspecified tongue conveyed in the oft-unidiomatic and Ukrainianized Russian of Gogol’s narrator. By contrast, “the jews,” when they talk to each other, are said to speak “German” (1835:137–38/1842:82–83). Given the demonic connotations of this term in Gogol’s artistic universe, “German” denotes here both the Yiddish language and a satanic idiom. Gogol', unlike most of his Russian peers, does not mark the Russian of his “jews” with corrupt pronunciation or grammar; nor does he pepper their speech with pseudo-biblical terms like those that adorn the perfect English of Scott’s Isaac and Rebecca. Instead, retaining a few signs of linguistic “jewishness” (“vei mir,” “ai, ai, ai”), he cuts straight to the signified of the “jew-speak”—the enunciator’s false spirituality. Thus, when Mardokhai implies that Ostap should be considered dead, Taras cannot understand him because the sage lapses into “gibberish” (1835:139/1842:84), as if compulsively using “German” for a blasphemous utterance, whose iniquity is stressed by his proclivity for spitting—a salient anti-Christian feature of the “jew-speak” in the story (1835:118, 135, 138–39, 142/1842:31, 79, 83–84, 87).4 The semantics of dirt and obsolescence are prominent in the descriptive lexicon Gogol' borrows from the generative model of “the jews.” Since his spiritual state is outlived and unclean, the praying ­Iankel' wears a dirty funeral shroud (1835:135/1842:79) and lives in a filthy house. The house’s decrepit roof is inhabited by sparrows, a common symbol of “jewish” parasitism (see Chapter 3); and its entryway is littered with rubbish (1842:79). Since dirt is a universal symbol of the spiritual chaos proper to any profane space (compare Andrii’s vision of Dubno’s streets as “a dried heap of dirt” [1842:43]), the picture of Iankel’s living conditions does not seem to clash in Gogol’s mind with his successful economic activity. But neither would this apparent con-

The Helper

tradiction bother Gogol’s peers, who in their own writings use filth, stench, and decay to describe the physical aspect and habitat of the very same “jews” they stigmatize as ruthless economic exploiters and profitmongers.5 Thus, Taras’s faith in the business acumen of “the jews” is not shaken by the fact that Warsaw’s “jewish” street, also known as “Filthy,” is a gloomy dumpsite where “soiled and ragged Jew-kids [zhidenki]” wallow in the dirt like sparrows or piglets (1835:137/1842:81–82). There is little originality in Gogol’s sketch of the Warsaw ghetto, indebted as it is to Goethe’s vision of the Frankfurt ghetto in Dichtung und Warheit (Poetry and truth, 1811); and specifically to the structure of Goethe’s narrative as a progression from dark chaos to the vision of the pretty “jewesses” who seem to fancy the hero, soothing his anxiety by the implicit evocation of Christian triumph in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. “The passably cute little face of a Jewess,” which we glimpse in the Filthy Street, is the sole physically attractive female specimen of “the jews” in Gogol’s oeuvre (and possibly a nod to Goethe). In contrast, Iankel’s wife embodies Baba Iaga; and her conversation with Taras echoes standard mythical commerce between a hero and a crone (1842:79).6 And since recourse to “the jews” pollutes a hero spiritually, the presence of dirt in their physical environment allows Gogol' to realize the metaphor: smuggling Taras into Warsaw, Iankel' hides him under bricks, literally covering the Cossack with a dirt product.7 Alcohol as a means of economic enslavement is another demonic detail in Iankel’s image traceable to the generative model of “the jews.” Consider Taras’s suggestion that Iankel' should smuggle him into Warsaw in a vodka barrel (1835:136/1842:80), previously used by “the jews” as a hiding place during the pogrom. “Jewish” alcohol trade has transparent spiritual implications in Gogol’s story. If in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, “the jews” run taverns that imitate the layout of synagogues (IV:109–10), thus being antichurches by definition, in the economy of “Taras Bul'ba” their control of alcohol consumption is nothing short of  blasphemous. This is because gorelka (vodka) is that “good old wine” of Communion that Taras drinks when welcoming his sons home, and later shares with Cossacks during their last supper by ­Dubno’s walls. “The jews” desecrate this beverage by their unholy touch; witness a Cossack’s words in Gogol’s story “Get'man”: “It’s intolerable enough that

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gorelka is in the hands of Christ’s enemies. And now God’s churches are as well!” (III:283). Commonplace in Slavic literatures, the association of “the jews” with liquor trade had an additional function for Gogol', displacing the moralist’s bad conscience about the substantial profits he drew from liquor production and retail on his Ukrainian estate.8 The bodily construction of Taras’s Helper draws on the satanic traits furnished by the generative model and mediated by the representations of the devil and “the jews” in the vertep theater. “The jews” of “Taras Bul'ba” sport such common signs of demonism as red and damaged hair; ruddy and tainted skin; extreme agility and jerkiness; flawed feet and gait (their thin legs mirror those of the devil in Gogol’s stories). Their flying earlocks and coattails are reminiscent of the devil’s horns and tail. Their comic yet “revolting” gesticulation and grimaces endow the satanic Other with the requisite element of didactic laughter. 9 The physical kinship of Gogol’s devils and “jews” reflects their interchangeability in his imagination. We find in the writer’s drafts and notebooks a description of hell as the place where “Jewish skull-caps grow on trees” (I:397); and a pun on the folk belief that a hungry man dreams of the devil: “Without dinner, one dreams of the Jews” (IX:549). But the implications of their corporeal resemblance are not limited to the spiritual kinship of Satan and “the jews.” Mounting his ghostly mare to take Taras to Warsaw, the lanky Iankel' parodies the image of a noble rider-warrior (1835:118, 136/1842:30, 54, 81), that is, of Taras himself; and recalls the allegory of death as an apocalyptic rider, thereby intimating the hidden implications of Taras’s destination.10 (Gogol' enhances the vitality of Iankel’s image as a rider by linking it to C. W. Faber du Faur’s popular sketches of the 1812 war; see Figure 3). This satanic parody serves as yet another reminder of Taras’s unredeemed, “jewish” side. Poking fun at earlocks (peyot), for example, the narrator brings into focus a physical trait “the jews” share with the Cossacks. For Gogol’s Petersburg readers, the hornlike shock of hair on Taras’s shaved head (chupryna, chub) is as exotic as Iankel’s peyot. Moreover, Taras and “the jews” similarly express strong emotions by pulling on their respective eccentric growths; and both attributes fly in the wind when their owners become agitated. But if Taras’s chupryna comes into focus in the story’s tragic episodes (the discovery of Andrii’s treason; Andrii’s

The Helper

pursuit on the battlefield), the peyot of “the jews” provides comic relief, parodically inverting these tragic situations. Such seemingly paradoxical physical affinity between the Cossacks and “the jews” suggests that the Helper’s services transcend the passage of knowledge and equipment to the hero, whose negative side “the jews” embody quite literally. As in theology, where the servitus ­Judaeorum doctrine logically abuts the elimination of the “jewish” Other through baptism, defeat through disappearance represents the ultimate service of “the jews,” who carry both Taras’s and Gogol’s own rejected and displaced qualities. In the story’s second redaction, this personal exorcism is manifest in the opposition of two animal symbols. The first is the smoked goose suspended from clotheslines in the Filthy Street next to “jewish” underwear (1835:137/1842:82). As a symbol of “jewishness” in general and of its threatening female sexuality in particular (see Chapter 3), this goose denotes the defeat and ­elimination

Figure 3. “Polish Jews and French Soldiers.” In: Christian Wilhelm Faber du Faur, Blaetter aus meinem Portefeuille im Laufe des Feldzugs 1812 in Russland. Stuttgart: C. F. Autenrieth, 1831.

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of “the jews.” This is because the strung and smoked bird is no more amphibious than those it symbolizes, namely, the victims of the pogrom in Zaporozh'e, who take functional baptism by drowning. But the main reason for Gogol’s choice of animal symbols lies in the parodic mirror effect the image of the “jewish” goose creates with regard to Gogol’s self-image. In the 1842 text, the writer not only projects on “the jews” his doubts vis-à-vis his social origins, religiosity, and possibly sexuality but contrasts the bird-symbol of his exorcised “jewish” side to another amphibious bird of the goose family—the golden eye duck, or gogol'. Researching and recording information about the bird whose name he bears, Gogol' introduces it into the story’s final paragraph. We thus see a “proud gogol '” (1842:94) swim alongside the free Cossacks delivered by Taras’s redemptive martyrdom. In the same way, Gogol' is delivered by exorcising his private demons into “the jews” in the course of writing and rewriting “Taras Bul'ba.”11 The dual narrative role of the Helper-Opponent places “the jews” of Gogol’s story in a paradoxical position—they continuously help their own detractors and persecutors. The relationship of “jewish” helpers with their Cossack and Polish masters in “Taras Bul'ba” is a series of brushes with death postponed by the promise of more services. And the same logic informs Ukrainian legends about “the jews” who first help the Poles to capture Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, and then organize his escape from captivity, allowing the Cossack to carry on his militant cause, which includes the slaughter of “the jews.”12 But this seemingly bizarre logic makes perfect sense to the clients of the generative model of “the jews,” who see “jewish” services as a form of theologically informed servitude, that is, not a product of free will but a result of Christianity’s superiority to Judaism. In narrative terms, this logic posits the neutralization and transformation of the Opponent into the Helper as a necessary condition and milestone in the Subject’s successful quest for the Object. But how does one neutralize the demonic nefariousness of “the jews” in order to profit from their services? Although “the jews” will do anything for money (1835:119/1842:33)— in Gogol’s private papers they are synonymous with banking, usury, and greed13—their devotion shifts to the highest bidder. An exchange of favors, informed by mythical logic, is a surer way of harnessing “jew-

The Helper

ish” energy. Soliciting Iankel’s assistance, Taras buttresses his monetary offer by reminding Iankel' that he once saved him. “Now it’s your turn to do me a favor,” he tells the reluctant demon, who accepts this tit-fortat logic that “puts to shame [. . .] the perennial lust for gold entwining a Jew’s soul like a worm” (1835:135/1842:79–80). Iankel' does the same thing Taras did for him: he guides the Cossack in Warsaw’s hostile environment (compare Taras’s words during the pogrom: “All right, I will guide you [provedu]” [1835:118]). Leaving Iankel' with a reward superior to the Polish bounty on Taras’s head, Gogol' eliminates any notion of altruism from his actions, contrary to Scott’s vision of Isaac’s bond to Ivanhoe. Steering Isaac through hostile surroundings, Ivanhoe expects nothing in return. Isaac repays the favor voluntarily, albeit “hesitating between habitual love of gain and a new-born desire to be liberal” (136). He is even ready to lose money for Ivanhoe’s sake, “his better feelings predominating over those which are most familiar to him” (92). Gogol’s “jews” are incapable of such selfless acts. This means that once a favor is returned, they can again become a hostile force, because as Ukrainian religious drama reminds us, “the jews” always “repay good with evil” and their “eyes are blinded by black ingratitude.” Indeed, even as Iankel' informs Taras about events in Dubno, “the jews” spy on the Cossack camp on behalf of the Poles (1842:67). Symptomatically, in an 1852 Russian theatrical adaptation of “Taras Bul'ba,” Iankel' ultimately betrays Taras for a hefty sum.14 A death threat, therefore, is the surest way to keep “the jews” at bay, especially since this threat symbolizes baptism, like the threat of the sign of the cross brandished over the servile demon by Vakula (“Noch' pered rozhdestvom”), and by his prototype in the vita of Ioann of Novgorod. Unlike the Cossacks, who can break with relative impunity an oath sworn on their faith (1835:115, 120/1842:27, 34), “the jews” suffer deadly consequences if they break their oath of service (1842:35)—a difference explainable by their theological status as slaves to the Law in contrast to the Grace that is the Cossacks’ indult. A modern critical trend interprets the services Taras receives from “the jews” as reflective of Iankel’s honesty, gratitude, and empathy.15 This wishful thinking echoes the liberal-minded tendency to elevate Shylock from his original, secondary, and comic role to that of a tragic

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protagonist. This reinterpretation is accompanied by the reading of Shylock’s monologue, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (III.i), as Shakespeare’s plea for tolerance—a reading obfuscating the implications of Shylock’s un-Christian call for revenge in this monologue, which is indicative of the unforgiving nature of the Law-bound “jews” and of the “jewish” nature of all vengeful Christians. The Judeophile reinterpretation of Shylock’s monologue divorces the play from its original context; for such rhetorical exercises in the “jewish” villain’s disingenuous selfjustification are commonplace in Shakespeare’s time. Even in Ivanhoe, for all its indebtedness to the liberal reinterpretation of Shylock, Isaac’s complaints about Christian abuse fall short of justifying his own negative traits: their main goal is to expose the flaws of Christians. Crucially, all such Shylock-monologues are ultimately traceable to medieval Passion Plays, where Synagoga bewails her “wretched desolation” even as Gabriel and Raphael amuse the audience by kicking her off the stage during a comic interlude.16 The same comic procedure punctuates east Slavic church drama and folk theater, wherein “the jews” regularly lament their (well-deserved) maltreatment. It is not surprising then that the Shylock-monologue is to be found among the most common devices employed by Gogol’s peers for the artistic representation of “the jews.”17 Like Shylock, Iankel' bewails the dangers of his trade in contrast to the ease with which Gentiles satisfy their love of gain (1835:142/1842:87); like Shylock, he bemoans the dehumanization of “the jews.” “Everyone treats the Jew like a dog, because they think he is not human if he is a Jew,” intones Iankel' in front of the unmoved Taras (1842:81). When taken out of context, this soliloquy casts Iankel' as a tragic hero. But such a reading overlooks the fact that his Shylock-monologue is framed by the comic bargaining scene that includes Taras’s payment for “jewish” services and Iankel’s admiring assumption that the gold he receives comes from a successful robbery. In other words, this context casts Iankel’s soliloquy as little more than a price-hiking tool. In Gogol’s day, the character of Iankel', unlike that of Akakii Akakie­ vich in Gogol’s story “Shinel'” (The overcoat, 1842), was read strictly as a comic type, the way Shylock was treated until the early nineteenth century. Iankel' and Akakii are in fact united by their troubles: both re-

The Helper

peatedly complain of mistreatment and appeal to the brotherly feelings of their persecutors (“Shinel',” III:144). Furthermore, as Boris Eikhenbaum shows, Akakii’s complaints function as a rhetorical device transforming an already comic figure into a grotesque one.18 And much the same can be said about the function of Iankel’s Shylock-monologue, whose introduction into the story’s second edition suggests that Gogol', working on “Taras Bul'ba” concurrently with “Shinel',” uses the same rhetorical device in both stories. And yet, the complaints of “the jews” and their claims to brotherhood strike the Cossacks as insulting and Gogol’s interpretive community as comically nonsensical; whereas Akakii’s plea falls on attentive ears both within the story and among its readers, propelling “Shinel'” to the status of a manifesto for a new Russian literary sensibility that focuses on the suffering of social underdogs.19 This difference in reception undoubtedly springs from the fact that Iankel' stands for “the jews,” and Akakii, for Christians. It is not empathy that stays Taras’s hand during the pogrom in Zaporozh'e, for “there’s always time to hang a Jew,” like the goose in the Filthy Street. The story’s creator and hero need Iankel' a bit longer, owing not only to the archetypal, mythical, and theological properties of “the jews” but to this actor’s role in the story’s narrative structure. Gogol' finds in Iankel' that ubiquitous personage who can “tie and undo all the story knots,” to cite once again Pogodin’s literary recipe, and whose antics move the plot along through narrative mediation and comic deceleration. Thus, the standard device of Passion and Mystery Plays—with “the jews” replacing the Vice and the devil as the plot’s go-between and the source of comic relief that marks a pause in the story’s development—finds its way into “Taras Bul'ba,” albeit with Scott’s help, since the comic scenes decelerating Ivanhoe’s narrative often feature Isaac the comic trickster. Similarly, Iankel’s verbal exchanges with Taras contain much material for laughter. Like theatrical interludes, they give the reader a respite from the pace of the narrative and from Taras’s tragic story, “mixing the comic and the tragic,” as prescribed by another contemporary Russian recipe for historical romance.20 Nor is it empathy that makes Iankel' play the Helper in the story of Taras’s spiritual journey, but rather that story’s theological implications

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and the concomitant narrative logic. Taras’s spiritual journey approximates the basic Christian story by sending him and the Cossacks he symbolizes (Subject) on a quest for redemption (Object), which is held out by their heavenly Father (Sender) to the Orthodox Christians (Receiver) despite the doubt and temptation embodied by women and “the jews” (Opponent) in their midst. Gogol' needs the actor called “the jews” to play the Helper as much as he needs this actor in the role of the Opponent until the story’s denouement, when the original redemptive sacrifice of Christianity breaks into Taras’s life. Emulating Jesus’ (self-)sacrifice, Taras recreates on the individual scale the Second Coming scenario, according to which “the jews” should vanish in the final confirmation of the true faith. With the exception of the saintly Ostap, all Christian characters in “Taras Bul'ba” have a “jewish” side. But in the story’s economy, a seat next to Christ’s throne is predicated on one’s ability to kill “the jews” in himself.

E l ev e n  Liberalism, Modernity, and

Semi(o)tic Chaos

A close reading of “Taras Bul'ba” illustrates that “the jews” can be paramount in a writer’s negotiation of his or her emotional and intellectual perplexities conceptualized and articulated in the imaginative language of a Christian culture. In the third part of my study I correlate this quality of “the jews” as holders of interpretive keys to authorial imagination with another facet of this mythical actor—its role in establishing dialogical rapports between writers and texts. Historically, cultural and ideological shifts have modified the interpretation of “the jews” in artistic texts. Shylock is a case in point; and Iankel' has not been unshaken by the winds of change. Such socially predicated polysemy extends the uses of “the jews” from intra- to intertextual. The actor’s intratextual role as a depository of rejected or displaced qualities is seconded by its intertextual role of furnishing the pretext and rhetorical means for artistic and ideological debates wherein “the jews” symbolize those radical changes in culture and society that are conventionally placed under the rubric of modernity. The lexicon of “jewish” difference functions as the lingua franca of the modern European imagination. A scrutiny of this code of cultural otherness in literary texts goes beyond a critic’s willful search for elective affinities, revealing mutually informing links between works and artists separated by language, aesthetics, and geography. Such literary and intellectual commerce, not always intentional but always assured by the indebtedness of European writers to the logic and symbolic vocabulary of the generative model of “the jews,” can clarify some obscure or ignored dimensions of literary texts and of their creators’ personalities. In the chapters that follow, I explore the confluence of

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the intra- and intertextual functions of “the jews” in four stories: Ivan Turgenev’s “Zhid” (The Jew, 1847) and “Neschastnaia” (The hapless girl, 1869); and Anton Chekhov’s “Tina” (Mire, 1886) and “Skripka Rotshil'da” (Rothschild’s fiddle, 1894).1 I examine these stories in the context of their creators’ personal and professional dilemmas, as well as in relation to one another and to those contemporary works of art, both Russian and foreign, whose authors articulate their social, cultural, and aesthetic preoccupations in the language of “jewish” difference. Why bring together Turgenev and Chekhov in this study? Outside my inquiry’s subject matter, this coupling is surely unoriginal. Critics have long pointed out intellectual, ethical, and spiritual concerns linking Chekhov and Turgenev; for example, their shared interest in a certain type of passive, indecisive male hero.2 But unlike Gogol', neither writer has produced a Iankel' of his own that would give an authoritative example for the depiction of “the jews”; nor, in contrast to Dostoevskii, made a mark on the debates about the Russian empire’s “Jewish question.” What brings Chekhov and Turgenev together for the purposes of this study is the poorly understood story of the imaginative uses to which both put “the jews” in the process of coping with their personal and professional dilemmas in the context of the paradigmatic shifts characterizing their artistic and cultural epoch: the secularization of European societies; the democratization and professionalization of literary authorship; the rise of the liberal intelligentsia in Russia; the increased pace of Jewish assimilation across Europe; and the concomitant entry of Jews into the European field of cultural production. This hitherto unappreciated aspect of the Turgenev-Chekhov connection is highlighted by the fact that like Dostoevskii, whose first literary exercises include a play with a transparently Gogolian title, “Zhid Iankel'” (Jew Iankel', 1844), Turgenev and Chekhov embark on their artistic careers under the sign of Gogol’s “jews.” In 1844, Turgenev assists Louis Viardot in translating Gogol’s stories, “Taras Bul'ba” among them. The latter is published in France shortly before the Russian publication of Turgenev’s “Zhid,” whose depiction of “the jews” is thoroughly indebted to Gogol'. Three decades later, Chekhov’s earliest project (1873–74) happens to be a theatrical adaptation of “Taras

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

Bul'ba”; and although its text does not survive, the writer must have studied his Iankel' well, because Gogol’s “jews” will continuously inform Chekhov’s artistic imagination.3 I think these are not mere coincidences. Nor can we reduce the fascination of the young Dostoevskii, Turgenev, and Chekhov with Gogol’s “jews” to just another case of artistic apprenticeship, whereby a budding writer sharpens his skills by emulating a stock literary type codified by an eminent precursor. “The jews” are too symbolically charged in Turgenev’s and Chekhov’s interpretive communities to be only a literary beginner’s stepping stone. This fascination with “the jews” is especially significant, considering that both writers insist nostalgically on their departure from the religious praxis of their childhood and from traditional Christian belief—a rupture whose beginnings coincide with their first forays into literature.4 Such self-confessed divorce from the belief system informing Turgenev’s and Chekhov’s formative years makes their “jews” all the more worthy of consideration. As transitional types between the Christian and post-Christian identity, both writers illuminate the spiritual and cultural experience of modern European artists and intellectuals, and the place of the imaginary “jews” in the articulation and conceptualization of this experience. As nineteenth-century Russian litterateurs grapple with their evolving status in the increasingly commercialized and professionalized field of cultural production, their readership looks to them for a redefinition of its very identity, whose traditional bases are eroding under the combined pressure of cultural secularization and the socioeconomic reforms that change Russia’s face in the second part of the century. No mean role in this identity crisis is played by the increasing acculturation of the empire’s Jewish subjects, which threatens to erase the boundaries protecting the carriers of the imaginary “jews” from the sign’s putative referents. To make matters worse, from the late 1850s onward, artistic recourse to the language of “jewish” difference in Russia is subjected not only to state censorship but to that of public opinion, which grows more sophisticated along with the country’s liberal intelligentsia. Before turning to Turgenev’s and Chekov’s stories, then, we need to account for the circumstances informing their uses of the actor called “the jews.”

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❊ In Western art, the Enlightenment view of morality, including the obligation of religious tolerance as the counterweight to ecclesiastic and state abuses, finds expression in the effort at the positive depiction of “the jews.” Suppressing the actor’s Opponent function, while preserving its traditional descriptive features, eighteenth-century artists promulgate an unconvincing literary type that combines the meekness and altruism of a model Christian with the stock negative traits of the “jewish” body, character, and trade, albeit motivated by a history of mistreatment. German authors alone produce some fifty plays, Lessing’s The Jews (1749) and Nathan the Wise (1779) among them, featuring “the jews” as pathetic and noble sufferers ever ready to forgive and serve their Christian abusers.5 By the early nineteenth century, nascent nationalist ideologies and distaste for a hackneyed and implausible type all but kill “the jews” as a rhetorical tool in the Enlightenment fight against obscurantism in German-speaking lands. In English letters and drama, however, the Enlightenment-style “jews” loom large well into the 1810s, thanks to Scott’s Ivanhoe and Edgeworth’s Harrington, and to the fashionable stage reinterpretation of Shylock as a tragic hero. In Russia, there exists no comparable contemporary artistic trend, owing partly to official censorship and partly to the common unreadiness among Russian artists to be as liberal with “the jews” as a Lessing or a Scott. An early attempt at emulating Western literary Judeophilia— Lermontov’s juvenile drama Ispantsy (Spaniards, 1830)—is printed only in 1880. The publication of another such attempt, Vasilii Narezhnyi’s novel Rossiiskii Zhilblaz (Russian Gil Blas, 1812), is aborted four times between 1814 and 1864. Although circulating in manuscript, this novel is barred from print as immoral, because “the jews” “cannot and should not be [depicted] as people of virtue”—this being how Faddei Bulgarin sums up in 1826 the reasons for the novel’s proscription. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise does not fare much better with Russian censors. Its translation is published, with extensive cuts, only in 1868 and is at once barred from the stage (unlike the German original), because its theological message “clashes with the nature of the Orthodox faith.” 6 Lastly,

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

the state opprobrium of Enlightenment Judeophilia in art is matched by the skepticism of the Russian cultural elite vis-à-vis the “tenderly Romantic” view of “the jews,” as one critic puts it in 1835.7 In this context, the subsequent reevaluation of the Enlightenment-style “jews” looks all the more remarkable. In 1844, Aleksandr Shakhov­skoi’s stage adaptation of Ivanhoe is allowed into production, capping some twenty years of deliberations in censorship committees. The play enjoys wide resonance thanks to Mikhail Shchepkin’s stage interpretation of Isaac in tune with the Enlightenment ethos of tolerance. In the opinion of critics, Shchepkin demonstrates that the comically repellent “jews” might possess “purely human qualities.” Two years later, Shchepkin again becomes the talk of the town as Sheva in Richard Cumberland’s The Jew (1794). If both events testify to the relative relaxation of censorship, their reception shows a generational divide. Mature artists and intellectuals are dismissive: Aleksandr Gertsen describes Shakhov­skoi’s adaptation as “God knows what”; and composer Aleksei Verstovskii sees Cumberland’s drama as “nonsensical” and “contrived.” The young cohort, however, fetes and promotes the Enlightenment model. A group of university students in fact translates The Jew expressly for Shchepkin’s repertoire.8 In the mid-1840s, then, some Russian artists turn to the Enlightenment-style “jews” as a symbol of social injustice and a humanistic exercise in finding beauty in the beast. At a time of stringent state control of public life, the empathetic vision of “the jews” as victims of injustice in remote lands and historical times becomes a parable of contemporary issues, notably of the urgent but taboo topic of serfdom. And if ­Gogol’s Iankel' does not yet make the cut, being read as a comic type, his descendants come closer to joining the “humiliated and insulted” of the liberal imagination. It is telling that Dostoevskii works simultaneously on the humanistic and sentimental Bednye liudi (Poor folk, 1845) and “Zhid Iankel',” which he conceives as a drama, not a comedy. Turgenev, too, embarks on his philanthropic treatment of serfs in Zapiski ­okhotnika (A huntsman’s sketches, 1852) concurrently with writing “Zhid.” The fact that he offers the story to the magazine Sovremennik (The contemporary), revived in 1846 by Vissarion Belinskii’s circle as the liberal intelligentsia’s mouthpiece, indicates “Zhid”’s place at the cusp of a new artistic and

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i­deological trend. And so do the protracted doubts of its censors—it takes almost a year before this short story is allowed into print. For the Russian artists and intellectuals of the 1840s, the Enlightenment-style “jews” are little more than an expedient tool in their run-ins with political authority. This is clear from their near-abandonment of artistic Judeophilia in the 1850s–70s, that is, in the period of considerable relaxation in state censorship. Furthermore, whatever empathetic treatment of “the jews” we do find in the Russian public discourse, it rarely entails a critical reevaluation, let alone disavowal, of the lexicon of “jewish” difference. A case in point is the history of the debate on Jewish civic equality, finally permitted in 1858 by Alexander II’s reform-minded government along with the debate on the institution of serfdom. That year, the conservative journal Illiustratsiia (Illustration) cata­ logues the faults of “the jews” in order to prove the unreadiness of Jews for civic equality. The same article insults, citing their Jewish background, two of the journal’s opponents writing in the liberal press. This personal jibe provokes a wave of self-righteous indignation. In open letters, scores of litterateurs voice solidarity with their insulted colleagues, using this occasion as a pretext to endorse the cause of emancipation in Russia, not so much Jewish as general. Among the signatories we find many current and future luminaries of Judeophobia.9 This paradox is at its clearest in one such letter, authored by a group of Ukrainian intellectuals. Opportunistically upholding the principle of Jewish equality, whose negation would also undermine Ukrainian nationalist aspirations, this letter espouses a view of “the jews” that is indistinguishable from that of Illiustratsiia but for one significant deviation: the authors blame the flaws of “the jews” on the Russian state’s abuse of minorities, thus diverting the discussion toward their own agenda of criticizing the empire’s cultural policies.10 Theoretical empathy for the plight of Russia’s Jewish subjects is part and parcel of the nascent intelligentsia’s ideology and can function as a calling card of political pedigree. Turgenev signs two different letters of protest against Illiustratsiia. And Dostoevskii, eager to position his review Vremia (Time, 1861–62) on the political Left, takes to task Ivan Aksakov’s Den' (Day) for its Judeophobia. “The Jews are the pets of Russia’s progressive circles,” complains Nikolai Kostomarov in 1862.11

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

Yet the liberal intelligentsia does nothing to challenge the traditional image of “the jews”: most aspects of the image’s generative model continue to coexist in the intelligentsia’s discourse with the expressions of support for Jewish civic equality. Moreover, in this period of reforms, Russia begins to catch up with modernity not only socially and economically but also ideologically. Like their Western counterparts, the empire’s political Left and Right find common ground in the use of “the jews” as a symbol of all that is wrong with the age; for the anti­ capitalist sentiment and the idealization of the agrarian society permeate the ideology of Russia’s liberals as much as they do the worldview of their foes among the Slavophiles and various social conservatives. Political differences aside, the Russian cultural elites see themselves as a bulwark protecting the recently emancipated peasantry from potential exploiters—the landowning institutions of the state and the forces of the free market. The Left, from moderate liberals to the Populists and dogmatic Socialists, uses the language of “jewish” difference to describe the arrival of capitalism in Russia, at times condoning the pogroms as a form of peasant self-defense against exploitation.12 The Russian liberal opinion is barely distinguishable from the conservative one in its vision of the stock exchange, railroad construction, and large-scale industry as “jewish” phenomena. The view of capitalism as “jewish” profit-­mongering unites such liberal beacons as Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin and Nikolai Nekrasov with their political detractors in one rallying cry against the “Gintsburgs, Poliakovs and Varshavskiis”—Russian financiers and industrialists of Jewish extraction who embody capitalism in general.13 The crucial split between the images of “the jews” espoused before 1881 by Russia’s liberal and conservative opinion-makers resides in the investment of the conservative camp, from the mature Dostoevskii to Ivan Aksakov to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, in anti-Judaism and Judeophobia as the core elements of political and cultural theory. This centrality of “the jews” in conservative thought has much to do with its vision of Russian Orthodoxy as Europe’s last rampart against the materialism and atheism of the modern age. Russia’s peasants (narod), as carriers of salvific spirituality that can redeem the mercantile and secular West from its “jewishness,” function in this scheme as the new chosen people.

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The Christian messianic appointment of the narod inevitably clashes with that of “the jews,” who have therefore every reason to sap Russia’s moral and social fabric. In the conservative opinion, they do so not only through capitalism (as the liberals have it) but by stoking the flames of political liberalism and radicalism and by frustrating Russia’s international ambitions through the manipulation of world finance, press, and diplomacy. The latter accusation peaks in the right-wing press during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the subsequent Congress of Berlin, with Benjamin Disraeli embodying the international “jewish” plot against Russia.14 In this respect, Russia fully partakes in the European evolution toward antisemitic ideology, as confirmed by the rise of interest in secular conspiracy theories among Russian readers. In the early 1860s, a censor’s report on a play by an obscure Russian author treats its thesis that “the jews” strive for world domination as “unprecedented rubbish.”15 A decade later, such theories are already cliché. A chapter from Hermann Goedsche’s novel Biarritz (1868), detailing a session of the world’s secret “jewish” government, appears in Russia as a separate pamphlet four times between 1872 and 1891. Another foreign tract, ­Osman-Bei’s World Conquest by the Jews (1874), goes through seven Russian editions in 1875 alone. Homegrown expressions of the same idea do not lag behind, especially after Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and the hardening of the government’s Jewish policies. Kniga ­kagala (The book of the kahal, 1869), by Jewish convert Iakov Brafman, captivates Dostoevskii and like-minded thinkers, heralding an avalanche of revelations about the “jewish” drive for power—from ­Ippolit Liutostanskii’s Talmud i evrei (The Talmud and the Jews, 1879– 80) to Vsevolod Krestovskii’s T'ma ­egipetskaia (The darkness of Egypt, 1888) to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), commissioned and disseminated by the Russian political police. ❊ In all logic then the acculturation of Russia’s Jews should have alleviated conspiracy fears. Echoing the general Enlightenment attitude, both the pre-1881 tsarist officials and the liberal advocates of Jewish emancipation in Russia have high hopes for cultural assimilation as a

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

tool for refashioning “the jews” into productive members of the nation. Assimilation, it is argued, opens the particularist and backward “jews” to the civilizing influence of Christian ethics and of modern progress, breaking up the “state within a state” in which “the jews” live, bathing in religious hatred and obscurantism. The monarchy initially pursues assimilation through repressive conversionist measures. But in 1844, even as Shchepkin shines in the role of Isaac, the crown modifies its ineffectual approach, introducing a system of secular schools based on the principles of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)—an event explaining the concurrent relaxation of censorship vis-à-vis the artistic expressions of Enlightenment Judeophilia. The graduates of these schools, along with those of the crown’s new rabbinical seminaries, can enroll in Russian educational institutions. These first steps in the formation of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia get a boost in 1861, when Jewish university graduates become eligible for state and professional careers outside the Pale of Settlement. Russian education thus becomes a means of social mobility in the absence of civic emancipation. Then, in 1874, the new conscription law gives advantage to secondary school graduates, all but perpetuating the steady stream of Jews through the Russian educational system.16 In practical terms, however, the more progress Jews make toward Russification, the more “the jews” appear as an abnormal group resistant to assimilation. This is because Jewish integration saps the image of Europe’s paradigmatic Other, thereby unsettling a core aspect of Christian and post-Christian identity. Responding to Jewish assimilation processes, a chorus of Western and Russian thinkers insists that secularization does not fundamentally change European societies, which remain morally and culturally Christian—an axiom that makes “the jews” a perennially foreign element, no matter how well they disguise themselves through acculturation or baptism. And if in the eyes of the Russian law a convert loses all “jewishness,” the recession of religious belief saps the traditional view of baptism’s salutary effect, as testified by the proliferation of proverbs and jokes about the unchanged nature of the baptized “jews” and the insincerity of their conversion. Furthermore, the rise of conspiracy theories engenders a new motif: acculturation is a ruse in the “jewish” war for domination. The officially

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condoned discrimination against converts becomes common in turnof-the-century Russia against the backdrop of the general awareness of real cases of crypto-Judaism.17 Russian attitudes toward Jewish assimilation follow the same pattern as in the West, combining the fear of real or imagined Jewish difference with anxiety at the disappearance of a central aspect of Christian identity. Facilitated by capitalism’s high degree of social mobility, the erosion of social borders, manifest in the penetration of former pariahs into spheres traditionally reserved for Gentiles, brings about semiotic chaos and problematizes culturally conditioned assumptions about the Other. In Russia, the signs of this definition crisis grow exponentially from the 1820s onward. Russian travelogues, both documentary and fictional, insist on the difficulty of telling “the jews” from Gentiles in foreign lands and scare the reader with tales of mistaken identity.18 There emerges in fact a subgenre of such anecdotes. If Pushkin’s diary (15.X.1827) tells us about a meeting with his schoolmate Kiukhel'beker, whom Pushkin initially misidentifies as “jewish,” similar tales circulate about the poet himself. A Petersburg dandy, El'kan, rumored to descend from “the jews,” exploits his physical likeness to Pushkin, impersonating him in public. The joke enrages Pushkin, not least because it assimilates him to “the jews.” But El'kan’s fluid identity also fascinates artists, inspiring the character of Shprikh in Lermontov’s drama ­Maskarad (The masquerade, 1835)—an early instance of “the jews” in disguise in Russian literature.19 This semiotic chaos elicits a variety of responses in Russia. Policy makers vacillate between opposite desires—to make “the jews” disappear through baptism and acculturation but also to negate the increasingly observable rift between the signifier, “the jews,” and its real-life signified. From the partitions of Poland and well into the reign of Alexander II, Russian officials try to force their Jewish subjects to abandon visible markers of religious and cultural difference. At the same time, emulating the German legal drive to restrict the ability of Jews to bear Gentile names, they try to reassert the semiotic distinctiveness of the “jewish” Other: a series of laws promulgated between 1850 and 1893 impedes the Russification of Jewish names and the adoption of fully Christian names by converts.20

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

Few people feel the semiotic threat of Jewish assimilation as poignantly as the author of “Taras Bul'ba,” whose letters from Europe convey displeasure at the growing inadequacy of the system of signs designating “jewishness.” In a letter to Vasilii Zhukovskii (8.I.1844), for instance, Gogol' makes the following remark: “Avicdor is a banker, thus—a Jew [zhid]. If you spell it with a ‘k’, his name acquires a Greek physiognomy; if you spell it with a ‘g’, you get something Spanish; consequently, in order to preserve its Jewish physiognomy you must spell it with a ‘c’” (XII:245). The importance of this distinct “physiognomy” grows in direct proportion to the erosion of visible difference between Jews and Gentiles. Russia keeps up with Western intellectual trends, transitioning from the religious to cultural and biological motivation of “jewishness” in the 1850s. The years 1858–59 see the institutionalization in the Russian press of the racial vision of “the jews.” Propping up the post-Christian identity with the postulate of biological determinism, the modern (pseudo-)scientific discourse offers corporeal signs as tools for identifying the culturally and religiously disguised “jews.” By the 1860s, Gogol’s physiognomic metaphor is realized across Europe in the widely shared belief that there exists a “jewish” facial type, which is part and parcel of the “semitic” physique—a construct fusing Orientalism with the traditional corporeal markers of demonism (see Chapter 4). The body of “the jews” becomes the primary means for coping with the semi(o)tic chaos of Jewish assimilation. This newly important tool for identifying the carriers of “jewishness” is supplemented by the axiomatic linguistic oddity of “the jews” in disguise, whose ostensibly correct speech remains vaguely foreign or alarms by fluency in too many languages, ultimately recalling the devil’s and the Antichrist’s polyglotism.21 In Russia, the 1860s see the birth of a new literary type, that of “the jews” in disguise, whose primary purpose is to conceal the external indices of their radical difference. ❊ The fears and reservations of the carriers of liberal ideology aside, their advocacy of Jewish assimilation and civic equality puts certain checks on the use of the language of “jewish” difference by the writers who share

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or want to be seen as sharing in the values of the Russian intelligentsia. Mindful of their public image, Russian authors now have to walk a tightrope between official censorship and increasingly censorious liberal public opinion. Their situation is further complicated by the rise of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, which naturally gravitates to the liberal camp, occasionally challenging those artists whose take on “the jews” it deems inimical. To be sure, as a function of acculturation, this phenomenon is not limited to Russia. As early as 1795, Nikolai Karamzin reports that Frankfurt’s Jewish community forced a local theater to drop The Merchant of Venice from its repertoire; and Maria Edgeworth writes Harrington in response to a Jewish reader’s remark that her “jews” contradict the writer’s liberal credentials.22 In the Russian context, such reader response tends to focus on the common ignorance about Jews and Judaism among the Russian litterateurs. Osip Rabinovich pioneered this method of highlighting the gap between Russian Jews and “the jews” of Russian literature—a tradition continued, for example, in Grigorii Bogrov’s derisive flaying of such a self-proclaimed expert on “the jews” as Nikolai Leskov.23 Incidentally, an 1858 row whose concurrence with the Illiustratsiia affair is no accident shows how a riposte from Jewish readers can degenerate into an all-out liberal censure. When journalist S. Gromeka publishes in Sovremennik his sketches of “The Polish Jews” to illustrate the need for their assimilation, a Russian-Jewish journalist takes to task Gromeka’s tone of contempt and revulsion that hardly bear out the essay’s stated political message. In the ensuing exchange, Gromeka finds himself on the defensive. Qualifying his portrayal of “the jews” as a record of the deplorable consequences of their mistreatment, he simultaneously blames his breach of the liberal etiquette on editorial tampering. At this point, Sovremennik’s editors, eager to reaffirm their political credo, turn on their contributor, siding with his critics.24 Learning from Gromeka’s woes, another Sovremennik author, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, puts up a better defense when forced to account for the Judeophobe passages in his Dnevnik provintsiala v Peterburge (A provincial’s Petersburg diary, 1873). While seeking the protection of poetic license, the novelist explains his “jews” as a reflection of commonly held opinions that he, as a truthful artist, faithfully conveys.25

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

All this means that unlike their political opponents, those Russian authors who identify with the liberal intelligentsia or worry about their image with the liberal reader no longer have the luxury of using the lexicon of “jewish” difference at will, no matter how concerned they may be about such “jewish” aspects of modernity as capitalism, semi(o)tic chaos in post-Christian culture, and the commodification of art. But before 1881, liberal self-censorship in Russia is comparatively lax and limited to the Enlightenment logic that allows the carrier of the image of “the jews” to use any of its elements on the condition of qualifying them apologetically as a result of the abuse historically suffered by “the jews.” The situation will change after 1881, as the waves of pogroms and the hardening of the state’s Jewish policies make overt Judeophobia in art and journalism a functional pledge of allegiance to the regime, which the liberal intelligentsia now openly opposes. But even before 1881, Russian artists are aware of the restrictions placed by the liberal code of political correctness on the public manifestations of the language of “jewish” difference. Turgenev, for instance, matter-of-factly expresses contempt for “little Yids” (zhidki) and invokes the standard Christian image of “the jews” in letters to friends, all the while signing open letters against Illiustratsiia and decrying Russian Judeophobia in public settings. Loath to alienate liberal and conservative readers alike, Turgenev privately makes financial contributions to pogrom relief efforts but turns down requests to write an essay on the subject of pogroms, disingenuously citing his lack of journalistic authority and, more sincerely, the fear of a backlash in the right-wing circles, which could publicly label him a “jewish” hireling.26 For Chekhov, the split between public and private pronouncements on “the jews” is even more dramatic and complicated. His letters to friends and relatives routinely invoke “the jews”—at times jocularly, at times seriously, but almost always derisively—and stand in stark contrast to the writer’s sincerely expressed pro-Dreyfus position. Characteristically, this contradiction was posthumously obfuscated by Chekhov’s editors: mindful of the writer’s iconic status with the liberal intelligentsia, his sister purged most mentions of “the jews” from the first edition of Chekhov’s collected letters (1912–16).27 This tension between the liberal code of political correctness and

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a European writer’s culturally conditioned imagination makes “the jews” in Turgenev’s and Chekhov’s oeuvre not only different enough from Gogol’s Iankel' to merit a separate study but also paramount to the fuller understanding of both writers as modern artists for whom the imaginary “jews” are not just a psychological safety valve but a means of intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue about modernity and the artist’s place in it.

Tw e l v e  Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

Turgenev’s “Zhid” is an anecdote from the life of colonel Nikolai Il'ich, who relates for the edification of young officers an episode from the 1813 siege of French-held Danzig, which he witnessed as an eighteenyear-old ensign keen on war and sex (IV:108). The ensign finds a helper in Girshel' the “jewish” pimp—a demonic tempter who miraculously springs up before Nikolai, “as if from under the ground,” in the wee hours of the morning (IV:109, 114). A deal is struck, and Girshel' produces Sara the “oriental” beauty. But the tryst is inconclusive because of Nikolai’s inexperience, Sara’s unexplained discomfort, and Girshel’s meddling, for the pimp jealously circles and peeks into the ensign’s tent. The second date is like the first, only Sara allows the officer some physical liberties before breaking into tears. Nikolai then lets her go without satisfying his lust. Next they meet during a marauding foray of Nikolai’s unit. Sara asks him to protect her household, and he obliges. Taken with his generosity and good looks, she offers Nikolai a date unbeknownst to her keeper, thus functionally eloping from Girshel'. Before they can meet, Girshel' is caught with a map of the Russian camp and brought before a general for a swift trial culminating in a death sentence. Nikolai asks the general to spare Girshel' despite the spy’s guilt, opposing humanist considerations to the general’s adherence to the letter of the law. As Girshel' is about to be hanged, Sara appears before Nikolai, revealing that the pimp is her father. In the ensuing execution scene, all those present are moved by Girshel’s anguish and Sara’s despair. Sara finally curses the whole gathering for inhumanity, while Nikolai vainly pleads with the general, who arrests him for insubordination even as Girshel' is hanged on a tree, as befits Judas’s kin.

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Had the artistic life of the 1840s abided by the standards of our day, Gogol' should have sued Turgenev for copyright infringement, so close was the image of Girshel' to that of Iankel'. While Sara’s appearance and speech are described in Orientalist terms (IV:111–12, 115) reminiscent of Ivanhoe’s Rebecca, Girshel' is a spitting image of Gogol’s “jews.” He reproduces their costume and proclivity for lifting the skirts of outer garments; their frail built, red hair, and freckles; their restless agility; their cowardice, expressed through Iankel'-like crouching and running in the face of danger; and their comic mannerisms—from the blinking eyes and screwed-up faces to the flying peyot and nonsensically spread fingers (IV:109, 113, 116–17, 119–20). As in “Taras Bul'ba,” the “jewish” physique contrasts with that of the Christian hero. Nikolai has “a nice Russian face” and attractively masculine build, voice, and comportment (IV:108)—a far cry from Girshel’s effeminacy, highlighted in a Gogolian scene that shows a soldier pick up and carry the pitifully screaming Girshel', his stocking-encased legs waving about and his eyes rolled up hysterically (IV:116–17). The story’s setting and plot are also thoroughly unoriginal. The siege of Danzig recalls that of Dubno in “Taras Bul'ba,” where the Cossack camp is similarly infested by “jewish” tempters and spies bound to Christians by a temporary pact. The story’s romantic triangle involving a jealous “jewish” father, his daughter, and a young Christian is a tired cliché, and Turgenev seems determined to meet in every way his readers’ expectations. This includes the oedipally required absence of ­Girshel’s wife, who makes a cameo appearance as “an ugly and disheveled Jewess” protecting her poultry from soldiers (IV:115)—yet another Gogolian image steeped in the implication of sexual violence—but misses Girshel’s hanging, where Sara assumes her role, “passionately embracing” the condemned (IV:122). Finally, like Gogol', Turgenev spurns historical precision. Making his “jews” side with the French, he disregards a large body of evidence testifying to the systematic assistance the Russian army received from Polish and Lithuanian Jews opposed to Napoleon on ideological grounds.1 But why should a politically and aesthetically ambitious review like Sovremennik be so interested in such conspicuously formulaic and hackneyed work that it spends almost a year lobbying the censors on its be-

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

half? And what could possibly bother the censors in a story as seemingly straightforward and predictable as “Zhid”? Is it the scandalous situation of a father prostituting his daughter? But the author handles his racy subject with care, clearly assigning blame to the greedy and immoral “jews,” while making a compassionate Christian the functional savior of the girl, whose honor remains intact. I would like to suggest another possibility, namely, that the story’s time-worn recipe and brazen emulation of “Taras Bul'ba” are intended as a smokescreen, albeit transparent enough to alarm the censors. And if this is indeed the case, we must look for some additional implications of Turgenev’s deceptively trite tale. In doing so, we would repeat a procedure applied to literary texts by the Russian reader of Turgenev’s time, who is well trained in the art of reading between the lines. On its most apparent level, the story invites us to heed the problem of punishment for Girshel’s crime of espionage, aggravated by attempted debauchery. Nikolai implies that his disagreement with the general is cultural. His opponent is “of German origin, honest and kind, but a stern executor of rules,” who “places the performance of duty above compassion” and orders the hanging “in accordance with the laws” (IV:118–19). The general rebukes Nikolai’s three pleas for mercy with legalistic logic: “Such is the law” (IV:119–20). We recognize the opposition of Law and Grace. The judge embodies the cruelty of God and “the jews”; the youth voices the Christian attitude. A trial scene is an old device illustrating this theological point. We find it in The Merchant of Venice and in “The Jew in the Brambles” (see Chapter 1), where it is informed by the evangelical trial during which Pilate thrice airs his desire to pardon Jesus, while “the jews” want him killed. But if Shakespeare’s judge (Duke) and defender (Portia) counter Shylock’s cruel legalism (“My deed upon my head! I crave the law” [IV.i.205]) with the ethos of mercy, Turgenev inverts the situation. Now it is Girshel’s turn to seek mercy. What Shakespeare’s play and the Grimm tale treat as a comic event (the trickster tricked) in “Zhid” becomes a tragedy forever instilled in the narrator’s memory. The trial and execution scenes in “Zhid” play on the contrast between Girshel’s clear guilt, compounded by his comic appearance, and his horror at the prospect of violent death. Breaking with the tradition

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of unapologetic abuse, most recently exemplified by the laughing pogrom mob in “Taras Bul'ba,” Turgenev offsets Girshel’s hilarious expression of mortal anguish with the sympathy others feel for his plight (IV:120–23). The entire execution episode in fact looks like an antiGogolian exercise in compassion, as stressed by Nikolai’s order to his soldiers not to laugh at Girshel’s contortions. The ensign’s humanism is not shaken even by the news that “the vile Girshel'” prostituted his own daughter, although the convict again offers Sara to Nikolai, this time to buy his own life (IV:122). It is as if Turgenev cast Girshel' in Iankel’s likeness to correct Gogol’s pogrom scene with a liberal agenda in mind. Implying that even a comic monster deserves compassion, “Zhid” polemically extends the reading of Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich as a tragic hero to Girshel' and, by implication, to Iankel'. And this is indeed the main interpretation “Zhid” receives in today’s critical literature.2 Against the backdrop of the Enlightenment-style “jews,” in vogue after Shchepkin’s recent stage successes as Isaac and Sheva, “Zhid” could also be read as a comment on Christian virtues. Sara’s castigation of Girshel’s killers as “Godless, pitiless, blood-thirsty dogs” (IV:123) evokes Merchant of Venice, projecting Shylock’s image as a “cut-throat dog” (I.iii.106) with “wolvish, bloody, starv’d and ravenous” desires (IV.i.137–38) on the Gentile heroes of Turgenev’s story, who become “the jews” by failing to live up to Christian values. Shylock can opt between baptism and death; this choice functions in Merchant of ­Venice as a show of Christian mercy. But this choice is absent from the Enlightenment model Turgenev seems to follow, wherein the conduct of Christians devalues their faith in the eyes of “the jews.” Turgenev does not pioneer this procedure in Russian letters.3 Nor is he daring in its application: we see the injustice of Sara’s blanket charge, more applicable to the general than to his Russian subordinates, whose empathy for Girshel' suggests Orthodoxy’s superiority to Protestantism. The German is assimilated to “the jews” through his cruel legalism and by virtue of being the only other character, besides Girshel', to speak accented Russian. But this interpretation, readily available to the reader of Turgenev’s day, rings false once we place the story in the context of the writer’s ­extra-artistic reflection on Christianity. Nor does it explain ­Sovremennik’s

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

interest in “Zhid,” given the review’s secular ideology. While in his public statements, such as his 1842 Master’s exam at St. Petersburg University, Turgenev toes the official church and state line, citing Christianity as a pillar of spiritual and intellectual life, his privately aired opinions could not be more different. In a letter to Pauline Viardot (19–20. XI.1847) sent from Paris at the time of the publication of “Zhid,” the writer grounds his areligious worldview in a denunciation of Christianity, with no distinction of confession, as a “blood-thirsty, gloomy, and inhumane” faith cloaked in the rhetoric of “love and charity” (PSS. Pis'ma I:262).4 We can therefore justifiably assume that the ostensible Christian message of “Zhid” is part of the story’s safety mechanism, placed there for the benefit of its censors, and that Turgenev’s handling of the issue of crime and punishment in this story may yield additional meanings more consonant with Sovremennik’s secular agenda. A key to the puzzle may reside with a story Turgenev writes simultaneously with or shortly after “Zhid” for his Zapiski okhotnika but withholds as unlikely to pass censorship.5 Published only in 1872 under the title “Konets Chertopkhanova” (Chertopkhanov’s demise), the story tells of the eponymous landowner’s encounter with Moshel' Leiba— the Iankel'-like creature Chertopkhanov saves from a peasant mob eager to lynch Moshel' for “crucifying Christ” (III:300). As Chertopkhanov whips his way toward the victim of Christian prejudice, he yells, “The law must punish, not private citizens! The law! The law! The law!” These words jar with the negative status of legalism in “Zhid.” But since Moshel', unlike Girshel', commits no punishable offense other than being of “the jews,” Chertopkhanov’s words have far-reaching implications that could indeed alarm the censors. They remind the reader that were Moshel' to seek the law’s protection, he would find that the Russian law’s religiously informed vision of “the jews” is not unlike that of the lynch mob. Thus, if the ethos of Enlightenment informing the ostensible message of “Zhid” dictates that Christian morality must inform state laws, the logic of liberalism in “Konets Chertopkhanova” questions Christianity’s ability to provide such moral foundation. The same message of secular humanism informs “Zhid”’s less apparent hermeneutic level. Since Orthodoxy is Russia’s official faith and the tsar is the divinely appointed guardian of both, such confluence of

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ecclesiastic and civil authority implies that if there is something remiss with one, there must be something wrong with the other. The figure of supreme authority in “Zhid” merits, therefore, a closer look. The narrator repeatedly stresses the fact that the Russian force is headed by a poorly assimilated German imposing his vision of the law on the reluctant troops. Picking up on the hint, the reader of Turgenev’s day, accustomed to fishing between the lines, could see in the general’s origin something more than the self-congratulatory contrast of Orthodoxy and Protestantism, if only because the supreme authority of the Russian empire also happened to be of German origin. From the 1760s onward, Russia was ruled by a line of the House of Oldenburg, descended from the marriage of a Romanov grand duchess to a duke of HolsteinGottorp. Even those Russian readers unfamiliar with the tsars’ genealogical tree were aware of the dynasty’s historical taste for Prussian civil and military models. Prussia is, incidentally, the story’s location. This hidden potential message of Turgenev’s tale of crime and punishment would indeed be worth Sovremennik’s trouble and would explain the prolonged reservations of the story’s censors. In such a reading, Sara’s blanket denunciation of Girshel’s killers as “Godless, pitiless, blood-thirsty dogs” is not so unjust after all, provided the reader sees behind the legalistic German the supreme representative of God and the law in Russia—its tsar, whose laws, from the liberal point of view, are “jewish” by virtue of pitilessness and whose religion is not so different from Shylock’s by virtue of “blood-thirstiness,” to use the term Turgenev applies to Christianity in his aforementioned letter to Viardot. And while Russian soldiers are guilty of carrying out the general’s cruel will, the hero-narrator with “a nice Russian face” occupies high moral ground—he at least has the courage timidly to voice disagreement with the authority. And so may the cautious author of this political parable, who descends from such a long line of Russian nobility that he is doomed to have “a nice Russian face.”6 It is Nikolai, naturally, not Girshel', who plays the Subject in “Zhid.” But the story’s title does not bear this out: misleadingly focusing our attention on Girshel', it obfuscates the fact that there is more than one male character in the story who qualifies, from Nikolai’s vantage point, for the appellation zhid. “The vile Girshel'” is only the most obvious

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

choice and, if we stick to the political reading proposed above, not the vilest of them. In this respect, it is significant that Turgenev chooses a different title, “Une scène de la vie des camps” (A scene from bivouac life), for the story’s French version, doubting the foreign reader’s ability to decrypt the Aesopian language of Russian art. “ ‘The Jew’ in the title might obfuscate some other characters,” the author writes to his translator, withholding more specific information.7 There remains, however, at least one more piece to the puzzle that is Turgenev’s misleadingly trite and simple “Zhid.” The story appeared in Sovremennik anonymously; and the editorial correspondence has led literary historians to conclude that this was done at Turgenev’s request.8 The author’s identity was of course an open and poorly guarded secret for the journal’s editors and collaborators (witness Belinskii’s offhand naming of Turgenev as “Zhid”’s author in a survey of literary life for the year 18479). We can also be sure that the censors knew who had penned “Zhid”; otherwise it would not have been allowed into print. The author’s identity in fact may have helped to dissipate the censors’ doubts, seeing as Turgenev was a scion of a prominent aristocratic clan. What then compelled Turgenev to publish anonymously at the time when he was making himself a name as a writer? The answer seems to lie in the story of Turgenev’s negotiation of his private life and his public image, whose cultivation naturally preoccupied an up-and-coming artist. An examination of this story may shed light on Turgenev’s initial psychological motivation for turning to the actor called “the jews” at this juncture of his artistic career. Ivan Turgenev’s name catches public attention several years before he  is recognized as a promising litterateur. Much to his chagrin, the name is not invoked in a positive light. In 1838, Turgenev is implicated in dishonorable conduct during a fire on the ship the nineteen-yearold student boards en route to a German university. Turgenev, rumor has it, makes quite a spectacle of himself during the ship’s evacuation. Losing all presence of mind, he screams in a high-pitched voice about being a widow’s only son (which is untrue); he tries to bribe the crew; he shoves aside women and children to climb into a lifeboat reserved for them; and finally forces the ship’s captain to restrain him. In fact, “punish” is the word used by evil tongues to describe the captain’s

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­ isciplinary action against him. Soon afterward, Turgenev’s notoriously d harsh and controlling mother writes to ask for an explanation: There is idle talk everywhere, and many people report it to me, much to my dismay . . . About that fat Mr. Turgenev who lamented so loudly, who said he didn’t want to die so young . . . There were ladies there, mothers of children. What are all these tales? It’s not your fault that you are fat. But! To behave so cowardly as to be noticed by those who were themselves terrified . . . You must agree, this leaves you with a stain of ridicule, if not dishonor.10

One easily imagines how the terms of this rebuke, let alone the actual hearsay, could hurt a young man’s ego. Turgenev never forgot this “stain of ridicule, if not dishonor.” Back in Russia, he tells his own version of the event, claiming to have been the only calm man on board and the source of comfort for crying females and panicked males. At least on one occasion this tale is debunked in his presence by an eyewitness. Vacillating between the private acquiescence to and public denial of the damaging rumor, Turgenev longs all his life for some form of rehabilitation. In 1883, shortly before his death, he dictates yet another version of the fateful trip. Now it is a fat German man who is irreverently disciplined by the ship’s captain for excessive panic and screaming.11 If even in his old age the writer cannot help projecting outward his “stain of ridicule,” including his mother’s remark on his weight, we should not be too surprised to find the same psychological mechanism at work in “Zhid,” whose details acquire additional significance in light of this incident. The German port of Danzig cannot but recall the German port of Lübeck, in whose sight Turgenev’s ship caught fire and sank. Nikolai’s age (“going on nineteen”) is reminiscent of Turgenev’s at the time of the calamity. The ensign’s behavior—a mixture of public courage and privately indulged despair, repeatedly expressed by his fleeing the scene of Girshel’s execution with his eyes closed (IV:121, 123)—recalls Turgenev’s contradictory, public versus private, versions of his own nearbrush with death. The name of the ship that caught fire with the future writer aboard, Nicholas I (Russia’s current tsar), surely stimulates the structuring of “Zhid” as a political parable against the autocratic regime, since a sinking ship is a common metaphor for a political crisis.

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

Only now the liberal message seems to be not so much Turgenev’s goal as his means of sublimating an awkward fact of his personal life—the aristocrat’s rumored physical punishment by a captain who, along with the ship’s crew, is a German-speaking foreigner, much like the stern authority-figure in “Zhid.” The episode’s most humiliating aspect, namely, Turgenev’s effeminate conduct in the face of mortal danger, implied by such details of the widely told anecdote as the high-pitched voice of his public lamentations and a behavior unfavorably contrasting with that of the ladies on board, is too painful to be attributed to “Zhid”’s Nikolai, who is the author’s alter ego. We find it projected on “the jews.” The laughter with which empathetic onlookers react to the spectacle of Girshel’s mortal anguish is provoked by his effeminacy—his high-pitched screams; lack of rational (read male) control over his agitated movements and utterances; his unmanly build allowing soldiers to carry him around in their arms. One sees here the possible psychological motivation behind Turgenev’s liberal-minded rewriting of Gogol’s pogrom scene into one that combines the comic with the tragic, like his own situation on the burning ship, wherein the threat of violent death meets a ridiculous but all too human reaction to it. But where does Sara fit in all this? An answer, once again, may reside in the story of Turgenev’s negotiation of his private life and public image. The writer submits “Zhid” to Sovremennik on the eve of a trip to Europe, where he is to reunite with Pauline Viardot, a French opera singer who becomes the object of his lasting affection during her 1843–46 engagement in Russia. Turgenev’s feelings for Pauline and his privileged place in her household (it is at this time that he helps her husband, Louis, translate “Taras Bul'ba”) soon become public knowledge. In 1846, rumors that he is Pauline’s lover with her husband’s acquiescence grow more persistent. And so do those about her suspected origin, stirred by the connoisseurs of “the jews” who see telltale signs in Pauline’s “oriental” features and alleged greed. Turgenev defends her in public, claiming that she is of Spanish stock; blames on her rapacious husband-manager the steep price of her concerts; and denies an affair with a married woman.12 We discern here several motifs punctuating “Zhid.” Pauline’s slandered innocence recalls the

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threatened innocence of Sara the “oriental” beauty. Girshel’s sexual mediation echoes Louis’s rumored role as a facilitator of Pauline’s affair. Since Louis is twice her age, the couple’s dynamic fits the daughter of “the jews” masterplot, as confirmed by Turgenev’s attempts to explain the high price of Pauline’s performances by casting Louis in the role of her greedy (read “jewish”) keeper-exploiter. But if “Zhid” is indeed intended, among other things, as a parable shielding Pauline’s honor, that is, as a public message Turgenev leaves behind before joining her abroad, then he fails in his task. To deflect from Pauline the charge of “jewishness,” Sara should follow the traditional path of the daughter of “the jews,” unambiguously breaking with Girshel' and embodying Christian virtue. She does nothing of the sort. Nor does Turgenev heed Lessing’s Nathan the Wise or Edgeworth’s Harrington, whose “jewesses” are ultimately revealed to have Christian parents. This split between his public statements about Pauline’s origin and his treatment of Sara may indicate that the story is not so much a shield protecting Pauline as an outlet for Turgenev’s awareness of her problematic origin, an awareness exacerbated, as Alexandre ­Zviguilsky shows, by Pauline’s dubious family tradition of descending from Spanish Gypsies rather than Catholics. This awareness is visible in Turgenev’s already cited letter to Pauline (19–20.XI.1847), which describes Christian education as something Pauline “is incapable of imagining” (PSS. Pis'ma I:262). The writer’s awareness of her non-Christian background forms an explosive mix with the rumor about her “jewishness,” casting Turgenev the aristocrat in the awkward role of a personage in a story about “the jews” in disguise. 13 “Zhid” allows Turgenev to cope with this troubling aspect of his attachment to Pauline. Nikolai does what his creator will not do: he loses interest in Sara after learning her family secret. Although he knows from the outset that Sara is “jewish,” the ensign finds her “repellent” and treats her as Girshel’s “accomplice” after the pimp’s filial bond to her is revealed (IV:122). It is as if Turgenev vented here his own surprise and frustration at being “schemed” by his beloved’s murky background. The problem will continuously stimulate his imagination, becoming part of the writer’s reflection on the social, cultural, and artistic implications of disguised “jewishness.” This private function of “Zhid” as a

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

medium for psychological projection warrants the author’s decision to publish the text anonymously for fear of making his personal dilemma public property at a time when the hearsay about Pauline Viardot is both too recent and so firmly linked to his own public image in Russia. But Turgenev may have more compelling reasons to seek anonymity. “Zhid” does not protect Sara’s real-life shadow from the charge of “jewishness” any better than it protects her from the accusation of an illicit affair. It seems that by keeping Nikolai from consummating his passion, Turgenev refutes the rumor about his own liaison with Pauline, guarding her honor the way Nikolai respects Sara’s. But the story contains intertextual allusions permitting those who share Turgenev’s reading list and know the identity of “Zhid”’s author (that is, Sovremennik’s inner circle) to interpret differently Nikolai’s nocturnal encounters with Sara. Giving Nikolai “one of those nice Russian faces” (odno iz slavnykh russkikh lits), Turgenev credits the phrase, in a footnote (IV:108), to Lermontov’s “Tambovskaia kaznacheisha” (A Tambov treasurer’s wife, 1838). At first glance, this narrative poem has little to do with “Zhid,” apart from the fact that it originally appeared in Sovremennik, albeit in its previous editorial incarnation, and also anonymously. Lermontov’s poem is a racy anecdote about an officer who seduces the wife of a sexually impotent official and then wins her in a game of cards. The average reader could see Girshel’s superficial resemblance to Lermontov’s cuckold, who is a cardsharp using his wife as sexual bait for the victims of his dishonest game—a likeness stressed by Nikolai’s first meeting with Girshel' after a night of gambling. Literary connoisseurs could also recall Lermontov’s run-in with censorship over this cryptically erotic tale, whose evocation suggests that there might be something left unsaid in “Zhid” as well. As an additional benefit, the poem gives meaning to Nikolai’s military rank: although Lermontov’s hero is too old to be an ensign (kornet), the term is applied to him repeatedly as a marker of attractiveness and sexual prowess (II:349, 353). More importantly, the invocation of Lermontov’s severely censored poem may itself function as a cryptic intertextual index fully comprehensible only to those who are privy to the unofficial life of Russian art. “Tambovskaia kaznacheisha” indeed recalls another of Lermontov’s erotic narrative poems, “Sashka.” Written before 1840 and disseminated

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in hand-written copies, the uncensored “Sashka” shares too many details with “Zhid” not to appear as its deliberate subtext. The poem’s eponymous protagonist, a young aristocrat and recent university student, like Turgenev in the 1840s, frequents a daughter of “the jews,” Tirza, who is a prostitute “worthy of an Oriental fairy-tale” (II:287). Tirza’s father may have inspired “Zhid”’s espionage twist, since Russians use him as a spy during their 1794 siege of Warsaw but inadvertently kill him, reacting to his death with a mix of empathy and laughter—an attitude accentuated in “Zhid.” Born after his death, the girl is named Tirza by a Russian ensign (II:280)—yet another invocation of the same rank—in reference to the Tirzah of The Song of Songs and, we presume, to his intimacy with the spy’s widow. The ensign’s choice of name for the girl marks “the jewesses” as little more than Orientalized sexual objects. Despite her trade, Tirza looks so proud and upright that “like Susanna, she could stand unjust trial” (II:280). Comparing her to the biblical Susannah unjustly accused of sexual transgression, Lermontov subverts the trope of slandered innocence to the ends of social satire. An aristocratic enfant terrible, Sashka wants to dress Tirza elegantly and show up with her in the beau monde, hoping that she will be mistaken for a lady. This will “punish the mob” (II:315), exposing the pharisaic (read “jewish”) hypocrisy of its social and moral hierarchy. With “Sashka” as his subtext, Turgenev opens “Zhid” to the motif of deceptive appearances. Given the similarity of Sashka’s and Turgenev’s backgrounds, the Lermontovian subtext casts doubt on the virtue of “Zhid”’s heroine, suggesting that her trysts with Nikolai, described with the prudish censors in mind, are not so innocent after all. This in turn allows the readers mindful of the kinship between the Turgenev-Viardot and Nikolai-Sara stories to give no more credence to Turgenev’s proclamations about the innocence of his relationship with Pauline than to this relationship’s ostensibly chaste shadow in “Zhid.” This message is of course private enough to require the anonymity of asterisks in lieu of the author’s name, limiting the damage to Pauline’s rather than Turgenev’s reputation; for his identity as “Zhid”’s author is known to a circle of colleagues that recalls the circle of officers listening to Nikolai’s tale. In fact, Turgenev’s private tale needs listeners, no matter how few, because of its psychological importance in the writer’s

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

quest to reclaim his masculinity, hurt in the 1838 incident. Turgenev’s cryptic affirmation of sexual triumph over Pauline’s greedy (“jewish”) keeper Louis parallels the emasculation, imputed to Turgenev after the fire, of Sara’s keeper Girshel'. As an added benefit, “Sashka” provides justification for Turgenev’s association with a woman suspected of “jewishness,” introducing yet another layer of meaning into “Zhid” as a tale of crime and punishment. Nikolai’s affair with a daughter of “the jews” is already less of a transgression than the “jewish” cruelty of his milieu. But against “Sashka”’s backdrop, Turgenev’s affair with Viardot looks like a mocking gesture of an enfant terrible bent on exposing the pharisaism of the Russian beau monde by extending to “the jews” disguised in its midst his aristocratic clout of legitimacy. Even the fallout of the Lermontovian subtext, which makes both Sara and Pauline little more than readily accommodating sexual objects, is not altogether undesirable, seeing as “Zhid”’s obscure intertextuality and geographically remote place of publication keep the story out of Pauline’s purview. With “Sashka”’s help, the twenty-nine-year-old Turgenev can emit an adolescent cry of sexual triumph—an epiphany for a writer whose male heroes are generally inferior to their female counterparts, especially given Pauline’s renown as a strong-willed woman with a host of admirers. In this context, the affirmation of masculinity in “Zhid” translates into the same kind of struggle for domination between sexes that we see in “Taras Bul'ba.” Mindful of social taboos and prudish censors, Turgenev makes Sara curtail Nikolai’s advances. But the male still carries the day, since Nikolai’s frustrated masculinity finds a sanctioned outlet with Sara’s effeminate counterpart, Girshel', who takes over her gender role, experiencing male violence and reacting to it as expected from a female. Sara’s and Girshel’s cross-gendering is quite clear in the execution scene. Both are carried in the arms of strong males; both are given to hysterical fainting (IV:120–23); but Sara is the more masculine of the two, since she musters the strength for a denunciatory diatribe. Strongly reminiscent of the sexualized violence directed at the effeminate “jews” in “Taras Bul'ba,” the implications of the execution episode in “Zhid” are far from limited to the ideologically minded correction of Gogol’s pogrom scene. We find in this episode a veiled show

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of triumphant sexual violence steeped in sadomasochistic connotations: the laughter of Russian soldiers, to which even Nikolai succumbs, may express pleasure from the vicarious physical and sexual subjugation of Sara through her effeminate counterpart. This pleasure is socially proscribed, hence the ensign’s (unsuccessful) attempt to resist laughter and forbid it to his subordinates, but pleasure it is nonetheless. The desperate and helpless curses Sara sends the way of the soldiers are those of a victim rather than a victor in this sexualized power struggle. Girshel' is the recipient of these taboo fantasies of sexual humiliation and rape— the ultimate affirmation of masculinity in a patriarchal culture. How does this taboo psychological dynamic fit with the story’s liberal ideology? The pleasure at Girshel’s abuse is a guilty one and cannot be openly acknowledged. At the same time, Turgenev is not the first liberal to indulge in the abuse of the effeminate “jews” as an outlet for repressed sexual fantasies. Vasilii Narezhnyi, whose Rossiiskii Zhilblaz is banned for its liberal-minded treatment of “the jews,” gives in to the same indulgence in his novel Bursak (The seminarist, 1824), whose hero lusts after a daughter of “the jews.” Abusing her fiancé to vent sexual frustration, the hero at once removes a rival and sensuously enjoys his humiliation because, “To kill a Jew is not any more sinful than to love a Jewess.”14 Liberal ideology, with its empathy for suffering underdogs, is not incompatible with the pleasure vicariously derived from the depiction of that suffering. But the sadomasochist dynamic of the liberal discourse must remain discreet. Vasilii Rozanov will later shock liberal opinion by exposing its discreet pleasures through his insistence on a link between pogrom and domestic violence. “They [the Jews] are even ‘beaten’ like ‘wenches’ [ikh i ‘b’iut’ kak ‘bab’],” writes Rozanov, “with the same touch of contempt, pleasure, and laughter”; and just like battered wives, “the Jews do not dislike being beaten—all their protests are just ‘for show’.”15 “Zhid” foreshadows many ideological and psychological aspects of Judeophilia before its appearance as a trend in Russian art after 1881. While Turgenev’s reasons for turning to “the jews” are probably rooted in his brush with “jewishness” in Pauline Viardot’s persona, his use of “the jews” goes beyond this private quandary, spinning a web of meanings, often contradictory or purposely deceptive. In “Zhid,” the liberal ideology of tolerance clashes with the pent-up violence of male

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

sexual fantasies. The story’s speciously trite plot and characters furnish a smokescreen that does double duty—on the one hand, concealing a cryptic political manifesto and, on the other, obfuscating the text’s function as a medium of psychological projection for an artist at odds with his public image. Most important, “Zhid” shows that “the jews” are too culturally overdetermined to be used for ideological purposes only, be those Judeo­phile or Judeophobe in spirit. In narratives employing the actor called “the jews,” ideological messages are but one level of signification. In the conditioned imagination of European artists, “the jews” are a catalyst facilitating the generation of meanings rooted in the self-image and private phobias of individual writers, whatever their primary motivation may be for turning to this mythical figure. And Turgenev, it seems, is fully aware of the powerful imaginative potential of the ethno­ cultural signifier he carefully and deliberately instrumentalizes in this early story for the concurrent ends of ideological warfare and psychological exorcism. ❊ The personal issues dogging Turgenev endured after “Zhid”’s publication. Twenty years later, the mature and acknowledged artist revisits many of “Zhid”’s motifs in a longer story, “Neschastnaia.” But unlike “Zhid,” whose creation is undoubtedly stimulated by the positive public response to Shchepkin’s Judeophile stage roles, “Neschastnaia” jars with contemporary Russian artistic life. The story seems out of place at the time of its publication because with the exception of Gleb Uspenskii’s writings, to be discussed later, “Zhid” remains for all intents and purposes the only literary expression of liberal Judeophilia by Gentile authors in the era of the reforms, when “the jews” become linked in the Russian cultural imagination to the negative aspects of modernity. This does not mean that the literary conventions for depicting “the jews” remain immutable, at least for those writers who see themselves as political liberals. As Turgenev begins his work on “Neschastnaia,” some aspects of “Zhid” are already taboo in the liberal intelligentsia’s cultural code. This concerns, first and foremost, the term in the story’s title.

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By the early 1860s, the ethnonym zhid becomes a derogatory term in contrast to evrei, previously favored in official discourse thanks to its stylistic superiority to the colloquial zhid. The new perception of the two signifiers as differently connoted testifies to the general shift toward a more nuanced handling of their signified. This semantic distinction is of course as tenuous as liberal Judeophilia itself, considering that the signified of evrei is anything but neutral in the European imagination—witness the distaste of contemporary assimilated Western Jews for its equivalents (Jew, Juif, Jude), which they counter with other terms (“Israelite,” “person of Mosaic/Hebrew faith”).16 The same uneasy relationship between Judeophilia and its unchanged imaginary subject transpires in Turgenev’s private boast that he can spot an assimilated Jew in a crowd without inquiring about his origins “for fear of insulting him.”17 Implicit in this statement is the view of “jewishness” as shameful and embarrassing. Symptomatically, Turgenev the liberal airs this opinion in the process of deploring Russian Judeophobia, which he contrasts to the benefits of civic emancipation in France, whose “jews,” in his view, proudly acknowledge their undisguised origins. In art the situation is even trickier. Russian writers have traditionally used zhid, evrei, and iudei interchangeably and without connotative distinction. This is still true in the 1840s. Consider the treatment of evrei as “a shameful word” in Lazhechnikov’s Judeophile drama Doch' evreia (A Jew’s daughter, 1849), renamed Vsia beda ot styda (Woe from shame, 1858); and the application of zhid to the saintly Sheva in Cumberland’s The Jew, translated as Zhid Sheva.18 With the advent of the terminological split, conservative writers flaunt this traditional semantic interchangeability of zhid and evrei to mock the ideologically motivated artificiality of the new distinction between the signifiers, whose referents, they insist, are uniformly negative. But on the political Left, public terminological discrimination becomes de rigueur following the prominence of onomastic issues in the Illiustratsiia and Gromeka affairs of 1858. This lexical evolution is complete in the early 1860s, when both Judeophile and Judeophobe commentators begin to treat zhid as a marker that, unlike evrei and iudei, is unacceptable to the liberal sensibility as a blanket term for “the jews.”19

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

At the same time, the use of neutrally marked signifiers amounts to a new kind of self-censorship imposed on authors, not by the state but by the liberal intelligentsia’s public opinion. Now that only a negative literary character could be called zhid, unless the term’s enunciator embodied regrettable bias, Russian writers had only to imagine a character worthy of being called evrei. And therein lay the snag that in my view put a damper on the literary expressions of Judeophilia in Russia before 1881. As far as the positive representation of “the jews” was concerned, the political will and the imaginative lexicon of Russian artists could not be farther apart. In the absence of the intense moral pressure exercised by the pogroms of the 1880s, writers commonly responded to this dilemma by restricting the Judeophile discourse to journalism, while falling back on the Iankel' paradigm whenever they needed “the jews” as a literary personage in the zhid role of capitalist exploiters symbolic of the modern age. As a corollary of this imaginative lacuna, the term evrei began, embarrassingly for the liberal sensibility, to lose its neutral value, becoming at times synonymous with zhid in the writings of authors with the most impeccable liberal credentials. One way of solving this quandary was to avoid the terminological issue altogether. Sharing the language of “jewish” difference with his interpretive community, a writer does not really need to identify a character explicitly as “jewish.” The suppression of ethnonyms has an additional benefit for the depiction of “the jews” in disguise, since the absence of ethnocultural definitions accentuates the aura of mystery that is part of the new literary type. By the time Turgenev confronts in “­Neschastnaia” the personally delicate subject of disguised “jewishness,” Russian literature offers a set of criteria for identifying “the jews” without the help of ethnonyms—a development to which Turgenev contributes in his 1855 novel Rudin. Falling into two categories, occupational and corporeal, these criteria capitalize on the response of Russian writers to Jewish acculturation in the 1820s–30s, when the baptized or assimilated “jews” are conceptualized as retaining their old habits—mediating activity in the service of the highest bidder; espionage and information trafficking; economic and sexual exploitation.20 And as if this does not suffice, “the jews” in disguise continue to bear the physical signs of their origin in their (Orientalized) faces and Iankel'-like bodies.

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The most famous, if hitherto unacknowledged, case of the early treatment of “the jews” in disguise hails from Gogol’s story “Portret” (The portrait), whose creative history exemplifies the literary type’s rapid evolution.21 The text’s first version (1835) features an old, miserly, and sickly usurer who lives in a Russian town and is obsessed with the subjects of immortality and the Final Judgment. His foreign origins are visible in the “southern” features of his permanently agitated face and in his dark, hypnotically brilliant eyes (III:403, 431). Making sure the reader does not confuse his Wandering Jew with some other demon, Gogol' reveals the usurer’s roots by assimilating him to the Antichrist (443), who as we recall is born to a “jewish” harlot. This allusion to “jewishness” vanishes from the 1842 redaction, which accentuates the mystery of the moneylender’s “southern origin” and non-Christian religion (India and Persia are thrown into the mix), as if to challenge the reader. Now it is up to us to find the right answer by sifting through semiotic indices in the usurer’s occupation and enhanced appearance of the vampirical undead (III:82, 88, 91, 121–22, 129). The suppression of ethnonyms in the depiction of “the jews,” which for Gogol' is an artistic choice, becomes for Turgenev an ideologically requisite procedure. Now that “the jews” must be handled with more sensitivity, for fear of incurring liberal opprobrium and sparking the wrath of assimilated Jewish readers, ethnonyms are better avoided whenever possible. “The jews” in disguise offer a perfect opportunity to do so. Turgenev masters this art relatively early in his career. In Rudin, he describes an episodic character, Konstantin Diomidych ­Pandalevskii— the protégé, errand boy, and informant of a rich landowner: Sporting a weightless open jacket, a weightless tie, a weightless gray hat, and a light cane [. . .] he spoke pure and correct Russian, albeit with an indefinable foreign accent. His face had something Asiatic about it. His long and slightly hooked nose; large, still, goggled eyes; large red lips; raven-black hair—all pointed to Oriental origins. And yet, the young man’s last name was Pandalevskii and he called Odessa his birthplace, although he was educated somewhere in Belorussia at the expense of a charitable and rich widow. Another widow found him a position. In general, middle-aged ladies readily took him under the wing: he knew how to seek and find their favor. [. . .] He was rather gentle, servile, sensuous, and secretly voluptuous. (V:203–4)

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

For Turgenev, Pandalevskii’s physique epitomizes “jewishness,” as testified by the “Portrait game” the author plays with Pauline Viardot in the 1850s–70s, sketching imagined human profiles and then supplying legends to describe their owners. Unlike Viardot, who distances herself from “the jews” by seeing “jewishness” in the slightest exaggeration or distortion of features, Turgenev’s idea of “jewish” physique is consistent with the “semitic” stereotype (see Figure 4). His associations with the carriers of this physique, conveyed by his inscriptions under the drawn profiles, reiterate the qualities attributed to Pandalevskii.22 Moreover, in Turgenev’s story “Stepnoi korol' Lir” (King Lear of the steppe, 1870), a set of physical traits echoing Pandalevskii’s is explicitly called “jewish.” These include dark and curly hair; an aquiline nose; a large red mouth; and “dark, permanently moist, prune-like eyes” (VIII:170), which recall Pandalevskii’s “Oriental eyes that often become moist” in response to sensory stimulation (V:204). Finally, for Turgenev’s interpretive community Pandalevskii’s “jewishness” is confirmed by his status as a spy and a sexual pollutant (V:206, 270, 279).

Figure 4. Profiles sketched and identified by Turgenev as belonging to “the jews,” 1856 (left) and 1865 (right). In: “Igra v portrety.” Iz parizhskogo arkhiva I. S. Turgeneva. Literaturnoe nasledstvo LXXIII.1, 1964, pp. 460, 513.

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Like Gogol', Turgenev outfits his cryptic message with clues challenging the reader to unravel the mystery of Pandalevskii’s origin. One such clue is Pandalevskii’s reference to his Odessa benefactor, “the venerable elder [blagopotrebnyi starets], Roksolan Mediarovich Ksandryka” (V:205). Literary historians have shown that the phrase’s archaizing style and its referent’s unusual name parody the 1855 obituary of Aleksandr Skarlatovich Sturdza, a retired official and Odessa philanthropist hitherto known to Turgenev’s readers as a butt of Pushkin’s epigrams.23 The obituary paints Sturdza’s charitable activity as an effort to spread Orthodoxy with help from women’s philanthropic circles. Heeding Turgenev’s allusion, informed readers would have deduced the rest. Odessa housed several groups imagined as “oriental”—Greeks, Armenians, Romanians, Jews. Of these, only Jews did not partake of Christian grace and could benefit from the works of Ksandryka/Sturdza and his female associates. Pandalevskii, the narrator tells us, is educated, sheltered, and employed by a series of rich ladies (V:203). The reader can therefore assume that he is a convert from Judaism who left Odessa with their and Ksandryka’s help, joining the ranks of “the jews” in disguise. There is at least one significant novelty in Rudin’s depiction of “the jews” in disguise, namely, Pandalevskii’s good musical skills. He sings and plays the piano to entertain and curry favor with the estate’s inhabitants, exploiting art to the ends of social mobility. This situation is replicated in Dostoevskii’s Besy (The possessed, 1872), which sports its own exemplar of “the jews” in disguise in the persona of the scheming and musically gifted zhidok (“little Yid”) Liamshin (X:248, 251–52). These “jews” use art as a utilitarian tool. In their hands, it becomes homologous to spying, to usury, and to Pandalevskii’s secret occupation as a purveyor of sexual services, which Turgenev wryly implies in the passage above when commenting on Pandalevskii’s skillful handling of middleaged widows. To be sure, such nefarious “jewish” meddling in art is already prominent in Gogol’s “Portret,” whose usurer tempts painters with mercantilism: his victims trade talent and inspiration for vanity and financial success. But in Rudin, “the jews” actually embody the growing commercialization of culture—a theme that finds fuller development in “Neschastnaia.” Pandalevskii voids art of its higher meaning and saps the traditional

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

social order. Ingratiating himself with a circle of the Russian nobility, where “the jews” do not belong, he insolently acts as an equal, albeit unbeknownst to the aristocrats, when he tries to seduce a serf girl—a pastime reserved for noblemen like Turgenev, whose illegitimate child from such a liaison is born in 1842. Pandalevskii’s ambition embodies the destabilization of the accepted meanings of art and social order, meanings rooted in the assumptions that are crumbling under the pressure of modernity. This process of deracination and the concomitant semi(o)tic chaos transpire in Pandalevskii’s uncertain origin and even in his wardrobe, whose repeated description by the qualifier “weightless” (legen'kii ) denotes him not so much as a dandy but as a Luftmensch, a “man of air,” a stock type in contemporary Ashkenazi popular culture symbolizing the crisis of the traditional Jewish community; and as an empty vessel, a free-floating signifier, a person who sheds his old identity without acquiring a new one. Concealing his origins, Pandalevskii implicitly normalizes his “jewishness” among the Russian gentry, sapping its moral and cultural bases. Symptomatically, in his aforesaid boast about spotting “the jews” in disguise, Turgenev vaunts his ability to defy the semi(o)tic chaos reigning in Europe. He structures the anecdote as a tale of exploit and reward, because the pseudo-Frenchman Turgenev exposes at a Parisian reception admits to his origin. The “outed” cultural trespasser thus acknowledges a border between himself and his observer, whose identity is no longer threatened by the possibility of being lumped together with “the jews.” This terrifying possibility is realized in Pandalevskii’s sexual advances to a serf girl: she calls him barin (master, V:206), confusing “the jews” with the true Russian nobles. Depicting Jewish acculturation in Rudin as a negative phenomenon, Turgenev heeds the general tendency in Russian art, whose liberals and conservatives similarly resent the semi(o)tic chaos of modernity. That is why “Neschastnaia,” in seeming to defy the prevailing negative view of “the jews” in disguise, jars with contemporary Russian literature. Not accidentally, the story’s critical reception, in Turgenev’s own estimate, is negative. It is deemed artistically unsound and, more significantly, out of step with the times.24 The story ostensibly treats its “jewish” heroine with the sympathy and compassion virtually absent from Russian

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literature since Nikolai’s apparent empathy for the suffering Girshel' in “Zhid.” Having said this, it is useful to recall that “Zhid” is a lesson in deceptive appearances and cryptic polysemy. ❊ Petr, the protagonist-narrator of “Neschastnaia,” recalls an episode from his life. In 1835, the eighteen-year-old Moscow student befriends his object of admiration, Aleksandr Fustov, who introduces him to the Ratch family. Ratch the elder, an assimilated foreigner of dubious origin and occupation, is a passionate musician. Married with children to a German woman, he has two adult children from his first marriage. At Ratch’s, Petr meets the elder of them, Susanna, whose dissimilarity from the rest of the clan comes from the fact that Ratch is only her stepfather. Susanna is an accomplished pianist, but music is a bone of contention in the household and a pretext for Ratch’s hints at Susanna’s “jewishness.” Petr realizes that Fustov is romantically involved with her; he also dislikes Ratch and Susanna’s half brother Viktor. Yet he revisits the Ratches on his own to see more of Susanna, and witnesses another confrontation between her and Ratch, again cloaked as a conflict of musical tastes. Events snowball as Petr and Fustov hear Viktor’s insinuation, concocted by Ratch, that Susanna’s past is tarnished by an illicit affair. Fustov believes Viktor and leaves town. Distressed by Fustov’s lack of faith, Susanna visits Petr, leaves a manuscript containing her life story, and hints at her imminent death. This story within a story is set on the estate of Ivan Koltovskii—Susanna’s father and onetime employer of a foreign “jewish” painter. The painter’s daughter is Susanna’s mother and Koltovskii’s mistress, married for appearances’ sake to Ratch, the estate’s corrupt manager. Losing her mother, Susanna relies on Koltovskii as her protector. His death opens her to the sexual advances of the new owner, Ivan’s brother Semen, even as she fancies Semen’s son Michel. The feeling is mutual, but their plans to elope are thwarted by informants. Michel goes back to his regiment and dies in action; Susanna moves to Moscow with Ratch’s new family, which benefits from her pension payable until her marriage—a condition that makes it lucrative for Ratch to slander Susanna in the eyes of her suitors. Her romance

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

with Fustov is the last hope of Susanna’s “hapless” life, and its unraveling is the last drop in her cup of suffering. After reading Susanna’s story, Petr no longer doubts her innocence and summons Fustov to Moscow. Fustov decides that visiting her immediately would be too much for one day. The decision is fateful, since that night Susanna dies in unclear circumstances. Fustov’s handling of the incident and his unbecoming reaction to Susanna’s death are punished by the idol’s fall in Petr’s opinion. Ratch’s guilt in hounding Susanna and his suspected role in her demise are sanctioned differently—the narrator implies that Ratch is physically beaten by guests during a melee at Susanna’s wake. Turgenev thus presents to the reader yet another tale of crime and punishment involving “the jews,” which unlike “Zhid” openly treats the problem of disguised “jewishness,” linking it directly to the subject of modern artistic life. Petr relates his initial sighting of Susanna using the aforementioned literary device of encounter and recognition, which describes “the jews” without the help of ethnonyms. This descriptive procedure builds narrative suspense, involving the reader in the semiotic process of unraveling the mystery of the heroine’s origin. Says Petr, She had little in common with the world around her. [. . .] Members of the Ratch clan looked content, well-disposed, and very healthy; her beautiful yet already withering face bore an impression of sadness, pride, and sickliness. [. . .] She recalled natives of the south. Her thick, dark, and lusterless hair; her deeply set beautiful eyes, also dark and dull; her low, protruding forehead; her aquiline nose; the greenish pallor of her smooth skin [. . .]—all this would hardly be unusual in Italy, but in Moscow, near the Prechistenskii boulevard, it simply amazed me! [. . .] The entering girl brought with her a whiff of slight physical chill. “Isn’t she like a statue?” I thought. (VIII:69–70)

Like Pandalevskii’s portrait, this sketch abounds in signs of “jewishness.” The traditional demonic features (dark eyes and hair, hooked nose, deathly pallor) are recoded in Orientalist terms, but the reader is prompted to connect Susanna’s withering, sickly, yet proud and statuesque image to the allegory of defeated Judaism—the humiliated ­Synagoga, invoked by Scott in his elaboration of Ivanhoe’s Rebecca. Susanna indeed projects her relationship with Michel onto the story

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of ­Rebecca’s love for the knight of Ivanhoe (VIII:109). Turgenev only slightly updates his daughter of “the jews” by stressing a feature popularized only recently by the European psychiatric establishment, namely, the “jewish” body’s effeminate proclivity for various neurotic conditions (see Chapter 1). Susanna’s “nervous disposition” (VIII:73, 77) is implicitly attributed not so much to her femininity as to her “jewishness.” Drawing on contemporary literary conventions, the narrator’s portrayal of Susanna’s “jewishness” is transparent enough not to require ethnonyms. In fact, the pan-European nature of Turgenev’s imaginative language becomes clear if we consider its faithful echo in the scene of Mirah’s introduction in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Susanna, Eliot’s assimilated daughter of “the jews” combines “oriental” physique, unusual in a northern setting, with the air of melancholy and “statue-like despair.” These telltale signs are further explained by a reference to Scott’s Rebecca (XI:193, 199–200). It is of no import for this study whether Eliot knew Turgenev’s story, translated into English in 1868 and into French in 1872; because the very fact of the concurrent adoption of the same descriptive approach to “the jews” in disguise in different national literatures bears sufficient witness to its appeal to the conditioned imagination of post-Christian readers across Europe. The Ivanhoe subtext unequivocally marks Susanna as a positive heroine. And to drive the message home, Turgenev finally resorts to ethnonyms, playing on the opposition of zhid and evrei. “I really dislike this Ratch fellow!” Petr tells Fustov; “Did you notice that emphatic derision in his evocation of the Jews [zhidy] in her presence? Might she be . . . Jewish [evreika]?” (VIII:73). What makes Susanna a positive case of “the jews” in disguise is, of course, her readiness to acknowledge what the story presents as her “jewish” origins (VIII:109). In this respect, she is much like the acculturated “Hebrew Frenchman” of Turgenev’s aforesaid anecdote, whose openness about his otherness is so praiseworthy; or like Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, who reclaims his “jewish” ancestry, summing up the salutary attitude as follows: “I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents—the shame is to disown it” (XII:246).25 But no matter how positive these self-confessed “jews” may appear in Turgenev’s and Eliot’s biological vision of “jewishness” (Susanna and

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

Daniel are baptized and reared as Christians), they are subject to the logic of the generative model and only mediate the identity of Gentiles. If Scott’s Rebecca plays Synagoga vis-à-vis Ecclesia-Rowena before leaving England, Eliot disposes of Daniel and Mirah by dispatching them to Palestine and thereby assuaging the reader’s anxiety about Jewish assimilation. Turgenev chooses a middle path. While nominally subscribing to the secular view of “jewishness,” he draws on the mythical and theological resonance of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot, achieving two aims at once. Since the masterplot shows its heroine in two stages—first as one of “the jews” and then as a newly baptized Christian—it lets Turgenev cast Susanna both as a Synagoga- and a Mary-f­igure, thus ensuring her positive resonance with the reader. It also allows the writer to exploit the oedipal and archetypal implications of the clash between a young Christian and “the jews” in the romantic intrigue of “Neschastnaia.” Susanna’s role of a sexually desirable Mary-figure is at its clearest as she nurses the bed-ridden Michel. Preferring the helpless and infatuated young man to Semen Koltovskii—Michel’s lustful father and her guardian—the heroine becomes the object of sexual rivalry between old and young males. The oedipal and archetypal dynamic of this rivalry is informed by the Christian myth (see Chapter 2). Indeed, Susanna’s father, Ivan Koltovskii, is a cruel authority figure feared and resented by Susanna and her mother (VIII:91–92). The almighty lord of his estate, Ivan hides his liaison with Susanna’s mother by forcing her to marry Ratch, who fills the shoes of the Christian myth’s Joseph the cuckold. And just like God in the same myth, Ivan hardly gets his share of the blame. His usurpation of females is projected onto several substitutes— Semen Koltovskii and Ratch, among others. Turgenev follows so closely the oedipal dynamic of the Christian imagination that he never properly motivates the mother personage: she is but Susanna’s foil, and the mother function is her name. Hence their identical physiques, including the “sorrowful” faces recalling old icons (VIII:91, 125). The latter detail assimilates them to the grieving Mary of Christian iconography; and so does the evocation of the icon of “The Consolation of Sorrow,” depicting Mary and the child Jesus, in front of which Petr’s aunt prays for Susanna’s soul (VIII:132).

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Semen Koltovskii and Ratch are not the only candidates for the “jewish” role of “the bad father.” From Petr’s point of view, this role also belongs to Fustov, who acts as Michel’s foil. Fustov and Michel share a passion for chess and horse riding; both are cast as Ivanhoe-like knights; and both, unlike Ivanhoe, fail to protect the daughter of “the jews” who fancies them (VIII:62–63, 85, 109–10). The orphaned Petr, called a “schoolgirl” (institutka) by his friends (VIII:61–62), chooses Fustov as his male role model. But once Fustov introduces him to Susanna, their bond weakens. Petr develops an interest for this sexually appealing mother-figure (she is ten years his senior) and visits Susanna unbeknownst to Fustov; and she comes to him after Fustov’s flight. Despite Petr’s disclaimers, their meetings are filled with erotic energy, convincing his aunt that Susanna is his mistress. It is then logical that Petr should understand Fustov’s failure to live up to Susanna’s expectations as male inadequacy. His friend’s unmanly indecision, nervousness, and tearful outbursts make Petr feel masculine superiority toward his exmentor, which he distinguishes from “female compassion” (VIII:124, 130). This reversal of roles has sexual triumph built into it: Fustov symbolically gives up his rights to Susanna when he lets Petr keep the dead heroine’s manuscript (VIII:136). Petr is closer in age and experience to “Zhid”’s Nikolai and to Turgenev at the time of his emasculating maritime mishap than to Susanna’s failed romantic choices. And the author himself stresses this autobiographical motif by claiming to have drawn inspiration for “­Neschastnaia” from an episode he witnessed as a student.26 In “Neschastnaia,” more so than in “Zhid,” the staple of Turgenev’s imagination—a mismatch between a strong female and a weak male—plays out in favor of the author’s alter ego. Through the story’s romantic intrigue, Turgenev instrumentalizes the Christian myth’s oedipal dynamic in tune with his idiosyncratic need continuously to reaffirm his publicly compromised masculinity. “Neschastnaia” reflects more faithfully than “Zhid” Turgenev’s own family dynamic by casting Petr’s widowed aunt as an emasculating force, whose overbearing care contributes to the hero’s “schoolgirl” reputation (VIII:61–62). This “bad mother” recalls Turgenev’s notoriously overbearing mother, whose emasculating energy is prominent in her missive on the occasion of the 1838 ship fire. Indeed, Petr pays inor-

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

dinate attention to the impression his relations with Susanna make on such an episodic character as his aunt (VIII:119, 132). It is as if he had something to prove to the emasculating female, having paid lip service to her care for him as an orphan, in other words, to that “female compassion” he contrasts so unfavorably to the masculine superiority filling him at the sight of Fustov’s humiliation. This puerile exhibition of masculinity through a show of sexual triumph recalls the cryptic message of “Zhid,” which implicitly assimilates Sara and her real-life shadow to the “jewish” prostitute from Lermontov’s “Sashka.” Like most other aspects of “Zhid,” its motif of an illicit liaison with a readily available female is developed in “Neschastnaia,” where Petr symbolically wins a female with multiple suitors, echoing Turgenev’s rumored conquest of the much pursued Pauline. But the same can be said about its opposite—the motif of Sara’s virtue, attacked by Girshel' and defended by Nikolai. In “Neschastnaia,” we find an even starker contrast between the heroine’s innocence, encoded in her very name, and the rumor implicating her in liaisons with both Michel and Semen Koltovskii and describing her pension as payment for the sexual favors rendered (VIII:120). This rumor persists after her death despite Petr’s attempts to clear Susanna’s name (VIII:136). In the context of “Zhid”’s resonance for Turgenev’s self-image, Petr’s inconclusive posthumous defense of Susanna echoes “Zhid”’s implicit defense of Pauline after her final departure from Russia—a defense as ostensibly earnest as it is dubious in the face of the story’s subtextual suggestiveness. Against “Zhid”’s backdrop, Petr’s defense of Susanna cannot be taken at face value any more than Nikolai’s scruples about Sara’s virtue. In fact, Turgenev is reminded of the rather transparent nature of “Zhid” ’s deference to social conventions when he tries to have it translated into French and discovers that Prosper Mérimée deems the text indecent. The translation finally gets under way only in 1868–69, concurrently with Turgenev’s work on “Neschastnaia.”27 Besides this coincidence, we find in “Neschastnaia”’s creative history other signs implying that like Sara in “Zhid,” Susanna is not the gold standard of virtue: like the Virgin Mary in Christian mythology, she is an ambiguous mother-­ daughter figure combining chastity with sexual appeal and serving as means for a young male’s oedipal self-assertion.

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“Zhid”’s subtextual reliance on Lermontov’s “Sashka” suggests that the implications of Susanna’s name may not be as clear-cut as they appear. Lermontov’s poem parodies the motif of slandered innocence: its Orientalized “jewish” whore, with a sorrowful face to match that of Turgenev’s heroine, only looks like the biblical Susannah (IV:281). Along the same lines, in the early draft of “Neschastnaia,” Turgenev does not call his heroine Susanna, instead naming her after the proverbial repentant prostitute Magdalene, whose profession is echoed in the yellow shawl Susanna wears during her improper nocturnal visit to Petr (VIII:86).28 Turgenev eventually discards the name of Magdalene, probably because it saps his effort to cast the heroine as an unambiguously positive case of “the jews” in disguise. But the initial choice of cognomens sheds light on the imaginative logic informing the story’s love intrigue with the oedipal tension of the Christian myth. At this point we can safely claim that twenty years after the publication of “Zhid,” Turgenev persists in dealing with his personal dilemmas through the language of “jewish” difference, with the daughter of “the jews” masterplot mediating his self-image in “Neschastnaia” even more so than in “Zhid.”29 The humiliation of Susanna’s male keepers, both her old guardians and her young suitors, is part and parcel of Petr’s masculine self-­ assertion. Their defeat can be moral, as in Fustov’s case, but it can also be physical, and indeed needs to be so for the purposes of psychological projection—suffice it to recall Turgenev’s rumored thrashing at the hands of a German-speaking authority figure. “Zhid”’s German general remains untouchable, and it is only his “jewish” foil who is subjected to physical abuse. But in “Neschastnaia,” the two figures merge in the persona of the German-speaking Ratch. There is an allusion to physical abuse in Fustov’s wish to “break Viktor’s bones” for slandering Susanna (VIII:121). But it is the rumor’s initiator, Ratch himself, who is the actual target of violence in this second installment of Turgenev’s tale of crime and punishment. Incidentally, Ratch plays the most visibly “jewish” role among Susanna’s male keepers because of his functional kinship to Joseph the cuckold. This kinship works as a template for reading other aspects of Ratch’s persona as signs of “jewishness.” Ratch’s Russian is unaccented and

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

spiced with folksy expressions, but his fluency falters under stress. He claims to hail from Prague and speaks German to his wife, but his occasional non-Russian phrases from Slavic languages are Polish. This opens the possibility that his place of birth is not the Czech city but the eponymous suburb of Warsaw, identified in Lermontov’s “Sashka” as home to Tirza’s family. Furthermore, going by Ivan Dem'ianych, Ratch admits to having Russified his name, Johann Dietrich, which he received at baptism. But there is no indication that this is his original name; for he could have converted as an adult (VIII:66–67, 81). Other details reinforce our doubt about Ratch’s origin. Rumor has it that he spied for the Russians during the 1812 campaign (VIII:67)—a “jewish” trade in the eyes of Turgenev’s interpretive community. His employment by a rich landowner as a wily go-between (compare Rudin’s ­Pandalevskii) adds finishing touches to Ratch’s “jewish” portrait. And so does Viktor’s description of him as zhidomor (skinflint, usurer)—a term combining zhid with the motif of forceful death (mor) dominating Susanna’s wake: “You killed the girl” (“Umoril devku,” VIII:83; emphasis [non-italic] added), says one guest to Ratch. Turgenev removed from an early draft of “Neschastnaia” one indisputable index of Ratch’s “jewishness.” Unlike the final version, which only alludes to physical punishment, the draft sports a scene of Ratch’s beating by Michel’s ex-secretary. Ratch loses his courage and, rather than fight back, follows Girshel’s example, emitting “pitiful, tearful shrieks,” first in Russian and German, and then in Yiddish, screaming, “G'walt!” 30 In the early version of the story, the oedipal dynamic of the Christian myth brings to its logical conclusion the sexual defeat of the emasculated “jewish” father-figure, even as Turgenev’s own need for manly self-assertion finds a “jewish” projection target that replicates his alleged conduct during the ship fire—a rumor as slanderous, in the writer’s publicly aired view, as that concocted by Ratch about Susanna. In fact, the 1838 mishap catches up with Turgenev in the summer of 1868, precisely at the time he is writing “Neschastnaia,” as the conservative press in Russia seizes on the eyewitness account of the fire at sea in P. V. Dolgorukov’s memoirs to attack Turgenev’s liberal politics.31 It is then little wonder that two decades after “Zhid,” the writer revisits his old tale of crime and punishment, wherein the

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effeminate “jews” stand for the German-speaking authority figure rumored to have given him a humiliating thrashing. But to appreciate the full import of Turgenev’s decision to suppress the explicit signs of Ratch’s origin we must return to the problematics of “the jews” in disguise. As a case study in hidden “jewishness,” Ratch complicates the story’s motif of slandered innocence. First, in light of the slanderer’s origin, the rumor of Susanna’s sexual transgression harks back to the legends and exempla in which “the jews” contest Mary’s virginity (see Chapter 2). Second, Ratch wrongfully accuses Susanna not only of sexual misconduct but also of “jewishness”: as an upright and baptized daughter of “the jews” she is more Christian than her accuser, who uses baptism to conceal the “jewishness” of his behavior. Hiding his true origin, all the more sinister because it does not show in his body, Ratch acts as a negative case (and typical in Russian letters) of the assimilated “jews,” unlike Susanna, who owns her descent and exhibits its physical markers. This contrast favors her image as a positive manifestation of “the jews” in disguise, justifying her as an exception and endowing her words, “Mr. Ratch is not my father” (VIII:71), with symbolic meaning. Her disclaimer is akin to Jessica’s renunciation of Shylock: it transforms Susanna from a Synagoga into a Mary-­figure, in keeping with the logic of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot (VIII:74). Going against the grain of the general trend in Russian art, this distinction between good and bad acculturation appears personally motivated, particularly because we have no evidence, artistic or documentary, that Turgenev has ever critically reexamined the language of “jewish” difference. His motivation is visible in the confluence of Susanna’s alleged sexual and ethnocultural transgressions recalling the charges the Russian beau monde levels against Pauline Viardot, whose shadow in “Neschastnaia” looms larger than in “Zhid” thanks to Susanna’s musical skills. Turgenev’s linking of the subject of modern artistic life with that of Jewish acculturation may hold the key to what Jean-Louis Backès calls “the fundamental enigma of the story’s subject matter” in light of the absence of the “jewish” theme from the story’s earliest surviving plans.32 The subject matter of “Neschastnaia” therefore is a result of thorough reflection and careful planning, and the coincidence of Tur-

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

genev’s work on this story with the long-delayed translation of “Zhid” appears to be part of this planning. During Petr’s first visit to the Ratches, Fustov’s inquiry whether Susanna has the musical score of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Robert the Devil” provokes the following reaction from Ratch: “What’s that? Meyerbeer’s ‘Robert the Devil’!” cried out the approaching Ivan Dem'ianych, “I bet it’s an excellent piece! He’s a Jew [zhid], and the Jews, just like the Czechs, are natural born musicians! Especially the Jews. Isn’t it true, Susanna Ivanovna? What do you say? Ha-ha-ha-ha!” This time, Ratch’s last words, and even his laughter, conveyed something more than his habitual raillery—there was in them a desire to insult. At least that was how I felt and how Susanna understood him. She shivered impulsively, blushed, bit her lower lip. A bright spot resembling the glitter of a tear passed over her eyelashes and, rising sharply, she left the room. (VIII:72–73)

Ratch’s facetious praise of the German-Jewish composer accomplishes two things. Claiming to be of Czech origin, he contrasts his own musical abilities with those of “the jews,” all the while deriding Susanna. Since “jewishness,” despite Susanna’s acceptance thereof, is a liability in the story’s economy, its public revelation is insulting—hence her categorical reaction to Ratch’s speech. Nor do the negative connotations of “jewishness” bode well for the musical ability of those marked by it, as confirmed by Ratch’s laughter at his own joke. Petr soon discovers that Ratch uses “jewishness” as a sign of alien aesthetics. On his next visit, Susanna interprets Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” showing extraordinary skill as a pianist and provoking Ratch’s impassioned diatribe against modern music. This defense of tradition puts such strain on his Russian that it begins to give way to German phrases and pronunciation. Punning on the expression “nechistaia igra,” which can mean either flawed performance or foul play, Ratch accuses modern composers and their interpreters of “hitting two notes with one finger”—an allusion to the perceived faults of modern art and to the dubious means and motivations of its adepts. Only this time, minding Susanna’s reaction, he euphemistically calls new musical tastes not “jewish” but “Janissar,” thus preserving the connotations of their barbaric foreignness. Tracing the decadence of music to the downfall of morality,

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Ratch tries to insult Susanna by implying that she exemplifies this moral breakdown. “Our ideals do not meet, be it in art, in life, or in morality. Isn’t it true, Susanna Ivanovna?” he says, recycling the phrase he used to hurt the heroine when he hinted at her “jewishness” (VIII:79–81). What could Ratch’s words mean to the reader of Turgenev’s day? The generative model of “the jews” provides for the association of profane entertainment, including any musical diversion devoid of higher spiritual significance, with “jewishness” (see Chapter 3). This association is exploited, for example, in early modern Europe by the professional rivals of klezmer bands: Christian competitors deride Jewish musical acts as caricatures of proper performance.33 Yet, the very fact that from the fifteenth century on, the klezmorim compete with Christian bands and form a visible presence in the popular cultures of central and Eastern Europe problematizes the exclusive attribution of the dramatic rise of the nineteenth-century concern with “the jews” in music to the newfound prominence of assimilated Jews as composers, performers, and art patrons. It is more historically sound to consider this concern against the backdrop of the revolution in the status of music itself in the Romantic age, which elevates music to the role of the supreme art, whose appreciation, let alone creation, proves the sensitivity and culture of individuals and the genius of nations. The topic of “the jews” in music thus functions as both a means and a pretext for the discussion of the larger issue of “jewishness” in culture, in response to the changing nature of modern artistic activity; hence, the stress on the inherent musical genius of “the jews” in the Judeophile novels by Benjamin Disraeli and George Eliot, specifically lampooned in William Thackeray’s parodies of literary Judeophilia.34 Casting aspersions on Susanna’s music, Ratch questions both her performance and her acculturation, implicitly decrying the impact of “the jews” on national cultures and their ultimate expression—the art of music. Turgenev shares Ratch’s view of modern art as too mercantile and subscribes to his vision of this phenomenon as “jewish” (compare Pandalevskii’s use of music). Moreover, the writer is proficient in the rhetoric of the contemporary discourse about “the jews” in music, which metaphorizes the downfall of culture in the capitalist age. Consider his 1869 sketch, “Chelovek v serykh ochkakh (Iz vospominanii

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

1848 goda)” (A man in gray spectacles [From the memoirs of 1848]), written shortly after “Neschastnaia.” As Turgenev’s alter ego debates with a shady monsieur François the state of the French theater, their discussion touches on the French-Jewish diva Rachel. The Frenchman launches into a diatribe about the “jewish” commercialization of art: Rachel, he repeated. Now, that is power. The power and cream of that Jewry [zhidovstvo] which now controls all the purses in the world and will soon control everything else. Who controls the purse, controls the woman; and who controls the woman, controls the man. [. . .] Yes, ­Rachel! She is like Meyerbeer who keeps taunting and teasing us with his “Prophet.” Now I’ll give it to you . . . Now I won’t . . . A shrewd man. In other words, a Jew . . . A maestro, albeit not in a musical sense. (XI:101)

Turgenev’s alter ego opposes no argument to this statement, implicitly subscribing to its vision of the “jewish” downfall of modern art and culture, and echoing Turgenev’s epistolary portrait of Rachel as a skilled but soulless actress “with a gilded coin instead of a heart.”35 But the writer makes exceptions for his acquaintances among assimilated Jews. Mark Antokol'skii is a case in point. In one letter, Turgenev extols the sculptor’s work, while condescendingly describing him as a “little Yid” (zhidok). Incidentally, the sculptor’s physical likeness to the “semitic” stereotype, in Turgenev’s eyes, might have dulled for the writer the discomfort that many of his Russian contemporaries experienced vis-à-vis Antokol'skii’s artistic success in a field and with subjects formerly reserved for Gentiles.36 But there is yet another artist whose skill Turgenev appreciates despite her rumored appurtenance to “the jews”—Pauline Viardot. The introduction of the “jewish” theme in “Neschastnaia” loses much of its mystery if we consider the chronological and geographic coincidence of Turgenev’s work on the story (February–September 1868, Baden-Baden) with Richard Wagner’s renewed attacks on “the jews” in music and on liberalism as the culprit of the Judeophile ideology. These attacks had serious implications for Turgenev the liberal and for Pauline, who collaborated with the composer, occasionally hosting Wagner in Baden-Baden. Turgenev hardly shared Pauline’s high regard for Wagner’s music and disliked his personality.37 And he was surely aware of Wagner’s obsessive

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Judeophobia. In 1868, Wagner was preparing an expanded version of his 1850 pamphlet, “Judaism in Music,” as a follow-up to the June debut of his opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The opera’s singer-villain, Beckmesser, was widely seen as a figure of “the jews,” prompting protests from Jewish communities in Mannheim and Vienna.38 Mastersingers is a notable presence in the correspondence with Paul­ ine that Turgenev maintains during his trip to Russia in the summer of 1868. The opera’s debut and reception provide them with a pretext for an exchange of opinions about Wagner’s music. This exchange, however, passes over the opera’s Judeophobia. Considering that Viardot is a singer, the lampooning of “the jews” as artists in Mastersingers could not escape the correspondents’ attention, attuned as they are to the language of “jewish” difference. Nor does Wagner keep secret from his acquaintances, including Viardot, his work on “Judaism in Music,” whose first version already presented “the jews” as congenitally incapable of the art of singing. The correspondents’ silence then speaks volumes about the taboo striking the problematic issue of Viardot’s origin in their circle—an issue that is made newly urgent by Wagner’s campaign against “jewishness” in modern European music. Unable to discuss it openly with Pauline, Turgenev finds a psychological outlet for this quandary in “Neschastnaia,” which appears in Russia a month before the reissue of Wagner’s opus in March 1869. As for Viardot, she suffers a nervous breakdown upon receiving from Wagner a gift copy of the expanded pamphlet hot off the press. The woman who distances herself from “the jews” by means of violent verbal attacks, as in the “Portrait game” she plays with Turgenev, lets her guard down, firing off an epistolary rebuke (unfortunately lost) that furnishes Wagner with solid proof of what he has suspected all along, namely, that Pauline is one of “the jews” in disguise.39 As Alexandre Zviguilsky points out, Ratch’s image incorporates many of Wagner’s traits, from his notoriously short temper to his philosophy of art; this is further confirmed by the similarity of Wagner’s oft-reproduced profile to that of Ratch, which Turgenev sketches on the margins of “Neschastnaia”’s early draft, and by the alliterative allusion to the composer’s given name in the surname of the story’s Germanspeaking villain.40 Turgenev in fact fears that the allusion might be too

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

obvious: he never corroborates the insight of his readers who see Wagner’s shadow behind Ratch. Responding to one such query, he insists on Ratch’s Czech origin, promising (disingenuously) to play down his German aura in the next edition. His initial disinclination to have “­Neschastnaia” translated may have stemmed from the same apprehension of too clear an allusion to Wagner, who was his faithful reader.41 The writer’s desire to downplay his anti-Wagnerian spoof suggests a reluctance to engage the composer in an open polemic that could reveal Pauline’s image underneath Susanna’s. Turgenev originally wanted to make Susanna a singer but changed his mind, thereby distancing her from Pauline. Even so, and despite the author’s description of the story as an episode from his youth, Viardot probably recognized herself in Susanna. In Turgenev’s own words, she “disapproved” of “­Neschastnaia”; not least, we may conjecture, because she resented being classified as one of “the jews,” no matter how positive a spin Susanna’s origin received in the story.42 The most instructive aspect of Turgenev’s reply to Wagner resides in the way he neutralizes the implications of the composer’s ideological constructs in relation to Pauline. Rather than deny the innate ­musical deficiency of “the jews,” Turgenev turns the tables on Wagner, all the while espousing the composer’s view of “jewishness” in modern art as a mercantile element transforming a “heroic” activity into an “art-bazaar,” to quote Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” (82). By casting Ratch as a case of “the jews” in disguise, Turgenev deemphasizes Susanna’s “jewishness,” which seems benign by contrast. This design is all but facilitated by the persistent rumor about Wagner’s own Jewish extraction. Combined with Wagner’s well-known attention to financial remuneration for his artistic labors, this rumor fuels a host of German and French caricatures depicting the composer surrounded by money­bags and, in Cosima Wagner’s words, “in the unpleasant likeness of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer”—in other words, as one of “the jews” he excoriates. A parallel series of contemporary visual satires places Wagner in the company of the admiring “jews,” whose facial traits he shares—a wily comment on his collaborators among assimilated Jews.43 Susanna’s biting reply to Ratch’s charge of immoralism follows much the same logic; she evokes her stepfather’s lucrative marriage of

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convenience to her mother as inconsistent with his principled Judeophobia (VIII:81). And considering Ratch’s choice of Meyerbeer as his main target, Susanna’s rejoinder reminds us of Wagner’s own lucrative relations with this artist, who also happens to be Pauline Viardot’s friend—Meyerbeer helped launch Wagner’s career only to become the whipping boy of “Judaism in Music.” But the brunt of Turgenev’s anti-Wagnerian spoof is hidden in Ratch’s musical performance. Before insulting Susanna with his comments on “the jews,” Ratch shows off his musical skills, forming a zither-bassoon duo with Fustov. Their choice of instruments is as suggestive as the narrator’s reaction to the music. Remarks Petr, I have always felt that the zither entrapped the soul of a usurious Jew, which coarsely whined and whimpered at being forced to produce sounds by a merciless virtuoso. Nor was Ratch’s performance enjoyable. Besides, his face suddenly turned purple and sinister and his white eyes were angrily spinning, as if he was about to kill someone with his cursing and menacing bassoon, which emitted, one after another, smothered, rough, and crude notes. (VIII:71)

The trademark roughness of Wagner’s style and the show of his notorious temper in Ratch’s face are mediated here by an allusion to klezmer music. The zither (tsitra) reminds Petr of “the jews” because it denotes a family of instruments including the dulcimer (tsimbaly)—the instrument of Mickiewicz’s Jankiel and a centerpiece, along with the violin and a wind instrument, of the klezmer band’s image in Russian letters.44 The casting of Wagner’s stand-in as a noisy klezmer is quite belittling in contrast to Susanna’s moving interpretation of the “Appassionata.” And since the zither is the folk antecedent of the piano, in “Neschastnaia”’s economy it embodies that very national tradition whose loss in modern music both Ratch and Wagner (“Judaism in Music,” 88–90) bemoan. Susanna, of course, is closer than Ratch to the imagined national roots of Russian culture. For all his Russian chauvinism, Ratch is a German-speaking foreigner. The unidiomatic gaffs peppering Ratch’s efforts to sound genuinely Russian (VIII:70) illustrate Wagner’s claim that “the jews” in disguise “talk the modern European languages merely as learnt,” because they “have not unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community” (“Judaism in Music,” 84). But since Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

marks Wagner as one of “the jews,” the composer’s vision of language as the cultural gold standard is satirized in the persona of Ratch the linguist, whose awkward attempts at verbal ultra-folksiness travesty modern nationalist ideologies. It is little wonder that even before publication “Neschastnaia” acquires the reputation of a liberal jibe at the Slavophiles. In his letters, Turgenev denies any such intention. But it is hard to imagine that the writer cannot see how a spoof of Wagner’s Romantic and Judeophobe nationalism, decrying “the not very lucid mental sport of Liberalism” (“Judaism in Music,” 80) as the main culprit of modern semi(o)tic chaos, puts him on a collision course with Wagner’s Russian counterparts.45 The latter seized every opportunity to deride Turgenev the liberal, as during his estival trip to Russia in 1868, when the conservative press revived the tale of his youthful maritime mishap. The temptation to reply in kind may have been irresistible. The ideological dynamic informing the story’s apparent level of signification supports “Neschastnaia”’s reading as a jibe at Wagner the antiliberal, at political conservatism in general, and at its Russian adherents in particular. “The jews” come handy in this ideological agenda, since Susanna, their only explicitly identified representative in the story, exemplifies through perfect acculturation the liberal ideal of Jewish assimilation, all the more positive in light of her hounding by Ratch the carrier of conservative philosophy. In this reading, Ratch’s implied thrashing at Susanna’s wake is a deserved punishment for ideological and ethical crimes. But if we go beyond the surface, recalling that the story’s archetypal structure and its resonance with Turgenev’s personal dilemmas are articulated in the terms of “jewish” difference, then the motives for the punishment of Ratch the Judeophobe no longer seem clear-cut. After all, the generative model of “the jews” informs both the Wagnerian ethos of Ratch’s persona and the anti-Wagnerian pathos of Susanna’s predicament; so much so that Ratch’s punishment may well represent the chastisement of a hypocrite who is beaten, not for mistreating “the jews” but because, being one of them, he hides this crucial quality, polluting the well-ordered world of Gentiles with semi(o)tic chaos. This is indeed the impression one gets from the story’s early draft, where there is no general melee at Susanna’s wake. Instead, Michel’s former secretary gives Ratch his public beating, even as the crowd,

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i­ncluding the narrator, gawks with sadistic amusement at this functional execution reminiscent of Girshel’s punishment in “Zhid.”46 The victim’s calls for help in Russian, German, and Yiddish amalgamate the domestic and foreign ideological targets of “Neschastnaia,” reducing them to the common denominator of “jewishness.” At the same time, Ratch the passive and effeminate victim of self-righteous male wrath cannot but remind us of the distribution of gender roles in “Zhid,” where Sara’s emasculated “jewish” keeper serves as the outlet for taboo sexual violence directed at Sara, who like Susanna can thereby remain innocent in every sense of the word. Ultimately, “Neschastnaia” helps Turgenev deal with a taboo aspect of his attachment to Viardot, since the issue of her “jewishness” shows no sign of abating and grows more noxious in the context of current cultural debates. Whether intentional or not, there is a stark contrast between Susanna’s proud admission of “jewishness” and Pauline’s denial thereof by means closely resembling Ratch’s—witness her compulsive denigration of “the jews” in the “Portrait game” with Turgenev. It seems that through Ratch’s corporeal chastisement, even if it is played down in the story’s final redaction, Turgenev vents residual resentment vis-àvis Pauline as a case of “the jews” in disguise, the same resentment we see in “Zhid” when Nikolai qualifies Sara as Girshel’s “accomplice.” Like the vicariously realized fantasy of sexualized abuse in “Zhid,” Ratch’s beating appears as a lived-out violent fantasy truly targeting ­Susanna/ Pauline, who must finally admit to the crime of disguised identity—an admission beaten out of Ratch as his screams progress from Russian to German to Yiddish. Having paid lip service to ideological Judeophilia on the story’s most apparent level, Turgenev the poster liberal of Russian literature cannot deny himself the discreet and guilty pleasure of physical abuse directed at the effeminate “jews.” The writer continues to conjure up this pleasure, like the shame of emasculation generated by his maritime mishap, well into his old age. In 1881, he shares with Russian friends his desire to “flog in the most painful fashion,” both journalistically and literally, Sarah Bernhardt, whose company is then touring Russia. Apologetic about the inadvertent sexual innuendo, Turgenev insists on the requisite punishment of  the French-Jewish diva for profaning “a wonderful voice” by vir-

Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

tue of being “all lies, falsity, and cheap Parisian chic”47—just as Wagner feared, let us add, when he warned about the pernicious influence of “the jews” on modern art. It is as if Turgenev took here a belated look at the Pauline he met in 1843, when she arrived in Russia from Paris for a theatrical engagement of her own. This suggestion may sound outlandish next to the commonly romanticized view of the writer’s relationship with Viardot, unless we heed the way in which “Neschastnaia”’s motifs resurface in Turgenev’s 1883 story, “Klara Milich.” The story’s protagonist, Aratov, is an orphaned young man, who like Petr lives with his aunt and is flanked by an assimilated “German” of murky origin and occupation. Aratov meets his own “hapless girl” (neschastnaia)—a term used throughout the story (X:79, 90–91)—in the persona of Klara, who is a singer, pianist, and actress of dubious moral reputation. Klara has Susanna’s “tragic eyes” and a face that “may be Jewish or Gipsy” (X:75). This time, Turgenev comes dangerously close to identifying Pauline as a case of “the jews” in disguise. Klara is likened both to the French-Jewish diva Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt’s eminent precursor, and to Viardot herself (X:73). Incidentally, the already quoted passage from Turgenev’s “Chelovek v serykh ochkakh” links Rachel to Meyerbeer as a shrewd huckster, whose opera The Prophet exemplifies the “jewish” commercialization of art. But the sketch passes over the fact that it is Pauline Viardot, not Rachel, who is associated with The Prophet by virtue of starring in a lead role during the opera’s Parisian premiere in 1849. Unlike Petr in “Neschastnaia,” Aratov sees flaws in the heroine’s art and personality, echoing Turgenev’s criticism of Sarah Bernhardt. Klara’s unflatteringly described appearance and histrionics earn ­Aratov’s dismissive label “Gypsy” (tsiganka)—“the worst expression he could come up with” (X:79), the narrator tells us. “Gypsy,” to be sure, is the dismissive term used by Turgenev’s own mother in reference to Pauline and to her family legend. But it hardly bears out the terrible connotations implied by the narrator. Turgenev clearly applies it as a euphemism for another term, this one indeed insulting, which Aleksandr Otto-Onegin, the writer’s personal secretary in 1882–83, often uses in reference to Pauline: zhidovka (Jewess).48 It seems the residual resentment toward Pauline and her hidden “jewishness,” palpable in “Zhid”

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and “Neschastnaia,” lost none of its intensity with time, in fact peaking in Turgenev’s writings shortly before his death. Ivan Turgenev was not the only Russian writer nurturing the titillating fantasy of stripping and whipping the assimilated Jewish prima donna Sarah Bernhardt. The young Anton Chekhov, then making a living as a journalist, was asked to review Bernhardt’s performances, and as his reviews show, he did not appreciate the actress’s appearance or skill any more than his eminent colleague did.49 By means of these reviews, Chekhov embarked on his own story in multiple installments about “the jews” in art, remaining keenly aware that he was taking this torch from the hand of Turgenev, whose tale of crime and punishment would continuously inform Chekhov’s own reflection on “jewishness” and modernity.

Th i rt e e n   Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

From the liberal viewpoint, Turgenev’s titillating fantasy of Sarah Bern­ hardt’s abuse was more blameworthy than ever thanks to its awkward timing. The Russia seen by the French actress was a country of pogroms and anti-Jewish legislation symptomatic of the crisis in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination. The intelligentsia’s view of anti-Jewish violence as instigated or condoned by the state was instrumental in distancing the idealized narod from the pogrom mob. But the casting of “the jews” as victims problematized recourse to the language of “jewish” difference in art and journalism, especially since the political Right openly exploited popular Jew-hatred to ideological ends. The traditional liberal sensitivity to Russia’s international image now had to accommodate the fact that the empire’s treatment of its Jews, symbolized by the entry of the Russian word pogrom into foreign vocabularies, supplied Western opinion with a scapegoat for its own guilty conscience vis-à-vis the rampant Judeophobia and nascent ideology of antisemitism in the “civilized” parts of Europe. Turgenev thus reacts, in 1882, to pogrom news: “All one has left is to blush (especially here, in Europe), to blush for oneself, for one’s native land, and for its people.”1 In the same year, another liberal icon, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, temporarily suspends his use of “the jews” as a figure of capitalist rapacity, penning a quasi-manifesto, “Iiul'skoe veianie” (The July breeze), which cautiously criticizes the branding of “the jews” as economic parasites and suggests that Russian writers should heed the suffering of the “jewish” masses instead (XV:235–39). Shchedrin’s grudging magnanimity—its many reservations sublimate his recent private outburst at a Russian-Jewish journalist asking the writer to raise his voice

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in defense of pogrom victims—attests to a new ideological climate in Russia. From now on, Judeophobia is to be the political tool of the conservative camp, while the public profession of Judeophilia is to fall, almost by default, within the purview of the tsarist regime’s moral and intellectual opposition. After 1881, a show of sympathy for “the jews” as “the persecuted tribe”—hitherto a minor and tenuous feature of Russian liberalism—acquires the clout of “a necessary symptom of decency” among the liberal intelligentsia.2 Liberal pundits and their foes do not delude themselves about the nature of this Judeophilia, which rather than challenging the traditional image of “the jews,” reflects the intelligentsia’s will to exploit to its own ends the empire’s “Jewish question.” Like Western Enlightenment authors, who practiced Judeophilia as a political expedient, critics of the Russian autocracy treat “the jews” as an abstract category symbolic of a larger fight.3 Judeophilia’s aura of dissent is further enhanced by the ham-handed official attempts to contain its expression. Censors intermittently ban Judeophile plays (Cumberland’s The Jew) and stories (Konstantin Staniukovich’s “Isaika” [1894]; Nikolai Leskov’s “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine i o druge ego Abrame-zhidovine” [The tale of Fedor the Christian and his friend Abram the Jew, 1886]). This role of “the jews” as a medium of dissent informs the November 1900 student riot at the premiere of S. Efron’s and V. Krylov’s Judeophobe Kontrabandisty (Smugglers) in Aleksei Suvorin’s Petersburg theater. Incidentally, Krylov was a translator and admirer of Nathan the Wise.4 But this is hardly a paradoxical accident. Artists dabbling in Judeophilia vacillate between their self-imposed moral duty and the resonance of “the jews” in their imagination. ­Leskov’s “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine” and his apologetic essay Evrei v Rossii (The Jew in Russia, 1883) jar not only with his previous treatment of “the jews” but with his better judgment as well. The writer privately confesses that his “belief in the brotherhood of nations” clashes with his “fear of the Jews”—a dissonance making him “an advocate of [civic] equality rather than of the Jews.” The same dynamic marks the profession of Judeophilia by such different figures as writer Leonid ­Andreev; theologian Sergei Bulgakov (a future anti-Jewish agitator during the civil war of 1918–20); and publicist Simon Petliura (a future

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

victim of vigilante justice for his role in civil war pogroms). Andreev shares with Gor'kii his unease about “the jews” as the recipients of “compliments and attention” predicated on liberal guilt and mandated by the intelligentsia’s code of political correctness. The pressure of this code, he complains, forces writers to be “liberals, socialists, revolutionaries, and devil knows what else, but least of all themselves.”5 For artists, this tension between heart and duty is exacerbated by the virtual absence in Russian letters of the tradition of Enlightenment Judeo­philia. Calling for a shift of focus from “the jews” as exploiters to “the jews” as victims, Shchedrin’s essay bemoans the lack of Russian examples and directs his confreres to foreign models (XV:239), such as Eliza Orzeszkowa’s story “Silny Samson” (Mighty Samson), whose 1880 publication in Shchedrin’s Otechestvennye zapiski (The annals of the fatherland) augured the new trend. Hitherto unknown in Russia, Orzeszkowa soon becomes a fixture of the liberal press, her Judeophile texts appearing at least seventy-one times between 1879 and 1917.6 At the same time, the few Russian samples of literary Judeophilia that do exist are reclaimed and invested with new significance. The 1880s reader discovers unpublished or ignored texts: Lermontov’s Ispantsy; Lazhechnikov’s Vsia beda ot styda; excerpts from Narezhnyi’s Rossiiskii Zhilblaz; Gleb Uspenskii’s 1865 stories “V balagane” (In the fair-booth) and “Den' nuzhdy i skuki” (A day of need and boredom). The latter is repackaged to fit the new fad—its title becomes “Zhidenok” (Jewkid), shifting the focus from Russian provincial mores to their “jewish” victim.7 Unlike Uspenskii’s maudlin stories, Turgenev’s “Zhid” is not revived at this time, probably because its “jews” are too ambiguous for the purposes of an earnest sermon.8 In order fully to appreciate this aesthetic and ideological shift, we must heed the initial reaction of Russian writers to the paradigmatic text of modern literary philanthropy, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Despite its seeming irrelevance to our subject, this novel historically serves as a user manual for authors desiring to make amends for their previous intolerance, and particularly for those European authors who come to regret the Judeophobe spirit of their earlier writings at the time when “the jews” are routinely conflated with the figure of the African in Orientalist discourse and in racial science (see Chapter 4).

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin upholds and moralizes this conflation: it argues for Christianity’s “humanizing and subduing influence” on the enslaved Blacks by likening them to the captive biblical Hebrews understood in Christological terms as a trope of spiritual slavery and redemption. This simile enables Stowe’s admirer, George Eliot, to negotiate her own former Judeophobia as an English national malaise and a religious aberration in light of Christian millenarian aspirations.9 In addition, Stowe’s African suggests the ways to modernize the Enlightenment-style “jews” through the humanistic ethos of realist art, which extends sentimental preoccupation with social underdogs to the detailed depiction of their physical suffering—a device shunned by the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers. In fact, Stowe’s novel both capitalizes on Enlightenment Judeophilia and provides a matrix for its modernization. Learning from “the jews” of Lessing, Cumberland, Edgeworth, and Scott, Stowe fashions her Blacks as model Christians by virtue of their honesty, love, devotion, submissiveness, and docility. Following the logic of “the jews,” who are more Christian than their Christian abusers, her Blacks are more Christian than their owners and, in James Baldwin’s estimate, “as white as she can make them.”10 A notable exception is Uncle Tom, whose physical kinship to the stereotype of the African is compensated by his Christlike meekness and martyrdom. Those using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a template for literary Judeophilia could find Stowe’s handling of Tom’s physical otherness particularly welcome at a time when outward kinship to Gentiles became a threatening aspect of “jewishness.” Here was a laudable exercise, not just in the humanization of a monster, for this task had been accomplished by Enlightenment Judeophilia, but in the self-congratulatory discovery of a saint in a monster’s body—a modern equivalent of washing and kissing the leper’s sores. Advocating an art that “rights wrongs, alleviates distresses, and brings to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten,” Stowe echoes the Russian liberal intelligentsia’s vision of literature.11 In all logic, then, Uncle Tom’s Cabin should have struck a sensitive chord when it reached Russia in 1852 (censors delayed its translation until 1858), concurrently with the publication of Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika. But despite the average reader’s “tearful”

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

response to Stowe’s blend of sentimentalism and graphic violence, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not sit well with Russian litterateurs. If even a utilitarian like Dmitrii Pisarev bemoaned Stowe’s didactic idealization of Black slaves as detrimental to the novel’s aesthetic and rhetorical value, we should not be surprised that Turgenev saw it as an anti­example of socially engaged art.12 In Russia, this criticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as flawed by crude tendentiousness echoes contemporary views of Enlightenment Judeophilia.13 Thus, the early attempts to cast “the jews” in Uncle Tom’s mold, such as Osip Rabinovich’s story “Shtrafnoi” (The penal recruit, 1859), catch the attention of the Russian-Jewish reader and go unnoticed in Russian literature at large. But with the ideological shift of the early 1880s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a useful tool for Russian literary philanthropy—a bridge, as it were, to the artistic tradition of Enlightenment Judeophilia, albeit an unacknowledged one since Stowe’s novel never really loses its artistically inferior status in the eyes of the Russian cultural elite. There is yet another important facet to the embarrassing utility of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s passive (read effeminate) Blacks suffer so readily and publicly that the novel’s scenes of violence cannot but recall the voyeuristic realization of taboo fantasies in Turgenev’s “Zhid” and “Neschastnaia,” where it is similarly buried under a liberal sermon on tolerance. In fact, the more Shylock’s reinvention as a tragic hero catches up with ­Iankel' in the 1880s under Uncle Tom’s aegis, the more liberalism’s discreet pleasures appeal to the Russian adepts of artistic Judeophilia. Sadomasochist indulgence, with “the jews” as its sexualized object, becomes a compensatory mechanism for and a reflection of the violence Russian writers inflict on their art and beliefs when they bow to the ideological and moral pressure of the liberal opinion. Unlike “the jews” in disguise, who remain a negative literary type, Gogol’s Iankel' moves into Uncle Tom’s cabin in the 1880s, offering a stock formula to those artists who opt to flaunt their liberal credentials by dabbling in Judeophilia. In this literary recipe, tried by scores of Russian writers before 1917, “the jews” are easily identifiable thanks to their racial alterity and rejection of baptism. The resulting visibility spares them the stigma of disguised “jewishness.” At the same time, the Russian Judeophile formula, like its precursors in Western art, suppresses

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the negative quality of “the jews” as the spiritual, economic, and political Other by casting them in the role of exemplary Christians in deed, if not in name. And although it is not in Judeophilia’s nature to doubt Christianity’s superiority over Judaism, the Russian followers of the Judeophile artistic recipe exhibit a striking lack of interest in questioning the lexicon of “jewish” difference. A century earlier, Lessing at least cautiously suggested the ethical equality of the two faiths.14 The selfcongratulatory magnanimity of fin de siècle Judeophile art in Russia has no room for such radicalism. The goodwill, altruism, and meekness of Uncle Tom’s “jewish” counterparts (krotkii [meek] is a term often used in Judeophile texts) stress the unrighteousness of Gentiles, who violate Christian values by sporting such “jewish” traits as greed, cruelty, and parasitism in contrast to the laborious but economically distressed “jews.”15 This Judeophile formula recycles the timeworn role of “the jews” as witnesses to the truth of Christianity and to the sinfulness of Christians, updating it with the Enlightenment mantra, “Jesus was himself a Jew.” For Russian liberals, to be sure, this slogan retains none of its original supersessionist and conversionist ethos (compare Luther’s That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew [1523]). They use it as a counterweight to racial biology, opposing to the antisemitic postulate of “jewish” immutability the Enlightenment ideal of acculturation, whatever misgivings individual authors may harbor privately about the impact of “the jews” in disguise on modern culture.16 The Judeophile formula in Russian literature highlights those features of the lexicon of “jewish” difference that pose no threat to the male Gentile reader. These are the physical and hygienic flaws of the emasculated “jewish” body; the sexually appealing exoticism of “the jewesses”; and “jewish” business acumen that benefits Gentiles. The male Judeophile object is a carbon copy of Gogol’s “jews”: he inherits their facial features, build, gait, speech, gestures, and uncleanliness. Liberal litterateurs appear unflustered by the Judeophile recipe’s indebtedness to “Taras Bul'ba,” which suggests its homology to the Judeophobe discourse. The two artistic approaches part ways not in their vision of “the jews” but in its motivation. For the liberals, “jewish” difference is the (theoretically) rectifiable consequence of social oppression; for their conservative opponents, it is rooted in “jewish” racial biology.17

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

The Judeophile literary recipe accentuates “jewish” physical difference by displacing its carriers from their natural habitat into Christian settings.18 This device is not new. Gentile writers have always tended to treat this actor as a solitary figure—an intruder from the orbis ­exterior who typifies the abstract notions embodied by “the jews.” Assimilationist ideology updates this practice by contrasting the acculturated “jews” as de facto Christians to the original “jewish” chaos whence they emerge. Characteristically, Orzeszkowa’s Judeophile novel Meir ­Ezofowicz (1878), whose assimilationist message reprovingly opposes the mass of “the jews” to their individual positive instance (Meir), shares its code of cultural alterity with Vsevolod Krestovskii’s Judeophobe trilogy, T'ma Egipetskaia (The darkness of Egypt, 1888–92). For a literary Judeophile, a solitary “jewish” character has the added benefit of distancing the liberal philanthropist from the polluting swarms of “the jews.” There are two concomitant benefits: the author’s political credentials are manifest in a positive instance of “the jews” in her oeuvre, yet the uniqueness of this lonely personage rules out the critical reexamination of the “jewish” Other, leaving its Gentile user’s cultural identity undisturbed. The Judeophile utilization of the lexicon of “jewish” difference follows the principle of inversion: liberals idealize “the jews” as much as their political foes demonize them. And since both rely on the same generative model, a Judeophobe is as able to concoct a work with “the jews” in the role of the meek and saintly Helper as a Judeophile is equipped to handle the newly fashionable discourse of antisemitism. History repeats itself in the Russian field of cultural production. Like their English predecessors, who shuttled between “the jews” as saints and villains, many Russian artists sit on two chairs after 1881.19 His Judeo­phile essay does not keep Shchedrin from revisiting “the jews” as the ur-symbol of capitalism in Sovremennaia idilliia (The contemporary idyll, 1883). Staniukovich likewise follows up his maudlin “Isaika” (1894) with a “jewish” predator, whose image in “Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa” (The adventures of a sailor, 1899) could satisfy the most exigent antisemite.20 Such shuttling is feasible even within one text: the Russian edition of Meir Ezofowicz becomes the exact ideological opposite of the Polish original after some editing by its translator.21 A reverse procedure is also

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possible, as illustrated by Leskov’s “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine,” a reworked exemplum about a merchant indebted to “the jews” whom he converts to Christianity through a show of righteousness. This widely disseminated Greek and Latin tradition is well known in the Russian cultural sphere. Symptomatically, Leskov deems this anti-Judaic conversion tale a suitable template for a Judeophile story. His meek, selfless, and wronged moneylender, Abram, is a model Christian in everything but name. He wants Fedor to succeed in his show of superior Christian ethics. Leskov is aware that his schematic and preachy story is an artistic flop. But that is precisely the point; for his vision of Judeophile art draws inspiration from the didactic utilitarianism of medieval exempla.22 To leave no room for interpretive speculation is a prominent objective of didactic utilitarianism proper to Judeophile art. This objective is manifest in the explicit description of “the jews” as “good” and “kind”; in the reworking of Shylock’s monologue (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”) into a unidimensionally tragic rhetorical tool; and in the framing of narratives about “the jews” with authorial calls for tolerance.23 Echoing the didacticism and sentimentalism of a Lessing or an Edgeworth, the Russian Judeophile recipe takes these qualities of Western literary Judeophilia to their extreme, albeit with uncredited help from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Indeed, the kinship of Stowe’s Blacks to “the jews” of Russian liberals is particularly striking in their common emasculation and infantilization. Both objects of philanthropy are treated with protective condescension, as passive recipients of the will of a physically and emotionally dominating (read male and adult) agency. Russian Judeophile texts tend to describe their adult male “jews” with the help of diminutive suffixes and informal or diminutive names; and often compare them to small animals from the lexicon of “jewish” difference (monkeys, sparrows, dogs), thereby placing “the jews” at the bottom of social and gender hierarchies.24 Like children, these adult “jewish” males cry easily and heartily. Like women in the modern imagination, they are prone to hysterics and nervous breakdowns.25 And since the lament filling Uncle Iankel’s Cabin is—at least in theory—strictly tragic, the Judeophile literary recipe openly exhorts its audience not to laugh at the sight of the sad “jewish” clown despite his comic aspect (compare Nikolai’s orders to soldiers in “Zhid”).26

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

The reasons behind this humorless restraint are not solely ideological; for the empathy stirred in the reader by the Judeophile discourse is far from disinterested. The “jewish” hero is not the Subject of the Judeophile narrative. This function is filled by his Gentile observer—the narrator, a character—who is the “jewish” Helper’s beneficiary. This distribution of narrative roles becomes clear if we heed the full implications of the fusion of Christian virtue with effeminacy in the image of “the jews” as permanently despondent yet solicitous for the wellbeing of others. In some texts, this image logically converges on that of the mourning Mary. Hence the frequency with which “the jews” appear in fin de siècle Russian art in the guise of altruistic medics whose professional activity echoes Mary’s intercessor function—they ease human suffering with complete self-abandon and with disregard for their patients’ social rank or moral stature. In fact, they are most fond of treating pogromists, meekly turning the other cheek to their abusers.27 Even those “jews” who do not practice medicine alleviate the suffering of Gentiles by embodying it. Judeophile art recodes the observable wretchedness of “the jews” from a sign of divine proscription (see Chapter 1) into a symbol of the human condition. The mournful and distressed aspect of “the jews” now reminds the reader that suffering is a mainstay of life. The “jewish” condition thus loses its parochialism. Its new message—“We are all Jews”—echoes the Russian intelligentsia’s view of Jewish emancipation as a tool in a larger civic struggle. This message also conflates the victims of prejudice with the guilt-ridden members of the prejudiced majority, who thereby appropriate the morally valuable victimhood of the objects of their philanthropy. Consider Lev Tolstoi’s refusal to sign a letter of protest against the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, because it spoke about the Jewish victims of Christian bigotry. In Tolstoi’s redaction, this letter deplored “the mob’s innocent victims” without mentioning their identity or that of the assailants. By this logic, empathy for “the jews” is, above all, selfpity.28 Unlike Gogol’s laughing Cossacks or Turgenev’s snickering soldiers, the Gentile observers of “the jews” in post-1881 Russian art are well advised not to laugh; for by succumbing to hilarity they unwittingly deride their own tragic condition.

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The tragedy of the “jewish” (now human and universal) condition peaks in sentimentalized physical violence endemic in Russian Judeophile art. “Sentimentality,” writes James Baldwin about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion is [. . .] the mask of cruelty.” But viewing Stowe’s novel as a catalogue of “unmotivated and senseless” violence, Baldwin misses a salient trait of the liberal imagination—its veiled erotic agenda, which can in and of itself motivate such violence in literature. As Freud ascertained from the example of his patients, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major fount of sado­ masochist fantasies in fin de siècle Europe. The novel’s appeal could, in some measure, be attributed to the taboo pleasures many a wet-eyed reader furtively derived from the protracted scenes of physical control and abuse passively suffered by Stowe’s Blacks—a pleasure hardly less gratifying than a liberal’s self-righteous indignation at social injustice.29 The same layering of overt ideology and covert eroticism, already manifest in Turgenev’s “Zhid,” informs the writings of Russian Judeophiles, whose imagined beneficiaries are at once the objects of ideological concern and of taboo sexual fantasies. The erotic dynamics of the liberal discourse are nowhere as pronounced as in the pogrom scenes that are a staple of Russian artistic Judeophilia. If we further account for the coincidence of the Judeophile literary fad with the rise of the Decadent movement, the implicit sexual subtext of a typical pogrom episode in fin de siècle Russian literature will not appear too unexpected or shocking. Quite to the contrary, these sexual connotations have their rightful place in the context of contemporary artistic life marked by the Decadent espousal of transgressive practices that defy conventional morality, including the exploitation of the sadomasochist fantasies traditionally generated by the Crucifixion imagery (compare Fedor Sologub’s Melkii bes [The petty demon, 1907])— fantasies that could not but resonate with the Judeophile ­recipe’s casting of the meek and saintly pogrom victims as Christ-figures. On the most apparent semantic level, the abuse of “the jews” furnishes an ethical touchstone that sorts the dramatis personae of a given narrative into two categories—the perpetrators and the victims. The second group implicitly includes the Gentiles empathizing with “the jews.” But the stock imagery employed in these pogrom scenes holds

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

the key to their fuller imaginative potential. The bird-down motif, prominent in this imagery, is a case in point.30 Symbolizing a violated home, bird down is ritualistically extracted by the mob from “jewish” bedding and scattered in the street, covering the damaged property and bodies of victims. But since east Slavic folklore identifies the stuffing of “jewish” pillows and mattresses as goose down, the image itself is not just a realistic detail—it evokes the association of “the jews” with the goose as a sexual symbol (see Chapters 3, 10). For the fin de siècle Russian reader, this bird down is a transparent allusion both to the physical maltreatment of the male “jewish” body, uniformly described as effeminate and birdlike (that is, straight out of “Taras Bul'ba”), and to the sexual abuse of “the jewesses.” For instance, in Gor'kii’s story “Pogrom” (1901), the obsessive repetitiveness of the motifs of bird down and of the birdlike “jewish” body is indulgently voyeuristic, particularly when they merge in the image of a “jewish” girl in a torn dress fleeing her abusers.31 The logic of Gor'kii’s indulgence has broad symbolic implications. These include not only the taboo pleasures of Turgenev’s “Zhid” and the unself-­conscious sadism of “Taras Bul'ba” but all those folk traditions that use the birdsymbols of “the jews” in scenes of physical abuse or in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. The masterplot’s resonance is explicit in Garin-Mikhailovskii’s “Revekka” (1896). The story’s Christian hero, the painter Antonii, wins the sexual favors of a daughter of “the jews” when the “filthy and down-covered” subjects of his Judeophile art convince Revekka that he “loves her people”—an unwitting comment on the transformation of the object of philanthropy into an erotic object within the artistic medium of the Judeophile discourse, which systematically conflates textual and sexual pleasure.32 And as if this taboo dynamic did not do enough damage to the Judeophile project, turning an exercise in humanist compassion into an act of self-indulgent voyeurism, the imaginative language of liberal writers creates other disparities between ideological intent and artistic realization. For example, “the jews” of Judeophile narratives often fall into water—an immersion whose result is the elimination, literal (drowning) and symbolic (functional baptism), of the Judeophile object.33 What are we to make of Isaika’s fear of water explained

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in Staniukovich’s eponymous story by the “jewishness” of this sailor who resists baptism and drowns himself to escape physical abuse? Does Staniukovich lose control of his material, succumbing to the logic of the generative model, which postulates the obliteration of “jewish” difference through the baptism or death of its carriers? Or does this immersion signal Isaika’s de facto Christianity in contrast to the unrighteousness of Gentiles? Ultimately, one wonders, how can a didactic tale like Staniukovich’s afford such ambiguity? Such aporiae plague the Judeophile imagination, suggesting that Russian artists may not fully control their material when they flaunt their liberal credentials without reexamining the lexicon of “jewish” difference. Serafimovich’s story “Pogrom” (1906) is a case in point. Here “the jews” bemoan their plight by alluding to the self-condemnation of their ancestors: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25). Is this an oversight or a suggestion that “the jews” still carry the deicidal guilt motivating (justly?) the pogrom mob? Nor can we miss the ambiguity in Andreev’s vision of the economic hardships that force “the jews” to “split a head of garlic ten ways.” Is this an awkward use of a negative symbol from the lexicon of “jewish” difference (see Chapter 4), or a parody of the Eucharist and of the miracle in the wilderness? Likewise, one cannot agree with Dobronravov that the consolation his hero offers to “the jews,” namely, that all suffering will end with the Second Coming, is a show of tolerance. And can we see as unambiguously tragic the pogrom violence aborting the plans of Chirikov’s watchmaker Leizer to create an eternal timepiece? Time, after all, stops with the Second Coming—an event whose theological implications for “the jews” are not so different from a pogrom, as it ushers in their final disappearance through baptism or death.34 Whatever interpretation we advance for such instances of rupture between Judeophile intent and its artistic implementation, it is clear that they are informed by the Christian vision of “the jews” and its attendant drive to abolish the Other. The adoption of the main fixture of Enlightenment apologetics—the casting of “the jews” as de facto Christians, which is in itself a way of negating the Other—leaves unresolved the negative resonance of “the jews” in the conditioned imagination of Russian artists. But this dynamic is not limited to Russia. Eliot

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

dispatches Daniel Deronda’s “jews” on a permanent quest overseas—a ­solution homologous to the drowning of Staniukovich’s Isaika and to the departure of Stowe’s freed Blacks for Africa.35 In the Russian context, such inability to accommodate alterity within the racial, cultural, and religious continuum of the imagined national body acquires metaliterary meaning. The implicit wish to see “the jews” vanish suggests that the creators of Judeophile narratives may resent the ideological straitjacket they wear and the aesthetic price they pay for staying on the right side of the liberal code of political correctness. Indeed, compounded by the crudely sentimental idealization of its infantilized object, the aesthetic unsoundness of Judeophile art is obvious to its foes, adherents, and presumptive beneficiaries alike. Publicist Oskar Gruzenberg derides Judeophilia as akin in its ethos and methods to the Society for the Humane Treatment of Animals. Vladimir Zhabotinskii insists that Russian-Jewish readers view Judeophile art as “yawn-inducing,” whereas Russian readers snub it altogether.36 And while critic Kornei Chukovskii publicly wonders whether RussianJewish readers may not be offended by the condescending philanthropy of Gor'kii’s maudlin and saccharine “jews,” Gor'kii privately airs similar dissatisfaction with the “weepy” approach to “the jews.” Nonetheless, he sees the Judeophile literary formula as a necessary product of the liberal intelligentsia’s opposition to the tsarist regime.37 Precisely because of this political conjuncture, open criticism of “the influx of Kosher dishes into the Russian literary cuisine,” as Zhabotinskii describes Judeophile art, is largely absent on the Left, except when it is facilitated by scandals involving reputed Judeophiles running afoul of the liberal code of political correctness, as Chirikov does in 1909.38 But even on such occasions, the job of exposing the fault lines of literary philanthropy is left to Russian-Jewish authors, whereas the non-Jews, mindful of their public image, limit their criticism of the Judeophile project to private exchanges. Kuprin, for example, mounts his defense of the chastised Chirikov by denouncing liberal constraints on the use of the lexicon of “jewish” difference in a letter to a trusted friend. This letter is an encyclopedia of fin de siècle antisemitism. Yet Kuprin’s candidly expressed vision does not stop him from churning out Judeophile narratives in a bow to the ideological pressure of the literary marketplace.39

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From the turn of the century until 1917, the liberal taboo on the negative artistic depiction of “the jews” intensifies in direct proportion to the flood of Judeophobe and antisemitic writings generated by the Russian Right. The sense of lost creative freedom becomes the corollary of liberal self-censorship.40 In view of the political urgency acquired by the Jewish minority in the empire’s waning years, artists identifying with the regime’s opposition have few choices left when it comes to the depiction of the “jewish” Other. Aware of the gap between “the jews” of their imagination and those of the Judeophile literary formula, many conform to the ideological expectations of the liberal reader. The resultant narratives are filled with the aporiae of the kind discussed above and, for all their formulaic insipidity, betray the authors’ apprehension of inadvertently running afoul of the liberal opinion. This fear informs Kuprin’s story “Svad'ba” (Wedding, 1908), whose Gentile hero loses control, lashing out at the festive “jews”—in much the same way that Kuprin rails in the aforesaid letter against the usurpation of Russian art by the gleeful “jews”—and is humiliatingly chastised, first by “the jews” and then by his Russian superior (IV:373–75). Another option consists of avoiding “jewish” subject matter altogether. This strategy—dubbed asemitizm (asemitism) in early twentiethcentury Russia—is not limited to the artistic Left. Given the scrutiny to which the depiction of “the jews” is subjected by Russian-Jewish readers and, after 1881, by the Russian intelligentsia in general, the pressure of public opinion functions as a potent tool of dissuasion.41 Artists of all political stripes unwilling to fit their idea of “the jews” into the Procrustean bed of literary Judeophilia, yet eager to reach beyond the target audience of professed antisemites, find the expedient of asemitizm handy. Already in the late 1870s, coming under criticism from Russian-Jewish readers who point out that his Judeophobia contradicts his declared ideal of universal brotherhood, Dostoevskii tries to avoid mentioning “the jews” in print, limiting his Judeophobe passion to private notes and correspondence. “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine” turns out to be Leskov’s last artistic brush with “the jews,” whose Judeophile treatment he finds far-fetched, all the while regarding its opposite as politically inopportune. Much the same logic informs Lev Tolstoi’s asemitizm.42

Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

As the option of avoiding “jewish” subject matter does not automatically imply a profession of ideological convictions, a Russian writer’s display of political colors through the artistic treatment of “the jews” must be viewed as a calculated choice. One can speculate about the sincerity of this choice for individual authors by comparing their public and private utterances; but it is undeniable that in most cases participation in the Judeophile artistic project is self-imposed. (An exception must be made for collections of stories and essays, whose editors personally solicit authors, placing them in a position in which asemitizm could adversely affect their standing with liberal opinion.43) This voluntary involvement in the erection of Uncle Iankel’s Cabin brings us back to the subject of liberalism’s discreet pleasures; for the sadomasochist dynamic of the Judeophile discourse is not limited to the voyeuristic fascination with the physical abuse of the effeminate “jews.” This taboo pleasure is matched by another gratifying activity—that of the identification with the victim. And while a Judeophile’s fusion with the object of his philanthropy is as gratifying ideologically and morally as the self-flagellation of a guiltridden member of the abusive majority, this identification would not generate so much agony and self-pity (compare Andreev’s complaint to Gor'kii, or Kuprin’s epistolary lament) were it not for Russian authors’ self-inflicted torment by Judeophilia. Jarring with their conditioned imagination, the Judeophile artistic exercise goes against their better instincts and emotions, imbuing them with the fear of chastisement should they falter in the (sweetly) excruciating task of writing against their grain. The sentimental Judeophile embrace enveloping the rebarbative “jews” is a source of much agony and introverted commiseration; the more so the longer one cuddles with the “jewish” leper. When Rozanov proclaims that “the jews,” like battered wives, sensuously enjoy physical abuse without admitting to it, he inadvertently articulates the guilty pleasures of the Judeophile imagination, whose sadomasochist dynamic matches the indulgence of Stowe’s readers in the latent eroticism of sentimental violence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.44 For the artists imaginatively conditioned to deal with the perplexities of modernity by conceptualizing them in “jewish” terms, the post-1881 propulsion of the Jewish minority to the center of ideological warfare

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complicates the use of the lexicon of “jewish” difference. This use becomes pregnant with ideological implications precisely at a time when the commercialization of culture makes a writer’s public image paramount to his or her success. A Russian litterateur launching his career after 1881 can ill afford to alienate the liberal establishment and the intelligentsia it represents, because the former is a towering presence in the Russian field of cultural production and the latter is a sizable chunk of its consumers. And although “the jews” are but one politically laden symbol on Russia’s ideological map and one of several ways to conform to or challenge liberal opinion, they also happen to offer the default and universally comprehensible symbolic language in which European writers can articulate the tension between their imagination and the literary market’s expectations—a tension endemic in the modern artist’s condition as a paid professional. Chekhov learns all this the hard way as he sets out to realize his artistic ambition despite the cultural baggage he trails from a traditionalist provincial hometown to Moscow—a hotbed of the liberal intelligentsia. Struggling for a place in a literary marketplace, the Chekhov of the 1880s and early 1890s is keenly aware of the need to manage his public image. The latent tension between liberal expectations and ­Chekhov’s conservative cultural baggage finds its logical outlet in the writer’s recourse to “the jews,” which punctuates the first fifteen years of his career. These are the writer’s years of reflection on and adjustment to Russian artistic life—an experience he articulates with much help from the imaginary “jews.”

Fo u rt e e n  Of Chekhov and Garlic

Using “the jews” as a conceptual tool to describe his artistic and cultural experience, Chekhov becomes part and parcel of the pan-European reflection on modernity. As a result, the stories analyzed in this chapter, “Tina” and “Skripka Rotshil'da,” resonate strongly with a number of contemporary Western texts, unwittingly engaging them into mutually enriching commerce. The works of fin de siècle English authors are a case in point. Like Chekhov and his Russian peers, Victorian writers are “fascinated with the figure of the Jew [. . .] because that figure allows them to negotiate their relation to the dominant fact of their existence: the burgeoning, but segmenting, market for letters.” 1 Thus, if a hitherto ignored dimension of Turgenev’s “Neschastnaia” comes to the fore when we heed the author’s dialogue with Wagner, Chekhov’s stories lend themselves to multiple, even contradictory, readings in the intertextual nexus encompassing the already discussed works by Turgenev and Wagner, but also such novels as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). “Tina” and “Skripka Rotshil'da” antedate Dracula, but there is no evidence that Stoker read them in translation. And although Trilby was published concurrently with “Skripka Rotshil'da,” it is unlikely that Chekhov was privy to the novel while finishing his story (he did not know English), or that Du Maurier read “Tina.”2 Yet the lexicon of “jewish” difference sets up complementary rapports between Chekhov’s stories and these Victorian novels: they hold explicatory keys to one another as constitutive elements of a larger cultural text. This text is the European continuum for the dissemination of the “jewish” image, which reduces thematic, linguistic, and generic disparities

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between literary works to a common denominator whose symbolic meaning transcends national and cultural boundaries. ❊ Chekhov’s correspondence attests to the consistent function of “the jews” in his imagination as a negative marker for a wide range of phenomena. This function exists quite independently from the writer’s own experience of dealing with individuals of Jewish origin and is most probably conditioned by the unself-conscious Judeophobia of the Christian milieu in Chekhov’s native Taganrog—an attitude that becomes unacceptable in Moscow’s intelligentsia circles at the time when Chekhov is adjusting to his new situation as a budding artist in a Russian cultural capital cum liberal bastion. This process of adjustment is visible in Chekhov’s attention to the semantic split between the terms zhid and evrei. He judiciously and consistently applies evrei in print, using zhid (along with the mocking evreichik and Shmul' ) in his private letters only, albeit as consistently; except for such cases when zhid and other invectives are clearly attributable to a fictional personage as distinct from the author.3 “Jewishness” looms large in Chekhov’s professional self-image. He describes matters of remuneration for his writings as transactions with “the jews,” the origins of his employers notwithstanding; and tends to view as “jewish” his own constant concern with the material side of a writer’s existence, at times jocularly casting himself as one of “the jews” populating Russian artistic life, and at times as their diffident but willing beneficiary.4 Chekhov thus shares the view of contemporary art as colonized by “the jews”—a symbolic tool by which European writers and intellectuals convey their discomfort in the modern field of cultural production, often including non-Jews in their lists of “the jews” despoiling modern culture.5 Chekhov’s initial maladjustment to liberal Moscow, intimated by his pronounced distaste for literary philanthropy (including Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Turgenev’s “Zhid”), shows in the awkward joviality of his letter to a Jewish classmate, Solomon Kramarev, discussing the pogroms of 1881.6 Chekhov adopts this tone to convey his apolitical ideal, which informs the letter’s contrast of “those who are busy working” to the

Of Chekhov and Garlic

pogrom mob. But the tenuousness of an apolitical stance in the current ideological climate is not lost on the writer. In 1886, he makes an important career move, accepting Aleksei Suvorin’s invitation to join the widely read Petersburg daily Novoe vremia—a notoriously antisemitic organ, as Chekhov previously noted in the same letter to Kramarev. Now, however, Chekhov breaks the news to his correspondents with no mention of Novoe vremia’s politics, implicitly marking this topic as irrelevant to a struggling artist’s professional travails. At the same time, he cannot shake off his apprehension of the impact this affiliation might have on his standing with prestigious literary monthlies controlled by the liberal establishment.7 In the same year, 1886, the professional peripeties and ideological dilemmas of the young artist are exacerbated by the unraveling of Chekhov’s affair with a scion of Moscow’s Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, Evdokiia Efros. This event, in Elena Tolstaia’s opinion, serves as primary psychological motivation for his writing of “Tina.”8 Sending a copy of the text, just published by Novoe vremia, to his friend M. V. Kiseleva (13.XII.1886), the author writes, “I dare present you with a printed story in which it is told how well-known litterateurs utilize their familiarity with ‘garlic’. The enclosed feuilleton earned me 115 rubles. How could I not be favorably disposed to the Jewish tribe after this?” (PSS. Pis'ma I:227). We shall retain from this jocular note the association of “the jews” with the motif of garlic; as well as the implied link of an artist’s attitude toward or commerce with “the jews” to financial remuneration for his work, the latter being an urgent issue for Chekhov, who is currently anything but a “well-known litterateur” in Russia’s cultural marketplace. “Tina” ’s hero, lieutenant Sokol'skii, visits Susanna Moiseevna Rotshtein to collect on the debt her deceased father contracted with his cousin, landowner Kriukov, who reassigns the debts of his business partners to the officer in order to help Sokol'skii finance his proposed marriage. But recovering money from the heiress to a vodka distillery is no mean feat. Susanna has a great sexual appetite: she seduces men to business and social ends, as a way of settling her financial obligations and populating her salon. Sokol'skii falls prey to her sexual magnetism, going away empty-handed. Kriukov, a married man, tries to recover

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the debt but also succumbs to the carnal pleasures Susanna dispenses so liberally. Embarrassed, he gives Sokol'skii the required sum and dispatches him to his bride, only to find the officer back at Susanna’s, where Kriukov and the rest of the area’s male elite are drawn despite the unsavory nature of Susanna’s salon, symbolized by the image of mire in the story’s title. This image mediates between the anecdote’s realistic motivation and its mythical dimension by evoking the topos of the swamp, marked in folklore as a doorway to the orbis exterior. As Toby Clyman shows, “Tina” appeals to the reader’s familiarity with the “pattern of the heroadventure myth.”9 The opening scene—the arrival of a “snow-white” rider at a smoked-up distillery (V:361), whose chaotic aspect echoes that of Susanna’s bedroom—parodies a mythical hero’s solicitation of a demonic helper. Susanna’s handling of Sokol'skii develops the parody, recalling Baba Iaga’s hospitality and confirming the warning about “this terrible woman” (V:367) issued to Sokol'skii. Like the witch-crone, she initially refuses to see the hero, who must insist (V:361). After the initial test, he is led into her bedroom, filled with plants and inhabited by birds, not unlike Baba Iaga’s forest abode (V:362). Susanna keeps her money in exotic receptacles, one inside another (V:367), recalling the ur-villain of Russian folklore, Kashchei, who hides his death in a series of containers and, like Susanna, usurps riches and steals brides (Sokol'skii forgets his bride by the story’s end). Enhanced by the folksy tone describing Kriukov’s subsequent foray into Susanna’s domain as a “visit to the devil” (V:373–74, 376), this parodic fairy-tale atmosphere primes the reader for a battle of good and evil, all the while ironically relativizing it. The heroes of our modern fairy tale can hardly tell evil from good; and their exploits are cast in the mundane terms of modernity. Susanna is at once an emancipated and free-thinking woman (a sign of the age); a regular courtesan; and the Whore of Babylon epitomizing a society in decline. Sokol'skii is both an impoverished nobleman (another sign of the times) and an heir to legendary heroes. His surname evokes a symbol of the groom in Russian wedding lore, the falcon (sokol ); and the Russian fairy-tale hero Finist the falcon—a groom ensnared by a witch and delivered by his bride. Chekhov’s witch, however, gets to keep her prey, adding to “Tina” ’s

Of Chekhov and Garlic

mood of general unheroic failure. The full implications of this mood are visible at the intersection of Chekhov’s imaginative dependence on the myth of Saint George the dragon slayer, explored by Savelii Senderovich, and the significance with which Chekhov’s stories invest an encounter of modern heirs to legendary heroes with “the jews.”10 “Step'” (The steppe, 1888) is a case in point. Its young hero, evocatively named Egorushka (Saint George is “Egorii” in Russian folklore), is a functional orphan, like Sokol'skii, in which quality he encounters “the jews” on a trip from his rural home to a city school. As in “Tina,” the meeting mixes the mundane—a guesthouse run by “the jews,” carboncopied from “Taras Bul'ba”—with the mythical; for “the jews” appear to the imaginative child as evil spirits and a hydra (VII:38–39, 40–41).11 The ominousness of their meeting is conveyed by veiled religious symbolism. Pitying the parentless boy, “the jews” take him into their bedroom, filled like Susanna’s (V:363) with a stifling odor and items suggestive of female sexuality. The innkeeper’s wife forces Egorushka to eat the food he dislikes and, like a crone, equips him for the journey with a useful object—a heart-shaped cookie (VII:38–39).12 Yet her gift proves both unusable (it melts in Egorushka’s pocket, and he feeds it to dogs [VII:91]) and symbolic of its beneficiary’s geographic, filial, and spiritual dislocation. This dislocation is manifest in the boy’s failure to find the Eucharistic Host in a church; and in his distance from peasants, who see his eating habits as “infidel” (VII:61, 65). Chekhov’s unrealized plans for the story’s sequel reveal the writer’s vision of the boy’s uprootedness as symptomatic of the modern condition: Egorushka finds no solace at school and, as a young man, succumbs to the age’s spiritual crisis by committing suicide.13 In the context of the story’s Eucharistic symbolism, “the jews,” despite their ostensibly good intentions, function as negative parent figures, who supply the child with a false Host in the absence of the true one, which he cannot find in a declining Christian society. This society’s (spiritual) orphans can now only dream of the protection of the Virgin (VII:42), who is often depicted holding the infant Christ with a Host and whose loving care is all but parodied in the unusable heart-shaped “jewish” cookie. Stripped of traditional spiritual armor, modern Finists and Saint Georges succumb to evil. Symptomatically, “Tina”’s Susanna ­per­forms

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a parodic anti-Communion of her own, treating Sokol'skii to a breakfast of bread and port wine, which facilitates the young man’s surrender to her sexual wiles (V:370). Casting Sokol'skii’s mission as a modern version of a mythical quest for a bride, Chekhov marks the hero’s failure to subdue Susanna, whereby he would transform her from the Opponent into the Helper (the way Taras Bul'ba wields his transformative power over “the jews”), as symptomatic not only of lieutenant Sokol'skii’s personality but of the decadence of his unheroic times. This decadence is embodied by Susanna the monster, to use the lieutenant’s terminology (V:372), whose heads are femininity and “jewishness.” The amalgam of women and “the jews” is a cliché of the fin de siècle critique of European decadence (hence the consonance of Susanna’s anemic and neurotic countenance [V:365–66] with the image of the decadent male in J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours [Against nature, 1884], whose effeminate hero inhabits a stifling orangery akin to Susanna’s bedroom14). Yet this commonplace helps Chekhov articulate his fear of female sexuality, which outside of its reproductive function strikes the writer as both revolting and destructive for an artistically disposed male.15 By this logic, men who give in to sexual temptation become unproductive and effeminate (compare Sokol'skii’s lapsed marital plans and failure to return to his unit), and lose the qualities distinguishing them from women and “the jews,” namely, reason, creativity, and spiritual transcendence (see Chapter 2).16 The combination of demonic qualities—sex and alcohol—in the persona of Susanna the distillery-owner is not any more original. “The jewesses” often appear in east Slavic folklore and Russian literature as sexually available tavern-keepers.17 And since the narrator insists that “Tina”’s Gentile heroes are typical of the intelligentsia at large (V:371), we cannot but assume that Chekhov places ordinary people into familiar situations only to frustrate his reader’s expectations informed by the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. Unlike the masterplot’s commodified “jewesses,” Susanna is both an active agent of seduction and the winner of the bodies, souls, and wallets of her Christian lovers. And contrary to the masterplot’s expropriation of “the jews” by way of their daughters, it is “the jews” who use Susanna to prey on a Christian society, whose spirituality and masculinity are in decline.

Of Chekhov and Garlic

The decadent inadequacy of Chekhov’s Gentile heroes shows in the reversal of traditional gender roles in “Tina.” Susanna plays the male part both economically, as an independent woman of means, and sexually, as a dominating suitor. She is in fact the first to articulate the ambiguity of her gender, informed by the prominence of androgyny in the lexicon of “jewish” difference (see Chapter 2). She presents herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body (V:364–65, 367). The same gender ambiguity transpires in her sudden strength, when she wrests from Sokol'skii her father’s promissory notes; and in Kriukov’s hesitation about the grammatical gender of the pronouns applicable to Susanna (V:376). Ultimately, the logic of the generative model makes Susanna a cross-dressed decoy of “the jews” who loom in her background—be it her late father, in whose chair Sokol'skii first finds the heiress (V:362), or the nameless Shylock-figure in whose company we see the lieutenant at the story’s close, in Susanna’s study, no doubt planning a financial transaction (V:378). The feminine façade is one of many traps “the jews” set up for their beguiled prey. Susanna takes pride in being as cultivated as the Russian gentry. She travels abroad; she is privy to the latest artistic and intellectual fads; and as an unbaptized but “open-minded” individual, she attends church services (V:365–66, 368). Her household seems devoid not only of “the traces of a caring female touch” but of “jewishness” as well. A painting in her living room features the meeting of Jacob and Esau (V:366), which a Russian observer would see as an allegory of Christianity’s conflict with and triumph over Judaism—a deceptive reassurance for those entering the “jewish” predator’s den.18 Another such ruse is Susanna’s critique of women and “the jews” for their shared unmasculine flaws (V:364–65, 367–68). As a daughter of “the jews” lacking in apparent femininity and “jewishness,” Susanna assumes the colors of her gullible victims (Kriukov calls her a chameleon [V:374]) and, once they let their guard down, attacks them with the sexual and financial voraciousness of a “jewish” female. Susanna’s attempt to suppress all outward indices of her origin runs into the modern vision of “jewishness” as an innate biological condition. This allows Chekhov to exploit the stock encounter and recognition device for the depiction of “the jews” in disguise, wherein telltale

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signs replace ethnonyms. In “Tina,” such signs include the heroine’s name, trade, Orientalized physique, accent, and exaggerated nose (V:362, 366). But unlike Pandalevskii’s description in Rudin, “Tina” ’s promptly aborted semiotic exercise is more playful than serious, considering the emphatic transparency of the indices provided. It is as if Chekhov at once primed his reader for an assimilation narrative and spoofed a stock device associated with such narratives in Russian literature, implicitly casting doubt on the very ability of “the jews” to hide their true nature—a damning suggestion for the story’s Gentile heroes, who are incapable of resisting “jewish” evil despite its mocking obviousness. The stifling odor overcoming Sokol'skii at Susanna’s is a case in point. Although it is alternately attributed to the fumes from her distillery and to her overindulgence in a jasmine perfume (V:361–63, 365), the hostess is the first to suggest the smell’s true nature. Playing on Sokol'skii’s liberal sensibilities, she complains of being scorned by local ladies and cites as especially spurious their claim that her home reeks of garlic. She attributes the olfactory peculiarity of her house to her late father’s medicine, assuring the officer that she “does not keep garlic even in the cellar” and banishes those who smell like garlic (V:366– 67). It is now up to Sokol'skii to heed the rumor’s implicit meaning. Yet he misses it, leaving the deciphering of Susanna’s foetor judaicus to Novoe vremia’s readers, for whom garlic is a “jewish” index and who might even trace the salient features of Susanna’s persona to Wolfgang Menzel’s famous warning about the iniquity of “the jews” in disguise as embodied by Heinrich Heine—“a Jew-boy from Paris, dressed in the newest fashion, but completely pale and enervated by debauchery, [and] with a peculiar smell of musk and garlic.”19 The historical continuity of the foetor judaicus motif informs the association of “the jews” with the allium plants as symbols of deviant sexuality and flawed acculturation (see Chapter 4). As a writer “familiar with ‘garlic’,” to cite again Chekhov’s missive to Kiseleva, the author of “Tina” spends his time mastering the art of unmasking “the jews” in disguise. His papers contain onomastic exercises in mock “jewish” names, including “Rozaliia Osipovna Aromat,” whose Russified aspect jars comically with its olfactory implications (Roza is also the name of the woman inhabiting the malodorous “jewish” bedroom in “Step'”)—

Of Chekhov and Garlic

a blend that would be appreciated by all those agonizing over the threat of hidden “jewishness.”20 Lulled by Susanna’s verbiage and misled by the smell of jasmine, which obviously hides another odor, Sokol'skii misses garlic’s significance as a warning sign, blinded as he is by liberal naïveté and cultural complacence. Eager to appear open-minded regarding Susanna’s origin, he opens himself to an attack. And even after their fiasco at Susanna’s, Sokol'skii and Kriukov persist in an “insouciant life” that no omen can disturb (V:375). Although Chekhov subscribes to Novoe vremia’s critique of the intelligentsia—described in his letter to Suvorin (27.XII.1889) as a spiritually inert and intellectually lazy group without religious faith or firm convictions but with a decadent penchant for perversion and debauchery (PSS. Pis'ma III:308–9)—the writer eschews explicit verdicts in his art. His poetics of understatement makes all the more important the fuller decryption of the signs of “jewishness” ignored by Chekhov’s complacent heroes. We can clarify the connotations of a sign like the garlic motif, transparent in Chekhov’s interpretive community but obscure for today’s reader, against the backdrop of other assimilation narratives he pens at this time. Take, for example, “Perekati-pole” (Tumbleweed, 1887). The story’s hero, Aleksandr Ivanovich, is a convert to Christianity who decries the quality of the “spiritual food given to the [Russian] people,” while feasting on a “nasty sausage” (VI:255–56) that surely reeks of garlic. This nominally autobiographical sketch of Chekhov’s encounter with a baptized Jew reworks and mythologizes the hero’s prototype to such a degree that the real-life original is lost in the portrait of the Wandering Jew, whose vagrant lifestyle and nervousness (VI:262) exemplify “traveling neuropathology”—a condition considered by the psychiatric science of the day as “jewish.”21 The narrator introduces Aleksandr Ivanovich in full accord with the encounter and recognition method. This time, Chekhov deploys the technique in all seriousness, to match the impassive tone of his pseudo-documentary tale, which barely conceals skepticism (noted by a Novoe vremia critic) about assimilation’s motives and effects.22 This skepticism is conveyed by puns invisible to the imperfectly acculturated hero but obvious to the Russian reader versed in the lexicon of “jewish” difference.

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Consider one seemingly innocent detail—the shoes the narrator gives to the vagrant hero in lieu of his broken boots (VI:266). Implicitly punning on the Russian proverb “A shoemaker without shoes” (sapozhnik bez sapog), this situation calls up the stock trope of “the jews” as shoemakers, which metaphorizes their wandering state.23 The pun suggests an incongruous lack of overt “jewishness” in Aleksandr Ivanovich’s persona and the narrator’s desire to reverse this lack, which the story’s original version (later circumspectly edited) presents as sinister in light of Aleksandr Ivanovich’s plans to become a school teacher. In the narrator’s view, this future provider of “spiritual food” is himself choking on undigested liberal platitudes (VI:259, 265)—the analogy with his “horrible” sausage is intended—and like the rest of his kind, can imbue his Russian pupils with little more than “anarchy” and “moral violence” (VI:547). What “Tina”’s complacent heroes miss then in Susanna’s olfactory peculiarity, and what Chekhov’s alter ego detects in Aleksandr Ivanovich, is the status of “the jews” in disguise as a symbol and agent of social and cultural disorder.24 Furthermore, Sokol'skii and Kriukov fail to identify the warning signs amounting to the composite picture of Susanna as a parasitical undead—a traditional hypostasis of “the jews” (see Chapter 3). These include her fear of daylight; her deathly pallor; her bed’s likeness to a funeral bier; as well as the strength this frail-looking creature exhibits in her eroticized physical clash with Sokol'skii, “leaving a sweetish taste on his lips”--an allusion to a vampire’s bloody kiss (V:362–63, 366, 369–70). The vampiric implications of this clash are highlighted by the bread and wine Susanna consumes before the defeated Christian, who is forbidden to “read a sermon” about her conduct (V:370). These food items, reminiscent of the Communion (minus the church sermon), refer us to the traditional symbolic homology of the vampire’s kiss and the “jewish” consumption of blood as two parodies of the Eucharist. Chekhov once playfully offered Suvorin (15.XI.1888) to coauthor a tragedy, Holofernes, about “an excellent general’s demise through Yid craftiness [zhidovskaia khitrost']” (PSS. Pis'ma III:71). Susanna is a variation on this plot. Witness her kinship to Oscar Wilde’s pallid Salome, from the eponymous 1891 play, who besieges her passive male victim until she finally lands a bloody kiss on his dead lips (the whole por-

Of Chekhov and Garlic

trayed in Aubrey Beardsley’s 1893 illustrations as the deed of a seductive “semitic” vampire). This kinship contextualizes “Tina”’s conflation of women, “the jews,” and vampires in fin de siècle European artistic life, wherein Judith’s beheading of Holofernes merges with Salome’s demand for John the Baptist’s head in one image of the predatory and viraginous “jewish” female epitomizing the decline of European masculinity. This context allows us to appreciate Susanna’s symbolic resonance in Chekhov’s interpretive community. Correlating “Tina” ’s realistic and mythical planes, this universally understood symbolism motivates the defeat of the story’s liberal and areligious heroes by their own worldview, which disarms them in the face of perennial demonic threats embodied and vehicled by women and “the jews.”25 The same coexistence of realist and mythical planes informs Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The novel describes the confrontation of a modern culture with an ancient evil, whose defeat is contingent on the suspension of rationalism and the return to the traditional protection from the demonic—crucifixes, holy water—that is, to the faith eroded by secularism and imagined as a rampart against the destructive agency of modernity (Stoker the essayist rails against modern art for not being Christian enough). Like Chekhov, Stoker casts this agency at the intersection of female sexuality, vampirism, and “jewishness.”26 Dracula is a transplant from Eastern Europe in whose appearance androgynous effeminacy is combined with “semitic” markers: curling dark hair; a hooked nose (elsewhere Stoker calls it “Jewish aquiline”); and the pointed ears and clawlike hands of modern antisemitic iconography (Figure 5).27 Dracula is literally a moneybag: banknotes and gold pour out when he is stabbed (266). And his entire persona, from his “reeking lips” (251) to his dwellings, emits an odor that induces “a horrible feeling of nausea” (24). This odor, wherein “corruption has become itself corrupt” (221), is the good old foetor judaicus, as the man handling the count’s luggage helpfully points out, remarking that “Yer might ’ave smelled ole Jerusalem” (201) in Dracula’s London home. Dracula’s physical degeneracy goes hand in hand with his parasitism (both qualities prominent in the lexicon of “jewish” difference), since the count first appears to us as an ailing old man but grows visibly younger and more “semitic” with each intake of Christian blood. This ­medicinal

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Figure 5. Charles Léandre, Rothschild. France, 1898. In: Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur. Munich: A. Langen, 1921, p. 209.

effect draws on the blood libel legend, which occasionally explains the cannibalism of “the jews” as a self-medicating procedure. This legend is reenergized in modern Britain by the Damascus affair (1840) and thenceforth popularized in the work of the famous Orientalist Richard Burton—a blood libel advocate and friend of Stoker’s. Although Stoker never explicitly calls Dracula “jewish,” he enlists the lexicon of “jewish” difference in order to make his monster more frightening at a time when the average British reader fears the large-scale arrival of Jewish migrants fleeing Russian pogroms and discrimination. Nor does Stoker’s interpretive community need an explicit indication of Dracula’s kinship with “the jews” any more than Novoe vremia readers need an explanation of the garlic motif in “Tina.” Both authors rely on their readers’ cultural proficiency, finding it more expedient not to articulate the obvious, at least in part for fear of running afoul of liberal opinion.28 Today we may find puzzling some of the implied yet unarticulated features of the code of otherness Chekhov and Stoker share with their

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audiences. Consider Dracula’s fear of garlic. Before the success of Stoker’s novel and its migration into popular culture, garlic was not viewed in European folklore and demonology as a powerful weapon against vampires. Like other strong-smelling allium plants, garlic was associated with the underworld (see Chapter 4); but its concomitant role as a mediator between the dead and the living did not make it stand out among the means for neutralizing evil. Stoker’s papers show that his knowledge of vampire lore came from Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay “Transylvanian Superstitions” and her 1888 book The Land Beyond the Forest. The essay and the monograph detail folk beliefs about witchcraft and vampirism but mention garlic once and in passing (the book makes two transient remarks). Stoker in fact did not heed Gerard’s mention of garlic, absent in the vampire lore he copied for future use.29 We can therefore assume that the author’s ultimate decision to lay stress on garlic had to do with his demonic protagonist’s dependence on the lexicon of “jewish” difference. But since “the jews” of the European imagination are notorious consumers of garlic, why should Dracula, their close relative, be so afraid of it? Chekhov’s story provides the answer to this question, which does not seem to puzzle Stoker’s contemporaries. Susanna fears garlic not because it disagrees with her but because as a sign of “jewishness,” it belies her acculturation as an insincere and imperfect disguise. And since assimilation into Russian culture is one of the main weapons in her hunt for new victims, the smell of garlic inevitably undermines her vampiric pursuit. By the same token, it is often forgotten that Stoker’s Dracula is, among other things, a narrative of assimilation that caters to the British apprehension and resentment of current Jewish immigration. As count Dracula makes clear, he summons Jonathan Harker to Eastern Europe not so much to finalize a land purchase in London as to have a chance to brush up on his English and learn the English ways, so as not to be taken for a foreigner in Britain (26–28). Susanna shares the count’s concern with the command of the language of her victims: “I hardly resemble a Jewess,” she says to Sokol'skii. “Do you think my pronunciation really gives me away?” And the lieutenant, like Harker in response to Dracula, diplomatically compliments his hostess (V:368). Dracula flees garlic for the same reason Susanna cannot abide

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it—it ­reveals his true self, which must remain disguised if his parasitical quest is to succeed. Susanna’s sexually connoted vampirism is a spitting image of the count’s tactics. If the affluent Dracula buys his way into British society, debauching its women and thereby undermining its fabric, Susanna, whose financial independence threatens patriarchal order, usurps the money and the seed of Russian males, who thus become as unproductive as she is. “Tina”’s misogyny is mirrored in Dracula, much of whose original appeal derived from its hostility to female sexuality unleashed by the count’s kiss and otherwise absent from the novel’s Victorian male-female relations. By preying exclusively on women, the androgynous count releases their hidden energy, turning them into erotically seductive vampires and showing that female blood retains the memory of the bestial past, which can reenergize an ancient demon. Only vampires are voluptuous and sexually appealing in Dracula. And since all of the novel’s vampires are women, the count reigns over them like a pimp (another “jewish” occupation [Chapters 2, 3]) or like Susanna, who controls the complaisant male population of her salon like a madam managing prostitutes in a bordello (V:377). Adding insult to injury, both vampires confound their victims with social and cultural ambition; Dracula does so by virtue of his nobility and wealth, while Susanna’s striving to host a fashionable salon crowns a recent socioeconomic ascent visible in the tastelessness of her pretentious furnishings (V:365–66). Insolence (naglost'), compensating for the absence of beauty and wisdom (V:370, 372), is the key tool in Susanna’s self-fashioning in the image of the Jewish hostesses (Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Sara Levy) whose salons shaped German intellectual life at the turn of the nineteenth century. Insolence and its synonyms are also the code terms in Russian literature for the social and cultural ambitions of “the jews” as symptoms of capitalist upward mobility to which Chekov is sensitive by virtue of his humble origins. Witness his sarcastic comments about the nouveau riche Poliakov clan’s stay in ­Biarritz; or about a Moscow paper run by the “Jerusalem nobility.”30 In this context, the emergence of assimilated Jewish artists, critics, and publishers has special resonance for those writers who, like Chekhov, use “jewishness” to conceptualize the professionalization and commod-

Of Chekhov and Garlic

ification of literature. Their response to this intrusion is facilitated by Wagner’s writings, which are intermittently discussed in the Russian press in Chekhov’s day.31 Chekhov’s letters and notebooks bear traces of reflection on “jewishness” in modern cultural life that echo Wagner’s fear of “jewish” parasitism. Chekhov conveys this fear by the garlic motif, possibly under the influence of Novoe vremia’s art critic Viktor Burenin, who describes the commercialization of culture by an olfactory metaphor— “the stifling aroma of our times.”32 Discussing with ­Suvorin (18.V.1891) editorial changes in the review Severnyi vestnik (The northern messenger), Chekhov refers to the Russian-Jewish critic Akim Volynskii as Filokserov (that is, phylloxera, a parasitic insect)—a pun on his surname, Flekser, coined by Novoe vremia. Playing on the polysemy of the word dukh (spirit, smell), Chekhov states, “Mlle ­Gurevich, Mr Filokserov will not improve Severnyi vestnik; they will bring in the spirit [dukh] of the Jewish philosopher they have translated [Spinoza] but without his wisdom and talent; the whole affair will not go beyond the smell [dukh] of garlic” (PSS. Pis'ma IV:233). Garlic’s symbolism, in this instance, is explained in Chekhov’s 1897 notebook entry castigating Russian-Jewish critics as “ignorant of and alien to the true Russian life, its spirit, form, and humor which they completely misunderstand.”33 And while we cannot justly attribute this view to Chekhov the man, who uses the notebooks as a testing ground for the ideas of his heroes, the entry does reflect his awareness that readers are privy to this view and can attribute it to the author, even if it is aired by a fictional character. Having established that in Chekhov’s imaginative lexicon “garlic” stands, among other things, for “jewish” cultural parasitism, we can read the writer’s jocular note to Kiseleva, which credits “garlic” with securing “Tina” good royalties, as a metacomment—first of all on the story’s place in the Wagnerian discourse about “jewishness” in culture; and second on Chekhov’s own engagement with “jewishness” in the quality of a modern artist who must contend with the commercialized reality of the literary marketplace. “Tina” declares its place in the European discourse about the “jewishness” of modern cultural life by making Susanna a transparent copy

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of Sarah Bernhardt. In Chekhov’s day, the actress is an iconic modern artist thanks to her financial success, and an iconic femme fatale whose image informs that of Wilde’s Salome and vice versa. Reviewing Bern­ hardt’s 1881 Russian tour, Chekhov ironizes about the gap between her reputation (market value) and perceived artistic mediocrity. He coyly traces this disparity to the ethnic origins of the actress, “whose ­Parisian-Semitic appearance defies description” (XVI:8). His verdict echoes Turgenev’s epistolary rebuke of the “untalented” actress as an insolent impostor full of “lies, falsity, and cheap Parisian chic.” But Chekhov goes a step further since Turgenev never explicitly links Bernhardt’s art to her origin, unlike most of her current detractors. Recycling his vision of Bernhardt in “Tina,” Chekhov makes Susanna’s own blend of chic and “semitism” reminiscent of the diva’s popular image. Susanna’s physique recalls the contemporary construction and conceptualization of Bernhardt’s ailing “jewish” body as the epitome of physical decadence. Susanna’s character traits reiterate Marie Colombier’s mock biography of Bernhardt, Les Mémoires de Sarah ­Barnum (1883), which casts the actress as an ugly, money-hungry, sexually promiscuous, and destructive female obsessed with social ascent. Finally, the Bernhardt paradigm in “Tina” is accentuated, as Elena Tolstaia points out, by the story’s indebtedness to La Glu (The leech, 1881), by Jean Richepin, who famously lived out the plot of his own novel through a selfdestructive affair with Sarah Bernhardt.34 Susanna is an actress in her own right. Without Bernhardt’s theatrical credentials, she successfully uses her chameleon act to the same lucrative and destructive ends. The Wagnerian discourse about “jewishness” in culture is echoed even in the name of “Tina”’s heroine, which critics trace to the Book of Daniel’s slandered Susannah, concluding that the cognomen of Chekhov’s willing seductress is as deceptive as her assimilated looks.35 But another subtext may be at least as important. Since Chekhov’s attention to “the jews” in disguise focuses on their cultural impact, he has good reasons to heed the conflict opposing Turgenev’s Susanna, who combines successful acculturation with a true artistic gift, to Ratch the Wagner-figure. Besides their name, Turgenev’s and Chekhov’s heroines share an “oriental,” ailing, and neurotic aspect; and the same age of twenty-seven, which is Chekhov’s own at the time of “Tina”’s ap-

Of Chekhov and Garlic

pearance. Both heroines use the art of storytelling to impress their innocence on a male audience. But similarity ends there. The true story written by Turgenev’s Susanna degenerates into the yarn Chekhov’s Susanna spins to beguile her prey. And since the reader of “Neschastnaia” does walk away with a feeling of residual ambiguity about the heroine’s virtue, it is logical for Chekhov to rewrite Turgenev’s story from Ratch’s point of view in order to show that rumors about Susanna as a courtesan are not so slanderous after all; and that, consequently, her art is also not as honest and pure as it appears. Chekhov polemically engages Turgenev in the very name of his heroine. At this time, “Neschastnaia” is read as a Judeophile narrative exemplifying the liberal ideal of Jewish acculturation.36 Opposing to Susanna Ivanovna “the daughter of Ivan” his Susanna Moiseevna “the daughter of Moses,” Chekhov takes on in Turgenev’s persona Russia’s liberals and their theoretical Judeophilia. Incidentally, his Susanna is also a liberal and a Judeophile: she just cannot abide the smell of “the jews” but otherwise “adores Shmuls and Iankels” (V:367). Turning the tables on the contrast between Susanna Ivanovna’s perfect Russian and the faltering command of Ratch, who hypocritically accuses her of foreignness, Chekhov mocks his heroine’s claim to Russianness by making her prove it with linguistic examples, whose full import she misses because it is visible only to the true speakers of Russian, to wit, those versed in the Russian code of cultural otherness. Susanna contrasts her Russian linguistic performance to that of the poorly assimilated “jews,” who say pekh instead of pukh (V:386). But she is unaware that pekh, which in itself has no Russian meaning, phonetically evokes the term Judenpech (the “jewish” pitch). This term was first coined by Arthur Schopenhauer in reference to a salient feature of the “jewish” body, its peculiar voice; it was popularized by Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg, whose positive heroes, Hans and Eva, pun on the German word Pech (bad luck) to mock the “jewish” art of the singer-villain Beckmesser even as a cobbler works on his broken shoes (compare Aleksandr Ivanovich’s shoe mishap in “Perekati-pole”).37 And as for pukh—bird down—this common sign of “jewish” sexuality and effeminacy highlights Susanna’s origin, providing an insight into Chekhov’s imagination, wherein “jewish” bird symbolism and pitch merge

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in the image of a turkey (in contrast to the more common goose); hence, Sokol'skii’s remark that Susanna “must be nervous like a turkey” (V:366), or the description of Roza, the innkeeper’s wife in “Step',” whose voice has a “turkey-like pitch” (VII:39).38 This desire to spoof liberal Judeophile rhetoric, manifest in “Tina”’s dialogue with Turgenev, also animates Chekhov’s aforementioned offer to Suvorin to remake Aleksandr Serov’s opera Judith (1863) into ­Holofernes, effectively reconceptualizing a tale of suffering and sacrifice as that of “Yid craftiness.” The same desire underlies the parody of Judeo­phile assimilation narratives in “Perekati-pole.” This story picks up where the narrator of Orzeszkowa’s Meir Ezofowicz leaves the eponymous “jewish” rebel, watching Meir quit his hometown and wondering what will become of him. Chekhov answers this query with his discouraging hero Aleksandr Ivanovich the tumbleweed. Fashioning his “former Isaak” (VI:258) in Meir’s likeness, Chekhov casts him as both the hero and the generator of a Judeophile assimilation narrative, that is, as a storyteller and an artist. While questioning their acculturation, Chekhov’s story also ridicules the artistic pretension of “the jews” in disguise. It is then hardly an accident that Aleksandr Ivanovich’s assimilationist attack on the traditionalist “jews” (VI:257–58) recalls similar jibes in Meir Ezofowicz and in contemporary Russian-Jewish autobiographies— notably in Grigorii Bogrov’s Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew, 1870– 72)—which herald their authors’ entry into Russian art and culture. Chekhov’s narrator problematizes this entry by subverting Aleksandr Ivanovich’s autobiographical monologue with comments about its awkward form, including the storyteller’s incongruous self-­importance; the Iankel'-like expressionism of his face; and his linguistic flaws (VI:257– 60). As a result, a Judeophile assimilation narrative is projected on a genre that is popularized in Chekhov’s day by the Russian-Jewish writer and raconteur Pavel Veinberg, whose Scenes from Jewish Life (Stseny iz ­evreiskogo byta) uses the troubles of the poorly assimilated “jews” to comic effect.39 Incidentally, this peculiar genre is professionally practiced by the brother of the innkeeper in Chekhov’s “Step'”—the rebel Solomon, whose assimilationist rejection of the “jewish” milieu jars so much with his Iankel'-like aspect that Solomon’s emancipation rhetoric strikes his audience as a lunatic’s rant (VII:33–36, 39–42).

Of Chekhov and Garlic

At this stage of his career, Chekhov’s keen attention to “jewish” cultural performance (assimilation) and to its artistic description bears directly on his status as a recent provincial arrival with little social or cultural capital who is struggling to secure a place in the Russian field of cultural production. Stigmatizing the ambitions of “the jews” in disguise, he effectively displaces his own striving for social recognition (assimilation) in Russia’s cultural center and his desire to become a professional of culture. This desire makes the young Chekhov’s social progress dependent on his career as an artist rather than a physician (studying medicine in the 1880s, he views it as a fallback option should he fail as a writer). Chekhov’s vision of art as a tool of social mobility first appears in his play Bezottsovshchina (The fatherless, 1878), written in Taganrog. This play testifies to the aspiring artist’s awareness of and discomfort with the reality of modern cultural life as a marketplace exploitable to the ends of socioeconomic success; hence, the articulation of this reality by the play’s “jews,” one of whom says, “If I could write, I would most certainly write for newspapers. Firstly, because it brings you money, and secondly, because writers are for some reason considered smart people” (XI:26). We should not then underestimate “Tina”’s function as Chekhov’s psychological projection venue, wherein “the jews” absorb what the writer perceives as the negative aspects of modern authorship. His metadescriptive note to Kiseleva says as much, linking Chekhov’s lucrative “familiarity with ‘garlic’” to his status as an artist who thrives by following the literary market’s “jewish” rules. Another ironic self-­ comment addressed to Kiseleva (13.XII.1886) further clarifies Chekhov’s vision of the cultural marketplace. Here the writer relates his success at Novoe vremia by a bittersweet boast: “Alas and wow! In ­Petersburg I am becoming fashionable like Nana” (PSS. Pis'ma I:278). Invoking the heroine of Emile Zola’s eponymous 1880 novel—a courtesan destroying her lovers in pursuit of social mobility—Chekhov casts his artistic self as a prostitute both pleasing and harming his reading clientele. And he indeed does both in “Tina” by relying on the ­clichés of feminine and “jewish” evil, which all but comfort the identity of his male Gentile reader, thus leaving unchallenged that very cultural complacency “Tina” excoriates in Sokol'skii and Kriukov.

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Chekhov thereby joins those “destructive modern writers” he claims to love despite the fact that they “spread decadence in France and help the devil breed in Russia the slugs and wood-lice we call the intelligentsia” (letter to Suvorin [27.XII.1889], PSS. Pis'ma III:308–9).40 His mention of Nana suggests, among other things, that Susanna holds keys to Chekhov’s self-image as an artist playing by the “jewish” rules of the literary market. Hence the coincidence of their ages and ailing physiques (the consumptive Chekhov is surely conscious of sharing his fashionably modern malady with Bernhardt). “Tina”’s attack on “jewishness” in modern culture, and on the intelligentsia’s surrender to it, contains much self-criticism, which may be the main source of the story’s ironic undercurrent. This irony shows the author’s awareness that, while exposing Susanna’s wiles, he himself engages in a “jewish” activity, and to the same lucrative ends, by pursuing a professional artistic career. In this light, Chekhov’s failed engagement to Evdokiia Efros—an educated, culturally ambitious, and independent Jewish woman—appears to furnish not only “Tina”’s primary motivation but also a tool for articulating the writer’s personal and professional perplexities. Chekhov’s letters contrast his dire straits to the financial security of Efros the “rich little Jewess” (bogataia zhidovochka). One letter both projects and parodies the young writer’s constant concern with money by way of an anecdote illustrating the “jewish” solution to the predicament of a struggling artist. In this anecdote, Efros’s “little Yid brother” (­brat-zhidok) is a con artist counterfeiting banknotes with marvelous realism. His immoral craft implicitly serves as a foil for the noble struggle of Chekhov the true artist, who is thus freed from the financial (“jewish”) aspect of modern authorship.41 Similar projection helps Chekhov negotiate his maladjustment in the positivist culture of Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia. He compensates his self-confessed loss of faith by jibes, made in front of Efros, about the “worthlessness of young Jews,” whose acculturation he treats as a sign of spiritual indifference despite the fact that his marital plans falter because Efros refuses baptism.42 The Efros episode immerses Chekhov in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. His inability to vanquish “the jews” by appropriating their daughter puts him in one category with the heroes of “Tina,” in contrast to the spiritually secure and manly heroes of traditional art and

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folklore.43 This personal failure informs Chekhov’s return to the masterplot in his comedy Ivanov (1887), which like “Tina” uses its “jewish” heroine as a litmus test for proving the inadequacy of Gentile males (XII:226, 228). With respect to “the jews,” the only difference between the story and the play is that the former employs a demonic heroine, whereas the latter showcases an angelic one, albeit equally schematic and unconvincing.44 The age of “Tina”’s lieutenant Sokol'skii (not yet twenty-eight [V:364]) and his status of a needy groom recall Chekhov’s situation in 1886. Since Sokol'skii’s fiancée is never called by name, let alone described, Susanna functions as her substitute, linking “Tina” to the ­Evdokiia Efros story. The hero of this story, Anton Chekhov, is on a quest for a bride and money, during which he runs into a Judith-­Salome of his own, judging by his epistolary fixation on Efros’s nose as an index of “jewishness” and of the “still unclear link of the nose to sexuality.” 45 This image of a Judith-Salome confronting a Gentile male is more urgent for Chekhov than for Turgenev: the inadequacy of Turgenev’s males causes Susanna’s demise; but the same inadequacy makes “Tina”’s males succumb morally to their Susanna (physical degradation is implied by the promiscuous female’s default status as the source of syphilis). In this respect, the male-female relations in “Tina” echo those in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Judeophile stories, whose acculturated “jewesses” sexually subjugate Gentile males.46 The sadomasochist dynamic of Susanna’s encounters with men looks like a finishing touch in Chekhov’s spoof of liberal Judeophilia, whose daydream of sexualized abuse “Tina” turns upside down. Sokol'skii and Kriukov engage Susanna in a sexually exciting physical confrontation to counter and punish her actions. And both are reduced to a humiliatingly passive role by “the jews” they imagined as weak and submissive. Chekhov’s parody of the Judeophile discourse’s taboo fantasy targets liberal sensibility at its weakest point, whose very existence goes unacknowledged for fear of public censure. This is not to say that the discreet pleasures of liberalism are foreign to Chekhov. While mocking them as the soft underbelly of an alien ideology, he uses the same fantasies to allay his insecurity vis-à-vis female sexuality. The artist admonishes on occasion his friend and colleague

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V. V. Bilibin (11.III.1886) for writing literature “like a lover who is told by a woman: You are too gentle . . . Be rougher! (Apropos: a woman is like a hen—she likes to be beaten in certain moments)” (PSS. Pis'ma I:212–13). In the same year, Chekhov does just that in “Tina,” roughing up Evdokiia Efros by making her literary alter ego a courtesan in an attempt to compensate for his own flop in the daughter of “the jews” masterplot. Chekhov persists in this need for masculine vindication at the expense of “the jews” long after the end of the Efros story. The recourse to the label “dog” and threats of violence as terms of endearment in letters to his wife, actress Ol'ga Knipper, may mean much more than the residual traces of the author’s earlier misogyny, as Senderovich argues. Consider another term of endearment he uses in this correspondence— “little Jewess” (zhidovochka)—the term he formerly applied to Efros. Knipper, who is not Jewish, particularly resents this appellation, presumably because of its implications for her looks and personality, and because it problematically conflates her with the ur-actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt.47 But such conflation is important for Chekhov—it fuses the signs of his personal and professional insecurities into one figure whose “beating” assuages the angst of a modern male artist. For although Knipper may not know it, Chekhov is certainly aware that during her 1881 tour, Bernhardt did receive a “beating” from a pogrom mob in Odessa, which realized Turgenev’s wet dream by stoning her carriage and shouting the Yiddish form of her name, followed by the Yiddish interjection expressing alarm: “Surka, gevalt!” 48 ❊ Chekhov’s decision to publish “Tina” in a notoriously antisemitic venue suggests his readiness to absorb criticism from the Left for the sake of advancing his image, articulated in his letters, as an apolitical artist who spurns ideological concerns in order to expose candidly the unseemly sides of the modern age.49 This defense might have worked, seeing as the initial reactions to “Tina” predictably followed the liberalconservative divide, had not the story’s appearance coincided with the outcry over Semen Nadson’s premature death from tuberculosis, which the intelligentsia blamed on the poet’s antisemitic vilification in

Of Chekhov and Garlic

Novoe vremia. Although Chekhov thinks highly of Nadson and agrees that the poet was mistreated, the writer’s affiliation with Novoe vremia squarely places him on the wrong side of public opinion. “They are practically drowning me in contempt for my work in Novoe vremia,” writes Chekhov to his brother Aleksandr. “But nobody hisses as much as the pharmacists, honest little Jews, and suchlike scum [ farmachevty, tsestnye evreichiki i prochaia svoloch'],” he goes on in the tone of Novoe vremia’s “jew-speak,” implying the persecuting hand of “the jews” in the liberal opprobrium he suffers.50 In this heated context, Chekhov’s self-stylization as an apolitical writer, imbued with the quasi-scientific objectivity of the French naturalists he invokes in relation to “Tina,” becomes susceptible to charges of opportunism, harming his public image. For example, Chekhov’s decision to send a letter of protest to editor V. M. Lavrov, whose ­Russkaia mysl' (Russian thought) calls him “a priest of unprincipled scribbling,” is a page in the long history of antagonism begun by Lavrov’s dismissal of “Tina” as “the kind of stuff written only for Novoe vremia” and continued by Chekhov’s refusal to publish in Russkaia mysl' out of revulsion, as he puts it, for the “dull censorship” of the liberal establishment.51 Reacting to the Left’s impatience with his defiance of its taboos, Chekhov assimilates his critics to “the jews” and their apologists. Spurning the didactic art of “theoretical moralists,” whom he associates with the liberal camp and describes to Suvorin as “extremely irritating,” Chekhov chooses as symbols of tendentious writing Russian-Jewish litterateurs and the Russian practitioners of literary Judeophilia, such as Grigorii Machtet, whose saccharine “Zhid” (1887) appears at the height of Chekhov’s run-in with the liberal establishment.52 Partaking of the pan-European reflection on “jewishness” in culture and mocking the Judeophile literary recipe for its sacrifice of art to ideology, Chekhov the writer does more than express Chekhov the man’s view of “the jews.” Both activities furnish the medium and the tools for his aesthetic and philosophical self-affirmation as a “free artist [. . .] neither liberal nor conservative,” who is opposed to political engagements as detrimental to creativity.53 In practice, Chekov’s choice of Novoe ­vremia as his editorial home is seen as a political parti pris. The writer becomes aware of this during the Nadson scandal, which as Elena T­olstaia

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argues, forces him to be more mindful of liberal taboos, especially on the subject of “the jews.” Chekhov never revises his idea of “the jews,” as testified by the inclusion of “Tina” in his first (1888) and subsequent story collections. But as a publicist writing about “the jews,” he resorts to the protection of a pseudonym.54 This of course is only a half-measure, for when it comes to art the contemporary reader routinely attributes the views of fictional characters to their creators. Chekhov knows this from the bitter experience of Ivanov—yet another of his assimilation narratives that subtly subvert the Judeophile discourse. At first glance, the play’s heroine, Anna (formerly Sara), is as innocent a victim of prejudice as Turgenev’s Susanna. Among the rumors spread by her detractors we find one about Anna’s feasting on garlic in the cellar of her house (XI:240)—a rumor recalling the disclaimer of “Tina”’s Susanna (the phonetic consonance of their names is hardly accidental) about garlic in her own cellar. And although Anna’s hounding is clearly unjust, Chekhov’s symbolic language generates yet another meaning that saps the apparent Judeophile message. Finding this meaning in the evaluation of Anna’s piano skills as “reeking of garlic” (XI:221), a censor eliminated it as offensive, putting Chekhov in the position of an artist chided both by the official Right and the oppositional Left. What did the censor see in this simile besides a show of bias by a personage who could hardly be confused with the author? And why did the author strike all mention of garlic in rewriting his comedy into a tragedy a year later? We find the answer in the lexicon of “jewish” difference, which Chekhov shares with his censor and in which garlic functions as a sign of artistic inferiority equivalent to racial markers in contemporary antisemitic iconography (Figure 6). And although it is debatable whether Chekhov intentionally opens to multiple interpretations his ostensibly Judeophile play written to improve his standing with the liberal reader, or simply loses control of his material, one thing is clear—after 1887, he could no longer ignore the suggestive symbolic power of the language of “jewish” difference and its concomitant potential uses.55 This knowledge comes in handy during Chekhov’s repositioning in the field of cultural production, following the writer’s realization that Novoe vremia and its publisher Suvorin (with whom Chekhov maintains

Of Chekhov and Garlic

Figure 6. Caricature from the antisemitic almanac Kikeriki. Austria, 1902.

a lifelong friendship) no longer suit his professional ambition.56 Moving in 1893 from the increasingly isolated conservative daily to prestigious liberal reviews, whose “dull censorship” he once promised to avoid “save for a case of extreme necessity” (letter to A. N. Maslov [7.IV.1888], PSS. Pis'ma II:237), Chekhov makes a transition that improves his chances of success in the literary marketplace and, by this token, his economic and social standing. This transition requires adjustments in the writer’s public image—a process whose traces we find, for example, in Chekhov’s later insistence that he broke with Novoe vremia in 1891, although in actual fact this year was marked only by his decision to start contributing to Suvorin’s daily under a pseudonym or anonymously.57 Even more importantly, Chekhov appears to counterbalance his pragmatic (“jewish”) compromise with liberal opinion by subverting its symbol—the Judeophile discourse—through the suggestive power of the code of cultural otherness his readers understand all too well. Opening an ostensibly Judeophile narrative to mutually exclusive readings, the way he does in Ivanov, the writer can assert his aesthetic and

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philosophical rejection of politically engaged art by holding a mirror to liberal readers and critics. The fact that they understand, and thus share, the lexicon of “jewish” difference shows that they are “up to their ears in lies, both theirs and those of others” (letter to Maslov [7.IV.1888]); or as Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” puts it, that they “purposely belie themselves” by “holding immoral and taboo all open proclamations of their natural repugnance against Jewishness” (80–81). Such implicit debunking of liberal hypocrisy no doubt helps Chekhov negotiate his deference to the market reality of artistic life and to the liberal code of political correctness, which encroach on his ideal of creative freedom and which he thus conceptualizes as “jewish” phenomena. ❊ It follows that divorcing Chekhov’s “jews” from the original context of the writer’s professional and personal circumstances, we miss much of  this mythical actor’s polysemic complexity in his stories. A case in point is “Skripka Rotshil'da,” conceived in 1892, written in late 1893, and published in February 1894, that is, precisely at the time of Chekhov’s transition from Novoe vremia to the liberal literary camp. This story is commonly read today as a Judeophile appeal for tolerance, despite the fact that such unambiguous didacticism would go against everything we know about Chekhov’s aesthetics and philosophy of art. A perfunctory reading of “Skripka Rotshil'da” encourages its identification with the Judeophile literary formula. The story’s hero, the old coffin maker Iakov Ivanov, alias Bronze, is an embittered, callous, and inept businessman, inheriting his sullenness from the protagonist of Pushkin’s story “Grobovshchik” (The coffin maker, 1830). Iakov is also a gifted violinist, who is only occasionally invited to play in the local klezmer band because he mistreats its flutist, “a red-haired, gaunt Yid [zhid] with a whole network of red and blue capillaries in his face and bearing the surname of the well-known money-bag Rothschild” (VIII:297). Iakov prefers the term zhid; the narrator, evrei, although his constant use of Iakov’s indirect speech makes this distinction tenuous. Heeding the Judeophile literary recipe’s reliance on “the jews” of “Taras Bul'ba,” Chekhov makes conspicuous their imprint on Rothschild, as if to highlight the hackneyed nature of the type he has already explored in

Of Chekhov and Garlic

“Step'.”58 Rothschild’s aspect and social status jar comically with his cognomen, undermining the association of “the jews” with capitalism—a device tested in Orzeszkowa’s “Silny Samson,” which invokes the house of Rothschild to contrast a proverbial sign of economic exploitation to the indigent and innocuous object of the Judeophile imagination.59 Besides being a Judeophobe, Iakov brutalizes his wife, Marfa, who reacts to abuse similarly to the effeminate and defenseless Rothschild. But Marfa’s death shakes Iakov from spiritual stupor by highlighting his mortality and enabling him to heed the universal suffering inherent in the human condition. Iakov conveys his awakening, made poignant by the realization that he has wasted his life and poisoned that of others, in the sorrowful tune he plays before death, even as Rothschild brings him a message from the klezmer band’s leader. There ensues a scene some critics interpret as a show of reconciliation in grief, and some contemporaries emulate in their own Judeophile writings. Joshua Kunitz sums up this reading: “A Christian and a Jewish soul meet, and a chord struck by one stirs a sympathetic vibration in the other.”60 Iakov even calls Rothschild “brother,” as if to rectify the Cossack rejection of Iankel’s appeal to brotherhood in “Taras Bul'ba.” He bequeaths his violin to Rothschild, who goes on to play Iakov’s last tune to much acclaim from tearful Russian audiences, thereby realizing the liberal ideal of humanist art that transcends social and cultural divisions. When performed by Rothschild, who “interprets plaintively even the most cheerful tunes” (VIII:298), Iakov’s melody becomes a figure of “jewish” suffering, whose expression through mournful music is a stock sign of a text’s appurtenance to the Judeophile discourse, a sign introduced in Russian literature by Gleb Uspenskii and most likely inspired by Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby, wherein “the jews” refute the charge of cultural infertility by recalling “the immortal melodies that we sang more than two thousand years ago by the waters of Babylon and wept” (266).61 Chekhov thus lays claim to the Judeophile recipe and follows it by raising the parochial grief of “the jews” to the universal level of the human condition, which unites Iakov and Rothschild. Or so at least goes a readily available reading, cleansing the author’s image of its Novoe vremia brand. In this reading, Iakov’s contrition for abusing Marfa and Rothschild functions as a parable of Chekhov’s regret for mistreating

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“the jews” and women in “Tina”; and Rothschild’s elevation to the status of Iakov’s artistic equal and heir comforts the Russian-Jewish reader. But the ideological overdetermination of this reading makes its adepts oblivious to the devil in the story’s painstakingly chosen details. Consider the scene of reconciliation that facilitates the liberal appropriation of Chekhov, wherein “Skripka Rotshil'da” functions as a proof of the writer’s departure from the intolerance of his youth. ­Canine symbolism is prominent in Rothschild’s image. It stands to reason that his gradual humanization in the story, paramount to its Judeophile reading, should include the suppression of such a charged marker of “jewishness.” Instead, Iakov’s last encounter with Rothschild is transparently cast as that of a master condescendingly showing signs of favor to his recently chastised and still fearful dog. A carbon copy of ­Iankel' breaking to Taras Bul'ba the news of Andrii’s defection, Chekhov’s Rothschild confidently crossed the courtyard halfway but, noticing Iakov, halted abruptly, shriveled and, probably out of fear, started to make signs with his hands as if trying to show on his fingers what time it was. “Come, it’s all right,” said Iakov gently and beckoned him to come closer, “Come!” Looking at him suspiciously and fearfully, Rothschild began to approach and stopped two meters away. “Only would you be so kind not to beat me!” he said, crouching. “Moisei Il'ich sent me again. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ they said, ‘go tell Iakov once more that there’s no way we can play at that wedding without them’” [. . .] “I can’t . . .” muttered Iakov, breathing heavily. “I’m sick, brother.” And he began to play again; and tears dropped from his eyes on the violin. Rothschild listened attentively, standing sideways, arms crossed. Little by little, the scared and puzzled expression on his face gave way to a mournful and suffering one; he rolled his eyes, as if in some tormenting rapture, and said, “Vakh-kh! . . .” Tears slowly streamed down his cheeks, dropping on his green coat. (VIII:305)

It takes a leap of faith to read this scene as that of fraternal reconciliation. But does it reflect the aforementioned aporiae inherent in literary Judeophilia, whose ideological intent finds no adequate imaginative means for artistic implementation? In other words, is this dubious reunion an unwitting failure of Chekhov’s good ideological intentions,

Of Chekhov and Garlic

or might it be something else entirely? Even overlooking the crude exaggeration of feeling in the heroes’ profuse shedding of tears, which by its very ostentatiousness mocks sentimental Judeophile art, we cannot ignore the scene’s subtext in Chekhov’s “Perekati-pole.” In both stories (VI:253; VIII:301), an encounter with “the jews” coincides with the feasts of John the Evangelist (May 8) and Nicolas the Wonderworker (May 9), which as I discuss later, have personal significance for Chekhov. Iakov’s trust-building gestures toward the intruding Rotshchild echo those of the narrator in “Perekati-pole,” who partakes of the Wandering Jew’s sausage, “fit for the teeth of a real watchdog,” to earn the intruder’s trust (VI:256). Having thus cast him as a dog, the story’s original version links Aleksandr Ivanovich’s mournful autobiography to musical performance, describing the sausage he carries in his pocket as “musical,” since it is made for “a musician’s stomach” (VI:546).62 For our purposes, it is immaterial whether Chekhov intentionally links the two stories through the parallelism of motifs and situations. What matters is that “Perekati-pole,” which parodically subverts Judeophile assimilation narratives, enables another reading of Iakov’s patronizing condescension, one that belies the common interpretation of the climactic scene in “Skripka Rotshil'da” as a “meeting of souls” that “vibrate sympathetically” (Kunitz) and “unite Russian and Jew in the redeeming poetry of suffering” (R. L. Jackson).63 Yet I find it equally hard to agree with Gary Rosenshield’s reading of this scene as the inadvertent thwarting of Chekhov’s candid Judeophile agenda by his idiosyncratic focus on the breakdown of human communication. The critic saps his own argument, comparing “Skripka Rotshil'da” to Dostoevskii’s “Pokhorony ‘Obshchecheloveka’” (The funeral of a universal man), a chapter in Dnevnik pisatelia (The diary of a writer; March 1877) wherein the author placates his Jewish critics by illustrating his ideal of brotherhood with a tale about a philanthropic Lutheran doctor who delivers a “Jew-kid” (evreichik) and secretly leaves money for his indigent parents. Casting the whole as a Nativity scene, Dostoevskii implicitly polemicizes with “the jews” in this ostensibly Judeo­phile narrative: the thirty kopeks the doctor leaves behind evoke the sum “the jews” pay for Jesus (in Slavic folklore, Judas is paid in local currencies). The Christian doctor thereby “turns the other cheek”—a

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detail Rosenshield ignores. Given Dostoevskii’s sensitivity to religious symbols, this detail is hardly more accidental than Chekhov’s rendition of Iakov’s “fraternal” reunion with Rothschild as that of a master and his dog. Both authors establish a hierarchy comforting the Gentile reader in a feeling of superiority to the object of his Judeophile philanthropy.64 In “Skripka Rotshil'da,” this superiority is conveyed by a host of details whose religious symbolism clashes with the story’s Judeophile reading. As in “Tina,” Chekhov puts much stock in the names of his heroes. Iakov’s everyman surname, Ivanov, follows the familiar pattern in Chekhov’s work—an encounter with “the jews” tests the average Russian in the same way the devil tests the average Christian. Iakov is the Russian for Jacob, the Jewish patriarch called Israel by God and whose name is prominent in the economy of “Taras Bul'ba,” where it is borne by Iankel', Rothschild’s prototype. As a Russian Orthodox Jacob, Iakov Ivanov is new Israel, with all the connotations of Christian replacement theology. At the story’s pivotal moment, Iakov pines on a riverbank by the pussy willow, which Marfa recalled before her death as the place where they had sat singing joyous songs at a happy time in their life. R. L. Jackson argues that, akin to the Hebrews mourning their exile by the rivers of Babylon, in Psalm 137, Iakov mourns his existential exile; and their shared exilic condition on earth mediates Iakov’s reconciliation with Rothschild.65 But this reading does not heed Chekhov’s work on individual detail. Jackson’s point of reference is Psalm 137 in the King James Bible, where the mourning Hebrews hang their harps upon­ ­willows. But Chekhov’s subtext is the same Psalm (numbered 136) in the Russian Bible, which features pussy willows—an image of tremendous significance for his Orthodox reader as a symbol of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and of the week preceding Easter. That Chekhov’s choice of tree is deliberate can be seen from his initial intent to lay the story’s scene at Easter (hence the residual symbolism of the days of the paschal week in the story’s final version); and from the coincidence of the tree’s appearance (VIII:303) to that in Chekhov’s Easter story “Verba” (Pussy willow, 1883; II:102).66 Additionally, owing to its dualism in folklore, the pussy willow denotes the two sides of Iakov’s existence. As a young tree, it stands for health and fertility—and it was by its young incarnation that Marfa and Iakov sat fifty years ago,

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singing and marveling at their baby girl (VIII:301). As the old tree now adumbrating the childless and despondent Iakov (VIII:303), the pussy willow denotes illness and infertility and is the devil’s hiding place. Incidentally, this tree is also a “jewish” locus: east Slavic legends occasionally designate the wood of an old pussy willow as the material from which “the jews” fashioned nails for the Crucifixion.67 It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Easter symbolism in Chekhov’s story of spiritual death and rebirth, which is structured as Iakov’s liberation from “jewishness.” There are many qualities the septuagenarian coffin maker shares with “the jews” and must overcome through spiritual regeneration. First of these is the semantics of obsolescence (see Chapters 1, 4) marking not only his body and soul but the town he inhabits, populated “mostly by the old people, who die so rarely that it is just a pity” (VIII:297). The resulting impression that Iakov lives in the realm of the undead is accentuated by his professional status as a mediator with the underworld, another quality he shares with “the jews” along with his stinginess and constant preoccupation with money and profit—or rather lack thereof, since as a failed businessman Iakov is trapped in the contemplation of his real or imaginary fiscal losses. It is then no wonder that others view him as homologous to “the jews”: Iakov is invited to play with the klezmer band only “when one of its Jews is missing” (VIII:298); and receives the same treatment as Rothschild from local street urchins (VIII:302–3). The “jewishness” of the world Iakov inhabits shows in the universal decline around him. Sitting by the pussy willow, he notices the deforestation on the opposite shore and the absence of traffic on a river that once carried cargo boats but is now colonized by ducks and geese (VIII:303–4). This reflection takes Iakov from the ravaged and exhausted countryside to the fantasies of self-enrichment through private enterprise, fantasies dominated by “the huge flocks of white geese” that he could have bred for sale, “making ten rubles a year from their down alone,” had he possessed the requisite business acumen. In tandem with Iakov’s other imaginary schemes, such as solo violin concerts, these geese—a transparently “jewish” symbol in Chekhov’s interpretive community—“could have brought him quite a capital!” (VIII:303). But the lazy hero is but a wannabe capitalist, unlike those who destroy the

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woods on the opposite shore, that is, “the jews” who once bred and sold geese but now ravage the land by more radical forms of capitalist rapacity—a common charge in modern Russian letters and an image that blossoms in Chekhov’s play Vishnevyi sad (The cherry orchard, 1903), albeit without the stress on the “jewish” nature of capitalism.68 In a world driven by profit, Iakov’s unrealized fantasy of turning music into a moneymaking tool makes all the difference between his art and that of “the jews.” To bring the point home, Chekhov projects Iakov on the stock figure of a gifted musician, often imagined as the devil’s debtor in legends about artists. Iakov’s special bond with his violin gives the instrument the aura of Paganini’s Cannone Guarnerius. And considering the violin’s function in folklore as a symbol of its owner’s soul coveted by the devil (compare the legends about the demonic origin of Paganini’s instrument and gift), we can expect that Iakov also owes his talent and violin to the devil, who is about to collect on the debt. Priming his reader for this scenario, Chekhov besets the dying Iakov with demons: they visit him in his nightmares (VIII:304); they are implicitly incarnated by Rothschild who stalks Iakov in the last days of his life; and they loom in the image of Rothschild’s sender— the klezmer band’s leader whose occupation as a tinsmith suggests his “fiery” control over Iakov as “Bronze.” The scene is thus set for Iakov’s journey to hell, augured by repeated summons from the “jewish” band, but the violinist declines the invitation. What makes him think that he can escape the devil’s grip? The answer may reside with the ideal of free and disinterested art Chekhov cultivates to compensate for the reality of the cultural marketplace. Iakov is guilty of many moral transgressions. But unlike those artists of fairy tales and legends who trade their souls for the socioeconomic benefits of the devil’s gift, he is too impractical to profit from his music, which he plays mostly for himself in a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. He does not commit the cardinal “jewish” sin in Chekhov’s universe—the subjugation of art to money—and can be saved by his creator after repenting his other sins (VIII:305). Iakov believes that he “cannot take the violin to his grave” (VIII:304) and fears that after his death the orphaned instrument may go “the way of the [felled] birch and pine woods” (VIII:304), that is, fall prey to

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profit-mongering. Since he could have the instrument buried with him, he is clearly concerned with the violin’s spiritual role as a vessel of his soul. Bequeathing the violin to Rothschild, whose “jewishness” marks him as the devil’s minion, Iakov, like so many fairy-tale heroes, fools the devil by his own logic. The infernal creditor both receives what he seeks and loses control over Iakov’s soul, because the tune Rothschild plays on the violin does not have the same spiritual meaning it has for Iakov. And at this point the story’s paschal symbolism becomes crucial for its alternative reading. Given Easter’s role in replacement theology, Iakov’s name indicates among other things the supersession of Rothschild’s mournful songs by new Israel’s song of earthly suffering, which is but a prelude to the spiritual rebirth unknown to the infidel “jews.” In this light, Rothschild’s appreciation of Iakov’s last tune is a misunderstanding. In his hands, the tune becomes yet another “lament on the rivers of Babylon”— a term Russian writers use ironically in reference to the Judeophile discourse, taking their cue no doubt from Disraeli’s Coningsby, cited above.69 Rothschild’s fancy for the tune accompanying Iakov’s physical demise and spiritual liberation (intimated by his words, “Life brings man losses, and death—profit” [VIII:304]) shows the inability of “the jews” to grasp the full import of Russian art. This implicit, both artistic and spiritual, clash of Iakov and Rothschild jars with Gary Rosenshield’s reading of the story as a parable of reconciliation wherein “Chekhov gives religion almost no role” and makes “Rothschild the only one who understands—and can understand—Iakov’s music.” 70 To be sure, this interpretation is indeed encoded in “Skripka Rotshil'da.” But the silence of contemporary liberal critics, who should have hailed the story if only because it came from a former Novoe vremia writer, speaks volumes about the full resonance of the text’s symbolic language in Chekhov’s interpretive community. The clash of Christian and “jewish” messages in Iakov’s last melody may have a metadescriptive function that suggests the deceptiveness of the story’s ostensible conformity to the Judeophile literary formula, and invests with other meanings Iakov’s daydream of getting rich by breeding geese and selling their meat and down in Moscow. Combined with the evocation of bird down—a standard pogrom marker in Russian

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literature—the phrase Iakov uses for the slaughter of geese, “bit' gusei ” (“to beat the geese” [VIII:303]), recalls the stock expression denoting a pogrom, “bit' zhidov” (“to beat the Yids”). Iakov’s proposed market enhances the allusion: as a bastion of liberalism, Moscow indeed fancies “the geese” and “buys” Judeophile art, which routinely sports scenes of violence (“beating”). Iakov’s unrealized dream of getting rich by “beating the geese” may then suggest his unchanged attitude toward “the jews.” And it may also function as Chekhov’s ironic self-comment. As a writer “familiar with ‘garlic’,” Chekhov knows how to sell his “geese” in “Moscow” in order to solidify his professional success (“capital”), contrary to the unenterprising Iakov, whose overt Judeophobia and misogyny illustrate the wrong way of “beating the geese” in the modern cultural marketplace—the way of Chekhov’s “Tina.”71 This brings us back to the discourse about “jewishness” in culture, whose place in “Skripka Rotshil'da” is ignored by critics despite its visibility in the story’s title.72 The title incongruously features an episodic character, focusing on Rothschild’s accession to the violin, which is ­Iakov’s throughout the story. Yet this story is not about Rothschild. As in every one of Chekhov’s narratives involving “the jews,” the Subject here is played by a Russian man who encounters “the jews” in the auxiliary function of the Opponent-Helper. Judging by the story’s title, then, Rothschild’s “lament on the rivers of Babylon” highjacks the tale from its true hero, thereby highlighting the distorting power of the (preprogrammed) Judeophile reading, which obfuscates the real subject matter of “Skripka Rotshil'da”—the existential suffering of an average Russian man graced with a divine gift. The view of Judeophilia as a “jewish” tool for usurping Russian art is not Chekhov’s invention. It is the regular fare of Novoe vremia’s Viktor Burenin, who while Chekhov works on “Skripka Rotshil'da,” chastises Mark Antokol'skii’s sculpture of Jesus for depicting “not the divine sufferer but the ‘suffering’, ‘oppressed’, and shackled Jewry,” that is, for replacing Christian spirituality with the Judeophile discourse that benefits the Russian-Jewish sculptor. In Burenin’s Wagnerian opinion, Antokol'skii’s “hidden, tasteless Yid [zhidovskaia] allegory slapped onto a Christian image” shows the ability of “the jews” to manipulate the Gentile public.73 Against the backdrop of this motif of art’s highjacking

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by “the jews,” the violin’s passing from Iakov to Rothschild acquires special meaning. It becomes a variation on the folkloric “musician meets the devil” plot (compare Igor' Stravinskii’s “The Soldier’s Tale” [1918]), wherein the devil swindles the musician out of his violin/soul and accompanies him to hell, playing the stolen instrument.74 To put it in terms of Chekhov’s own stock plot—the average Russian meets “the jews”—Iakov is yet another instance of a modern male vanquished by “the jews.” Like Sokol'skii before him, Iakov is a decadent shadow of the traditional heroes of Christian mythology and art, to wit, of the triumphant and Jew-baiting violinist in the Grimm fairy tale “The Jew in the Brambles” (see Chapter 1). While “Skripka Rotshil'da” leaves open the possibility of Iakov’s salvation, augured by his spiritual reawakening, it also leaves open the possibility that Rothschild fools Iakov into giving him the violin through a fake show of emotion in response to Iakov’s last melody, which he cannot fully understand. Hence the double entendre informing the town’s reaction to the instrument’s handover: “And now everyone is asking, where did Rothschild find such a good violin? Did he buy it, did he steal it, or maybe someone pawned it to him?” (VIII:305). We find ourselves in Wagner’s territory, dealing with an intellectual commonplace of Chekhov’s day—“the jews” as artistic imitators, creatively barren but skilled in mimicking and usurping Gentile art, which they transform from a medium of the spirit into one of economic profit.75 And it comes as no surprise that Chekhov signals to us the veiled presence of this rhetoric in “Skripka Rotshil'da” through the motif of garlic. Iakov is overcome by the smell of garlic when he plays in the klezmer band; and he applies the epithet “garlic” to Rothschild (VIII:297, 302). Leaving Iakov’s opinion of “the jews” conspicuously unexplained, the narrator prompts us to look behind the Judeophile façade: “Without any visible reason, Iakov gradually came to hate and despise the Yids [zhidy], and especially Rothschild” (VIII:298; emphasis added). The reader is free to see Iakov’s Judeophobia as an irrational bias, the way it is treated in liberal discourse. But in actual fact, Iakov’s hatred is not entirely unfounded. Its reasons are visible to the reader who goes beyond the liberal dogma, heeding the text’s significant details. As a coffin maker with flagging business, Iakov has no use for the town’s traditionalist “jews,”

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who bury their dead in shrouds—a piece of cultural knowledge Chekhov shares with those Russian readers who, like himself, have lived within the Pale of Settlement.76 More important, Iakov—the best violin player in town—faces competition from the klezmers, who monopolize local musical entertainment and seldom invite him to play, because of his short temper and Judeophobia, which thus sap his chances in the music market (VIII:297–98). Chekhov’s interpretive community could easily see in this picture the shadow of the proverbially short-tempered Wagner, whose continuous collaboration with Jewish musicians did not mollify his fury at what he saw as the monopoly of “the jews” on European musical life. ­Iakov’s nickname solidifies the Wagnerian allusion. Pleading ignorance once again, the narrator says that “for some reason” the townsfolk call Iakov Bronze (VIII:297)—yet another invitation to active interpretation for those readers willing to see through the story’s Judeophile smokescreen. Wagner’s temperamental Judeophobia provides a key to Iakov’s nickname. Every time “Bronze sits down to play with the band, his face starts to sweat and turns purple [bagrovelo],” ostensibly from “the heat, [and] the suffocating smell of garlic” (VIII:297). But taking into account the meaning of the garlic motif in Chekhov’s day, it may be the musical performance of “the jews” that enrages Iakov, his fury expressing itself in the changing color of his face, which becomes like hot bronze. Chekhov chooses his epithets with extreme care, so much so that those among his contemporaries who are specifically preoccupied with the subject of “the jews” in art might recall that when Ratch, the Wagner-figure of Turgenev’s “Neschastnaia” sporting a “dark red” complexion (VIII:65), performs a duo, his face, like Iakov’s, turns purple (bagrovelo) even as his partner’s dulcimer sounds like the lament of “the soul of an old usurious Yid.” And it is precisely Rothschild’s penchant for such plaintive tunes that makes Iakov finally lose his temper when they play together in the klezmer band. But why should Iakov, himself given to sad reflection, dislike Rothschild’s musical laments? Iakov plays his sad tunes in private, in moments of existential pain, and with no lucrative intent. It is hard to imagine that his tunes are cheerful when, at night, “bothered by all sorts of nasty thoughts, [he]

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touches the strings, the violin makes a sound in the dark, and he feels relieved” (VIII:298); or when he plays after learning of Marfa’s illness; or on the eve of his own death. In public, he must perform joyful songs, since the klezmers play at weddings and enlist Iakov because he is “especially good at Russian songs” (VIII:297; compare the cheerful songs he and Marfa sing in their youth). As the band performs Iakov’s joyful songs, Rothschild interprets even the most cheerful tunes plaintively, that is, “in the Yid-style,” to use Chekhov’s own term for artistic inadequacy (po-zhidovski; letter to Suvorin [29.XII.1895], PSS. Pis'ma VI:113). He distorts the songs’ “genuine spirit of the Folk,” as Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” puts it (89), subverting Russian music the way Wagner’s “jews” are said to subvert German music (99). The possible performance of Jewish tunes by Iakov, a gifted Russian musician forced by the art market to join a klezmer band, only adds insult to injury. Chekhov’s narrator is explicit about Iakov’s musical gift (VIII:298) but keeps mum about Rothschild’s artistic worth—a detail suggesting to Viktor Shklovskii the story’s reliance on the “Mozart and Salieri” motif.77 In the Judeophile interpretation, this detail seems trivial. But for the readers attuned to the Wagnerian paradigm (and we must not take lightly their importance in Chekhov’s interpretive community), this fact casts Rothschild as Wagner’s worst nightmare—a “jewish” imitator who creates no original cultural values and thrives in European art’s general decline (Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 82, 85, 89). Such an interpretation of the seemingly innocuous Rothschild may at first sound outlandish, until we contextualize it in Chekhov’s reflection on cultural decadence, which he often articulates through the opposition of artistic gift and technical skill. Consider his critique of Sarah Bernhardt as “skilled but untalented”; his aforementioned mockery of the critic Volynskii as a garlic-reeking untalented parasite; and his view of the liberal literary establishment as censorious yet ungifted.78 The Russian reader of 1894 could therefore find in Chekhov’s story an allegory of modern artistic and cultural decline manifest in the fact that besides Rothschild, Iakov has no one to pass his instrument to (“now it will become an orphan” [VIII:304]). And while in another instance of significant silence about Rothschild’s artistic ability, the narrator gives us no indication that the “jewish” flutist has ever handled

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a violin, Rothschild turns out to be a good imitator and plays Iakov’s sad tune on Iakov’s instrument, enjoying great popularity among the town’s Russian elite, who apparently forget the garlic smell he exudes, demanding that he play the same sad tune “ten times over” (VIII:305). There is, to be sure, little originality in the image of a “jewish” violin­ ist—a literary cliché in Chekhov’s day—or in Rothschild’s transition from flute to violin, which probably draws on the story of Mikhail Gusikov, a famous klezmer virtuoso, who in the 1830s gave up the flute for a device of his own invention, the “straw-fiddle.” But Chekhov draws on the dark side of the (Wagnerian) image of the “jewish” musician, whose superior skills are unmatched by his ability to create music on a par with the Gentiles.79 The story’s ending thus lends itself to at least two readings. In the Judeophile interpretation, Rothschild is an exploited hack forced to play (zastavliaiut igrat' [VIII:305]) the sad tune of exile over and over again. But in the Wagnerian logic, the ex-­flutist exploits the Russian song of existential suffering, remaking it into a tearjerker for sentimental audiences (a wily jibe at the consumers of Judeo­phile art). He squeezes cash from the tragic human condition, and his tunes are akin to the plaintive melody played by Susanna’s money coffer in “Tina” (V:367). Rothschild thereby violates the example set by the exiled Hebrews in Psalm 137, who refuse to play by the rivers of Babylon and who inspire Iakov, the true Israel, to do likewise; for he declines the “jewish” band’s invitation after taking the full measure of his earthly captivity. In the Wagnerian reading, the ex-flutist’s appellation no longer strikes the reader as a misnomer, despite the apparent incongruity between the surname of a “well-known money-bag” and its Iankel'like bearer. As a shrewd exploiter of the cultural triumphs of others, Rothschild is an artistic vampire whose innocuous appearance hides the parasite Chekhov’s readers could recognize, first by matching the surname with the contemporary iconography of its well-known owner (Figure 5), and then by projecting the whole on the model artistic vampire of European literature—the demonic Little Zaches from E.-T.-A. Hoffmann’s eponymous fairy tale (1819). Zaches highjacks the artistic achievements of others, including violin performances. His true appearance—hidden by a magic that is not unlike the spell of liberal

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Judeo­philia Chekhov openly derides in “Tina” and more circumspectly in “Skripka Rotshil'da”—foreshadows modern “jewish” iconography; although, like Bram Stoker’s count Dracula, Zaches is never explicitly identified as “jewish.” This does not mean that Chekhov creates his Rothschild with Hoffmann’s demonic trickster in mind. However, their consonance does provide yet another pointer to the place occupied by “Skripka Rotshil'da” in the European continuum for the dissemination of the imaginary “jews.” This place is further confirmed by the unintended dialogue between “Skripka Rotshil'da” and Trilby, whose author says explicitly what Chekhov cautiously implies. Du Maurier’s international success in the year Chekhov publishes his story sheds light on the potential Wagnerian resonance of “Skripka Rotshil'da.” 80 Like Rothschild, Trilby’s Svengali lacks a musical gift, for which he compensates with skill. “I cannot sing myself, I cannot play the violin, but I can teach,” he says. Like Rothschild, he plays a wind instrument—“a kind of little flexible flageolet [. . .] an elastic penny whistle” with which he turns a “poor old twopenny tune” into a tearjerking “shrill scream of anguish” (28–30), quite reminiscent of Rothschild’s musical laments. As smelly as Rothschild, Trilby’s musical villain uses his artistic skill to ingratiate himself with Europe’s cultural elites, which overlook his stench and his moral transgressions for the sake of his music (57). Art is a vehicle of social ascent for this recent arrival from Eastern Europe, who still “receives supplies from his own people in Austria” (55)—hence, we may presume, much of his smell. Svengali is unapologetic about exploiting art to the ends of social mobility. Since he cannot sing or play the violin, he employs his satanic power of mesmerism to turn a Christian girl, Trilby, into a “singing machine—an organ to play upon—an instrument of music—a Stradivarius” (440–41) that brings him fame and fortune. Acceding to Iakov’s “Stradivarius” and to the tune that could make his fortune, Rothschild should not do worse than Svengali. What Svengali calls teaching, his victim sees as vampirism. “He reminds me of a big hungry spider, and makes me feel like a fly!” says Trilby (72). Like Dracula, who puts his victims into a somnolent trance, Svengali feeds on the mesmerized Trilby artistically, spiritually, financially, and sexually, thereby reaching a

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goal of all “jewish” artists (130)—the appropriation of Gentile females, which is also Dracula’s main concern. Du Maurier illustrated his novel himself. It is thus little wonder that Svengali’s appearance (Figure 7), down to his clawlike hands, prefigures Dracula’s and echoes the iconography of the ur-symbol of capitalism, Rothschild (Figure 5), whose name Chekhov gives to his artistic vampire in disguise and Wagner uses to exemplify the “jewish” invasion of Europe’s ailing cultural body (80). The consonance of Chekhov’s and Du Maurier’s narratives does not end there. As a music teacher, Svengali evokes in the memory of the Anglophone reader Herr Klesmer of George Eliot’s Judeophile Daniel Deronda. Klesmer is also a recent transplant from “the East,” but the appearance and manners he shares with Svengali and Dracula are ascribed

Figure 7. Illustration by George Du Maurier for the first edition of his novel Trilby. London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1895, p. 381.

Of Chekhov and Garlic

to the eccentricity of artistic genius (104, 115). Tolerated by the British elite thanks to his art, Klesmer follows what Eliot sees as the right path to successful assimilation, punctuated by baptism and a marriage to his Christian pupil. Trilby’s parody of Eliot’s vision, which for the scandalseeking Du Maurier is a ridiculous utopia, ostentatiously rubs the sensibility of British liberals the wrong way. As an artist more mindful of his image with the liberal reader, Chekhov performs the same operation on intelligentsia opinion in “Skripka Rotshil'da” surreptitiously and with more circumspection than he previously exhibited in “Tina,” which spoofs literary Judeophilia on the material of Turgenev’s “Neschastnaia.” Eschewing Du Maurier’s shock strategy, Chekhov lets his reader savor the hidden meaning of Iakov’s violent outburst at Rothschild as a tongue-in-cheek comment on what the author sees as the Judeophile straitjacket put on readers and artists alike by liberal ideology. As Rothschild stalks the newly widowed Iakov with an invitation from the klezmer band, the grieving artist wants to be left alone: “Will you get out of my face, garlic?” Iakov shouted. “Stop bothering me! [. . .] Get lost!” roared Iakov and rushed toward him with clenched fists. “They just don’t let you be any more, these scabs.” (VIII:302) Chto ty lezesh' ko mne, chesnok?—kriknul Iakov.—Ne pristavai! [. . .]—Proch' s glaz doloi!—zarevel Iakov i brosilsia na nego s ­kulakami.—Zhit'ia net ot parkhatykh!

On the face of it, this is yet another flare-up of Iakov’s Judeophobe passion conveyed by such trademark items from the lexicon of “jewish” difference as garlic smell and scabby skin (see Chapter 4). But this scene lends itself to another reading, already prefigured in Chekhov’s “­Perekati-pole.” Here Aleksandr Ivanovich continues his monologue long after Chekhov’s alter ego loses all interest in his story and feels that the intrusive and bothersome Wandering Jew is scouting for the constant approving attention of a Christian audience (VI:262). The same motif resurfaces in Chekhov’s letters, which depict the writer’s encounters with a young Jewish man (Evdokiia Efros’s brother) as an annoying imposition by a “very tedious Shmul'” who “just keeps coming”—like Rothschild to Iakov, let us add.81 The above-cited scene could therefore be read as Iakov’s revolt against the artistic (“joining

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the band”) and social (Judeophile) expectations imposed by “the jews” and their liberal apologists. The proposed reading finds indirect confirmation in Evgenii Chirikov’s Judeophile play, “Evrei” (Jews, 1906), whose Russian hero is beset by “the jews” probing his sentiments vis-à-vis themselves and their problems. “What do you want from me already?!” exclaims Berezin. “Meddling in another man’s soul is tactless” (“Chto vam, nakonets, ot menia nado?! [. . .] Eto—nedelikatno . . . lezt' v chuzhuiu dushu”).82 The coincidence of Chekhov’s and Chirikov’s vocabulary in the verb lezt' (to crawl, penetrate, bother; compare Iakov’s “Chto ty lezesh' ko mne”) has more significance than meets the eye. This verb is used to denounce the colonization of Russian art by “the jews,” which Novoe vremia’s Burenin presents as follows in his list of real and imaginary Russian-Jewish litterateurs: “Today, various Frugs, Minskis, Zhidovichs, Abramovichs are crawling out of every crack” (“Lezut teper' iz vsekh shchelei raznye Frugi, Minskie, Zhidovichi, Abramovichi”; emphasis [non-italic] added).83 And although such forceful rejection (“with clenched fists”) of liberal Judeophilia in an ostensibly Judeophile text might strike today’s reader as improbable, we must not underestimate its personal significance for Chekhov, who uses the lexicon of “jewish” difference to negotiate his strategic yet embarrassingly utilitarian repositioning in the field of cultural production. As noted above, the author reversed his original intention to lay the scene of “Skripka Rotshil'da” at Easter, choosing instead the May feasts of John the Evangelist and Nicolas the Wonderworker, during which his alter ego meets the Wandering Jew in “Perekati-pole.” By doing so, Chekhov gives “Skripka Rotshil'da” an intimate dimension, since the icons of both saints are his family’s heirlooms. In fact, the writer never parts with the icon of John, painted by his father. It is then only logical for Iakov to inherit some aspects of Chekhov’s self-image. The first of these is Chekhov’s continuous concern with financial matters (especially with losing money), which he himself conceptualizes as “jewish.” 84 Another such feature is the writer’s ultimate entry into the liberal (read “jewish”) press despite his view of it as repulsive (letter to A. N. Maslov [7.IV.1888], PSS. Pis'ma II:237). This reluctant collaboration recalls ­Iakov’s grumbling performances in the klezmer band. Then there are the misogyny and Judeophobia that the author of “Tina” shares with

Of Chekhov and Garlic

Iakov, although “Skripka Rotshil'da” does much to improve Chekhov’s public image in this regard. Last, Iakov’s musical split between public cheerfulness and private sadness echoes Chekhov’s trajectory away from the genre of humorous feuilleton. He views this genre as a mere moneymaking tool for a struggling artist whose dire straits make him akin to the captive Hebrews “sitting and crying by the rivers of Babylon” (letter to Al. P. Chekhov [13.V.1883], PSS. Pis'ma I:70). The writer’s self-description by the Russian Bible’s Psalm 136 (he quotes it in Church Slavonic), which furnishes the controlling metaphor of “Skripka Rotshil'da,” reveals the place of the motif of slavery in his professional self-image. But this motif is also paramount to Chekhov’s family lore, built around his grandfather Egor—a gifted man (he played the violin) who was born a serf but bought his and his family’s freedom. Chekhov repeatedly applies the figure of slavery to himself, most famously in the letter to Suvorin (7.I.1889) discussing his longing for “a feeling of personal freedom” as part of his status as an artist who “squeezes a slave drop by drop” from himself (PSS. Pis'ma III:132–33). For Chekhov the artist, this metaphor casts the ideal of creative freedom as a modern version of the exploit of his grandfather Egor, whose name, as Senderovich argues, mediates the writer’s fascination with the myth of Saint George.85 But the metaphor’s resonance does not stop there, evoking the exploit of the Kievan Paterikon’s monk Evstratii, who resists to the end the material and spiritual slavery imposed by “the jews” (see Chapter 1). This evocation roots Chekhov’s ideal of liberation in the theological opposition of Judaism and Christianity as Law and Grace, the first symbolizing slavery and the second, freedom. Speaking about the exorcism of his inner slave, Chekhov projects his ideal of artistic freedom on the stock trope of overcoming “jewishness,” which as we have seen, informs the exorcism of the inner “jews” by Taras Bul'ba and his creator (see Chapter 6). The same exorcism is equally urgent for Chekhov, who imagines his own and Iakov’s personal and professional existence as marked by “jewishness.” Chekhov’s artistic liberation from slavery then has two aspects. One is material and has to do with a stable income that ensures a writer’s independence and frees him from the “jewish” concern with money.

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Another is spiritual, since a “free artist [. . .] neither liberal nor conservative” cannot be a slave to an ideology or to public opinion (letter to A. N. Pleshcheev [4.X.1888], PSS. Pis'ma III:11). A commonplace in Chekhov scholarship, the line about “squeezing a slave drop by drop” has been used in Chekhov’s liberal appropriation and construction as a “progressive” cultural icon. But considering that the line’s addressee is the publisher of a conservative antisemitic daily, it is not impossible that by invoking the figure of slavery, Chekhov implies his apprehension of liberal (“jewish”) opinion, from which he longs to be freed and which he challenges in “Tina.” Suffice it to recall that the repetition of this challenge in Andrei ­Belyi’s 1909 essay on “jewishness” in art looks like a true exploit to the litterateurs who view Russia’s cultural life as controlled by “the jews” and their advocates.86 The prominence of the hero-adventure myth in “Tina” appears to support the story’s status as a heroic challenge to a formidable foe. But similar to “Tina”’s heroes, their creator is no glorious knight: unlike the spiritually rejuvenated Iakov, Chekhov accepts the invitation to the “jewish” band, going over to the liberal press and producing an ostensibly Judeophile story that can earn him the favor of liberal opinion. The same story’s veiled subversion of the Judeophile discourse functions as a psychological safety valve, allowing Chekhov to negotiate his professional compromise through a Wagnerian parable about an artist’s place in the modern cultural marketplace. In the final count, the image of Iakov playing in front of the admiring Rothschild is their creator’s bitterly fatalistic commentary on the inevitable liberal (mis)interpretation of his own sad tunes. These tunes have nothing to do with “the jews” but will be appropriated by them anyway, like Iakov’s violin or Wagner’s music, whose admiration by “the jews” is a commonplace of the antisemitic discourse.87 And as if to confirm the irrelevance of his sorrowful melodies of existential suffering to Judeophilia, Chekhov bans “the jews” from his oeuvre after “Skripka Rotshil'da.” Like so many of his colleagues, he takes refuge in asemitizm—a socially sanctioned attitude that brings the writer closer to his ideal of artistic freedom by creating the illusion that he is above the ideological fray and the pressure of public opinion. Equally importantly, as Chekhov secures by the mid-1890s his position in the Russian

Of Chekhov and Garlic

field of cultural production, the writer’s need to articulate his professional and social status in the language of “jewish” difference decreases. Now he can take a step back and evaluate critically, on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair, the symbolic value of “the jews” as a tool of psychological projection (letter to Suvorin [6/18.II.1898], PSS. Pis'ma VII:167). The writer keeps his public silence on the subject of “the jews” during the Dreyfus affair, in which he takes keen interest, siding with Zola.88 His privately aired dreyfusisme has no bearing on his idea of “the jews”: the “Yids,” “Jerusalem nobility,” and “Shmuls” of his letters retain their role of ironic negative signs throughout the author’s life. But subscribing neither to Novoe vremia’s ideology of antisemitism nor to its liberal mirror opposite, Chekhov, like so many dreyfusards, can see the injustice of the charges against Dreyfus while speaking the language of “jewish” difference. And now that his professional security makes recourse to “the jews” less urgent, he can offhandedly advise a colleague to write “a joyful song [. . .] about Russian life, and about life in general, which is given to us only once and should not be wasted on the castigation of Shmuls” (letter to I. L. Leont'ev [2.II.1900], PSS. Pis'ma IX:39)—an advice prefigured in Iakov’s musings by the pussy willow: Why did Iakov swear, growl, throw punches, offend his wife all his life; why did he just now frighten and insult the Yid? Why do people always spoil each other’s life? This leads to such losses! Terrible losses! If there were no hate and malice, people could be of tremendous utility to each other. [. . .] Why is the world made in such a strange way that life, which is given to man only once, goes to waste? (VIII:304)

In the Judeophile reading, this passage is understood metaphorically as a sign of Iakov’s newfound humanity. But it is possible to stay much closer to the letter of Iakov’s lament. We know what “utility” is derived from “familiarity with ‘garlic’,” namely, 115 rubles, which “favorably dispose” their beneficiary to “the Jewish tribe” per Chekhov’s epistolary annotation to “Tina.” And now that the missive’s author is indeed “a well-known litterateur” consecrated by the liberal press, no venture is less appropriate than that of “frightening and insulting the Yid.” Chekhov shares this insight with Stoker, who skirts the liberal ban on overt Judeophobia by resorting to the homology of vampires and “the jews,” which allows him to

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“dramatize in a socially acceptable form a body of hostile perceptions” about the Other.89 Both writers opt out of Du Maurier’s scandalhungry violation of liberal taboos as vulgarly commercial (and reminiscent of Chekhov’s strategy in “Tina”). To the crude joys of explicit Judeophobia, realized in Trilby’s climactic scene of Svengali’s public thrashing, both prefer the subtler pleasures of liberalism—an ideology confining “the beating of the geese” to the extratextual space of a writer’s interpretive community.90 Using the lexicon of “jewish” difference as a universally understood code of otherness, Chekhov and Stoker equip their texts with encrypted messages. The more these messages go against the grain of the liberal dogma, the more their detection and decryption are gratifying, and the more the texts containing them are appreciated by the reader for the discreet pleasures they furnish. Fin de siècle European artists conceptualized their urgent professional reality—the subjugation of cultural production to market forces—in the language of “jewish” difference, which Christianity had bequeathed to them as the main symbolic tool for describing alterity and conceptualizing adversity. But this imaginative praxis jarred with modern Europe’s liberal code of political correctness. That is why the disguises adopted by the “jewish” vampires and vampirical “jews” in Chekhov’s realistically motivated stories, in Du Maurier’s occult melodrama, and in Stoker’s fairy-tale thriller tell yet another tale, that of a writer who must negotiate his imaginative dependence on the generative model of “the jews” in an ideological context that stigmatizes overt public expressions of Judeophobia and antisemitism (acceptable only a few decades earlier) as socially and culturally retrograde. The pent-up tension resulting from the incongruity of the imaginative means available to modern European artists and the demands of their ideological environment finds an outlet in the motifs of disguised “jewishness” and vampirism. These motifs mirror Chekhov’s and ­Stoker’s efforts to vest their privately nurtured phobias in terms that would be both socially acceptable and semiotically accessible to their readers. And as they do so, the fine aroma of garlic seeps out of Europe’s cultural cellars and into the literary kitchens of its writers.

Fi f t e e n Reb Goethe and the Problematics

of Russian-Jewish Authorship

European anxiety about “jewishness” in modern art is a crucial factor in the formation of a qualitatively new crop of Russian-Jewish authors. If in the 1850s–70s, Russian writers of Jewish extraction negotiate their cultural origins in an essentially foreign setting, the second wave of assimilated artists is more at home in Russian than in Jewish culture. By the same token, if the first cohort of Russian-Jewish authors goes largely unnoticed by the Russian reader thanks as much to its parochial focus on Jewish issues as to its artistic mediocrity, the next wave of artists, born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, leaves an indelible mark on Russian letters. It is also this generation that is regarded today as the backbone of “Russian-Jewish literature”—a concept whose examination closes my study. The participation of Jewish individuals (or those aware of their Jewish origin) in European artistic life adds yet another dimension to the issue of the representation of Jews in art. What impact might the generative model of “the jews” have on the artistic identity and praxis of the assimilated Jews who view the language and culture of the Gentile majority as their own? The experience of German Jews prompts contradictory conclusions. Gershom Scholem insists on the mythical nature of the German-Jewish symbiosis. He argues that Jews never belonged to German culture in the eyes of the Gentile majority and only fantasized about their inclusion, absorbing uncritically the lexicon of “jewish” difference and sacrificing their cultural specificity on the altar of assimilationist illusions. A host of recent studies counters that German Jews forged a distinct identity by engaging with the majority culture through a process of acculturation, not assimilation.1 Taking these

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polar views as delimiting a range of experiences in the history of Jewish assimilation, I consider only one aspect of this history—the place of Christian and post-Christian imaginative patterns in the cultural and artistic self-image of Russian-Jewish artists and in their ideas of “the jews” and “jewishness.” Any examination of a hyphenated artistic or cultural identity gravitates toward the issue of the relative importance and interaction of its constituent elements. But when it comes to the identity of assimilated Jews, a unique problem arises from their encounter with “the jews” of the Christian imagination. This problem sets the experience of assimilated Jewish writers apart from all other cases of multicultural artistic identity; first, because Jews stand out among European minority groups by virtue of having an imaginary double—“the jews”—whose function as the paradigmatic Other is unrivaled in European cultural history; and second, because the very medium of literary expression— language—is among the defining markers of modern European national identities, whose theoreticians endow “the jews” with the same narrative and symbolic value they have in Christian theology and myth. The following chapters focus on two authors from the second cohort of Russian-Jewish writers. I scrutinize the place of the generative model of “the jews” in Isaak Babel’s artistic self-image through the close reading of two stories, “Moi pervyi gus'” (My first goose, 1924) and “Guy de Maupassant” (1932). I then contrast Babel’s deceptively explicit engagement of “jewish” subject matter with its cryptic treatment in Iurii Fel'zen’s unfinished novelistic project about the aesthetic and philosophical maturation of a Russian émigré writer (1930–40). This contrast, I hope, puts in new perspective the larger issue of RussianJewish authorship as well as that of “Russian-Jewish literature,” which I examine from the vantage point of the analytical methodology developed and tested throughout this book. European Jewish communities did not know hermetic cultural isolation. As Christoph Daxelmüller shows, from the late Middle Ages on, most of the popular reading matter consumed by Ashkenazi Jews along with properly religious material was translated from or inspired by Gentile sources, albeit reworked to the point of shedding their Christian character. Echoing this phenomenon, a nineteenth-century anecdote

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

tells how a Galician scholar, rabbi Chajes, once came to a synagogue aggrieved: “The people ask him why he is sorrowful. ‘Goethe is dead’, he answers. The whole community becomes sad and some pious people consider reciting the kaddish [a prayer of mourning] for ‘Reb Goethe’.”2 The gist of the anecdote lies in the appropriation of a Gentile cultural icon by a traditional Jewish community on its own terms—a process unwittingly implementing Goethe’s ideal of World Literature with its stress on interaction between national artistic and intellectual currents. In this sense, Johann Wolfgang Goethe indeed finds his rightful place in Ashkenazi culture as Reb Goethe—a Yiddish title of respect derived from rebbe (rabbi). But this creative appropriation is highly selective, for its agents miss or choose to overlook Goethe’s contempt for the Jewish tradition.3 Such selectivity is a function of rabbi Chajes’s and his community’s reading of Goethe through the lens of their own intellectual baggage, which ensures their cultural autonomy vis-à-vis the Gentile majority. Indeed, as Ruth Mellinkoff shows, consumers of Christian art and thought in traditional Jewish milieus are largely immune to the denigrating connotations of the language of “jewish” difference, which they overlook or file away among the attacks that since biblical times test their faith.4 Here the attitude of a traditional Jewish culture could not be more different from that of its assimilated scions, who experience “the jews” as a source of irritation that elicits an array of responses irreducible to the simplistic notion of Jewish self-hatred. These responses range from the elaboration of a hybrid identity by Moses Mendelssohn and his adepts; to Jewish self-abnegation pioneered by Mendelssohn’s own children and echoed by their Russian-Jewish contemporaries (Abram Perets, Nota Notkin, Judah Nevakhovich); and to the reclamation or reinvention of Jewish identity by fully acculturated Jewish individuals.5 Like other minorities, assimilated Jews often uncritically absorb the majority discourse about them. In this respect, the shame generated in some Jews by the lexicon of “jewish” difference is actually innocuous in comparison to the part other assimilated Jews (or apostates) have played in the fabrication of proofs during ritual murder trials.6 RussianJewish experience follows this pattern, exhibiting instances of acute shame for one’s origins (for example, Boris Pasternak) and outright libel

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that ­favorably distinguishes its author from the rest of “the jews” (for example, Iakov Brafman’s Kniga kagala [The book of the kahal], 1869).7 In 1859, Osip Rabinovich, a pioneer of the Mendelssohnian ­Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) in Russia, called, in print, on his coreligionists to shun the Yiddish forms of their biblical names as unseemly to the Russian ear. But considering that at this time the empire’s Jews had no Russian ear to speak of, this usage posed a problem only for the embarrassed Rabinovich’s hybrid identity. Symptomatically, Rabino­vich and his younger colleague, Grigorii Bogrov, promoted the ­Haskalah by depicting the traditional Jewish milieu in “jewish” terms—as spiritually and physically exhausted, morally corrupt, parasitical, and so on. This imaginative vocabulary, more familiar to the Russian than to the contemporary Jewish reader, showcased the authors’ assimilationist credentials and shielded them from the stigma of “jewishness” by displacing it on the unassimilated Jewish masses. By the early twentieth century, this displacement mechanism became common enough among the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to merit special treatment in Vladimir Zhabotinskii’s journalistic polemics.8 If such is the attitude of leading figures in the first Russian-Jewish cohort, assimilated by choice and still in touch with traditional Jewish culture, it is only logical for the next wave of Russified artists and intellectuals to follow the trend among the scions of Jewish families in Europe—Henri Bergson, Cesare Lombroso, Karl Marx, Simone Weil, Otto Weininger—who internalize the discourse about “jewish” difference and, in Martin Buber’s words, “turn away from a Judaism they do not know; in actual fact turning aside from a conventional conception of Judaism created by Christianity.”9 Moreover, like their Gentile peers, the second generation of Russian-Jewish artists uses “the jews” as a tool for coping with personal and professional perplexities. Consider Osip Mandel'shtam’s reply, in Chetvertaia proza (Fourth prose, 1930), to the ideologically motivated charge of plagiarism leveled against him by ­Soviet critics, some of whom he knows to be of Jewish extraction: When I reached a certain age, adult males of the tribe I hate with all my heart and to which I do not want to and will not belong set out collectively to subject me to a repulsive and vile ritual. Its name is literary circumcision or degradation performed according to the customs and

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

calendar needs of the writing tribe. [. . .] Authorship, in its European and particularly Russian form, is incompatible with the honorable title of a Jew which fills me with pride. Bearing the memory of shepherds, patriarchs, and kings, my blood rebels against the thieving Gypsy that is the writing folk. As a child, I was kidnapped by a creaky train of unwashed Gypsies [. . .] who vainly taught me their craft, their sole occupation and art—theft. Writers are a race with foully reeking skin. [. . .] Expelled from cities and hounded in villages, everywhere and always do they keep close to power which confines them, like prostitutes, to areas of ill repute. This is because literature, everywhere and always, has the same function of helping the authorities to control the soldiers and helping the judges to punish the doomed. [. . .] Bearded males in horned fur hats raised above my head a stone knife to castrate me. They were probably the priests of their tribe: they smelled like onions, novels, and goat meat. It was terrible, like in an infant’s nightmare. [. . .] They were old men with sinewy necks and small goose heads. [. . .] I will flee [. . .] the twelve Judas windows of the indecent house on Tverskoi boulevard, never again to hear the clinking of silver pieces and the counting of printer’s sheets. (Sochineniia, II:96–97)

This passage falls within the Wagnerian tradition of couching in “jewish” terms the criticism of contemporary art and its professional ­mores.10 The narrator casts himself as an innocent victim by appealing to the mythical and theological resonance of “jewishness” in the images of the archetypal “bad father” wielding his (castrating) knife and of old priests circumcising a reluctant infant, inspired by the icon­ography of Jesus’ circumcision. The Opponent sports a plethora of features from the lexicon of “jewish” difference: exile and wandering; collective and continuous infamy; the foetor judaicus made of onion and goat smells; kinship to lepers and prostitutes; ritual murder (child theft, ­cyclical bloodletting); the goose as the group’s animal symbol; Judas’s silver pieces. To these are admixed familiar historical facts, such as the reliance of European Jews on the authorities for protection and their premodern legal status of servi camerae; their common occupation as mediators between upper and lower social strata; and finally, their geographic segregation. But describing the Soviet literary establishment in “jewish” terms, Mandel'shtam avoids ethnonyms that would make such identification

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explicit. Like Turgenev in “Klara Milich,” he prefers the transparent euphemism “Gypsy” (see Chapter 12). In my view, he does so not so much to comply with the early Soviet code of political correctness as to contrast more effectively his Jewish-born self to the spiritual and professional “jewishness” of his critics. Casting his narrative alter ego as a child-figure bearing “the honorable title of a Jew,” the poet effectively projects his predicament onto that of the Jewish-born Jesus, seen by exegetes as King David’s descendant (compare the narrator’s kinship to “shepherds, patriarchs, and kings”). This procedure allows Mandel'shtam to return the charge of plagiarism to his accusers, who are as immoral (“thieving”) and libelous as the “jewish” persecutors of Jesus; hence the image of Moscow’s House of Writers on Tverskoi Boulevard as Judas’s den. The poet thus employs the displacement technique tested by the pioneers of Russian-Jewish writing, only he does so to validate his artistic rather than cultural identity. Mandel'shtam’s assumption that the reader will see the connotations of his symbolic language without the help of ethnonyms suggests that his target audience is primarily non-Jewish, in contrast to the hypothetical audience of the first wave of assimilated writers who claim to reach out to Russians and Jews alike, although their readership is in fact limited to the nascent Russian-Jewish intelligentsia.11 The question of target audience is central to the issue of Russian-Jewish authorship, serving as a litmus test of individual commitments to creative activity that is Russian-Jewish rather than Russian. But even artists with an explicit bicultural commitment may not be able to fulfill it because of their divorce from Jewish culture and imaginative dependence on the lexicon of “jewish” difference. Semen Iushkevich is a case in point. Tracing his artistic pedigree to Dostoevskii and Chekhov, this latter-day advocate of the Haskalah promotes assimilationist ideology by means of social satire. Like Rabinovich and Bogrov, he imagines his audience as a mix of Russians and Jews; and like them, he draws on the lexicon of “jewish” difference to expose what he sees as the flaws of Russian Jews. But Iushkevich underestimates the implications of the post-1881 ideological split of Russian art along Judeophile-Judeophobe lines (see Chapter 13), which problematizes the kind of sociocultural criticism practiced by the pioneers

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

of Russian-Jewish writing. As a result, his “jews” are feted on the Right but faulted by the liberal intelligentsia, Russian and Russian-Jewish, as hackneyed and Judeophobe. Rejecting the manuscript of Iushkevich’s Leon Drei, Gor'kii reacted to the novel’s “jews” (9–10.II.1908): “The author chose to write it at a very inopportune time. Is he simply dumb, this Semen Solomonovich, or can he not see, blinded by inspiration, what goes on around him?” 12 Despite the divergence of their imagined audiences, Iushkevich and Mandel'shtam exhibit the same reliance on the generative model of “the jews” to the ends of self-validation in the majority culture. But if the first cohort of Russian-Jewish writers contrasts itself with “the jews” for the purposes of sociocultural self-definition, its successors, Iushkevich and Mandel'shtam included, use this contrast as a shield from the Wagner­ ian discourse peaking in Russian artistic life at the turn of the century. This discourse erects before the Russian cultural elite the bogeyman of the spiritually rootless, linguistically flawed, and aesthetically infertile “jews” who rule the artistic marketplace. Of these charges, linguistic inadequacy has the gravest implications for a writer. Thus, bemoaning the state of modern art, Viktor Burenin invokes the poets of Jewish descent—Semen Nadson, Nikolai Minskii, Semen Frug—as carriers of “the Yid jargon silencing the native tongue” of Russian poetry.13 How did Burenin’s contemporaries understand this statement? In Russian letters and drama, the tendency to mark “the jews” with incorrect speech originates in the eighteenth century. Reflecting the pattern of Jewish settlement in the empire, Polish vocabulary and phonetics are the most common means of linguistic othering.14 In general, incorrect speech remains an optional and minor feature of “the jews” in Russian art until Jewish assimilation forces authors to seek new ways of reasserting “jewish” difference.15 And even as they do so, their ideas of the “jewspeak” are so divergent that many are content simply to mention the “Jewish accent” without risking a plunge into the specifics.16 But against the backdrop of the generalized belief in “jewish” linguistic inadequacy, Russian writers of Jewish descent face a major hurdle on the road to recognition. Here their story overlaps with that of German Jews who react to linguistic othering by “a veritable obsession with proper usage.”17 Among the pioneers of Russian-Jewish writing, this obsession marks

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Lev Levanda’s novel of assimilation, Goriachee vremia (Seething times, 1875), whose positive “jews” speak flawless Russian and negative ones copy the “jew-speak” invented by Faddei Bulgarin. The issue of linguistic competence grows in importance for the next wave of assimilated artists, especially those bent on avant-garde experimentation. Boris Pasternak complains repeatedly that his stylistic nonconformism highlights his “jewishness” for the cultural majority, whose representatives malign the poet’s linguistic experiments as signs of his ethnocultural origin. Osip Mandel'shtam goes to great lengths to disprove those critics who link his hermetic poetry to “jewish” usage. Theorizing the Russian language as “unbound by national or religious institutions” (that is, open to ethnocultural newcomers), Mandel'shtam subsequently devotes a chapter of his autobiography to the illustration of his organic link to the Russian language, which his narrative alter ego contrasts with his father’s inadequate proficiency and further grounds in the aesthetic rejection of Hebrew as enunciated by his grandfather.18 The issue of language becomes nothing short of tragic for the artists moving in the direction opposite to that of Pasternak and Mandel'shtam— toward the reclamation of Jewish identity. Propelled into Zionism by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Vladimir Zhabotinskii describes his generation as prisoner to the Russian language, which “condemns us to a lifelong link to a people and a country whose fate leaves us cold.” Implementing his ideal of cultural autonomy, Zhabotinskii the polyglot publicist gradually abandons the art of letters because he can write literary fiction only in Russian. Similarly radicalized by Judeo­phobia (the 1913 Beilis trial), Valentin Parnakh chooses a different path. Torn between his desire to forget Russia and write poetry in another language and the awareness of his foreignness to Jewish cultural and religious traditions, Parnakh becomes a Russian poet in France, all the while devoting himself to the study of Jewish history and art.19 Exile puts him at a safe distance from tsarist Russia and on equal cultural footing with Russian expatriates in Paris. More important, the culturally neutral (by Parnakh’s estimate) milieu of Parisian artists mollifies the conflict between the poet’s Jewish identity and the Russian medium of his art. Parnakh’s tentative solution to the aporiae of Russian-Jewish authorship foreshadows Mandel'shtam’s theory of the Russian language as a

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

neutral entity unbound by national and religious factors (not accidentally, he uses Parnakh as the foil for his alter ego in Egipetskaia marka [The Egyptian stamp, 1928]). This solution has the added benefit of placing Parnakh in the heart of Western artistic life, thus integrating him into that “general current of European life and culture” ignored by Jewish traditionalists, at least according to a Haskalah advocate like Iushkevich.20 Ultimately, it affords Parnakh the illusion of being not a Russian but a world writer—Goethe’s ideal come to life, as it were—a self-image to which Mandel'shtam could relate, given his own longing for “world culture” as an escape door from Russianness and his selffashioning at the crossroads of Russian, German, and Jewish cultures.21 In this context, the title of Reb bestowed upon Goethe by rabbi Chajes’s traditionalist community reclaims its etymological roots in the rebbe as a teacher and spiritual authority. The bitter irony of the situation is of course in the fact that the ideas of the theoretician of World Literature command the highest respect from those who travel the farthest from their Jewish roots, losing the creative cultural autonomy of rabbi Chajes’s milieu. Caught between Russification and the discourse about “jewish” difference, the second cohort of Russian-Jewish writers offers a full gamut of responses to this predicament—from the abnegation of Jewishness (Pasternak) to the rejection of Russianness (Zhabotinskii), even as the vanishing breed of the Haskalah proponents (Iushkevich) is overshadowed by all those striving to realize the ideal of World Literature. This ideal lets a writer replace the early Russian-Jewish intelligentsia’s salient longing for Russian culture with that for Western or world culture, whose pastures look greener in light of the crisis of assimilationist ideology in pogrom-plagued Russia. Isaak Babel' and Iurii Fel'zen are among those who nurture Reb Goethe’s ideal of artistic and cultural cross-fertilization. Both designate French literature as the escape route from the insoluble contradictions of Russian-Jewish authorship, not only implementing Goethe’s formula of World Literature but using it as an alibi and a shield that transforms the curse of “jewish” marginality into the advantage of cultural universalism. The instrumentalization of French literature—Babel’s choice of Maupassant as his model and Fel'zen’s similar recourse to Proust—is

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not the only thing these writers have in common. Born in 1894, both mystify their past so thoroughly that we still know little about their lives before the year each misleadingly cites as that of his belated entry into literature—1924 for Babel', 1926 for Fel'zen.22 Carefully managing their images, both furnish sparse or false autobiographical data in support of the authorial personae they cultivate, thus prompting the reader to turn to literary fiction for information. And although aesthetically informed self-stylization is common among modernist artists, I argue that the logic of Babel’s and Fel'zen’s autobiographical narratives is governed by their shared need to accommodate the lexicon of “jewish” difference at a time when it reaches special intensity in the European turmoil to which they ultimately succumb—Babel' in a Stalinist jail, Fel'zen in Auschwitz. These similarities, of course, do not diminish the divergence of the authors’ political, professional, and aesthetic choices. But these choices themselves represent the main options available to Russian artists of Jewish descent in the period framed by the world wars and punctuated by the rise of communist and Nazi dictatorships. A fuller understanding of Babel’s and Fel'zen’s artistic personae then requires an appreciation of their cultural and ideological contexts—Soviet Russia and the Russian émigré milieu in France, respectively. As already discussed, in the late 1870s “the jews” came to embody leftist radicalism in the imagination of the Russian political Right, all the while retaining their role as the ur-symbol of capitalism. Figuring out the proportion of individuals of Jewish origin among Russia’s radicals has since become a cliché of both the accusatory and the apologetic discourses about “the jews” in the country’s revolutionary movement.23 In my opinion, it is a methodological fallacy to treat the visibility of assimilated Jews among Russian Socialists and Communists as the reason for the Russian obsession with the “jewish” hand in revolutionary activity, which even today holds many historians under its spell. The fact that political activism among assimilated Jews, most of them devoid of any Jewish identity, is routinely traced by tsarist officials and Russian conservative opinion to Judaism and the international conspiracy of its adherents suggests that “the jews” are a default imaginative answer to Russia’s sociopolitical troubles. “The jews” would have emerged as

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

the culprit of these troubles even if no Jews had been counted among Russian revolutionaries, in which case they would have been invented in the same way that “the jews,” according to the popular belief, engineered Russia’s strategic upsets in its wars with Turkey (1877–78) and Japan (1904–5).24 The view of “the jews” as the engine and backbone of revolutionary extremism in Russia is not limited to right-wing circles, given its roots in the age-old fear of “jewish” revenge as a corollary of the ethos of dispossession informing Christian substitution theology (see Chapter 1). Many Russian Judeophiles believe in the existence of “jewish” political sedition, which they present—unself-consciously drawing on the ancient motif of “jewish” revanchism—as a result of the empire’s mistreatment of its Jewish subjects. Gor'kii, for instance, conceives a play about a revolutionary “Semite meting out retribution like Elijah” but abandons his project, realizing that in the ideological climate of 1901 it might do more harm than good to the Judeophile cause. Other literary liberals are not as circumspect, casting Russia’s “jewish” radicals as the effeminate and fanatical avengers of their abused brethren.25 The February revolution of 1917 officially abolished all discrimination against Jews and, along with it, the Russian intelligentsia’s Judeophile obligation. But once the brakes of liberal self-censorship were lifted, little stood between Russian public opinion and the default mechanism of a post-Christian culture to blame its sociopolitical and economic ills on “the jews.” Indeed, in the summer of 1917, Russian observers across the political spectrum report a spike in antisemitic agitation against the backdrop of growing popular resentment vis-à-vis the appearance of Jewish individuals in the geographic, social, and professional spheres newly opened to them. The year 1917 augured a replay, albeit on a larger scale, of the reformist 1860s–70s, when Russian culture had struggled to accommodate the emerging Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. By October, the scene was set for a Judeophobe backlash, subsequently legitimized, even in the eyes of the ex-­Judeophiles, by the prominence of assimilated Jews in the power echelons of the Bolshevik dictatorship.26 Echoing this paradigmatic shift in the intelligentsia’s ideological attitudes, the poet and critic Zinaida Gippius rebuffs in 1921 the charge

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that former Russian political liberals have turned to Judeophobia in response to the empire’s violent denouement: I have a feeling of full equality with the Jews, of our kinship in mis­fortune. Those who, until now, have not shed the hackneyed pre-­revolutionary notions and views—“the oppressed people,” “the pogroms,” etc.—are, above all, hopelessly lost in their misunderstanding of the revolution, be they “on the Left” or “on the Right.” Are we not, like the Jews, an oppressed people? And are we not all victims of a general—Leninist and all-Russian—pogrom?

The erosion of the intelligentsia’s Judeophile obligation is particularly evident in the private reactions of writers to the current political and cultural upheaval. In her 1918 diary, Gippius opines that the ­Soviet regime is a “jewish” dictatorship, lucidly pinpointing the gap between this conclusion and her former Judeophile engagement. Mikhail ­Bulgakov records in his 1924–25 diary the impression that “the jews” control and manipulate Soviet political and cultural life. To soothe his anxiety, he reads an 1870s essay mocking the cultural pretension of “the jews” in disguise. Although the diary does not specify the essay’s author, this jibe at Jewish assimilation might have been penned by Viktor Burenin, who specialized in such matters. Incidentally, early Soviet literary life sports a legend that couples Burenin the ex-scourge of “the jews” with his favorite whipping boy, critic Akim Volynskii (the garlic-reeking “Filokserov” of Chekhov’s letters to Suvorin; see Chapter 14). In the legend, Volynskii, the head of Petrograd’s Writers’ Union, magnanimously helps an unemployed, destitute, and tearful Burenin. The tale’s message is ambiguous. Georgii Adamovich sees in it a show of Volynskii’s decency toward a sworn enemy. But a writer like Bulgakov, preoccupied with the role of “the jews” in Russian culture, could see the same legend as an illustration of the final triumph of “the jews” over Russia’s literary establishment.27 In fact, in his unpublished 1920s essay, Volynskii himself testifies to the erosion of the liberal intelligentsia’s Judeophile commitment. “I hesitate to accuse the entire Russian intelligentsia of harboring antiJewish attitudes, although its charity has always struck me as highly dubious,” writes the critic. “At present, deliberate anti-Jewish incitement has been abolished but we do not observe a drop in antisemitic sen-

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

timent in Russian society.”28 Expressing their views about “the jews” in Russia’s political and cultural turmoil, Gippius and Bulgakov do so privately, not so much for fear of violating the already shaky liberal taboos but because such rhetoric is pregnant with new consequences. At the time when Volynskii formulates his similarly private accusation, the Russian intelligentsia struggles to come to terms with a mirror reversal in the dynamic of the “Jewish question.” In a twist whose historical irony does not escape attentive observers, the intelligentsia and the state swap roles: bound by its internationalist ideology, the Soviet regime enforces Judeophile discourse until the early 1930s.29 The intelligentsia, in contrast, no longer feels morally bound to Judeophile ideology and is much freer in the expression of the opposite attitude. Given the internationalist ethos of the young Soviet regime, it is tempting to assume that writers of Jewish descent feel more at home in Soviet literature than in pre-1917 Russian art, or in emigration. In Shimon Markish’s view, “revolution gives Babel' a sense of second belonging.” If previously, “Russian-Jewish writers were foreigners in the eyes of the Russian reader,” Soviet letters, according to Markish, house Jews and Russians on equal terms. “I contend,” writes the critic, “that Babel’s devotion to the Soviet regime, his love of Soviet Russia, and his constant exhortations to his family to return from exile, especially in 1934–35, have much to do with this fact.” This argument ignores the pressure placed on artists by the Soviet state, and Babel’s concomitant need to dissociate himself from the exilic choice of his family (his letters were likely purloined). It also contradicts the testimonies of his contemporaries: witness Volynskii’s aforementioned view; or Parnakh’s discovery, after his return to Russia in the early 1920s, that Soviet internationalism conceals “the vicious [Christian] Orthodoxy of an old, decaying intelligentsia and the rejuvenated antisemitism of the society at large.”30 Babel’s artistic and cultural position therefore is more complex than Markish imagines it. And we can expect to find an echo of these perplexities in his writings. The situation of acculturated Jews who, like Fel'zen, leave Russia is hardly simpler. Jewish refugees from the Russian empire include the Yiddish-speaking population displaced by civil war pogroms and privations, as well as the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia fleeing with the rest

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of the country’s elite. The second group identifies with the Russian rather than Jewish exodus.31 But this identification is tenuous in view of the émigré glorification of the antisemitic White armies. Despite their general sympathy for the White cause, Russian-Jewish exiles, like the Jews who were summarily barred or expelled from the Volunteer Army, feel alienated from the emigration’s founding myth of heroic anti-Soviet struggle.32 And although Russian-Jewish émigrés pioneer the discussion and study of civil war pogroms in both Russian and French (for example, Il'ia Cherikover and his Jewish Historical Archive; the review Evreiskaia tribuna [The Jewish tribune]), Soviet polemicists exploit their dubious position in émigré culture, casting them as allies to White pogromists; for the Red Army at least condemned anti-Jewish violence among its troops, contrary to the impunity of the Volunteer Army’s pogroms, condoned by its leaders and by anti-Soviet public opinion.33 The fact that émigré artists—Russian and Russian-Jewish—fail to address civil war pogroms despite their unprecedented scope speaks volumes about the subject’s taboo status in Russian émigré culture, laying bare the fault lines of the position occupied in it by the Jewish intelligentsia. Combined with the heightened sensitivity of Russian-Jewish exiles to their exclusion from the emigration’s founding myth, the recession of Judeophile ideology breathes new life into asemitizm (see Chapter  13) among the exiled intelligentsia unaffiliated with the extreme Right. Marina Tsvetaeva purges her portrayal of commissars as “the jews” (“a hating Christian is a Hebrew” worshipping “the murderous Old Testament God”) for fear of hurting “the tender sensibilities of true Semites” among the editors of Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary annals). ­Gippius, to take another example, banishes “the jews” from her writings after her 1921 essays draw, at once, the charges of Judeophobia and of her being paid by “the jews.”34 Likewise, the paucity of “jewish” heroes in Vladimir Nabokov’s oeuvre is inversely proportional to the urgency of Jewish subjects in his life—from his father’s role in the advocacy of Jewish civic equality to the writer’s marriage to a Jewish woman, which puts him on a collision course with some Russian friends. Familiar with émigré Judeophobia (and sensitized to it by his wife), Nabokov is aware of the insufficiency of the imaginative means

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

at his disposal for the artistic depiction of Jews and, save for his semiautobiographical novel Dar (The gift, 1937), avoids such depiction in his Russian fiction.35 For the Yiddish-speaking refugees from the defunct empire, the situation is clear: they are lucky to have fled a land to which they have no intention of returning—an attitude also professed by the likes of Zhabotinskii. Furthermore, they see the Russian emigration as a hostile entity composed of pogromists, and this impression is reinforced by the prominence of right-wing Russian exiles in the current European antisemitic propaganda efforts.36 By contrast, the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia finds itself in a bind. Forming the backbone of émigré literary and intellectual life, it is suspected of divided loyalties and faces hostility from the average émigré reader, whose Judeophobia is taken for granted.37 There exists compelling evidence for the pivotal role played by Jewish writers, critics, editors, and patrons in exiled Russian letters. But this role is seen by Russian émigrés as a mixed blessing. And these reservations are far from limited to the political Right.38 Consider poet Anatolii Shteiger’s Wagnerian disgust at the sight of the Jewish patrons, without whom, as he readily admits, the émigrés “could not publish a single line in Russian”; or the praise of the Ladyzhnikov publishers’ Russian cultural effort by a reader deploring the “jewish” control of émigré publishing, unaware that the house is run by Russian Jews.39 The most famous reflection on assimilated Jews in émigré culture belongs to writer Mikhail Osorgin—a political liberal complaining in his 1925 essay “Russian solitude” (Russkoe odinochestvo) that a “Russian Slav of Christian sensibility” is hard-pressed to find soul mates in the émigré cultural elite, overpopulated as it is by individuals of Jewish origin (4). And while his goal is to bemoan the decline of the Russian intelligentsia, Osorgin unwittingly reminds his Jewish readers of the tenuousness of their Russian self-identification (hence the essay’s appearance in the Zionist Rassvet [Dawn]). If the cultural situation of the exiled Russian intelligentsia is marginal by definition, that of the assimilated Jews within the émigré community is doubly so. Neither the adoption of the majority discourse, manifest in the acceptance of “jewish” guilt for the Russian Revolution, nor the insistence on a distinct Russian-Jewish identity, accompanied by the rejection of Judeophobe

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clichés, can lift the stigma of Otherness from Russian-Jewish exiles, swear as they might by the emigration’s self-imposed mission of perpetuating “true” Russian culture.40 Russian-Jewish émigrés find themselves in a milieu that flaunts Christian spirituality in response to Soviet atheism. Nonconformity with this religious parti pris deepens their cultural alienation: witness Lev Shestov’s exchanges with Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdiaev, the former insisting that Shestov’s thought is unwittingly Christian, and the latter dismissing it because “those deprived of Christian experience” cannot grasp the European philosophical tradition.41 It is not surprising then that baptism and conspicuous concern with Christian thematics acquire more importance among Russian-Jewish writers in exile than in tsarist Russia. Baptism, to be sure, does not change their status in Russian émigré culture: “The Black Hundred persistently regard them as ‘Yids’, whereas the Jewish bourgeoisie, to which they could otherwise turn for solace and support, looks at them askance, like at renegades.”42 But we do see in statements by Russian-Jewish exiles that Christian (especially Orthodox) religiosity and the concomitant sense of fuller acculturation validate their claim to the émigré ethos of Russian cultural preservation and continuity.43 Besides, baptism is further encouraged by the geography of Russian exile: the resurgence of religiosity in the émigré cultural elite, heavily concentrated in France by 1925, echoes the revival of Catholic spirituality among French writers accompanied by a literary fad for conversion narratives, wherein recently baptized French-Jewish authors profess their newfound faith.44 A different attitude on the part of Russian-Jewish exiles, namely, the valorization of Jewish identity, is interpreted as quaint particularism or as an outright affront to the spirit of Russianness. Thus, Gippius employs the heavy guns of Christian anti-Judaism to describe the Zionist choice of poet Dovid Knut and his wife Ariadna Skriabina, a convert to Judaism. “We were out late,” reads her diary (16.II.1939), “and ran into Knut and his nasty wife. [. . .] She has converted to the Yid-faith [zhidovstvo] because Knut has become not so much a poet as a militant Israelite. ‘His blood be on us and on our children’ [Matt. 27:25].” 45 The implicit cultural outsider status shared by Babel' and Fel'zen lends special resonance to their place in the stylistic revolution sweep-

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

ing Russian letters after 1917. Babel' positions himself at the epicenter of this revolution, contributing to the experiments of the Soviet artists who rebel against the Russian literary tradition. Fel'zen, equally interested in this tradition’s stylistic overhaul, finds himself on the other side of the ideological divide, in an aesthetically conservative émigré milieu that is keenly aware of the precipitous linguistic changes brought about by Russia’s sociopolitical crisis and determined to resist them for the sake of preserving “true” Russian culture. And although stylistic experimentation is generalized among younger Soviet and émigré artists, there remains a distinct possibility that a different measure will be applied to such experiments when they are conducted by writers of Jewish descent, as Boris Pasternak complains to Maksim Gor'kii in 1928.46 Linguistic anxiety is part of the post-1917 Russian Judeophobe backlash. As early as 1918, Gippius describes the language of the Soviet era, including that of Aleksandr Blok’s poem “Dvenadtsat'” (The twelve), as “jewish” and traces the newly introduced orthography to “the Jewish accent.” Decrying “Russian solitude,” Osorgin lists “the purity of language and pronunciation” among the traits separating him from Russian-Jewish exiles. And his colleague Merezhkovskii privately marvels at Shestov’s style: “How could this Jew have mastered Russian so brilliantly?” Around the same time, Mikhail Bulgakov’s diary keeps track of “the Jewish accent” of Bolshevik officials, even as the author regales himself with the “jew-speak” in a Judeophobe feuilleton from the 1870s—an activity also enjoyed by Gippius, who likes to recall Burenin’s lampoons on Russian-Jewish poets.47 After 1917, “jewish” linguistic othering rarely surfaces in print: in the USSR it grates on official internationalism; in emigration it falls within the purview of the far Right, with which no mainstream author publicly identifies. The “jew-speak” thus shifts into the private domain, as intimated by occasional remarks in émigré memoirs or by Mandel'shtam’s aforementioned reclamation of linguistic Russianness in the 1920s.48 Babel' and Fel'zen could not ignore the linguistic othering they faced in their respective artistic milieus. This awareness makes all the more significant their shared proclivity for stylistic experimentation. Having ample opportunity to shake off Soviet censorship during his trips to France (1927–28, 1932–33), Babel' chooses to remain “an upright

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Soviet citizen” in order to stay a writer by profession in contrast to his émigré peers who seek alternative sources of income.49 Babel' thereby sticks to the modern image of the writer as a paid professional, whereas Fel'zen and his colleagues cultivate the myth of a return to premodern (“pure”) artistic activity thanks to the diminished role of financial remuneration in émigré cultural life. And since the opposition of amateur and professional modes of artistic production is traditionally conceptualized in modern Europe in the terms of “jewish” alterity, one of the tasks of the chapters ahead is to examine Babel’s and Fel'zen’s employment of the lexicon of “jewish” difference as the main cultural code in which assimilated Jewish artists can describe their imagined place in Reb Goethe’s equally imaginary World Literature. Neither Babel’s Russified family nor his Russian schooling in Odessa, where traditional Jewish life is weak and where he receives only the most basic Jewish education, accounts for the importance and visibility of “the jews” in his oeuvre, which Alice Nakhimovsky justly views as unusual for a Russian-Jewish writer of his day.50 In this respect, Fel'zen, a native of Saint Petersburg, is more typical of the experience of the second wave of assimilated authors by virtue of driving “jewish” subject matter into the deeper recesses of his art. But the differences in their artistic approaches to “jewishness” cannot hide similarities in the writers’ personal trajectories, shaped by their shared condition of being Russian Jews. Before turning to literature, Isaak Babel' and Nikolai Freudenstein (Iurii Fel'zen’s real name) jumped through the same hoops. Both were trained in professional fields for which they had no inclination—Babel' in commerce, Fel'zen in law—to accommodate Russia’s discriminatory laws. Both found an opportunity for social mobility in the cracks produced in the imperial monolith by war and revolution: Babel' volunteered as an under-officer in 1916; Fel'zen enrolled as a cadet in a military academy after the monarchy’s fall in 1917.51 But the most striking similarity resides in the double life Babel' and Fel'zen lead as accomplished writers, cultivating a Russian façade that all but obfuscates the ties both privately maintain to their Jewish origins. Babel’s letters to his exiled mother and sister are full of references to Jewish religious and cultural life, but no such references are found in his correspondence with friends. And although he continues to attend

The Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

synagogue services and keeps in touch with Jewish relatives, his second, Russian, wife knows next to nothing about all this.52 Fel'zen’s public image is similarly alienated from his private life. Among his émigré colleagues, he enjoys the carefully managed reputation of a perfect gentleman, which represents the polar opposite of “jewish” vulgarity. Hence Vasilii Ianovskii’s tongue-in-cheek remark that Fel'zen learned much “in his uncle’s tailor’s shop specialized in dazzling uniforms for Petersburg’s golden youth.” In tandem with his physique, which Vadim Morkovin describes as “typical of the ‘Nordic race’,” Fel'zen’s public image makes some émigrés believe that he is of German stock—an impression reinforced by the displacement of “jewishness” in his literary fiction. Yet Gippius records in her diary (6.VIII.1939), “He is, above all—Jewish, and the rest comes after. More exactly—his Jewishness is filial rather than personal (it comes from his mother, his sisters).”53 I contend that an investigation of the ways in which both writers negotiate their “filial Jewishness” can provide valuable insight into their artistic oeuvre and personae.

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as a Former Jew

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The most significant achievement of recent scholarship on Babel' is its insistence on the need to separate the little-known details of the writer’s life from the autobiographical motivation of his writings, wherein documentary self-descriptions are as fictitious as the allegedly memoiristic Red Cavalry and Childhood story cycles. The resulting approach to his oeuvre as a record of self-stylization—a fictional autobiography whose hero is related to Babel' the man inasmuch as he plays out the dilemmas of Babel' the writer—facilitates our inquiry into the place of the generative model of “the jews” in Babel’s imagination.1 But students of Babel’s art tend to underestimate the issue of his target audience, paramount to the interpretation of his writings and to the testing of the common assumption that “the jews” in Babel’s oeuvre are novel and iconoclastic, thanks to his “inside view of Jewish life.”2 Consider the Friday-night synagogue scene in Babel’s play Zakat (Sunset, 1926–28). A tallith-wrapped cantor unloads his gun at a rat; the worshippers spit and do business; and the whole gathering is likened to a bazaar (II:297–99). Even putting aside the implausible shooting, which picturesquely conjures up Odessa’s mythical freewheeling mores, it is difficult to argue that this scene is written from an insider’s vantage point: it is not customary to don the tallith (prayer shawl) at night, save for the Kol Nidre services on Yom Kippur; ritual spitting ceased in the eighteenth century, surviving only in the Hassidic rite, which is not described here; and business is not done on the Sabbath.3 Why should Babel' summon such dubious details harking back to the “jewish” rituals of the Russian imagination, from Iankel’s prayer in “Taras Bul'ba” to Isai’s Friday-night rite in Dostoevskii’s Notes from the House of the Dead,

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the latter sporting not only spitting and a tallith but also phylacteries, which are worn on workday mornings only? Dostoevskii, at least, never saw Jewish worship—Isai’s prototype was a convert to Orthodoxy.4 I think the answer may be found in Babel’s target audience. Every detail of the service in Zakat testifies to the author’s orientation toward the Gentile reader, for whom such details function as signs of “jewishness” and of Judaism’s degenerate, anti-Christian nature, buttressed by the episode’s timing—the “jewish” Sabbath as the axiological nadir in the weekly Christian calendar. Symptomatically, Babel’s play drew accusations of Judeophobia, giving its author a taste of Iushkevich’s troubles.5 We find the same orientation toward the non-Jewish reader in ­Babel’s depiction of “the jews” as epitomizing the physical and spiritual decline of the European male—an idea he shares with many assimilated Jewish intellectuals of his day. Babel’s narrative alter ego is an aspiring writer coveting the body and spirit of the Gentiles, unspoiled by “jewishness” and civilization, because his own neurotic and frail physique is a liability for an artist, given the modern articulation of decadence in “jewish” terms (“Probuzhdenie” [Awakening, 1931], II:174–75, hereafter “Pbn”; “Syn rabbi” [A rabbi’s son, 1924], II:129; “Dnevnik 1920 g.” [The diary of 1920], I:363–64).6 Accordingly, Babel’s hero finds the “jewish” body offensive to good taste. And like Mandel'shtam’s alter ego, who flees all his life from the “strong odor of Jewishness,” Babel’s protagonist describes the “stifling prison” of his ancestral culture by stock Christian tropes. These include the foetor judaicus motif and the image of “the jews” as the undead who will resuscitate with the coming of a new era—a political metaphor carbon-copied from the Christian discourse about Judaism’s adherents.7 The guilt generated in a Russian-Jewish writer by such reliance on the lexicon of “jewish” difference, whose negative resonance Babel' cannot miss, may explain the artist’s attempts to cast his alter ego as a reincarnation of Hershel Ostropolier—a legendary court jester to a rabbi and an irreverent observer of the mores of fellow Jews. In 1918, Babel' writes “Shabos-Nakhamu,” inaugurating his soon abandoned “Hershel” project, still echoed later by the Red Cavalry cycle’s hero-­narrator (“Rabbi” [1924], II:35–36).8 In “Shabos-Nakhamu,” Hershel uses his storytelling skills to swindle “the jews” by mocking their religious

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praxis. From here, the figure of a blaspheming artist-trickster migrates into the Childhood cycle. Its hero inherits his artistic disposition from a grandfather who is a defrocked rabbi turned con artist (“Istoriia moei golubiatni” [The story of my dovecot, 1925], II:144, hereafter “IMG”; “V podvale” [In the basement, 1931], II:182). But the same sense of guilt may inform Babel’s ultimate decision not to make his alter ego a new Ostropolier. While Hershel cracks jokes both at and for Jews, a Gentile target audience brings Babel’s authorial persona dangerously close to Pavel Veinberg—a nineteenth-century Russian-Jewish raconteur whose dubious fame comes from his popular and demeaning “scenes from Jewish life,” a genre Babel' knows well.9 To distance himself from the servile renegade, Babel' puts an occasional ironic spin on the language of “jewish” difference he otherwise uses so liberally. For instance, setting afire a police station and cutting water to a nearby hydrant (v krane ne okazalos' vody), his “jewish” gangsters mockingly realize the Russian doggerel, “If there’s no water in a spout, the Yids must have drunk it” (“Esli v krane net vody, znachit vypili zhidy”); and taunt a police chief by addressing him the way Iankel' spoke to Taras Bul'ba (“Korol'” [King, 1921], I:126) or the way Veinberg spoke to his Russian audience, catering to its idea of “the jews.” The same fear of resembling a Veinberg-style “jewish” artist is visible in the rebellion of Babel’s literary alter ego against the career of a violinist, glorified as lucrative in his Odessa home, which reeks of “onion and Jewish fate” (“Pbn” II:174). The young hero rejects not just a career in music but the Gentile idea of the “jewish” artist uncritically absorbed by his ethnocultural milieu. Suffice it to recall that an allium-­smelling violinist evokes in Babel’s interpretive community the memory of Chekhov’s Rothschild and, more generally, of the “jewish” virtuoso as a stock Wagnerian symbol of modern cultural decline.10 Taking as my starting point the presumption that Babel' sees his target audience as primarily non-Jewish, I will treat his fictional and nonfictional writings as a coherent autobiographical narrative that presents in the symbolic language of a post-Christian culture a portrait of the artist as a former Jew. This narrative opens with the boyhood of a prodigious liar (“Pbn” II:172; “V podvale,” II:179) and goes on to the adulthood of a budding artist for whom “a well-told story need not re-

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

semble real life, which does its best to resemble a well-told story” (“Moi pervyi gonorar” [My first honorarium, 1922–28], II:250). The hero of this autobiographical narrative is both the public face of Babel' the artist and a test pilot for a limited set of scenarios informing Babel' the man’s negotiation of Russian authorship and Jewish origin, scenarios that arise from the axiomatically transgressive nature of the art of letters as seen by Babel’s protagonist, himself a “writing-desk scandal-monger” (“Kak eto delalos' v Odesse” [How it was done in Odessa, 1923] I:127; hereafter “KDO”). Relying on the lexicon of “jewish” difference for the articulation of his cultural and artistic identity, the hero of Babel’s autobiographical narrative soothes the concomitant guilt by treating literary activity as transgressive by default. And so does his creator, who admires artists reputed for their social marginality (François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud) and presents himself as a “formerly shy Jew” reformed by literature, “in which there is no place for self-effacement and diffidence”11— hence, we may presume, the fusion of art and crime in the linguistic and story­telling performance of the bandits in Babel’s Odessa cycle, who share the author’s spite for “the jews” (Zakat, II:286) and with whom Babel' the artist identifies.12 This fusion of art and crime has the added benefit of distancing ­Babel’s authorial persona from “jewishness,” since his bandits are neither the maudlin effeminates of the Judeophile imagination nor the “jewish” thugs believed by Judeophobes to be at the helm of modern Europe’s criminal underworld (see Chapter 2).13 Instead, they fit the noble bandit paradigm, whose apogee in Russian popular culture coincides with Babel’s youth and draws on Russian folklore, where such bandits are often of Cossack origin. This explains the structural kinship of Babel’s Cossacks and “jewish” gangsters, similarly capable of fighting the White Army (“Froim Grach” [1933], I:123) and traceable to Gogol’s Cossacks.14 Literary activity is transgressive because it makes Babel’s alter ego abjure his cultural past and because Russian culture is hostile to a transplant from the world of “onion and Jewish fate.” This fate can be reversed by illicit means only: Benia Krik becomes a bandit king through violence and eloquence; Babel’s alter ego follows suit. In one version of this illicit intruder scenario, the Moldavanka-born writer moves to

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Petersburg without the permit required of Jews; inhabits a basement in Pushkin Street (“Avtobiografiia,” 8); and is charged with pornography, although his case goes up in flames along with the courthouse (“­Nachalo,” II:367–68), recalling the precinct arsoned by Benia’s men. This autobiographical tall tale casts Babel’s 1915–16 stay in the capital as that of a natural-born outlaw (Moldavanka is Odessa’s gangsterland) whose transgressive habits inform his artistic persona, hence the underground abode in a street named after the patron saint of Russian letters.15 The same details convey Russian culture’s resistance to a newcomer with no right of residence in its orbis interior. In another take on this scenario, the “homeless poet” steals into ­Petersburg’s Anichkov Palace, where he studies the personal effects of the deposed monarchs (“Vecher u imperatritsy” [An evening at the empress’s, 1922], II:95–97); and helps himself to regal wardrobe and cigars (“Doroga” [The road, 1932], II:205–6). The same situation is tested in the Red Cavalry cycle, whose protagonist makes himself at home in a castle abandoned by the Polish gentry (“Berestechko,” II:70–71). This intruder scenario testifies to Babel’s vision of the majority culture as a hostile element to be overcome by illicit or violent means, be it artistic iconoclasm or Benia Krik’s banditry. Compare this vision to that of Mandel'shtam, whose alter ego “steals away” from a Petersburg synagogue “like a thief ” (Shum vremeni, 19) because his home is in Christian Petersburg. Babel’s hero is as resolute in renouncing his ancestral culture, but unlike Mandel'shtam’s alter ego, he must steal into Russianness—a fact aggravating the latent sense of betrayal and guilt generated by his recourse to the lexicon of “jewish” difference, the kind of guilt we do not find in Mandel'shtam’s oeuvre. Babel’s “writing-desk scandal-monger” drowns out this guilt by rubbing against the grain with those readers who might find shocking the presence of “the jews” in the sancta sanctorum of Gentile symbolic space. A case in point is his take on Christianity, which is as unflattering as his vision of Judaism, albeit irreducible to a Nietzschean assault on religion, for Babel' is aware of the special standard applied to Jews who comment on Christianity.16 Visiting Catholic churches during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, Babel’s hero sees himself as a “violent intruder,” not just because he belongs to the Soviet camp but because he

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inverts traditional theological and social order. Dressed like a Cossack, adulated by the vanquished Poles, the hero discusses church art in sacrilegiously naturalistic terms. The fact that the Poles ignore his origins only exacerbates his profane rhetoric for the Gentile reader.17 His provocative posture mirrors the iconoclastic art of Pan Apolek, a Christian Ostropolier in the Red Cavalry cycle who paints church frescoes deemed profane by Catholic clergy. Like the artistically disposed and banished ex-rabbi who happens to be the hero’s grandfather, Apolek is “chased from the temple under construction,” becoming a model artist for Babel’s alter ego (“Pan Apolek,” II:18, 22–23). Against Apolek’s backdrop, the profane rhetoric of Babel’s narrator appears to taunt the Gentile reader to chase him, an artistic iconoclast and a “violent intruder,” from the temple of Russian letters currently under (re)construction.18 Babel’s rebarbative approach to Christian sensibilities goes hand in hand with his appropriation of Christian symbolism to the ends of artistic self-modeling, because his Russified background imbues the writer with the symbolic vocabulary of the majority culture and because this vocabulary is the only one understood by his target audience. For instance, Babel’s autobiographical narrative casts its hero’s encounter with Maksim Gor'kii as Jesus’ encounter with John the Baptist: Gor'kii is the “Precursor” of the “literary Messiah from the south” who comes to illumine Russia’s gloomy literature (“Odessa” [1916], I:64–65). This role distribution projects the story of the artistic maturation of Babel’s alter ego onto that of Jesus’ flight from “jewishness”—the paradigm also informing Mandel'shtam’s artistic self-fashioning, as discussed above.19 Thus, when the hero of Babel’s autobiographical narrative pledges to serve the “new covenant” and “gospel” furnished by Apolek’s artistic example (“Pan Apolek,” II:18), these must be the same iconoclastic principles by which he, like the aforesaid “literary Messiah from the south,” intends to change Russian literature. The Babel'-Gor'kii teacher-disciple dynamic—another recurrent scenario in the autobiographical narrative—echoes a stock motif of early Russian-Jewish fiction, whose heroes integrate into the hostile Gentile world with help from Russian mentors.20 Babel’s alter ego first enters the majority culture despite the educational numerus clausus but with tacit support from a liberal (read Judeophile) teacher of Russian literature.

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At a school entrance exam, the boy recites verses about Peter the Great from Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik (The bronze horseman, 1833). The exam’s subject and the examiner’s field are as significant as the Christian symbols framing the boy’s success: the “5+” mark that he enunciates as “five with a cross”; the gift of doves crowning his triumph; the Cathedral street, where they buy his uniform (“IMG” II:142–44). These details suggest that acculturation is inseparable from Russian literature, the two forming a springboard for a plunge into Christianity. Thus, Babel' links his hero’s cultural trajectory to the topos of immersion into water as an element hostile to a scion of “Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money-­changers” (“Pbn” II:173–74; “V podvale,” II:186). Overcoming hydrophobia with help from a Russian mentor (compare Jesus’ immersion by John the Baptist), the hero learns from his swimming teacher how to handle an antithetical element and to correct the “jewish” flaws in his artistic vision of the world (“Pbn” II:174–75). In a reminder of the Gentile majority’s unremitting hostility, the pogrom during which the boy’s doves are killed and uniformed portrait destroyed originates in the same Cathedral street where they buy his school outfit (“Pervaia liubov'” [First love, 1925], II:155; hereafter “PL”). The hero must therefore retake his (cultural) entrance exam, whose details—Peter’s city as the scene of Mednyi vsadnik—recur when as a budding artist, he sojourns in Petersburg’s Pushkin Street. Again he overcomes barriers with a Russian patron’s help. His art is rejected by editors who suggest that he go into commerce (that is, stay “jewish”). But he meets Gor'kii, who blesses his literary career as a form of martyrdom and, like his swimming teacher, faults the hero’s life experience and dispatches him on a learning journey “into the world.”21 The evangelical terms of this artistic self-modeling resurface in Babel’s letters, which contrast him as an altruistic martyr to the venal Soviet literary establishment, that is, to the “Judas’s house” denounced by Mandel'shtam’s Jesus-emulating alter ego.22 Distancing his authorial persona from “the jews” through Christian symbolism with the goal of coaxing his target audience into accepting him as an equal, Babel', despite his unconvincing hymns to Soviet internationalism (“Doroga,” II:206), is ever conscious of the latent hostility nurtured by the cultural majority toward intruders from the world of

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“onion and Jewish fate.” This awareness incites his alter ego to re­assert himself through an endless entrance exam that looks like a contest with the reader. Displacing this contest onto the French cultural sphere, Babel' levels the field, putting the contestants on equal cultural footing and motivating as freely chosen his artistic marginality, which in actual fact is imposed on the author by his Russian interpretive community.23 Claiming to have written his first stories in French (“Avtobiografiia,” 7), Babel' the writer casts his authorial persona as a cosmopolitan hailing from two non-Russian worlds at once—Reb Goethe’s dream of World Literature come true. But the same premise must seem so far-fetched to Babel' the man that he parodies it in Benia Krik’s complaint about the divine injustice of Jewish settlement in Russia instead of Switzerland, “where [Jews] would live among Frenchmen” (“KDO” I:134). The literary Messiah whose advent is prophesied in Babel’s 1916 manifesto “Odessa” originates in his native city, whose population is “half Jewish” and which by this token can beget Russia’s “national Maupassant” (I:62–63). The French writer denotes here the opposite of the Russian literary tradition, standing for a sun-drenched, anti-ascetic (read unChristian) sensibility foreign to Russian literature and its foggy capital, Petersburg (I:64–65). Choosing Petersburg as the scene of “Guy de Maupassant,” a story incorporating the main scenarios of his autobiographical narrative—intruder; teacher-disciple; cultural entrance exam—Babel' clearly means this text as an update of his earlier manifesto, “Odessa.” Indeed, “Guy de Maupassant” often contradicts the artistic and cultural self-­stylization of “Odessa”’s narrator, suggesting that Babel’s vision of himself as a writer of mixed cultural allegiances evolves considerably in the decade separating the two texts, whose comparison reveals the fault lines of Babel’s carefully constructed authorial persona, going a long way to clarify the place and function of the generative model of “the jews” in the writer’s imagination. ❊ “In the winter of 1916, I found myself in Petersburg with a false passport and without a penny,” begins the narrator of “Guy de Maupassant” (II:217). Critics note that this opening marks the story as

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part of Babel’s autobiographical narrative, which subtextually motivates the hero’s marginality as that of a budding artist illegally transplanted from the world of “onion and Jewish fate” into the heart of Russian culture.24 Our feeling of déjà vu is enhanced by another familiar scenario: the hero is patronized and housed in the city’s Peski district by a schoolteacher of Russian literature, Aleksei Kazantsev. These details allude to the main “teacher of literature” in Babel’s autobiographical narrative—Maksim Gor'kii, also known as Aleksei Peshkov (compare Peski), who described the Kazan' period of his life in Moi universitety (My universities, 1923), serialized in Babel’s editorial home, the review Krasnaia nov' (Red virgin soil). Thus, when Kazantsev recommends the hero to a “jewish” publisher whose wife needs help translating Maupassant’s complete works, we cannot but recall Gor'kii’s Library of World Literature—an ambitious translation project inspired by Goethe’s eponymous ideal and serving as a lifeline for many litterateurs during the lean years of early Soviet rule. Collaboration with Raisa Benderskaia on the Maupassant project improves the hero’s material situation even as he implements Goethe’s thesis of intercultural dialogue. It also gives him a pretext to engage in a critique of “the jews” in disguise and to showcase his ars poetica, whose centerpiece—the fusion of aesthetic and physical fulfillment— runs counter to the ascetic and didactic spirit of the Russian literary tradition, debunked here in the persona of Lev Tolstoi (II:219–20).25 The illustration of the hero’s ars poetica culminates in his sexual conquest of Raisa, which is subtextually attuned to the story they are translating. Babel' has previously cited this story, “L’Aveu” (Confession, 1884), as an example of that “southern” sensibility with which the coming artistic Messiah is going to remedy the lack of “joyful and bright descriptions of the sun” in Russian literature (“Odessa,” I:64). For Babel’s hero, then, “L’Aveu” is all about France’s joyful sun, which he sorely misses in his frigid, yellow, and malodorous Petersburg street (II:217–19, 221–22). These epithets conjure up the madness-inducing apocalyptic city of the Russian literary imagination and create a palimpsest effect by projecting Petersburg as a locus of spiritual and physical decay upon the topoi of “jewishness.” In Russian letters, the yellow color of the imperial capital’s official buildings can denote insanity and

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prostitution; but this color is also a stock “jewish” sign. And if we add to it the stench of the hero’s neighborhood, his environment starts to recall the dark and filthy street where Iankel' shelters Taras Bul'ba—another illicit “southern” visitor in a capital city forsaken by God and light. Our impression that Babel’s narrator inhabits a ghetto grows as we learn that Kazantsev, like the hero’s swimming teacher and mentor of “jewish” children in Odessa, shepherds a group of marginals who resemble a flock of geese (II:219)—a “jewish” symbol that is as important for Babel' as it is for Gogol'. Madness and “jewishness” overlap in “Guy de Maupassant.” Although he is Russian, Kazantsev sports a “jewish” marker on his head—bird down (II:217, 222)—whose yellow color also denotes insanity. Supplementing his income with translations from the Spanish, ­Kazantsev lives in an imaginary Spain. He has never seen Spain but loves it obsessively (II:217), partly thanks to the delusional Don Quixote, whose adventures are his favorite read, and partly because Spain is the preferred destination of literary lunatics, from Gogol’s Petersburg clerk ­Poprishchin (“Zapiski sumasshedshego” [The notes of a madman], 1835) to Peredonov, Kazantsev’s colleague in Fedor Sologub’s Melkii bes (The petty demon, 1907).26 Kazantsev’s insanity recalls his protégé’s obsession with France, the country he knows from the writings of a French author driven into madness by congenital syphilis. Maupassant’s symptoms—headaches, reduced vision (II:223)—also mark Babel’s hero, plagued as he is by weak eyes and neurasthenia, which racial science ascribes, along with hereditary syphilis, to “the jews” as the epitome of the decline of the European male and his civilization (see Chapter 4). This decline, manifest in the bodies and minds of his “teachers of literature”—Kazantsev and Maupassant—menaces the hero’s artistic ambition; for he does not separate spiritual and physical fulfillment, per his Odessa mentor’s advice: “Fortify your nerves and swimming will come naturally” (“Pbn” II:175). In Petersburg, he discovers that Russian culture is as decadent as his native milieu; and that Russian art is as joyless (“Odessa,” I:64–65) as Maupassant’s hypochondria-inducing syphilis or the hero’s “jewish” home in Odessa. Yet, the “fertile bon vivant” Maupassant defies his encroaching disease (II:223; “Odessa,” I:63). ­Emulating Maupassant, the hero flaunts his marginality as symptomatic

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of the modern condition and scorns those who hide from modernity, referring to Tolstoi’s religious constructs and, implicitly, to his patron’s “Spain” (II:217, 219–20). While Kazantsev takes refuge in Don Quixote’s dreamland, Babel’s hero becomes a knight, confronting the emasculating monster of the modern imagination—the “jewish” female—in order to assert his manliness and freedom from “jewishness” as qualities synonymous with artistic fertility. There is no evidence that Valentina Dynnik, a native of Kiev and Babel’s collaborator in the Maupassant project, which took place in the 1920s independently from Gor'kii’s translation program, was Jewish.27 However, invoking the image of an ambitious yet mediocre “jewish” female, Babel' exploits the cliché amalgam of women and “the jews” embodied by the figure of Judith-Salome cum Sarah Bernhardt and symbolizing the crisis of male-generated culture (see Chapter 14). This amalgam has special resonance for the writer: like many assimilated Jews, he draws on the Gentile idea of the “jewish” female as the emasculating “bad mother” to cope with his anxiety vis-à-vis the majority discourse about the effeminacy of “jewish” males (see Chapter 2). Critics thus note that Babel’s “jewesses” are unsympathetic and schematic; and that their mighty build and sexual appetite contrast with the timidity and frailty of their males.28 At the same time, Babel’s “jewish” males asserting themselves through a show of sexual prowess—his Odessa gangsters, for example—choose Russian partners, as if to highlight the danger of the emasculating “jewesses” and to display their manliness before an audience from which the charge of effeminacy emanates.29 Symptomatically, the erotic appeal enjoyed by “dark-haired southerners” among Petersburg’s “soft-bodied and blond ladies” is part of the cultural upheaval prophesied in Babel’s 1916 manifesto, “Odessa” (I:62). But in actual fact, as a form of masculine (creative) self-affirmation, the miscegenational conquest works only in Odessa’s mythical space. Babel' is aware of the negative connotations attached in his interpretive community to the sexual union of Gentile females and “jewish” males. Migrating from Benia Krik’s world into a more realistic setting, this union promptly acquires the resonance it has in European racial thought— the noble dark-haired knight becomes a lustful despoiler (“Mariia” [1934], II:323–33). Thus, outside a client-prostitute relationship, Babel’s

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autobiographical narrative shrinks from the scandalous potential of a “jewish” male’s sexual encounter with a Russian female as too risky for the writer’s authorial persona, which might end up looking like a new Svengali.30 In this light, the choice of a “jewish” woman as a means of the ­hero’s self-assertion in “Guy de Maupassant” is the lesser of two evils. For Babel’s contemporaries, Raisa is a stock type explored in Chekhov’s “Tina.”31 Like Chekhov’s Susanna, she and her sisters are cast in Orientalist terms. Babel' takes from Chekhov the “semitic glitter” of their eyes (“Perekati-Pole,” VI:257) and the paleness of their noses, framed like Susanna’s (“Tina,” V:362) by the shawls they don en route to see Serov’s Judith, the same opera Chekhov wanted to rewrite into a tale about “an excellent general”’s demise through “Yid craftiness” (see Chapter 14). Judith’s invocation thus accentuates the juxtaposition of the exuberant carnality of Babel’s viraginous “jewish” females, with flowing dark hair and little mustaches, and their self-effacing husbands (II:218–21). It also completes Raisa’s fusion with the familiar fin de siècle sign of emasculating evil, whose other ingredient—Salome—is manifest in Raisa’s persona when she appears to the hero in a revealing dress, “her body swaying like a snake [. . .] to the sounds of music, her head with coiled hair swinging, her rings clanking” (II:220). Although the chronotopes of “Guy de Maupassant” and “Odessa” overlap, the later story appears intent on correcting Babel’s youthful manifesto, which implicitly included its hero-narrator among the darkhaired southerners destined to conquer Petersburg artistically and sexually. The story’s females actually help the hero distance himself from his “southern” origins. Himself a recent arrival from the Pale of Settlement, the protagonist describes Raisa as “that intoxicating breed of Jewesses hailing to us from Kiev and Poltava” (II:218). The pronoun “us” identifies the narrator with his Russian audience, in contrast to Raisa, who functions as his “jewish” foil, exemplifying imperfect cultural assimilation. From the Russian reader’s vantage point, of course, both translators of Maupassant are “the jews” in disguise. The hero carries a false passport and wears borrowed clothes. Raisa’s identity is also borrowed: her recent arrival in Petersburg is facilitated by a nouveau riche husband

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and by baptism, announced in the Christian artifacts decorating her home. Her Russian-sounding patronymic, Mikhailovna, surely approximates and hides her original cognomen, Moiseevna, which she shares with Chekhov’s Susanna.32 Ashamed of her “jewish” past, visible in her money-crazed husband (II:220), Raisa affects ostentatious yet ephemeral acculturation. Her home is “a pseudo-grandiose castle” (II:218) evocative of Kazantsev’s expertise in Spanish castles (II:217). As critics note, Kazantsev’s Peski home, which literally means “sand,” intimates the origin of all these “castles on/of sand” in the French metaphor for daydreams, les châteaux en Espagne, marking as ephemeral not only Kazantsev’s Spanish passion but also Raisa’s cultural façade.33 It is then important for Babel’s alter ego to convince the reader that his own escape from “jewishness” differs qualitatively from that of his hostess, who thereby absorbs his guilt for cultural apostasy. The hero’s main line of defense is his artistic intuition, which distinguishes his own Russianness from the way assimilation is lived in ­Raisa’s milieu of “rootless, denationalized, and baptized bankers” (II:218). He is quick to point out the flaws in Raisa’s taste, evident in the expensive decor of her home, which like that of Chekhov’s Susanna, mixes vulgarity and pretension, laying claim to the latest trends in art and design (II:218–22). More importantly, Babel’s alter ego juxtaposes his and Raisa’s linguistic skills. The Russian idiom spoken in her household, the “rolling Jewish noise with singing endings” (II:220), leaves a peculiar mark on the style of Raisa’s translations. Her style is “tiresomely correct, lifeless, and impertinent—the way Jews used to write in Russian in the old days” (II:218–19). Given Babel’s concern with stylistic economy and expressivity, this comment betrays the writer’s anxiety vis-à-vis the Gentile idea of “jewish” linguistic inadequacy.34 But the oxymoronic description of Raisa’s style as both correct and impertinent lends itself to multiple readings. The qualifier “correct” evokes the critique of faulty assimilation by which authors of Jewish origin often assert their Russianness. Consider the spite of Mandel'shtam’s alter ego for a book written in “the timid style of a Russian-speaking Talmudist”; or his remarks about the “fake-sounding correct Russian” of his Hebrew tutor (Shum vremeni, II:14; compare the hero’s poor vocabulary in Babel’s “Probuzhdenie”

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[II:175]).35 Moreover, the extension of Raisa’s linguistic inadequacy to Babel’s Russian-Jewish predecessors may signal the author’s reluctance to be associated with their writings. The term “impertinent” historically denotes in Russian literature the ambitions of “the jews” in disguise (see Chapter 14). Babel' is surely aware that in tandem with his irreverent treatment of Christianity, his stylistic experiments must strike Russian traditionalists as impertinent. Yet these experiments are also judicious. The Yiddish- and Ukrainian-inflected jargon in his Odessa stories, or the shockingly naturalistic tropes in the Red Cavalry cycle, ensure that the author’s deviations from standard Russian usage remain comprehensible.36 In this context, the dismissal of Raisa’s style as correct and impertinent acquires a metadescriptive function. “The way Jews used to write” may denote Babel’s earlier stylistic program, which in the late 1920s he disowns as affected and florid for the sake of “calm, clarity, and subtlety”—the trademarks of Chekhov’s art.37 By Babel’s admission, Chekhov facilitated his departure from stylistic expressionism. His abandonment of Maupassant-inspired naturalistic tropes is visible in the stylistic restraint of “Guy de Maupassant,” which alludes to the new artistic model by incorporating the title of Chekhov’s story “Uchitel' slovesnosti” (A teacher of literature, 1889–94) into ­Kazantsev’s job title—“uchitel' russkoi slovesnosti” (II:217; emphasis [non-italic] added).38 But the Chekhovian subtext of “Guy de Maupassant” is cryptic, unlike Maupassant’s trumpeted presence, which nevertheless does not go beyond perfunctory plot summaries. It is as if Babel' reviewed here his earlier eulogy of the French writer in light of his newfound longing for “a literary coup d’état, like in the days of my youth” (letter to I. L. Livshits [10.I.1928], I:260). Conceived by a budding artist in the early 1920s, but completed only in the 1930s by a famous writer who has seen France without recognizing the land of his dreams, “Guy de Maupassant” both uses “France” as an ingredient of Babel’s authorial persona—Reb Goethe’s palliative for the quandary of Russian-­Jewish authorship—and mocks “France” as his youthful delusion on a par with his former megalomaniacal ambition of giving Russian literature its Messiah.39 Maupassant’s demotion suggests Babel’s disillusionment with Reb Goethe’s transcultural blueprint for an artistic identity. “France” retains

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its mediating importance for Babel’s translation of Russian-Jewish experience into the symbolic language of Russian culture only as long as he believes in the possibility of such a translation. This belief informs the ethos of “Odessa” but hardly that of “Guy de Maupassant.” Translation means cultural coexistence rather than mutual cancellation. But the filial past of Babel’s alter ego is locked with his Russian present in a mutually negating relationship. Consequently, Chekhov may furnish a subtextual primer for the reading of “Guy de Maupassant” as a story of cultural and aesthetic enfranchisement, wherein the unwanted aspects of Babel’s authorial persona—his earlier style, his passion for France and for Maupassant as its symbol, his ethnocultural past—are displaced on “the jews” or, more precisely, on the predatory “jewish” female as the stock type institutionalized in Russian literature by Chekhov’s “Tina.” Chekhov’s reader is not surprised to discover that Babel’s Raisa combines a Russian disguise with a passion for Maupassant—this combination is traceable to Susanna’s “passion for the Russians and the French” (“Tina,” V:368). Since Raisa is as insecure as Susanna in her assimilated identity, and as unprepared to occupy a place in Russian culture to match her privileged economic status, Maupassant—“the only passion of her life” (II:218)—mollifies her anxiety in the same way the imaginary France comforts Babel’s alter ego at an earlier stage of his autobiographical narrative (“Odessa,” “Avtobiografiia”). Raisa’s quandary is foreshadowed in Susanna’s awareness of the importance of linguistic mastery for “the jews” who “try hard to pass for the Russians or the French” (V:368). Chekhov’s phrase all but identifies the source of Susanna’s faulty cultural situation, shared by Raisa. Both heroines emulate Russianness instead of becoming Russian. They exemplify the modern idea of women and “the jews” as groups that prefer surface to substance and matter to spirit, effectively disqualifying themselves as creators of cultural values (see Chapter 2). The figure of translation metaphorizes acculturation and links it to the issue of creativity. A faithful adaptor, Raisa stays close to the original. This makes her renditions of Maupassant slavishly lifeless; and in matters of acculturation, pushes her into an exaggerated emulation of the Russian elite’s tastes and lifestyle. Babel’s alter ego is subtler and

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more creative. As in his stylistic work, which relies on the intuitive sense of measure (II:219), his translations stress creativity and want to “forget the original,” as Babel' himself puts it, describing his cinematic adaptation of Sholem Aleichem (“Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy” [Errant stars, 1926], II:447). But this is also how Babel’s autobiographical narrative translates Russian-Jewish experience into the symbolic language of Russian culture. The hero’s translations captivate Raisa to the point of erotic arousal, because they rival rather than copy the originals; just as the hero ­rivals the flirtatious Polyte in “L’Aveu” by succeeding in his own sexual conquest. This conquest has the same implications as the prowess of ­Babel’s gangsters, who can “spend a night with a Russian woman and the Russian woman will be satisfied” (“KDO” I:127). Witness Raisa’s allusive admiration of his literary skill: “Kak vy eto sdelali?” (“How did you do it?” II:219; compare “Kak eto delalos' v Odesse” [How It Was Done in Odessa]). Not accidentally, conflating Babel' and his alter ego, a fellow Russian-Jewish litterateur, Viktor Shklovskii, observes, “I even think that ‘he can spend a night with a Russian woman and she would be satisfied’; for a Russian female loves eloquence.”40 But Babel’s alter ego is braver than his Odessa bandits: he subdues a creature more dangerous than a Russian female. Captivating Raisa by his translations and autobiographical tall tales (II:220), he conquers her sexually, giving the ultimate show of freedom from “jewish” effeminacy. Symptomatically, his triumph is outfitted with Eucharistic symbolism. The sexual consummation of their passion for Maupassant is fueled by Raisa’s wine, vintage 1883, whose age in 1916 is that of Christ at Golgotha (II:221–22). This wine liberates the hero from unmanly timidity (the way literature reforms Babel' the “formerly shy Jew”), fusing literary and erotic passion with the Passion of Christ in the image of the sexually excited Raisa as a crucified deity.41 Capitalizing on the sexual fantasies traditionally generated by Crucifixion imagery and exploited in Russian modernist art, whose aesthetics inform the decor of Raisa’s house, this sacrilegious scene offers yet another link to Chekhov: Susanna and Sokol'skii perform a similar antiCommunion. The subtext highlights the superiority of Babel’s hero to Chekhov’s apathetic males. But in “Guy de Maupassant,” masculinity’s

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physical triumph is inseparable from its artistic triumph. Discussing with Raisa his translation of “Miss Harriet” (1883), the protagonist showcases his skill in a scene reminiscent of the lesson given by the artist-hero of Maupassant’s story to his female admirer (I:877). Babel’s hero couches his lesson in military terms, as if to stress the manly nature of creativity as inimical to women and “the jews.” Likening his handling of “the army of words” (II:219) to an officer’s command of his troops, the hero activates the polysemy of the word razviaznyi (impertinent), used in reference to Raisa’s “jewish” style, which thereby becomes not just impertinent but undisciplined, that is, militarily unfit.42 No money changes hands during the hero’s ultimate rendezvous with Raisa. This would have been too “jewish” a reward in the eyes of Babel' the artist, who, contrary to the constant pursuit of financial remuneration by Babel' the professional of literature, opposes his creative altruism to the crass mercantilism of the Soviet literary marketplace.43 We know that the hero’s triumph is untarnished by money, not just because Raisa’s money, which turns Kazantsev’s protégés into “a flock of drunken geese” (I:219), is not mentioned during their final meeting, but because their liaison echoes Céleste’s amours with Polyte in “L’Aveu.” Since Céleste trades sex for free rides to town (II:194), it is possible that Raisa also uses sex to skip a payment for the hero’s professional service. In this instance, the Maupassant subtext may both inform Babel’s story and obfuscate its dialogue with Chekhov’s “Tina,” whose reader recognizes in Raisa’s actions Susanna’s “jewish” usurpation of money through sex. The Chekhovian subtext sheds light on the hero’s seemingly unmotivated decision not to fete his sexual triumph and to spend the night poring over Maupassant’s biography, as if it were a manual describing the symptoms of a disease he contracts. Learning from this nocturnal reading that syphilis plunged Maupassant into “suspiciousness, unsociability, and litigiousness” and that the writer was survived by his mother, the hero treats this information as premonitory (I:223). Indeed, exposure to syphilis at Raisa’s is a possibility. A symbol of modern decadence, syphilis lurks in the obscene gaze of Raisa’s maid (II:218) and in the yellow complexion of her husband, whose rumored ties to Rasputin resonate with sexual license (compare rasputstvo [debauchery]

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in the maid’s eyes). Raisa’s Salome-like appearance on the night of their sexual union uncannily resembles Louis Raemaker’s 1916 drawing of the female allegory of syphilis; and the year corresponds to the story’s chronology.44 In Chekhov’s Wagnerian paradigm, which treats modern cultural ills as “jewish,” the hero’s nocturnal reading is well motivated. Witness the effects of syphilis on Maupassant the iconic modern artist who must survive and succeed in a cutthroat field of cultural production—hence his “suspiciousness, unsociability, and litigiousness.” The commodification and professionalization of art is, like Maupassant’s syphilis, a destructive hereditary condition for a Russian writer of Chekhov’s or Babel’s generations. But it is also a condition encoded in “jewish” terms by their interpretive communities, and is by this token much more dangerous for Babel’s authorial persona than for the public image of his Gentile precursor. The money Raisa advances at the outset of their collaboration is the hero’s first artistic honorarium. Crucially for our understanding of ­Babel’s authorial self-fashioning, it is a “jewish” female who intimates to his alter ego the economic value and manipulative power of art and sex. The same scenario informs Babel’s unpublished “Moi pervyi gonorar” (My first honorarium), where the hero exploits his artistic skill as a means of sexual and economic gratification in the company of a Russian prostitute, Vera, who is, like Raisa, his first paying audience. Raisa is the hero’s economic lifeline and a possible source of infection. Vera likewise embodies both sides of the mother archetype filtered through the oedipal tension of Christian mythology. As a potential source of syphilis, she is the emasculating and devouring “bad mother”; but the compassionate Vera also resembles the Virgin (II:246). It is in the context of Babel’s autobiographical narrative that we can fully appreciate the importance of this archetypal and oedipal dynamic in the writer’s cultural and artistic self-modeling. Taking his cue from Chekhov’s Susanna, Babel' steeps Raisa in mythical motifs. Her husband’s publishing house is named after a Greek demigoddess, Alcyone. Her home sports the “old Slavic style” of Mir iskusstva (Russian Art Nouveau), whose fairy-tale motifs leave imprints on Raisa’s bare back. The walls of her “castle” are decorated

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with Nikolai Rerikh’s “prehistoric monsters,” whose roar accompanies the hero’s Orpheus-like retreat from Raisa’s before her husband returns, that is, before the emasculating Judith defeats Holofernes in the opera he went to see. Like Sokol'skii in “Tina,” Babel’s alter ego is lured into a “jewish” monster’s den by the prospect of money. But unlike Chekhov’s white rider, he gets his prize—masculinity and Russianness—and, like Theseus, abandons the defeated ogre’s used female, whose flawed art and acculturation highlight the sexual victor’s artistic and cultural success. Raisa’s role here is that of a potentially emasculating agency (the Opponent) and of the ogre’s daughter (the Helper). Her bald, yellowfaced, money-crazed husband recalls Kashchei, the “bad father” of Russian folklore. This is of course the template of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot, with Babel’s alter ego playing the young Christian. The masterplot’s oedipal logic informs the hero’s erotic fixation on Raisa’s breasts; her maternal status as his provider; and the evocation of Maupassant’s tale about a hungry youth sucking on a wet nurse’s breasts to relieve milk’s pressure—a parable of the hero’s own function vis-à-vis Raisa’s many frustrations (II:218, 220–21). Consequently, her resemblance to a crucified deity during sex has more to it than Babel’s desire to shock religious sensibilities.45 It conveys the dynamics of the daughter of “the jews” masterplot, whose heroine is baptized through her union with a Gentile—a union sublimating the Virgin’s oedipal ambiguity in Christian mythology (see Chapter 2). In tune with this mythology, Babel’s alter ego is torn between his Russian neighbor Katia, “the good mother” whose chest is crossed by a shawl and who animates his wet dreams (II:220), and Raisa in the role of Eve, who displaces and obfuscates the Virgin’s taboo sexual appeal in the Christian imagination. Staying on the story’s mythical and archetypal level, we observe that the figure of the ogre to whom Raisa belongs—her husband, Benderskii—is rather cursory. But if we consider Benderskii in light of Babel’s autobiographical narrative, the “jewish” husband’s neurotic aspect and quest for profit in artistic publishing recall the hero’s own father, whose fixation on the lucrative side of music exemplifies the “jewish” approach to art (“Pbn” II:175). The son’s revolt through the symbolism-laden swap of violin lessons for swimming lessons has as its corollary the

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old man’s emasculation. The father’s attempt at enforcing his authority degenerates into a nervous breakdown (“Pbn” II:176–78); and the same effeminacy marks his hysterical conduct in front of Galina Apollonovna Rubtsova, a Russian woman fancied by his son (“PL” II:154–56). Some shared motifs—the scars (rubtsy) on Raisa’s back (II:220) and in ­Galina’s surname; the mythical consonance of Galina’s patronymic and of the Alcyone publishers; Galina’s erotic hold on her officer-husband and Raisa’s ability “to drive officers mad” (II:218); Galina as the ­hero’s first love and Raisa as his first lover—suggest that the hero’s revolt against paternal authority subsequently spills over into his conquest of Benderskii’s wife. The boy’s revolt and the young man’s sexual triumph are symbolic milestones in the hero’s cultural and artistic liberation from “jewishness.” Against the backdrop of the teacher-disciple scenario, the hero’s rejected “jewish” father is the antipode of the Gentile mentors mediating his entry into Russianness. His Jewish origin notwithstanding, Babel’s imagination casts the actor called “the jews” in its traditional function of the Opponent-Helper; whereas the Subject of his autobiographical narrative is played by a hero disowning the “jewishness” of his native milieu. We can justifiably argue that Babel’s cultural and artistic self-modeling draws on the stock situations encoded in the generative model of “the jews.” It reproduces the situation in which a male overcomes his “jewishness,” filial or spiritual, to be worthy of “the good father” (see Chapter 2, situation 2). Babel’s hero thus follows the paradigm of transformation set by Jesus and present in a variety of narratives, from “Taras Bul'ba” to Mandel'shtam’s artistic self-construction. If the hero’s “jewish” father is prominent in Babel’s autobiographical narrative, his mother is seldom mentioned. She merges with her husband in the image of a joyless Odessa home from which the boy flees into an erotic fancy for his Russian neighbor Galina, not unlike the Odessa bandits fleeing to Russian lovers from their “jewish” wives, who “take their teeth out, pour Yid soup into their veins, and bend their backs” (Zakat, II:286).46 In Babel’s unpublished story “Zakat” (distinct from the eponymous play), Benia Krik’s mother takes her husband’s side against their rebellious children, violating the oedipal logic of the masterplot about a boy (Jesus-figure) who finds in his mother

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(Mary-figure) an ally against the cruel “jewish” father, whose taboo referent is God himself (see Chapter 2). Symptomatically, Babel' marks this treacherous “bad mother” with a “jewish” sign: her surname is Gorobchik, the Ukrainian for sparrow (II:260, 263–64). And the same betrayal motif informs Raisa as a sexually desirable mother-figure whose conquest crowns the oedipal revolt of Babel’s alter ego: although she facilitates the affirmation of his manliness and Russianness, Raisa may also give him an emasculating illness symbolic of cultural decadence. Raisa’s ambiguous gifts evoke those of the hero’s mother, whose gift of life to him is accompanied by “jewishness”—a condition as corrosive as Maupassant’s congenital syphilis. Witness Babel’s own rendezvous with his mother in Paris, culminating in a trip to the Jewish quarter in the city’s heart, “yet hundreds of kilometers away from Paris”47—a reminder of the brittle artificiality of the artist’s putative freedom from his origins in the current capital of World Literature. And lest this sound far-fetched, consider Babel’s unfinished story “Evreika” (The Jewess), whose hero, the commissar of a Red Cossack brigade and the double of Babel’s alter ego in the Red Cavalry cycle, sees his secure cultural status implode when his mother arrives in Moscow, realizing Babel’s own epistolary advice to his family. As she moves in, their Russian neighbors complain that she brings with her the smell of onion and garlic—a sign of otherness (see Chapters 4, 14) denoting much more than the Ashkenazi cuisine with which she regales her son’s comrades (“Evreika,” 295– 306). The author’s abrupt abandonment of the story at this point speaks volumes about the unremitting tension between his filial past and the stigma attached to it in the majority culture where he makes his home. Yet it is precisely the (baptismal) drowning of this filial past in Russianness that defines the hero of Babel’s autobiographical narrative and underlies his inauspicious premonition at the end of “Guy de Maupassant,” which leaves the reader with a sense of unresolved ambiguity. Since syphilis functions in the story as a signifier of two conditions—that of a professional of art and that of a transplant from the world of “onion and Jewish fate”—the hero’s implicit query at the story’s close, “Am I free from syphilis?” hides another question, “Am I free from ‘jewishness’?” to which there is no answer. This fundamental ambiguity reflects the aporiae of Russian-Jewish authorship in Babel’s artistic trajectory.

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

Suffice it to recall that Babel' finalizes “Guy de Maupassant” in the context of the Soviet campaign against “bourgeois nationalism” and the concurrent turnabout in the official attitude toward patriotism, with class-based internationalism giving way to Russocentrism as the pillar of Soviet state-building.48 This ideological shift marks negatively most public expressions of Jewish cultural distinction, as attested by the newly minted official narrative about the full resolution of the “Jewish question” in the USSR—a resolution whose tongue-in-cheek reiteration in Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov’s novel Zolotoi telenok (The golden calf, 1931) precedes by less than a year “Guy de Maupassant” in print. The novel casts sinister light on the Soviet state’s new cultural policies by accompanying the announcement of the “Jewish question”’s successful resolution with a tale of the Wandering Jew’s murder during the Russian civil war.49 For Babel', this rapprochement of pogrom violence and the Stalinist crackdown on Jewish cultural identity is quite evocative. For it echoes his alter ego’s struggle with “jewishness” and even uses the same metaphor to describe this struggle—the pogrom-style killing that Babel’s hero performs in “Moi pervyi gus'.” ❊ Babel' outfits his hero’s unending entrance exam into Russian culture with animal symbols, whose accumulation makes his oeuvre not unlike a medieval bestiary. In “Guy de Maupassant” the horse is such a symbol. It hails from the Red Cavalry and Odessa cycles, where the ownership and skillful handling of horses are inimical to “jewishness,” thanks as much to the animal’s correlation with armed exploits as to the Russian literary tradition’s view of “the jews,” despite their folkloric image as horse thieves, as deficient riders whose flawed posture or equipment denote sociocultural transgression.50 Babel' is not alone among his Russian-Jewish peers in subscribing to these implications of “the jews” on horseback: witness Vladimir Zhabotinskii’s doodle, “The Savage Cavalry of the First Hassidic Brigade” (Figure 8). And since masculinity equals creativity, Babel' applies equine symbolism to his personal and professional life.51 The horse-related travails of his alter ego in the Red Cavalry stories jar with Babel’s own passion for horses, advertised so widely that one wonders about

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Figure 8. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, “The Savage Cavalry of the First Hassidic Brigade,” undated. Courtesy of the Jabotinsky Institute, Tel Aviv.

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its relation to the writer’s attempts at distancing his authorial persona from “jewishness.”52 The hero of “Guy de Maupassant” likens Raisa and her sisters to mares, projecting his sexual triumph onto the coachman Polyte’s possession of Céleste in a horse-drawn carriage (II:220, 223). The added benefit of this simile is in the contrast it creates vis-à-vis Chekhov’s inadequate males, such as the teacher of literature from the invoked “Uchitel' slovesnosti”—a bad rider and shy admirer of a woman impassioned by horses (VIII:311). Yet horses remain in “Guy de Maupassant”’s backdrop, unlike in the Red Cavalry cycle to which the story’s equine symbolism alludes, not least because the cycle’s last tale, “Argamak,” is published concurrently with “Guy de Maupassant” and after a similar decade-long delay. It is as if Babel' tried to signal that even as the “Jewish question” is declared solved in the increasingly Russocentric Soviet public life, it is also solved for his authorial persona. For why else should the writer twice revisit the scenario of his alter ego’s cultural entrance exam in 1932, the year Socialist Realism becomes the sole method of Soviet art; and the same year the “nationality” category appears in the internal Soviet passport, reimposing on Babel' the brand of Jewish origins his alter ego eludes before 1917 by carrying a fake passport? In “Guy de Maupassant,” the hero’s freedom from “jewishness” shows in his sexual and artistic domination of a woman he reins in like a horse. And although the coincidence of masculine and artistic selfaffirmation is a leitmotif of Babel’s autobiographical narrative, “Guy de Maupassant” is its only installment (published in Babel’s lifetime) where his alter ego becomes a mentor, capping the development of the narrative’s teacher-disciple scenario, as intimated by the hero’s focus on “a timely-placed period” in his literary lesson to Raisa (II:219). “Guy de Maupassant” marks just such “a timely period” in the larger tale of the hero’s artistic and cultural evolution at the point when Babel’s alter ego finally feels superior to his Russian and French “teachers of literature”— the delusional Kazantsev-Gor'kii; the demoted Maupassant; and the cryptically designated Chekhov, whose apathetic males are no match for Babel’s triumphant protagonist. And much the same point is made in “Argamak,” a tale of the hero’s apprenticeship in the art of horse-

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riding that allows him finally to blend in with and become equal to the Cossacks, who are the very antithesis of “the jews” (II:131–35). Babel’s animal symbols are gendered. The horses in his stories may be stallions or mares, but all of them denote femininity as a medium for manly self-assertion. This way Babel' opposes his hero’s ultimate transformation into a good rider—in the literal and metaphorical senses (sexual, cultural, artistic)—to the “jewishness” of his father, whose symbolic antipode is a mounted Cossack officer (“Pbn” II:176–78). The effeminate father seeks the rider’s protection during a pogrom; he kneels in dirt and touches the legs of the horse (“PL” II:155), echoing the erotic game of Galina and her officer-husband, who kneels submissively on a dirty floor and embraces the viraginous female’s legs, playfully reversing traditional gender roles (“PL” II:154). It is then no accident that the main animal symbol of “Moi pervyi gus'”—commonly translated as “My first goose,” although gus' means gander—is gendered, following the logic of the generative model of “the jews,” and attuned to the animal symbolism of “Taras Bul'ba” (see Chapters 3, 10). The narrator of “Moi pervyi gus'”—Babel’s alter ego and the protagonist of the Red Cavalry cycle—is a propagandist attached to the First Cavalry Army under the assumed name of Kirill Liutov (Ferocious), which was Babel’s pen name during his 1920 stint as a war journalist. The Red Cavalry cycle is the most radical page in Babel’s autobiographical narrative, since here his alter ego openly emulates the Cossacks. The goal of this emulation is manifest in the episode where the armed Liutov rides in Cossack company even as a “jewish” prisoner begs for his life, clinging to Liutov’s horse (“Ikh bylo deviat'” [They were nine, 1923], I:438–39) the way his father once clung to the feet of a Cossack horse and Iankel' to Taras Bul'ba’s feet (1835:118/1842:31). And just like Taras, Liutov patronizes “his” abused “jews” (“Pan Apolek,” II:24), using a pronoun that marks his distance from them.53 Some critics see in Liutov an attempt to forge a new “jewish” type in Russian letters informed by the Zionist cult of physical vitality and by the tough “jews” of Yiddish art—the ba’alguf (strongman) of Haim Nachman Bialik’s “Arye Ba’alguf ” (1899) and of Sholem Ash’s “Kola Street” (1904). Liutov, it is argued, like Odessa gangsters, embodies Babel’s “dream about an armed Jew who defends himself and his kin.”54

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

This reading may tell us more about the aspirations of Babel’s readers than about his oeuvre: his “jewish” gangsters are ostentatiously unrealistic; and the more Liutov resembles a tough male, the more his emulation of the Cossacks and concomitant flight from “jewishness” jar with the ba’alguf’s comfort with his origins. The view of Liutov as the type Babel' invokes but never depicts (“the unexpected breed of Jewish warriors, riders and partisans” [“Karl-Iankel',” 1931, II:163]) ignores the writer’s artistic context, in which this “jewish” type remains hypothetical. “The jews” of early Soviet art fall into two categories—as an economic beneficiary of Russia’s turmoil, and as a commissar epitomizing the puny and scrupulous intelligentsia’s divorce from the narod with its physical vigor and moral unconcern.55 Liutov corresponds to the second literary cliché. In the Red Cavalry cycle, the traditional view of Jewish assimilation as a break with cultural obscurantism under Russian civilizing influence yields to the idea of assimilation as a revolutionary upheaval that one accepts along with complicity in the destruction of a decadent culture— “jewish” and Gentile—by the barbaric masses, who carry the seeds of a new, universalist order. In this light, the ba’alguf’s preference for physical vitality to moralizing intellectualism, which makes him a new “jewish” type in Yiddish literature, becomes in Babel’s autobiographical narrative a means of cultural apostasy whose end result is not the renewal of Jewish identity, as the Zionist adepts of the “muscle Jew” hope, but this identity’s universalizing dissolution along with the ethnocultural milieu that sponsors it. This is the message Babel' conveys in “Moi pervyi gus'” through the lexicon of “jewish” difference. The story opens with Liutov’s jealous contemplation of commander Savitskii’s virile physique, even as Savitskii mocks the new arrival’s intelligentsia background as a liability among the Cossacks. Indeed, the Cossacks in Liutov’s billet harass the bespectacled intruder. We recognize the entrance exam scenario punctuating Babel’s autobiographical narrative.56 This time around, the hero passes his test through a show of violence. He kills with histrionic brutality a goose wandering around the courtyard and forces its reluctant female owner to cook the bird. This act proves to the Cossacks that Liutov is “their kind of guy” (II:34). They share their pork stew with him, while Liutov reads to

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them Lenin’s speech. Later they share with him their bed—a haystack— where the hero dreams of women, his legs intertwined with those of the Cossacks and his heart aching from the goose’s “murder” (II:34). The fact that Liutov hides behind a Russian-sounding alias suggests that Cossack hostility to his intelligentsia background is only half the story at best. Readers versed in the lexicon of “jewish” difference may see the social antagonism explicitly motivating Liutov’s clash with the Cossacks as a euphemism for another conflict. Babel’s circumspection looks like a bow to ideological pressure: Soviet censors condone the depiction of intolerance among Red Army fighters if it is rooted in class struggle, but condemn it as antithetical to the dogma of revolutionary internationalism if based in ethnocultural prejudice—hence the rarefaction of Soviet Judeophobia in the Red Cavalry stories in contrast to its omnipresence in Babel’s unpublished war diary.57 In “Moi pervyi gus',” telltale signs alert us to the existence of another story behind the façade of an intellectual’s conflict with the masses—a cliché of Soviet art and an effective cover for the issues of Russian-Jewish identity. One such sign is embedded in the name of the officer Ivan Chesnokov, to whom Savitskii issues orders while deriding Liutov as parshiven'kii (mangy; II:32). The officer’s cognomen combines a common Russian name, Ivan, with a common sign of “jewishness,” garlic (chesnok), highlighting the leitmotif of hidden cultural identity in the Red Cavalry cycle. The same leitmotif is accentuated by Savitskii’s description of Liutov’s physique with a term semantically and etymologically related to parsha (dog mange) and its derivative “jewish” invective, parkhatyi (see Chapter 4). We thus end up with the two terms of abuse (chesnok, parkhatyi) that Chekhov’s Iakov uses in his run-ins with Rothschild (VIII:302). In this context, Liutov’s law degree, a detail foreign to Babel’s biography, acquires special meaning, referring to the theological status of “the jews” as people of the Law. And so do his glasses, which may signify both his intelligentsia background and his ethnocultural origin, given the prominence of the figure of impaired sight in the lexicon of “jewish” difference.58 The fusion of physically debilitating learning with “jewishness,” salient in Babel’s autobiographical narrative and symbolized by Liutov’s much discussed glasses, transpires in the consonance of the Cossack

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

view of Liutov as a victim of learning (“postradavshiii po uchenoi chasti,” II:33) with his childhood image as a learned boy (“uchenyi mal'chik”) and a “little rabbi” (“PL” II:154, 156). The implications of the “little rabbi”’s foray into a Cossack billet, despite warnings, are laid bare in the violent demise of the similarly imprudent goose nonchalantly parading before hungry men (II:34). Savitskii’s comment that the Cossacks can kill a man for wearing glasses (“tut rezhut za ochki,” II:32) evokes the slaughter of poultry, for which the same verb (rezat') is used, and the slaying of “the jews” by pogromists, which Liutov consistently describes as akin to the killing of poultry.59 Savitskii’s words then foreshadow the goose’s “murder,” linking it to the symbolism of pogrom violence. This symbolism remains a closed book for today’s students of ­Babel’s art. “There is nothing obviously Jewish in the story,” argues Nakhimovsky, reading “Moi pervyi gus'” as a parable of “the moral fastidiousness and physical passivity [. . .] of the Russian intellectual.” Shcheglov is similarly caught up in the message about the intelligentsia’s ambiguity toward revolutionary violence; whereas Maguire finds Liutov’s handling of the goose absurd, for it exhibits “far greater violence than [the Cossacks] would ever perpetrate.”60 Such readings are encouraged by Babel’s imaginative debt to the fin de siècle fusion of “jewishness” with the figure of the decadent intellectual. But the same conflation lets the writer exploit a trite but censor-proof plot— an intellectual meets the masses—as a smokescreen for a narrative of assimilation. Heeding the role of the goose as a “jewish” symbol in contemporary Soviet art, I contend that this narrative shaped the story’s reception in Babel’s day. Consider the “jewish” Opponent of Mandel'shtam’s imagination, those “old men with sinewy necks and small goose heads” (Chetvertaia proza, II:97); or the “jewish” member of Ostap Bender’s gang in Il'f and Petrov’s Zolotoi telenok, Mikhail Panikovskii—a thief (compare Babel’s focus on outlaws) and a man without a passport (compare the fake identities of Babel’s alter ego) who harbors a quasi-erotic passion for geese.61 But the clearest proof of the resonance of “Moi pervyi gus'” in Babel’s interpretive community hails from a 1931 caricature by Boris Efimov, a major Soviet political cartoonist. Unpublished in Babel’s lifetime, it depicts the author as Liutov in front of a goose, with Jewish liturgical

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articles donned over his uniform (Figure 9), although Liutov’s ethnicity is not explicitly discussed in this story. According to Efraim Sicher, who discovered the drawing, the published version of the same caricature did not contain such explicit ethnocultural markers.62 Consequently, the original reception of Babel’s story, and of the cycle framing it, appears to be twofold: bowing to the dogma of internationalism, public critical responses stressed the intelligentsia’s conflict with the masses; but privately, readers focused on the ethnocultural difference of Babel’s alter ego. Babel' was certainly privy to this dualist interpretation of his oeuvre.

Figure 9. Boris Efimov, caricature of Isaak Babel', 193. In: Isaak Babel', Detstvo i drugie rasskazy, ed. Efraim Sicher. Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1979, p. 128.

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

The transparency of the goose’s symbolic meaning for Babel’s original readership was all but guaranteed by the author’s consistent reliance on Russian culture’s code of otherness. For example, the hero of his autobiographical narrative receives, in recompense for passing his school entrance exam, a pair of turtle doves—a symbol of the Holy Spirit in the Annunciation imagery.63 After a pogromist smashes the female dove against his face, the boy, covered in bloody feathers, walks the streets that are “swept clean like on Sunday” (“IMG” II:150)—the day whose Russian name means “resurrection.” The pun is amplified when his family reads an article likening the October 1905 manifesto, which grants Russia a constitution and triggers the pogrom, to “the glorious Resurrection of Christ” (“PL” II:157). Babel' thus appeals to the reader’s familiarity with the link between pogrom violence and Easter (see Chapter 2), accentuating the Christian resonance of the dove, whose death marks the hero’s rejection by the majority culture.64 The boy’s return to “jewishness” is manifest in his feathered aspect, which harks back to the Gogolian tradition of the birdlike “jews” and to the attendant association of bird down with pogrom violence.65 As already discussed, bird down denotes in the Russian cultural imagination a mob’s violation of the “jewish” home and the sexual humiliation of its inhabitants, coming as it does from their bedding stuffed with goose feathers. Babel’s original readers would see as logical the presence of a goose—as a sign of “jewish” effeminacy—in the scene of the boy’s neurotic fit in front of Galina, who shelters him from the pogrom, washes the feathers off his face, and scolds the “little rabbi” for his bout of hysteria (“PL” II:156). The hero’s sullied manliness, like his father’s concurrent humiliation at the feet of a Cossack horse, is stressed by the wife of the pogromist who kills his dove. “I can’t stand their seed and their stinky men,” she says (“IMG” II:149). This verdict is all the more insulting because the ability sexually to satisfy a Russian woman is the gold standard of masculinity in Odessa’s mythical space. As ­Galina administers her rebuke against the backdrop of a frying goose, the boy’s throat begins to swell, recalling the goose’s distinctive feature—its neck—which has a specific function in the Ashkenazi cuisine much appreciated by Babel', who surely knows that a stuffed goose neck looks as swollen as his hysterical alter ego’s throat (“PL” II:154–59).66

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It is then no accident that pronounced necks mark the birdlike “jews” in the Red Cavalry stories, whose narrator links pogrom violence to the slaughter of poultry by focusing on the victims’ throats. Witness the old man killed in a backyard, like poultry, and lying with a torn gullet on a slashed (goose-down) mattress.67 And if the boy in “Pervaia liubov'” reacts to Galina’s rebuke by imagining himself as a ba’alguf who fights pogromists (II:156), his mature incarnation earns Cossack respect through the symbolic reenactment of a pogrom. Characteristically, Liutov’s slain goose is removed by its distressed female owner in the same way the mourning “jewesses” pick up pogrom victims throughout the Red Cavalry cycle.68 The goose’s slaughter is steeped in sexual overtones. It includes a chase; the victim’s immobilization on the ground; the poking of its body with a phallic object—a Cossack saber Liutov finds nearby; and the contemplation of its “spread out white neck” (II:34). Critics note that the bird’s “stern” and “clean” aspect (II:34) recalls a billeting officer’s advice to Liutov about the bonding value of sexual violence among the Cossacks: “But if you mess up a lady, the purest one, then the men will be gentle with you” (II:33).69 The implicit sexual violence of the goose-slaughter scene echoes Liutov’s eroticized admiration of commander Savitskii—a virile macho with legs “like girls forced up to their shoulders into shiny boots,” wielding a riding whip and cracking sexual jokes, in tune with Babel’s symbolic association of horses and women (II:32).70 Taking his cue from Savitskii and the billeting officer, Liutov gives a show of manliness in order to be “treated gently” by the Cossacks; hence, the theatricality of his goose hunt, which is part of a larger initiation ritual, as Iurii Shcheglov points out.71 Although he nominally kills the goose for food, Liutov sates himself with the Cossacks’ pork dinner and never tastes the “jewish” bird, thereby engaging in the salient exercise of Babel’s autobiographical narrative—masculine self-assertion tantamount to the attainment of Russianness. The same “jewish” self-abnegation informs his confrontation with the goose’s female owner, related to the hero as the only other bespectacled personage in the story.72 But their affinity is hardly that of two intellectuals in the midst of the narod: she lives in a rural area and passes time spinning yarn. Yet she is not a local peasant, for her speech

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

is syntactically related to that of Babel’s Odessa “jews,” as stressed by the contrast of her “jewish” bird with the pork cooked by the Cossacks, whom she openly resents. Consequently, the glasses of the goose’s “half-blind” (II:34) owner may appeal, like Liutov’s, to our ability to identify a motif from the lexicon of “jewish” difference. This task is facilitated by other Red Cavalry stories describing a synagogue with broken windows as eyeless (“Uchenie o tachanke,” II:43), and Judaism as a religion with blinded eyes (“Rabbi,” II:35). Babel' appropriates the Christian trope of “­jewish” spiritual blindness, realized in the female allegory of Synagoga and informing not only “Moi pervyi gus'” but also “Guy de Maupassant,” where Raisa’s and her sisters’ eyes “glitter with semitic myopia” (II:221). And recalling that Synagoga can function as Jesus’ rejected “bad mother” (see Chapter 2), we find similar connotations in Liutov’s clash with a mother-figure embodying the source of his “jewishness”—a familiar object of hostility in Babel’s autobiographical narrative. Indeed, the malevolent old woman who refuses to feed the hero, thus forcing him to kill her goose, is a living reminder of Liutov’s “jewish” past and, by this token, a threat to his assimilationist project.73 And just like Raisa in “Guy de Maupassant,” the goose’s owner both impedes and facilitates the hero’s assimilationist project in the quality of his foil. She incarnates femininity and “jewishness”—two qualities Liutov exorcises by slaying their animal symbol. “Moi pervyi gus'” complements our understanding of the power struggle between Babel’s alter ego and the heroine of “Guy de Maupassant,” making explicit the implied violence of their sexual encounter through which the hero affirms his manliness and superiority to the emasculating “jewish” female and to her male keeper—his “jewish” father-figure. After all, the ultimate achievement of the hero’s integration in the Cossack community is his dissimilarity from his father, whose place is at the feet of a Cossack horse. As discussed above, Raisa’s transformation into an eroticized Christian deity suggests Babel’s imaginative dependence on the oedipal dynamic of the Christian myth. The same dynamic informs the curse Liutov learns from the Cossacks and repeats like an incantation during the goose’s killing. This invective refers to the speaker’s copulation with the Virgin (II:33–34; compare Babel’s “Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:425), and

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its implicit sexual violence is enhanced by the pun in the billeting officer’s advice about defiling the purest of the ladies (samuiu chisten'kuiu damu)—an allusion to Mary (“Prechistaia deva”) and to her incarnation in the Fair Lady (“Prekrasnaia dama”) of Aleksandr Blok’s poetry. In Babel’s autobiographical narrative, then, the sexualized slaying of the goose is homologous to the killing of the hero’s dove by a pogromist, considering that the bird’s symbolism of purity and chastity, stressed by its female sex, derives from its link to the Annunciation. In “Moi pervyi gus',” Babel’s alter ego effectively switches sides, becoming the agent rather than the object of pogrom violence, which functions as both a sign and a means of his integration into the majority culture. And as this culture is embodied by an all-male, Judeophobe, and misogynous group, we cannot but recall the Cossacks of “Taras Bul'ba,” especially since Liutov projects the Soviet-Polish war onto the nebulous historical context of Gogol’s story.74 This intertextual link highlights the kinship of Gogol’s and Babel’s artistic self-fashioning, similarly marked by geographic, cultural, and linguistic marginality. Gogol’s exorcism of Polishness and Catholicism, cast in “Taras Bul'ba” as “jewish” and feminine temptations, informs Liutov’s exorcism of “jewish” effeminacy. And Liutov performs this exorcism by means of a ritual that cannot but recall the contrast of the smoked goose hanging above Warsaw’s “jewish” street, where Taras hits the nadir of emasculation, to the “proud gogol' ” accompanying the delivered Cossacks in the finale of Gogol’s story (see Chapter 10). But the Gogolian subtext is not without its irony, since the author of “Taras Bul'ba” would never admit the author of “Moi pervyi gus'” into his temple of Russian literature, in which there is no place for “the jews,” even assimilated. Incidentally, Liutov is prefigured in a novel by Gogol’s peer and compatriot, Evgenii Grebenka, where “the jews” in disguise infiltrate and undermine a Cossack community (Chaikovskii [1843], 8, 126–27). Babel' himself is certainly aware that his ethno­ cultural origin would have been scorned by the classic whose oeuvre he exploits to the ends of artistic and cultural self-legitimation. We find an echo of this awareness in the long shadow cast by Gogol’s Iankel' in Babel’s art—a shadow stretching from Babel’s abandoned youthful project about “a Jew Iankel'” who serves his Russian master like his

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

namesake in “Taras Bul'ba,” to Iankel’s fusion with Marx in the story “Karl-Iankel',” whose title denotes the birth of that “unexpected breed of Jewish warriors” (II:163) transforming by force a society in which Jews are sociocultural pariahs.75 The terms of Liutov’s integration—“Little brother [bratishka], sit down to our meal” (II:34)—recall Iankel’s appeal to brotherhood snubbed by Gogol’s Cossacks. Contemplating the use of the term “brother” in the Red Cavalry cycle, Carol Avins points out its ambiguity: Liutov applies it both to a dying coreligionist and fellow Red fighter (“Syn rabbi,” II:129), and to a slain Polish soldier (“Ivany” [Two Ivans, 1924], II:98)—two foes reconciled by death.76 The same ambiguity informs the sacrificial killing that seals Liutov’s brotherhood with the Cossacks. His admission in their circle is tenuous. Liutov cannot shed his special, as distinct from equal, status visible in his appointment as an explicator of Lenin’s words to the dining Cossacks, which fuses edification with entertainment. And as if to stress the “jewishness” of this role, he goes about this task like a Torah scholar, “reading, rejoicing, and tracking joyfully the mysterious curve of Lenin’s straight line” (II:34).77 Babel’s war diary pays close attention to the mistreatment of Jews by the Red Army. A silent observer mindful of his Russian cover, Babel' empathizes with the victims and occasionally shields them from abuse (“Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:365–67, 386–88). It is tempting to see in Liutov’s heavy heart, “crimson with [the goose’s] murder” (II:34), a remorseful parable of Babel' the man’s passive complicity in Jewish suffering, as well as that of the cultural apostasy with which Babel' the writer’s artistic self-fashioning resonates. But the diarist’s identification with Jews (I:382, 385, 434) and distaste for Russian mores (I:370, 388, 392, 402) are inversely proportional to his alter ego’s distance from “the jews” in the Red Cavalry cycle, where the “jewish” theme is eclipsed by that of the intelligentsia’s place in the Revolution.78 And seeing how carefully Babel' conceals his diary, this discrepancy cannot be just a bow to the Soviet view of ethnocultural particularism as alien to the revolutionary spirit, if only because Babel’s authorial persona has much to gain in the eyes of his target audience from Liutov’s “jewish” self-abnegation and emulation of the Cossacks.

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Indeed, at the end of “Moi pervyi gus',” Liutov sleeps in Cossack company, dreaming of women. This affirmation of masculinity confirms his immunity to “jewish” cultural infertility. Suffice it to recall the military terms in which his alter ego anachronistically couches his literary lecture to Raisa in “Guy de Maupassant,” whose action is anterior to that of the Red Cavalry cycle. It is among the Cossacks that the hero of Babel’s autobiographical narrative hones the skills distinguishing his style from Raisa’s “jewish” usage. Drawing on various sources—­Lenin’s rhetoric, Savitskii’s military orders, the Cossacks’ invective-strewn speech—Liutov forges a style and tests it, before an approving Cossack audience, on his landlady whose Russian is as “jewishly” inflected as Raisa’s.79 Wielding like a weapon the manliness of his “extraordinary prose [. . .] , full of courage [muzhestvo] and crude joy” (the root meaning of muzhestvo is masculinity), Liutov attacks “the sour dough of Russian novels” with bellicose avant-gardism (“Vecher” [Evening, 1925], II:77–78), thus staking his place in Russian literature by Benia Krik’s means—those of violence and eloquence. But the louder Babel’s authorial persona disowns “jewishness,” the more suspect it becomes in the eyes of the majority culture. Witness the  criticism of the Red Cavalry stories by the First Cavalry’s commander, Semen Budennyi, whose initial salvo appears soon after the publication of “Moi pervyi gus'.” Punning on the consonance of Babel' and baba (a wench), Budennyi dismisses the writer and his alter ego as effeminate and sexually deviant exemplars of the decadent intelligentsia. Resuming his attack in 1928, at the height of the cultural revolution that intensified ideological pressure on artistic “fellow-travelers” like Babel', Budennyi adds to his arsenal the denunciation of the Red Cavalry cycle as “the ravings of a mad Jew,” thereby completing Babel’s stigmatization as a cultural outsider.80 And given the coincidence of Budennyi’s renewed attacks with Il'f and Petrov’s work on Zolotoi telenok, the novel’s spoof of Babel’s fixation on “jewish” effeminacy through the cowardly Panikovskii’s eroticized passion for geese appears to target both the author of “Moi pervyi gus'” and his highly placed critic. Panikovskii’s disquisitions on the pursuit and slaughter of geese as a heroic act of masculine self-assertion (291– 94) lampoon not only Liutov’s skirmish with his goose but also the

Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

comically crude campaign the iconic Red Cossack Budennyi wages on Babel' as a symbol of the effeminate, decadent, and “jewish” intelligentsia. Zolotoi telenok’s parodic nod to “Moi pervyi gus'” (chronologically concurrent with the unpublished caricature of Babel' as a “jewish” warrior in front of a goose) could discombobulate Babel’s artistic identity at a time when the growing Soviet drive for Russocentric homogeneity stigmatized expressions of ethnocultural distinction, including the “jewish” subject matter of Babel’s fiction. The newly imposed taboo on the “Jewish question” transformed “jewishness” from a cultural into an ideological liability. All this may explain Babel’s last-ditch effort to distance his alter ego from “the jews” through the belated publication of “Guy de Maupassant” and “Argamak,” followed by the rarefaction of “jewish” subject matter in his writings.81 But his former openness to this subject matter is deceptive. What transpires in “Guy de Maupassant” and “Moi pervyi gus'” is the manipulation of the Russian reader’s code of cultural otherness to the ends of artistic self-validation. This manipulation is salient to Babel’s ars ­poetica, as his alter ego demonstrates through a series of performances— the autobiographical tall tales mesmerizing Raisa (“Guy de Maupassant,” II:220) and Vera (“Moi pervyi gonorar,” II:250–52); the goose act mounted for the Cossacks’ sake—in which his image varies according to his needs. Aware of the endemic hostility of the majority culture to a transplant from the world of “onion and Jewish fate,” Babel' demonstratively engages the topic of “jewishness” in his art, not to incorporate “jewishness” into his authorial persona but to mark his distance from it. I see no other explanation for the fact that Babel', whose explicit artistic treatment of “jewishness” is justly considered unusual for a RussianJewish writer of his day, never meaningfully challenges the lexicon of “jewish” difference. Fashioning his own autobiographical narrative as a tale of cultural liberation, Babel' inscribes the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship within the Soviet master narrative, whose hero must overcome his past to join the builders of the new life. This narrative outfits the assimilationist project of Babel’s alter ego with an alibi more solid than the cultural cross-fertilization of Reb Goethe’s World Literature ­recipe—too fragile in its idealization of foreign authors and lands, and

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too “cosmopolitan” in the context of the Soviet state’s growing Russo­ centrism. For a Soviet writer, Lenin’s speech and the party program, whose style Liutov admires (“Moi pervyi gus',” II:33–34; “Vecher,” II:77), are safer reference points than Maupassant’s stories. Lastly, the Soviet ideological alibi favorably contrasts Babel’s alter ego’s flight from “jewishness” to the apostatic self-denial of a convert who yields to the pressure of the majority culture instead of acting as an agent of its change. In this light, Babel’s artistic affronts to Jewish and Christian sensibilities announce both the writer’s political credentials and his break from the traditional choices of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. These affronts cast the escape of the author’s literary alter ego from “jewishness” not as an opportunistic betrayal but as a painful sacrifice at the altar of a radically new universalist culture under construction in Soviet Russia. The fact that Babel' the man apparently nurtures few illusions about Communist utopia hardly detracts from the usefulness of this utopia’s universalist ethos for his self-fashioning as a Russian writer.

S ev e n t e e n Writing and Reading in the Margins Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

Iurii Fel'zen’s novels—Obman (Deceit, 1930), Schast'e (Happiness, 1932), Pis'ma o Lermontove (Letters About Lermontov, 1935; hereafter Pis'ma)— and several stories share a set of characters and a thematic unity, forming an autobiographically motivated narrative dubbed “­roman s pisatelem” by its protagonist (Pis'ma, 22–24). The polysemy of the word roman opens this phrase to several readings: “a novel with/about a writer” or “an affair with a writer.” These are the axes of Fel'zen’s unfinished novelistic project, wherein the stories of the protagonist’s artistic maturation and sentimental education are linked by the philosophy of love and art elaborated in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time, 1913–27).1 In Proust’s novel, an artist’s creativity is directly proportional to the pain inflicted upon him by a love interest. Accordingly, Fel'zen’s hero, a Paris-based Russian émigré writer, Volodia, carries on a torturous but artistically stimulating affair with a fellow exile, Elena Gerd or Lëlia. The novels and stories composing Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem” are episodes in this affair whose ups and downs furnish material for Volodia’s psychological analysis of himself and of others, which constitutes the backbone of his solipsistic art. As in the case of Babel’s hero, World Literature looms large in Volodia’s artistic self-fashioning; hence, Lëlia’s reproach that he insufficiently speaks about things Russian (Pis'ma, 20). The writer combines his romantic interest in Lëlia with two more liaisons—one with Proust and another with Lermontov as the unsurpassed masters of psychological art. These literary liaisons are so emotionally intense that Lëlia is rightfully jealous of Volodia’s artistic passion. An “affair with Proust” (“roman s Prustom”) immerses him in contemporary French art, helping

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Volodia shed “the confining skin of uninationality” and become a European writer attuned to the modern human condition (Pis'ma, 20, 30). Lermontov, appreciated above all as the author of Geroi nashego vremeni (The hero of our time, 1840), anchors Volodia’s aesthetics in that aspect of the Russian literary tradition that anticipates, in his opinion, modern sensibility (Pis'ma, 47, 113). Faithfully echoing Fel'zen’s views, Volodia’s artistic self-fashioning approximates the figure of the ideal émigré modernist, which crystallizes by the early 1930s in the critical debates in Russian literary Paris.2 Despite the coincidence of Fel'zen’s and his hero’s circumstances, Volodia is more distinct from his creator than the protagonist of Babel’s autobiographical narrative from his author. This distinction reflects the gap between Fel'zen’s cultural ambiguity, to which his émigré colleagues testify, and Volodia’s confident Russianness, conveyed by the sparse data he furnishes about his family past in contrast to the torrent of autobiographical information generated by Babel’s alter ego. Fel'zen seems intent on enhancing this contrast between his and Babel’s protagonists by borrowing the title of Babel’s 1931 story “Probuzhdenie” (Awakening)—narrating the hero’s rebellion against “jewishness” in his native Odessa—for a 1933 story about Volodia’s formative experience in Petersburg. The cultural difference between the two cities accentuates the dissimilarity of the young heroes in favor of Volodia’s “natural” Russianness, as opposed to the “acquired” one of Babel’s alter ego.3 Volodia is a typical Russian intelligent with no “jewishness” in his cultural past, as stressed by its association with Wagner’s music.4 Fel'zen’s authorial persona benefits from Volodia’s complete Russification, which implicitly supports Fel'zen’s own claims to Russianness in his essays (such as “We, Russians, we know . . .” ), buttressed by his advertised esteem for the artistic tastes of professional antisemites (Léon Daudet) and by his silence about “jewish” subject matter in the novels he reviews in the press (James Joyce’s Ulysses, Irène Némirovsky’s David Golder).5 Yet, Volodia’s accounts of his Petersburg youth are strangely lacking in family information. This elision becomes meaningful once we realize that Fel'zen’s carefully crafted image of a “European gentleman,” which he extends to all of his literary alter egos, is informed by the fear of “jewishness” manifest in the writer’s belief that “Jews must

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

learn European cultural restraint.”6 This European, as distinct from Russian, cultural apprenticeship is part of Reb Goethe’s recipe for allaying the salient contradictions of Russian-Jewish authorship. But the recipe has its flaws: what one observer may see as the beneficial absorption of foreign models, another may qualify as “jewish” mimicry.7 Indeed, against the backdrop of the language of “jewish” difference, Volodia’s vision of exile as the summit of the modern condition and modernist sensibility—informed by the same social dislocation, spiritual instability, and cultural cosmopolitanism—is open to another reading. In this reading, Volodia’s self-construction as a Russian modernist marginalized by expatriation both capitalizes on and obfuscates Fel'zen’s status as an author marginalized in the Russian literary tradition by virtue of his ethnocultural origin. Consider Volodia’s dismissal of Christian revivalism as a response to the cultural and spiritual alienation of the modern age. Spurning “other­worldly ‘celestial’ solace,” he subscribes to a blend of stoicism and creativity exemplified, in his opinion, by the psychological art of Lermontov and Proust (Schast'e, 60). Volodia only reiterates Fel'zen’s own criticism of the view that a revitalized Christianity is the panacea for the modern human condition and for the decline of art in the secular age. At first glance, this stance is motivated solely by the aesthetic and philosophical concerns of an intellectual who sees modernity as a force stimulating, rather than destroying, artistic creativity. Dismissing the cultural role of religion, Fel'zen the essayist assimilates religious belief to totalitarian ideologies.8 But the reception of Fel'zen’s ideas by his interpretive community shows that this debate conceals a different quarrel. This quarrel is about the place of the Jewish intelligentsia in Russian émigré culture, whose elite reacts to Soviet atheism by positing Christianity as the source of creative and spiritual vitality—a thesis invalidating any artist marked by “jewishness.” In 1928, this quarrel erupts in the émigré press, pitting Lev Karsavin’s Christian dismissal of Judaism against Aron Shteinberg’s claim to the Jewish intelligentsia’s right of residence in Russian culture and rejection of Christian superiority to the Jewish tradition, shocking for the debate’s time and place. And although Fel'zen prefers a more “careful and tactful” response to the pressure of the majority culture, he clearly

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appreciates such rebuttals of Christian triumphalism, not least thanks to the reception of his theories by fellow émigrés who publicly chastise the writer for missing the Christian essence of European culture and privately accuse him of the “jewish” agenda of sapping Christianity’s cultural vitality.9 Volodia’s and Fel'zen’s opposition to Christian revivalism thus follows the principle of dual encoding, wherein the explicit level of signification (the debate about art and modernity) conceals reflection on the European discourse about “the jews” constituting the implicit backdrop of Fel'zen’s self-fashioning as a Russian writer. We find another instance of dual encoding in Volodia’s vision of ­exilic experience. The expatriate sees his own cultural and spiritual uprootedness as symptomatic of the modern human condition in general, but keeps mum about the possible reading of the same qualities as products of his taboo family past. He thus projects his generation of Russian artists maturing only in exile onto the critical discourse about modernity. These artists are marked, in his opinion, by a radical break between past and present; a permanent identity crisis; a clash of old and new values; the commodification of art (exemplified by Soviet artists’ lucrative subservience to the state); and cultural and spiritual dislocation, literally realized in the “perpetual wandering” of Russian émigrés—a phrase Volodia borrows from the lexicon of “jewish” difference.10 This borrowing is anything but accidental. Parallels between the Jewish Diaspora and Russian emigration are as common in the selfconceptualization of the émigré cultural elite as its construction of the Soviet-émigré cultural dichotomy in the terms of the age-old opposition of “jewish” spiritual barrenness and Christian fertility.11 Yet both Fel'zen and his hero generally shrink from explicit parallels between exile and “jewishness,” despite (or maybe thanks to) the fact that all of the qualities marking their artistic generation as modernist also apply to Russian-Jewish authorship. Fel'zen’s fear of open parallels between the exilic and “jewish” conditions speaks volumes about the demons besetting his artistic identity and explains his desire to distance Volodia from the slightest suspicion of “jewishness” as potentially damaging to his own authorial persona. And considering that Volodia’s affair with Lëlia overlaps with his passion for literature, not least because she is his first audience and critic, the hero’s dread of disapproval and

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rejection as a lover and an artist (Pis'ma, 36–37) is loaded with metaliterary meaning. It conveys Volodia’s, and ultimately Fel'zen’s, fear of rejection by Russian literature, once designated by Vladimir Zhabotinskii as the unrequited love of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia—a metaphor critics revive in Fel'zen’s day to describe the dynamic between Russian-Jewish readers and “the jews” of the Russian literary tradition as an abusive relationship between a stoic lover and a capricious and sadistic beloved.12 This is precisely the relationship Volodia carries on with Lëlia. Such dissimulation of the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship in Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem” makes an investigation of the role of the writer’s ethnocultural origins in his artistic self-fashioning a study in significant absences. To be sure, these absences are as eloquent as Babel’s deceptive openness to “jewish” subject matter. In fact, Fel'zen’s art of concealment is yet another instance of the dual encoding of his authorial persona. Although neither Fel'zen nor Volodia ever admit this particular debt, their literary mentors, Proust and Lermontov, not only bridge European modernism and the Russian literary tradition but provide a template for negotiating the aporiae of Russian-Jewish authorship. On the one hand, Fel'zen’s knowledge of Lermontov scholarship informs his vision of the Russian classic with ethnocultural ambiguity, rooted in the legend of Lermontov’s dubious origin (traced to his ­mother’s alleged liaison with a French-Jewish family doctor). This legend is made newly urgent in Fel'zen’s day by the inclusion of Lermontov, as a “semitic” exemplar, in Hans Günther’s 1930 racial manual popular with the Nazis (Figure 10).13 As a result, Fel'zen’s imagined Lermontov—a modernist avant la lettre whose European spirit is manifest in his un-Russian sense of measure and freedom from political, religious, and national sectarianism—is open to another reading. In this reading, Lermontov becomes a cryptic symbol of Russian-Jewish authorship, informed by Reb Goethe’s ideal of cosmopolitanism and opposed to the “spirit of intolerance and malice for foreign ideas and faiths,” which Fel'zen finds in the “censoriously loud Christianity” of Gogol' and Dostoevskii—two Judeophobe classics whose negative evocation is all the more significant coming as it does from a Russian-­Jewish writer in search of a place in the Russian literary tradition.14

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Figure 10. Mikhail Lermontov (left page, top row) as an example of a “jewish” racial type from the “mainly oriental” subcategory. He is flanked by Charlie Chaplin (directly below) and Ludwig Börne and Baruch Spinoza (right page, top row). In: Hans Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes. Munich: Lehmanns Verlag, 1930, p. 82.

On the other hand, privy to Proust’s critical reception, Fel'zen is surely aware of the perceived link between the writer’s family background and the challenge his novel poses to the French literary tradition. In Fel'zen’s day, both the proponents and the detractors of La Recherche casually trace Proust’s ars poetica to his “jewishness.” A Catholic like his father, Proust grew up in close proximity to the French-­Jewish bourgeoisie, his mother and her family staying faithful to the Jewish tradition, albeit in a highly assimilated form. Thus, citing Proust’s mixed background, contemporary French critics describe his complex syntax as a “rabbinic style”; see as “talmudic” La Recherche’s narrative structure, shaped by extensive psychological speculation; reduce to the common denomina-

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

tor of “jewishness” the frail and neurotic bodies of Proust and his hero, Marcel; and identify as “jewish” the gift of mimicry that allows Proust to frequent the Judeophobe aristocracy (“le faubourg Saint-Germain”) and the antisemitic Right (Léon Daudet, Maurice Barrès), and permits Marcel to shuttle between incompatible social circles and individuals in La Recherche.15 The topic of social and cultural mimicry in Proust criticism abuts the larger issue of ethnocultural concealment. Those critics who know the author personally marvel at the discrepancy between what they see as Proust’s “semitic” physique and ties to the French-Jewish milieu and his depiction of Marcel’s family as typical French Catholics. They also note that La Recherche displaces Proust’s alterity onto Marcel’s doubles, Swann and Bloch being the most obvious case studies in acculturation. At the same time, the “jewish” heroes of La Recherche strike Proust’s interpretive community as unusually diverse, albeit unoriginal, and certainly worth special attention, coming as they do from the pen of a French-Jewish artist whose importance cannot be denied by even the most vociferous Wagnerians.16 “Deep down, almost every Jew is an antisemite,” writes Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve (307), an essay unpublished in his lifetime. This maxim sums up his approach to the problematics of French-Jewish authorship, whose relative weight in La Recherche makes this novel “a drama of tribal assimilation.”17 In La Recherche, we find the familiar figure of an artist who must overcome the original sin of “jewishness” to prove his worth. As usual, this figure rests on the opposition of one’s acculturated self to the rest of “the jews,” who embody Proust’s fear of being cast by his readers in “jewish” terms. Marcel stands in stark contrast to several cases of faulty acculturation: Bloch and Swann function as his “jewish” foils even as they absorb Proust’s own “semitic” physique as well as the “jewish” aspects of modern cultural and artistic life. In the process of this outward projection, Proust helps himself liberally to the antisemitic rhetoric of the French Right.18 Of special note is Marcel’s Wagnerian attribution of linguistic inadequacy to Bloch, a French-born critic and dramatist who violates the French language, which is not his birthright; unlike Marcel, whose stylistic experiments are implicitly justified by the status of French as his natural idiom.19

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In this context, Volodia’s unambiguous Russianness looks like Fel'zen’s deliberate choice between Babel' and Proust, that is, between the illustration of the process of an artist’s flight from “jewishness” (Babel') as opposed to its result (Proust). Accepting the Proustian model, Fel'zen introduces Volodia’s “jewish” shadow in Schast'e, having first tested this device in “Neravenstvo” (Inequality, 1930). In the latter story, an émigré sporting Volodia’s artistic method and Fel'zen’s “Nordic physique” and aristocratic manners finds his opposite in a vulgar and noisy “southerner” (98–99, 100, 104). The same “Arian” looks and noble manners grace Volodia and Lëlia (whose main prototype is a Russian-Jewish woman from Riga). Lëlia is a dazzling blonde with white skin and excellent French, which along with her first marriage to a White Army officer, enhances her aura of gentility (Obman, 7, 33, 35, 44). By contrast, her foils, mulattoes with hooked noses and fat pouting lips, are either explicitly “jewish” (“Figuratsiia” [A crowd scene, 1940], 3–4) or of dubious origin, like the shrewd entrepreneur Ida Ivanovna, whose rumored identity as “a German from Riga” (Obman, 87–89) recalls the impression of Fel'zen’s uninformed colleagues that he is of Baltic German stock. Thus, from the moment Mark Osipovich Shteinman, a culturally ambitious young exile reluctantly supporting himself as a businessman, materializes in Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem,” he embodies the author’s exorcised “jewish” self. A dark-skinned gentleman-dandy with fakelooking dress and manners, Mark is the source of Volodia’s unexplained anxiety. This anxiety may suggest that the Russianness of Fel'zen’s alter ego reflects the author’s wishful thinking more than his autobiographical reality; and that Mark is Fel'zen’s self-parody—an ironic look at the public persona the writer cultivates in his Russian milieu. Parodying Fel'zen’s “European gentleman” image, Mark’s spiritual and intellectual kinship with Volodia is undermined by his visible “jewishness.” Volodia finds this contradiction so irritating that he longs to reveal Mark’s Pale of Settlement origins as different from his own stolichnost'—a term he coins, on the basis of the Russian word for a capital city (stolitsa), to denote spiritual and cultural modernism. But as usual in Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem,” the discourse about modernity obfuscates an ethnocultural quarrel manifest in the specifically “jewish” provincial backwardness opposing Mark to Volodia’s cultivated Russian self.20

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

Volodia reveals Mark’s cultural disguise by showing up uninvited in his home, which is run by Mark’s mother (Schast'e, 159–60)—a “provincial Jewess” speaking an “impossibly garbled caricature of the Russian language” and voicing opinions straight out of Babel’s world of “onion smell and Jewish fate.” Given the centrality of stylistic experimentation in Fel'zen’s art, informed by Proust’s view of language as an unreliable and inexact tool, the invocation of linguistic “jewishness” in Schast'e is as pregnant with metadescriptive significance as Marcel’s castigation of Bloch’s usage in La Recherche. Claiming the right to violate normative usage for the sake of fuller self-expression (69), Volodia writes in drawn-out and syntactically complex “Proustian” periods; embraces unidiomatic turns of phrase and agrammatical neologisms; and eschews, as too “Soviet,” such tokens of Babel’s style as the short period and shocking or naturalistic metaphors.21 Contrary to French critical views of Proust’s style, émigré critics do not explicitly link the style of Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem” to the topos of “jewish” linguistic competence. This is not surprising, given the aforementioned importance of asemitizm in the public discourse of the émigré cultural elite. Nor does this mean that such links are not made in private. Consider the unpublished 1939 essay about Fel'zen in which Gippius invokes “the general rule (with exceptions) that any language spoken ‘natively’ by Jews contains ultimate depths unknown to them.” As a result, she argues, they may be “artists of genius in music, painting, sculpture, but there has never been a RussianJewish writer of genius.”22 Fel'zen could not have been unaware that his origin opened his stylistic program to the charge of “jewishness.” Volodia’s linguistic contrast to Mark’s family provides a shelter of sorts from the lexicon of “jewish” difference, both for Fel'zen and for his alter ego, serving as a projection device similar to that Babel' employs in “Guy de Maupassant” when his hero scorns Raisa’s “jewish” style. Volodia’s visit to Mark’s home highlights the metaliterary resonance of Mark as his foil and rival for Lëlia’s attention, especially if we recall the centrality of Volodia’s amours in his ars poetica and Lëlia’s role as his first critic, that is, as a symbolic gatekeeper of Russian literature and culture. Volodia’s condescending view of Mark as an inapt lover, a cultural parvenu, and too timid an analyst of the human soul allays his own fear

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of being inadequate as a lover and an artist. Incidentally, his relationship with Lëlia improves after Mark’s suicide, brought about by Lëlia’s coquetry. At one point, Volodia scolds Mark for his insolent (naglyi) attempt to conquer Lëlia and become “geroi romana”—a double entendre meaning a novel’s hero and a lover—a role that is “not his birthright” (163). The qualifier insolent, traditionally applied to the ambitions of “the jews” in disguise, explains the unspoken part of Volodia’s rebuke, namely, that Mark’s “jewishness” makes him unfit for Volodia’s cultural role as a European modernist, whose ars poetica hinges on his romantic liaison with Lëlia, in other words, on his masculine ability to captivate a Russian woman. Administering his rebuke in the form of a mock epitaph on the eve of Mark’s suicide, Volodia casts the rival’s demise as punishment for his ambition (163). Mark’s death bears out his prophecy but leaves open the question, Who punishes him and why? At first glance, Mark dies because of his failure to understand Lëlia’s sadistic nature, which is transparent and less dangerous for Volodia thanks to his psychological insight and masculine self-confidence. But the upturn in Volodia’s affair with Lëlia after Mark’s death suggests yet another reading. Mark’s suicide may be a requisite sacrifice helping Volodia regain Lëlia’s favor and thereby affirm his male, artistic, and cultural competence. Ultimately, then, it is Volodia’s creator who punishes the neurotic, effeminate, and sickly Mark for imposing himself on Lëlia and, by this token, on Russian culture without proper qualifications. Killing off his alter ego’s “jewish” shadow, Fel'zen inscribes Mark’s death in the long tradition of “jewish” exorcism running from Gogol’s “Taras Bul'ba” to Babel’s “Moi pervyi gus'.” And it is as such an exorcism with personal connotations for the author that Mark’s fate resonates in Fel'zen’s interpretive community. Consider Anatolii Shteiger’s “Zhid” (The Jew, 1934). Appearing in a review run by Georgii Adamovich, to whose circle both Fel'zen and Shteiger belong, this story exploits the Judeophile literary formula, which ostentatiously uses the invective zhid to highlight the mistreatment of “the jews” by the Gentile majority (compare Machtet’s “Zhid”; Uspenskii’s “Zhidenok”). Shteiger draws on many clichés in the Judeophile recipe. The story’s meek and forgiving hero, émigré writer Karnats, is more Christian in spirit than his Judeophobe Russian compatriots. He

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

is also more sincere in his espousal of the modern crisis theories, which inform the émigré artistic milieu and to which he ultimately succumbs, repeating the suicidal (and baptismal) plunge of Staniukovich’s Isaika (see Chapter 13). The story’s formulaic nature intimates Shteiger’s ironic distance from the Judeophile literary tradition. Characteristically, the only person truly affected by Karnats’s death is also the story’s most Judeophobe character—the brother of Karnats’s Judeophile colleague Kirill who fails to respond meaningfully to his friend’s demise. Karnats’s circle is a transparent parody of the “Russian Montparnasse” frequented by Fel'zen and Shteiger. Moreover, Kirill’s surprise visit to Karnats’s home echoes Volodia’s visit to Mark’s place. “Zhid” all but reiterates the situation in Schast'e with one exception: instead of his mother we see the “jewish” hero’s married sister, who is Karnats’s source of subsistence. Like Mark’s mother, the hostess speaks terrible Russian (122) and airs a worldview that is “jewishly” fixated on socioeconomic success. For the reader in the know, these details evoke the rumor among Fel'zen’s colleagues that he, “distracted” from business ventures by literary activity, subsists on the largesse of his married sister. This clash of material necessity and cultural ambition in Fel'zen’s authorial persona is echoed in Mark’s and Volodia’s lives, as both make a living in the business world but resent its materialistic encroachment on their cultural pursuits.23 And as if to confirm Fel'zen in the role of “Zhid”’s addressee, Shteiger repeatedly uses the title word of Schast'e (happiness) to describe Karnats’s philosophy of life and art, which like Volodia’s, hinges on amorous experience.24 What resonance could Shteiger’s story have for Fel'zen’s authorial persona? The poor quality of Karnats’s art notwithstanding, his suicide is the outcome of solitude rationalized by modernist sensibility but rooted in cultural deracination. Karnats is indeed rejected both by the Russian-Jewish milieu in Paris, which is indifferent to his plight as a hungry artist, and by the exiled carriers of traditional Russian culture, for whom he is, above all, a zhid. In fact, his Russianness is acknowledged only in the French press reports of his suicide. “Zhid” then points to the futility and harmfulness of acculturation. If Mark’s suicide enhances Volodia’s Russianness and by extension that of Fel'zen’s authorial persona, Karnats’s death represents cultural assimilation’s fallout as seen by

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Shteiger the Gentile artist anxious about the role of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in Russian cultural life in exile. Given the highly sensitive nature of this topic in the émigré public discourse, Shteiger articulates his anxiety in private (in his letters to Zinaida Shakhovskaia), whereas publicly he cloaks it in a moralizing parable whose target is visible only to a small circle of émigré litterateurs in Paris.25 “Zhid”’s message is reinforced by other situational parallels with Schast'e. Consider Mark’s discussion of the “Jewish question” with a Volunteer Army veteran, Shura, which makes Volodia uneasy (48). In “Zhid,” Kirill’s Judeophobe brother, also a White veteran, uses the term zhid during a conversation with Karnats. Both Volodia and Kirill are upset by the breaches of asemitizm they witness. Volodia motivates his embarrassment by the triteness of Mark’s and Shura’s arguments. But his cursory way of reporting Shura’s words acquires more meaning in “Zhid”’s context. Shteiger’s White veteran brags about his pogrom exploits but feels Karnats’s pain more acutely than his Judeophile brother. Next to these pogromist boasts, Shura’s vitriol about “killing the Bolsheviks,” which discomfits Volodia as much as Shura’s debate with Mark (“Vozvrashchenie” [A return, 1934], 175–78), looks unrealistically timid. Fel'zen’s interpretive community knows that in the Volunteer Army parlance, zhid is the common term for the Bolshevik foe. Shteiger stresses this usage, as if to correct Fel'zen’s alter ego for his elliptical treatment of émigré Judeophobia despite Volodia’s cult of honesty as an artistic and existential principle. And the same evasiveness casts Fel'zen’s authorial persona in unfavorable moral light, given the writer’s family background. Fel'zen is aware of the moral ambiguity created by the gap between his origins and the conspicuous Russianness of his alter ego—“Zhid” highlights a problem already inscribed in Schast'e. Thus, Volodia’s victory in his rivalry with Mark for Lëlia’s affection is spoiled by the guilty awareness of his unfair cultural advantage. This guilt grows during Volodia’s meeting with Mark’s mother, whose ostensible lack of acculturation is so “honest” and “amazingly dignified” that Volodia feels uneasy under her gaze, as if she gleaned something unseemly behind his façade of a “European gentleman.” And when she tells him about her struggle to better her children’s socioeconomic lot, Volodia is filled

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

with a sense of shame for himself, for Lëlia, and for Mark, all of them looking like pathetic decadents next to this woman (159, 165, 171). By this token, Mark’s intellectual and emotional affinity with Fel'zen’s alter ego (160–63, 173) makes him not only Volodia’s “jewish” foil but Fel'zen’s cultural double, whose story can be read as a parable of the writer’s own cultural trajectory. Ostensibly, Volodia qualifies Mark’s death as an “irreparable loss” because he loses a stimulating interlocutor. But it is not hard to see the fuller implications of Mark’s suicide in the context of Lëlia’s symbolic function as a gatekeeper of Russian culture. This function casts the story of Mark’s self-destruction as that of unrewarded cultural selfabnegation—the same kind of self-abnegation informing Fel'zen’s decision completely to Russify his literary alter ego to the ends of artistic self-validation as a Russian writer. The grief of Mark’s mother at her son’s funeral only crowns the distress she already experienced, sharing it with Volodia, at the spiritual loss of her son to the siren call of Lëlia’s milieu. What is “irreparably lost,” then, not only with but also in Mark, is the possibility of honest and dignified faithfulness to one’s ethnocultural origins, a characteristic that Volodia comes to admire in Mark’s mother. At the funeral, the mother is flanked by “gracefully refined, darkeyed, beautiful ladies—Mark’s rich married sisters” (172), whose introduction foreshadows the family situation of Shteiger’s Karnats and echoes Fel'zen’s own family dynamics, which Gippius identifies as the source of his “jewishness”—“filial rather than personal (it comes from his mother, his sisters)”—and which informs Fel'zen’s public image to the end; for the writer is said to have stayed with his mother in occupied Paris until his first arrest, subsequently trying to join his sister abroad.26 The image of Mark’s sisters recalls that of Raisa’s sisters in “Guy de Maupassant,” albeit without its negative resonance. Reading Mark’s fate as a parable of Fel'zen’s cultural trajectory and as the writer’s guilt-allaying counterweight to the ethically dubious suppression of his alter ego’s family history, we can argue that Volodia’s vision of Mark’s relatives—incongruously nostalgic for a Russian character—polemically engages Babel’s autobiographical narrative and its salient renunciation of the “jewish” home.27

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But this guilt-driven polemic is kept under wraps in Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem,” which eschews “jewish” subject matter once it is exorcised from Volodia’s life and from his creator’s artistic universe through Mark’s sacrifice. The silence of Fel'zen the novelist and literary critic on the personally urgent issue of “jewishness” jars with Fel'zen the man’s openness about his Jewish origin and Fel'zen the essayist’s equation of Soviet and Nazi intolerance in an émigré milieu that, as he knows, is receptive to Nazi ideology28—so much so that by the late 1930s, Fel'zen’s extra-artistic focus on the “Jewish question” starts to irritate Zinaida Gippius, in whose salon he effectively replaces her former protégé, Osip Mandel'shtam, in the capacity of “Zinaida’s little Yid” (“zinaidin zhidenok”). Like Vasilii Rozanov, who decried Vladimir Zhabotinskii’s immersion into Jewish political activism as tantamount to his abandonment of Russian culture, Gippius views as a form of cultural betrayal the radicalization of Russian émigré writers of Jewish extraction in response to the antisemitic atmosphere of 1930s Europe. But her irritation with Fel'zen and “his Jews,” as she puts it in her diary, is not without a literary precedent.29 Proust’s Marcel is similarly irritated by Swann’s regression from a fully assimilated European gentleman into a stereotype of “the jews” under the combined effect of Dreyfusism and terminal cancer, whose impact on his body metaphorizes the impact of Swann’s political engagement on his cultural standing.30 Fel'zen is surely aware that unlike his literary alter ego, he follows in Swann’s rather than Marcel’s footsteps. This awareness is in fact visible in Volodia’s admiration of Lermontov’s defiant refusal to “hide and cower in a hole” in the face of social conventions (Pis'ma, 50), in contrast to La Recherche’s obfuscation of those traits of Proust the man (Jewish origin, homosexuality), which are a liability for Proust the artist. And this is where Fel'zen parts ways with Volodia, whose admiration of Lermontov’s imagined rebellion remains strictly theoretical, highlighting a contradiction at the core of Fel'zen’s authorial persona. While Fel'zen the artist lays claim to a place in the Russian literary tradition by distancing his alter ego, and therefore himself, from “jewishness,” the man proudly stands by his hybrid identity, leading a memoirist to observe that “had he wanted to conceal his Jewish origin from the Germans, he would have likely succeeded.”31

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

Fel'zen’s choice of “Swann’s way” brings no resolution to the aporiae of Russian-Jewish authorship in his art, because this resolution resides as much with the writer as with his target audience. If émigré critics, for the most part acquainted with Fel'zen personally but bound by the code of asemitizm, treat the absence of “jewish” subject matter in his “roman s pisatelem” (and even its momentary eruption in Mark’s story) with silence, the same cannot be said about the average émigré reader. A copy of Schast'e preserved at the Bibliothèque russe Tourguénév in Paris contains marginalia that, judging by the orthography, belong to Fel'zen’s contemporary (Figure 11). The inscriptions annotate Mark’s sexual advances, rebutted by Lëlia: “Filthy Yid. Vulgar Yid”; and comment on Volodia’s reproach to Lëlia for her coquetry with Mark: “Right on, if you flirt with a Yid, face the music. No decent woman would keep the Yids’ company or make their acquaintance, let alone flirt with a Yid.”32 This émigré reader’s response is not an isolated case. Shimon Markish cites an inscription on the title page of a 1923 copy of Il'ia Erenburg’s novel, Zhizn' i gibel' Nikolaia Kurbova (The life and death of Nikolai Kurbov), given to the University of Geneva’s library by an émigré family. Here the author’s name is annotated as follows: “Despicable Yid” (“gnusnyi zhid”).33 Unlike Erenburg’s émigré reader, Fel'zen’s annotator is unaware of the author’s Jewish origin, directing his Judeophobe passion at Mark—Volodia’s “jewish” foil and the “jewish” double of Fel'zen’s authorial persona. For all his likely apostatic guilt, then, Fel'zen the writer still benefits from Mark’s sacrifice to the Judeophobe sensibility of his interpretive community, whose attention is thus distracted from the author’s own cultural identity. Like Volodia in the company of Shura the White veteran, Fel'zen is aware of the importance of the lexicon of “jewish” difference in the imagination of his émigré readers. He successfully deflects the negative resonance of “jewishness” from his authorial persona through cultural dissimulation, but at a steep cost.34 The very fact that “the jews” persist in their role as the paradigmatic Other of Fel'zen’s readership, as amply testified by the Proustian obfuscation of “jewish” subject matter in his artistic and critical writings, casts permanent doubt on the writer’s claim to a place in Russian literature, making this place marginal by definition, even if

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Figure 11. Marginalia within copy of Iurii Fel'zen, Schast'e. Berlin: Parabola, 1932, pp. 86–87. Bibliothèque russe Tourguénév, Paris. Call # Б–697.

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

Fel'zen’s marginalizing (self-)doubt is never clearly articulated in his writings, contrary to the unending cultural entrance exam that punctuates ­Babel’s autobiographical narrative. ❊ Placed next to each other, Fel'zen’s and Babel’s approaches to the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship afford us a fresh look at a debate that focuses on Babel' but excludes Fel'zen, creating yet another instance of significant absence in Iurii Fel'zen’s story as a RussianJewish writer. At the debate’s core is the vision of Russian-Jewish authorship as an autonomous literary tradition, “Russian-Jewish literature.” This vision is largely a critical matter, since no Russophone writers, at least before the Second World War, define their poetics in relation to a Russian-Jewish literary tradition. But as an ideologically driven critical construct, Russian-Jewish literature has played its part in the historical evolution of the identity of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, which like its Western counterparts finds a source of selfjustification in European literary studies whose traditional equation of literature and nation allows critics to imagine homogeneous literary canons as tokens of ethnocultural specificity.35 As a branch of the debate about assimilation, reflection on RussianJewish literature has been driven principally by political rather than aesthetic concerns. It is in response to Russian Wagnerians, for instance, that Vladimir Zhabotinskii coins his thesis that “literary nationality” hinges on a writer’s target audience rather than language. Shifting focus from language to readers, the critic puts much stock in art’s subject matter. In his view, an artist cannot be considered Jewish unless he voices the concerns of a Jewish community—a view concurrently held by Hungarian-Jewish critic Wilhelm Bacher. Unlike his compatriot and Hebrew poet Saul Chernikhovskii, Zhabotinskii the Zionist does not admit the existence of Russian-Jewish literature but views Russian-Jewish writing as part of the larger Jewish tradition including Hebrew and Yiddish texts, the way Ruth Wisse does today.36 Long before Wisse, Zhabotinskii’s ideas help early Soviet critics imagine “Russian-Jewish belles-lettres” as an autonomous tradition born with the Russian-­Jewish intelligentsia itself.37 It stands to reason

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then that this intelligentsia’s perceived demise should be framed by death verdicts to its literature: witness Semen Dubnov’s obituary to the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia on the eve of the Second World War; or Shimon Markish’s designation of the year of Babel’s and Zhabotinskii’s deaths (1940) as the upper temporal bracket of Russian-Jewish literature.38 The main weakness of Zhabotinskii’s theses lies in their disregard for the realia of contemporary life. The Russian census of 1897 shows that only 0.9 percent of Jews (44,328 people) consider Russian their native tongue, while a quarter of Jewish respondents are literate in it. And neither group is keen on distinguishing between Russian and Russian-Jewish writers—it is difficult to explain otherwise the generally short lifespan of Russian-Jewish periodicals that regularly go bankrupt before 1917 for lack of readers.39 In this light, neither the pioneers of Russian-Jewish writing nor their successors can realistically see their readership as mostly Jewish, contrary to Shimon Markish’s claim that “pre-­revolutionary Russian-Jewish literature was a Russophone literature written by Jews for Jews [. . .] even if Russian-Jewish writers attracted the attention of Russian readers.”40 In fact, the memory of Rabinovich, Levanda, and Bogrov survived solely among the RussianJewish intelligentsia not because of these writers’ special status in its reading list but because of their advocacy of Jewish rights, in other words, their contribution to the Russian Judeophile discourse. The opposite opinion is equally beset by contradictions. Those rejecting the idea of Russian-Jewish literature insist on the key role of language in creative writing, debunking not only the notion that a hybrid cultural identity can engender a literary tradition but also that a writer can be “Russian-Jewish.” Informed by the idea of language as the vessel of a nation’s spiritual quintessence—“Language equals faith. Language equals nationality,” writes Iulii Aikhenval’d—these critics are ready to speak only about the contribution of Jews to Russian art, which Arkadii Gornfel’d likens to that of the artists of Ukrainian origin. The flaw of his simile is obvious: Gogol' and Korolenko never met with anything resembling the reception reserved for Jews in the Russian field of cultural production. But it is precisely the issue of reader reception that the opponents of Russian-Jewish literature sacrifice to assimilationist ide-

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

alism. Consider Aikhenval'd’s claim (made in Weimar Germany!) that in literary activity, “religions, faiths, and churches merge”: “There are no Jews in German literature, only Germans,” writes the critic, “Just as there are no Jews in Russian literature, only Russians.” Mark Slonim’s view that “Jewishness plays no role” in Vasilii Grossman’s artistic identity has been as promptly and soundly disproved by history.41 The shock of the Shoah put the final nail into the coffin of traditional assimilationist ethos informing Aikhenval'd’s, Gornfel'd’s and Slonim’s critical opinions, and tipped the debate’s balance in favor of the concept of Russian-Jewish literature. This literature’s ranks progressively swelled as critics began to designate new or previously overlooked candidates for inclusion (a procedure exemplified by a recent Englishlanguage Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature).42 In the closing pages of this book, I would like to test the logic of the critical discourse about Russian-Jewish literature on the specific cases of Fel'zen and Babel'. The respective treatments these writers receive (or, significantly, do not receive) in the quarrel about Russian-Jewish literature reveal the fault lines of the opposing opinions, making us fully appreciate the complexity of the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship. In a programmatic essay, Shimon Markish posits the criteria for populating Russian-Jewish literature with specific names. To qualify for inclusion, writers must: (1) embrace their origin and, as a result, have a clear Jewish identity; (2) have “organic” ties to Jewish cultural traditions, consequently focusing on Jewish subject matter and treating it from an insider’s vantage point; (3) be embedded, religiously or otherwise, in a Jewish community, serving as its mouthpiece, that is, as artistes engagés. In addition, the second assimilated cohort must have a dual allegiance, Russian and Jewish—a condition epitomized, in Markish’s view, by Babel'.43 Today’s adepts of the concept of Russian-Jewish literature stick to these outlines, albeit with variations: some narrow the pool by requiring that artists “unambiguously identify as Jewish writers” (Kobrinskii); others enlist “any Russian-language writer of Jewish origin for whom the question of Jewish identity is, on some level, compelling” (Nakhimovsky, Shrayer)—a formula whose exclusive focus on identity issues reveals the ideological nature of the concept it describes.44 The same ideological motivation transpires in the appeals

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to postmodern identity politics by the critics who place Russian-Jewish literature alongside the Francophone literatures of Africa or AfricanAmerican literature.45 This ideological motivation explains the divergent visions of ­Babel’s art among the debate’s participants, whose extra-artistic agendas shape their reading of literary texts. Consider Dubnov’s 1939 estimate that “in the last twenty years, not a single truly [. . .] artistic book by a Russian-Jewish writer has come out of Russia.” This statement implicitly negates Babel’s undeniable aesthetic value in order to prove the critic’s thesis about the death of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. But the view of Dubnov’s assimilationist opponent, Slonim, rings as false when he characterizes Babel’s art as “dissolved in the Russian element” to the point of “allotting no significant place to Jewish life and heroes.” Slonim’s disregard for textual evidence foreshadows Wisse’s highly dubious claim, made to opposite ideological ends, that “Babel’s Russian Jewish prose is almost as secure as Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish. There is no sign in his writing of an ‘identity conflict’.”46 If we now apply Markish’s criteria to Babel' and Fel'zen, the results hardly bring us any closer than the less sophisticated arguments of Markish’s predecessors to proving the existence of a Russian-Jewish literature. When Markish and like-minded critics postulate a writer’s conscious acceptance of his or her ethnocultural origin as the prerequisite for a distinct Jewish identity, they fail to specify on what evidence such personal attitudes should be determined. When applied to an artist, this criterion is flawed aesthetically. It ignores the common divide between the human being and the authorial persona this human being may choose to cultivate through oral and written, artistic and extraartistic, statements; by means of meaningful behavior in everyday life; and by way of literary alter egos. We can argue in favor of Babel' the man’s acceptance of his origin and his concomitant Jewish identity on the basis of his war diary and personal correspondence. But it would be a stretch to make the same argument about Babel' the artist, who as his autobiographical narrative shows, distances his authorial persona from the man’s ethnocultural profile, which once made public to his Russian target audience, stops being Jewish and becomes “jewish.” Babel' implements Aikhenval'd’s thesis that “a writing Jew stops being

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

a Jew when he becomes a writer”—a thesis echoing the statement of Levka Krik, Benia Krik’s brother, that “a Jew who mounts a horse stops being a Jew and becomes a Russian” (Zakat, II:278).47 But if in Aikhenval'd’s assimilationist utopia any Russophone author has full rights in the Russian field of cultural production, in Babel’s reality such rights are contingent on a Russian Jew’s ability to distance himself from “jewishness” in the eyes of his Gentile reader. Turning to Fel'zen, we see that there is sufficient documentary evidence to assume that the man’s Jewish roots are central to his cultural identity. But Fel'zen the artist pursues the same agenda as Babel', distancing his authorial persona from “jewishness,” even if he adopts a strategy of concealment opposed to Babel’s deceptive openness to the artistic treatment of “the jews.” The coded obfuscation of “jewish” subject matter in Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem” leads to the writer’s omission from the critical discourse about Russian-Jewish literature, but it hardly diminishes his importance for our appreciation of the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship. And just how justified is Fel'zen’s critical omission? After all, Babel' does not explicitly identify as a Russian-­ Jewish (let alone simply Jewish) artist any more than Fel'zen does, so that the critical distinction between the two appears to be based largely on the visibility of “the jews” in their literary fiction. This brings us to the next point in Markish’s schema, the one about “Jewish subject matter and material,” whose defining importance for Russian-Jewish writers is a result of their “organic link to the Jewish civilization”—a link ensuring their insider vision of this subject matter. Besides unwittingly echoing Richard Wagner’s racial metaphysics, with its insistence on the organic link to the European civilization enjoyed by Gentile artists and unknown to “the jews,” this thesis ignores the crucial fact dominating my examination of Babel’s and Fel'zen’s oeuvre, namely, the dependence of assimilated Jewish writers on the imaginative patterns of the Gentile majority. Identify as they might with their Jewish background, these artists may be unable to speak about Jewish experience from an insider’s vantage point. And even if they tried to do so, we would be hard-pressed to ascertain whether a Russian-Jewish writer’s recourse to the cultural majority’s lexicon of “jewish” difference is unconscious, intentional, self-subversive, or all of the above.

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For instance, how can we be sure that Fel'zen’s Schast'e, which conspicuously takes an outsider’s look at “the jews” and describes them in the readily recognizable terms of cultural otherness, does not intend to subvert the vocabulary of “jewish” difference even while using it to shield Fel'zen and his alter ego from the cultural disgrace of “jewishness”? And if we do argue in favor of the novel’s subversive challenge to the generative model of “the jews,” as I think we can, then the text’s subject matter, its implicit debunking of the outsider vision of “the jews,” and its author’s cultural identity clearly meet Markish’s criteria for inclusion in Russian-Jewish literature. Can we not therefore make a case for Schast'e as a major event in this literature, whose theoreticians are completely oblivious of Fel'zen’s existence despite the fact that the writer is a more visible figure in interwar Russian émigré literary life than the oft-cited Dovid Knut and Vladimir Zhabotinskii? Conversely, is the common assumption that Babel' approaches his subject matter as an insider versed in Jewish culture so indisputable indeed? As I have tried to show, critics making this claim brush off the possibility that the writer may not want to appear to his Russian audience as a Jewish insider. Nor can we rule out the possibility that Babel' is unable, thanks to his Russified upbringing, to treat his ethnocultural background from an insider’s vantage point. Consider the argument that an insider vision of Jewish culture is manifest in Babel’s use of Yiddish folklore in “Shabos-Nakhamu,” a story about Hershel ­Ostropolier’s adventures. At first this sounds convincing, since the story seems to follow the outlines of the Yiddish folk plot “Visitor from the World Beyond.” Yet, contrary to this plot, Babel’s Hershel not only swindles “the jews” by posing as a visitor from the dead but mocks their religious praxis. Shabos-Nakhamu denotes the first Sabbath after the ninth day of Av—the fast commemorating Jerusalem’s destruction. But Hershel pretends to be Shabos-Nakhamu, “subverting language and faith,” as even Ruth Wisse is forced to admit.48 Students of Babel’s art are usually unperturbed by its mockery of the Jewish tradition. Nor do they wonder about Babel’s reasons for choosing this particular plot from Yiddish folklore despite the fact that “Shabos-Nakhamu” is the only case of Babel’s explicit artistic treatment of this folklore. The story originally appeared not in a Russian-Jewish

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but in a Russian periodical, although the choice still existed in 1918. “­Shabos-Nakhamu” thus targeted, first of all, Gentile readers ignorant of the Ostropolier tradition and prone to judge its in-group humor from the Christian perspective on “the jews.” Our doubts about Babel’s motives become even more urgent if we recall that a similar plot exists in Christian folklore. It originates in Catholic and Byzantine exempla about a Gentile who exploits the religious beliefs of “the jews” by posing as “their” messiah or as a prophet foretelling that their daughter, whom he impregnates, will bear this messiah. The resultant material dispossession and spiritual humiliation of “the jews” indicates Christianity’s superiority over Judaism.49 This tradition is the likely first association Babel’s target audience would have with “Shabos-Nakhamu,” making its young author a continuator of Pavel Veinberg’s “scenes from Jewish life”—a far cry from the proud assertion of Jewish roots today’s critics find in Babel’s story. I have argued above that Babel' resents the Gentile idea of the “jewish” artist, which Pavel Veinberg symbolizes and Babel’s literary alter ego debunks. The hero first does so through his symbolically charged refusal to be a violinist like the rest of “the jews” aspiring to an artistic career (“Probuzhdenie”); and then by contrasting himself with “the Jews [who] used to write in Russian in the old days” (“Guy de Maupassant”). The latter contrast carries multiple meanings, including Babel’s possible reluctance to be placed under the rubric of ­Russian-Jewish literature.50 This problematizes the next point in Markish’s schema, given the critic’s stress on Babel’s work as the epitome of that literature. ­Positing a writer’s duty to voice the concerns and pre­ occupations of a Jewish community—because “loners and groups who sever their ties to the community (in religiously-ritualistic, national, or cultural sense) [. . .] do not remain in [Russian-Jewish] literature”— Markish glosses over the leitmotif of the hero’s flight from “jewishness” in ­Babel’s autobiographical narrative and shows insensitivity to the aesthetic specificity of Babel’s artistic identity. Babel’s art is fiercely individualistic thanks to its immersion in the modernist ethos of a clean break from the past and the concomitant aesthetic valorization of marginality. Imbued as much as Fel'zen with modernist sensibility, Babel' cultivates sociocultural marginality through an

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unusually open, for his time and place, treatment of his Jewish origin, whose largely negative resonance in his Russian interpretive community buttresses the author’s aesthetically valuable outsider status. Thus, when Markish puts Babel' on a literary kibbutz and casts him as an ­artiste engagé, he reproduces the collectivist pressure applied to Babel' by Soviet ideologues and to which the writer reacted by becoming, in his words, a “master of the genre of silence.”51 My contention that Babel' instrumentalizes his Jewish background to the ends of modernist posturing will not sound outlandish if we recall the consonance of exile, the modern human condition, and “jewishness” in the overlapping artistic identities of Fel'zen and his literary alter ego. With regard to their authorial images, Babel’s exploitation of his Jewish background, as opposed to Fel'zen’s obfuscation of the same, marks a difference in the writers’ artistic means rather than in their vision of “the jews.” Unlike Babel', who finds in his Jewish background a convenient tool for modernist self-fashioning, Fel'zen does not need to exploit this aspect of his biography, which is even more negatively connoted for his émigré audience than for Babel’s Soviet readers. Fel'zen has another autobiographical feature to exploit to the same ends—exile and the concomitant, aesthetically valuable, social and cultural marginality. The ironic outcome of their divergent stances is that, in his autobiographical narrative, Babel' the consecrated classic of Russian-Jewish literature goes much farther than Fel'zen, the same literature’s ignored page, in distancing his authorial persona from “jewishness” by denouncing his ancestral milieu—the very community whose voice he represents, according to Markish; so much so that Fel'zen, as I have earlier suggested, appears to correct Babel’s harsh artistic treatment of their shared roots, a treatment particularly unseemly in the antisemitic atmosphere of 1930s Europe. In an attempt to rectify Markish’s vision of Russian-Jewish authorship, Kobrinskii downplays the notion of Russian-Jewish writers as community mouthpieces in order to focus on their target audience. The critic argues that Babel’s oeuvre encodes separate sets of messages for Russians and for Jews, capitalizing on Markish’s suggestion that the second assimilated cohort of writers has “dual civilizational appurtenance” and “equally belongs to two peoples.” As an example of a message addressed

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to the carriers of Jewish culture and illegible to the Russian reader, Kobrinskii cites the goose’s slaughter in “Moi pervyi gus'.” He argues that the story implicitly draws on the rite of Kapparot—an expiation of sins before Yom Kippur, which consists of donating to the poor a rooster or a hen killed by a Jewish butcher.52 But while the critic justly classifies Liutov’s actions as a ritual sacrifice, he fails to account for ­Babel’s bird choice, which does not correspond to that in Kapparot yet carries much symbolic meaning for the Russian reader. Kobrinskii ignores the goose’s implications in the lexicon of “jewish” difference and the story’s concomitant anti-“jewish” ethos, which makes its alleged, hidden and exclusive, dialogue with the Jewish reader rather improbable. Neither Markish nor his successors have a very clear idea of the method for determining the target audience of Russian-Jewish writers. As a result, when Markish proposes “Jewish subject matter and material” as a gauge of Russian-Jewish authorship, he misses the possibility that this subject matter may well turn out to be “jewish” when seen from the vantage point of its intended Gentile readership. Yet, without the benefit of an author’s direct statement (and given that the choice between Russian-Jewish and Russian publishing venues, amounting to such a statement, is often unavailable), the clarification of a writer’s target audience boils down, in my opinion, to the study of the symbolic language he or she employs when depicting “the jews.” Barring the possibility that a Russian-Jewish author may want to address, first and foremost, the Jewish reader but is unable to go beyond the imaginative means offered by the majority culture (a hypothetical scenario for which I have yet to find examples), the analysis of the language of “jewish” difference in Russian-Jewish writing appears to be the main, albeit indirect, method for determining its intended audience. The issue of target audience is paramount to our discussion because it reveals the central aporia of the critical discourse about Russian-­ Jewish literature. Historically, neither the proponents nor the opponents of this concept have cared to explain the third term of the formula “Russian-Jewish literature,” treating as self-evident something that is far from it. A survey of pre–Second World War essays about Russian-Jewish literature shows that their authors tend to use literature as a synonym of writing and authorship. Furthermore, they do not distinguish between

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fiction, criticism, philosophy, and journalism. As a result, ­literature ends up designating any combination of printed matter selected according to a critic’s ideological agenda. And although the postwar advocates of Russian-Jewish literature do not fare much better in this regard, their conspicuous effort to ground this critical concept in cultural and literary theory permits us to demand a clearer definition of terms. This is not, as it may appear, a matter of the academic splitting of hairs: such terminological imprecision nolens volens conceals the debate’s ideological motivations and implications. With the exception of critics like Zhabotinskii and Wisse, who are concerned with Jewish cultural self-sufficiency and therefore inclined to speak about a single multilingual Jewish literature, both sides in the quarrel about Russian-Jewish literature postulate or deny its existence as a way of affirming or negating the possibility of Russian-Jewish authorship, that is, the possibility of calling a writer “Russian-Jewish.” Treating literature and authorship as synonymous, the debate’s participants are basically discussing the viability of a distinct Russian-Jewish identity and, by extension, of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. Historically, then, the discourse about Russian-Jewish literature carries on the old debate about the limits of Jewish acculturation. The deniers of Russian-Jewish literature and authorship act as the epigones of the idealistic, Haskalah-inspired assimilationists; whereas the advocates admit the resistance of Russian culture to assimilated Jews but are loath to renounce what they see as the benefits of acculturation, consequently seeking a middle path between Zhabotinskii’s renunciation of Russianness and Pasternak’s renunciation of Jewishness. But literature and authorship are not synonymous. The first term refers to the life of an artistic text in its cultural, historical, and social context. The second heeds the personal dimension of an artistic text as the imaginative medium for the idiosyncratic self-expression of authors with unique intellectual, emotional, and psychological needs. Ironically, the nonideological elaboration of the concept of literature chronologically overlaps with the debate about Russian-Jewish literature, but is barred from this debate by virtue of deemphasizing the selection and grouping of texts according to social, ethnic, or gender considerations. Instead, this understanding of literature stresses the dynamic and mutually defin-

Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

ing relations between writers and their interpretive community (both literary professionals and average readers) in a given historical period.53 If literature refers to the sum total of these relations, in other words, if by literature we mean not a body of texts designated by a critic but a process in which a writer’s aesthetics and identity form and evolve in response to an artistic tradition and to the contemporary reception of his or her works, then the issue of target audience becomes central to the quarrel about Russian-Jewish literature and at the same time distinguishes this quarrel from the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship. It is undeniable that at least for the first two cohorts of the Russian writers of Jewish extraction, the clash between Jewish origins and the majority discourse about “the jews” sets the artistic and cultural experience of Russian Jews apart from that of their Gentile peers. In this sense, we can justifiably argue that the artistic identities and oeuvre of some Russophone writers are marked by the quandary of Russian-­ Jewish authorship and that this quandary makes Pasternak, who abjures his Jewish roots but wrestles with them all his life—witness the ethos of Christian supersessionism in Doctor Zhivago (1957)—no less of a Russian-Jewish writer than Zhabotinskii, who abjures his Russian upbringing but is unable to write fiction in any other language, as testified by his ultimate novel, Piatero (The five, 1936). Contrary to Markish’s view that writers who are part of Russian-Jewish literature must clearly embrace their Jewish origin, Russian-Jewish writing accommodates Russophone authors who are conscious of their Jewish roots, whether they tackle the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship openly, like Babel', or cryptically, like Fel'zen. But exploring the interrelations of cultural identity, artistic selffashion­ing, and literary aesthetics to find the salient features of RussianJewish writing is not the same as saying that this writing amounts to a literature. In our age of theoretical sophistication, those critics who prefer to group Russian authors of Jewish extraction into a literature must demonstrate that these authors are engaged in a Russian-Jewish literary process; in other words, that Babel’s or Zhabotinskii’s aesthetic maturation is informed by a Russian-Jewish literary tradition and by commerce with a Russian-Jewish interpretive community. To my knowledge, no such evidence exists. And even if we interpreted Zhabotinskii’s break

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with the Russian literary mainstream as an attempt to focus exclusively on a Russian-Jewish readership, we would still be at a loss to show that the writer’s ideological and aesthetic shift draws on the literary heritage of his Russian-Jewish predecessors. The problem is that Zhabotinskii’s predecessors are disqualified by the theoreticians of Russian-Jewish literature as aesthetically unsound. As a result, no serious attempts are made to show that Semen Frug’s poetry, for instance, is of any consequence, positive or negative, for Mandel'shtam’s ars poetica; or that the prose of Bogrov, Levanda, or even Iushkevich has any importance for Babel' beyond its possible dismissal in “Guy de Maupassant” as “the way Jews used to write in Russian in the old days.” In a noteworthy departure from this trend, Zsuzsa Hetényi has tried to trace Babel’s art to that of the first Russian-Jewish cohort; but her skills as a literary scholar are no match for this task.54 In extremis, one could argue that Babel' is to Russian-Jewish literature what Pushkin is to modern Russian letters—the mythologized founder of a tradition and its towering reference figure. Instead, Babel’s critical treatment echoes the way Deleuze and Guattari treat Kafka in their unconvincing musings about a “minor literature” that can exist “within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.” By this “minor literature” the critics mean the German writings of Prague’s Jews, epitomized by Kafka, but they fail to show Kafka’s predecessors or successors in this literature, making him look like a soloist who has lost his orchestra. Likewise, casting Babel' as both the summit of Russian-Jewish literature and its finale, Markish never examines Babel’s aesthetics with respect to a Russian-Jewish literary process.55 The same problem saps the arguments of those who accept Babel’s key role in Russian-­Jewish literature but insist on this literature’s continuity beyond 1940 (Kobrinskii, Nakhimovsky, Shrayer); unless of course we accept Hetényi’s peculiar logic that Babel’s influence on foreign writers is “living proof ” of the existence of the Russian-Jewish literary tradition in the absence of tangible evidence that Babel' himself is part of this tradition.56 ❊ Like the Kafka of Deleuze and Guattari, Babel' cuts an odd figure in the discourse about Russian-Jewish literature—that of a classic without

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a literature or a soloist without an orchestra. His solitude in RussianJewish literature echoes the cultural solitude salient to Russian-Jewish authorship across its range—from the artists vying for acceptance in the Russian field of cultural production to those rebelling against it. Thus, we know that Iurii Fel'zen aborts his creative activity in the occupied Paris whose atmosphere leaves him with “no desire or capacity to write,” not least because of the palpable pro-Nazi sentiment among his émigré colleagues and readers.57 As a leitmotif of his oeuvre and a staple of his authorial persona (Schast'e, 60; “Razroznennye mysli,” 113), cultural solitude is attributable to Fel'zen’s exilic condition and modernist self-fashioning. But if we account for the fact that he cloaks the contradictions of Russian-Jewish authorship in exilic and modernist terms, we cannot dismiss the possibility that Fel'zen’s artistic silence is informed by the clash of Jewish origins with the discourse about “jewish” difference espoused by his target audience—the same clash we find in the trajectories of his peers, Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman and ­émigré writer Dovid Knut.58 For no matter how well Fel'zen obfuscates the problematics of Russian-Jewish authorship in his oeuvre, the cultural majority’s code of otherness finds ways to set the artist apart from his Russian colleagues. Vasilii Ianovskii recalls that their mutual friend, émigré poet Boris Poplavskii, once described the challenging poetics of Fel'zen’s “roman s pisatelem” as follows: “Who can sit through an entire concerto for flute without orchestra?!” 59 Ostensibly, this is a reference to the stylistic and narrative peculiarities of Fel'zen’s novelistic project. But for those versed in the Russian code of cultural otherness these words evoke Chekhov’s Rothschild the flutist, who swaps his instrument for a violin, leaving a klezmer band for a more prestigious solo career—an allusion not to the difficulty of Fel'zen’s poetics but to their “jewishness.” It is possible that Poplavskii made an accidental, yet significant, slip; or that Ianovskii invents it, as the memoirist is a master of cryptic Judeo­ phobia.60 For our purposes, however, what matters is not the provenance of the comment but the very fact of its existence and probable resonance in Fel'zen’s artistic circle, a fact making Mikhail Osorgin’s aforementioned complaint about “Russian solitude” in émigré cultural life sound like a bad joke.

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Extending Poplavskii’s metaphor to Fel'zen’s authorial persona, we see that the artist is not unique in his “jewish” condition of a soloist without an orchestra: Osip Mandel'shtam is also haunted by cultural solitude in Russian letters. This solitude is manifest in the poet’s anxiety about his “jewish” marginality, which he projects, as we have seen, onto his critics. Boris Kats explains this anxiety by Mandel'shtam’s loss of assimilationist illusions in the 1920s, a loss conveyed in his poetry by the image of a “jewish” virtuoso playing, without an audience, the same Schubert sonata over and over again (“Zhil Aleksandr ­Gertsovich” [There lived Aleksandr Gertsovich], 1931).61 The musician’s instrument is not specified, as if to stress the “jewish” artist’s cliché status of a violinist. His nocturnal performances indeed recall those of Chekhov’s Iakov, whose violin and tune Rothschild appropriates. But unlike Roths­child, Mandel'shtam’s musician does not profit from art. Furthermore, the narrator’s suggestion that Aleksandr Gertsovich should abandon his unappreciated concerts is akin to the rejection of the majority culture’s idea of the “jewish” artist by Babel’s alter ego, who refuses to become a violinist, forging his own artistic path through a never-ending entrance exam that is not unlike Aleksandr Gertsovich’s repetitive music. The fact that Babel' and Mandel'shtam fall back on the trope of the “jewish” musician as the foil of their artistic personae shows yet again their imaginative debt to the logic and vocabulary of the generative model of “the jews,” which furnishes the symbolic lingua franca of European art. But the dynamics of Russian-Jewish writers’ reliance on the cultural majority’s code of otherness differ from those we have observed, for example, in Chekhov’s art, where this code works as a universalizing device. Placing his stories within the European continuum for the dissemination of the imaginary “jews,” the language of “jewish” difference translates Chekhov’s cultural and professional concerns in terms whose meaning transcends national boundaries. “The jews” both mediate the articulation of Chekhov’s authorial self-image and facilitate his entry into the European literary process by virtue of resonating with “the jews” of British, French, or German writers. Whether or not Chekhov is aware of it, “the jews” are his bridge to Goethe’s World Literature. But when Fel'zen and Babel' use the lexicon of “jewish” difference in search of a place in the majority culture, this symbolic praxis, first

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and foremost, shields their authorial personae from the stigmatization performed by the very imaginative lexicon they operate and share with their interpretive communities. The same symbolic language that functions as a universalizing tool for a Russian artist can become a discriminatory tool with regard to a Russian-Jewish artist, for whom Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s ideal of World Literature inevitably becomes Reb Goethe’s tentative recipe for solving the aporiae of Russian-Jewish authorship—not so much a place of intercultural commerce as that of cultural refuge. In the hands of assimilated Jews, the language of “jewish” difference is a double-edged weapon ever threatening to break away from authorial control once a text becomes the property of its Gentile readership. This loss of authorial control over a text’s interpretation is the common denominator of such different reader responses as the Judeo­phobe marginalia in Fel'zen’s Schast'e; Gor'kii’s negative verdict on Iushkevich’s Leon Drei; and the initial reception of Babel’s play Zakat as pandering to the Judeophobe sensibility. Whatever their degree of acculturation and imaginative reliance on the generative model of “the jews,” the situation of writers of Jewish origin in the Russian field of cultural production is unique. Their cultural solitude is enhanced not only by the distance from their Jewish ancestral culture and languages but from one another; for we cannot speak any more about the Gentile majority’s unequivocal acceptance of Jews as Russian authors than about the Russian-Jewish literary process. Historically, the potential participants in this process have not been interested in reaching out to one another in order to establish a literary tradition of their own, striving instead for full integration into Russian literature, or abandoning Russian creative activity altogether should their individual assimilationist projects fail. Each Russian-Jewish writer examined or mentioned in my study is a soloist or, to use Poplavskii’s loaded description of Fel'zen’s aesthetics, a flutist without an orchestra. The crucial impact of the second generation of assimilated Jewish writers on the development of Russian poetry and prose is beyond doubt. We must, however, come to terms with the fact that this generation, caught between the uprooting dynamics of assimilation and the discourse about “jewish” difference, did not produce an adequate, let alone original, response to the cultural othering it

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experienced in Russian society. The isolating effects of this othering are palpable in the artistic legacies of such different writers as Mandel'shtam and Babel', Fel'zen and Pasternak, Grossman and Knut, whose imaginative universes are mined by the insoluble contradictions of Russian-­ Jewish authorship. These aporiae constantly threaten to transform the most gifted and iconoclastic writers into lone flutists performing variations on the same plaintive tune of assimilation and its discontents— a tune that is as predictably dictated by the generative model of “the jews” as the imaginative representations of the “jewish” Other throughout Europe’s Christian and post-Christian history.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction 1.  On the concept of stereotype see Arthur Miller, “Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Stereotyping,” in Miller, In the Eye, 4. Wolfgang Stroebe, Chester Insko, “Stereotype, Prejudice, and Discrimination: Changing Conceptions in Theory and Research,” in Bar-Tal, Stereotyping, 4–5. 2.  Parkes, Antisemitism, 60. See also Isaac, L’Antisémitisme, 25–26; idem, Genèse, 319. 3.  I am especially indebted to Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide; idem, “The Faith and Fratricide Discussion,” in Davies, Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity; and to Hyam Maccoby’s Sacred Executioner. Other important works include Marcel Simon’s Verus Israel; Léon Poliakov’s Histoire de l’antisémitisme; Alan Davies’s Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind; John Gager’s Origins of AntiSemitism; and Gavin Langmuir’s Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. 4.  Literature on the secular recoding of the Jewish image is voluminous. See, for example, Shmuel Almog, “The Borrowed Identity: Neo-Pagan Reactions to the Jewish Roots of Christianity,” in Wistrich, Demonizing, 136–38. Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes, x–xi, 135–40. Cohen, Myth, 186–87. Alan Davies, “On Religious Myths and Their Secular Translation,” in Davies, Antisemitism and the Foundations, 203. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, 10–11, 300–307. Katz, From Prejudice, 46, 63–64, 119, 266–67, 319–20; idem, Out of the Ghetto, 86, 99–100, 106–7; idem, Emancipation, 68, 75–76. Gary Kates, “Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality and Representation in Revolutionary France,” in Fehér, French Revolution, 109. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 409–10. Otto Kulka, “The Critique of Judaism in Modern European Thought,” in Wistrich, Demonizing, 196–209. Olender, Languages, 15, 64, 70, 136. Poliakov, Le Mythe arien, 210–11. Ruether, Faith, 217–22. 5.  Granovskii, “Sud'by evreiskogo naroda,” Sochineniia, 111. Knox, Races, 194, 206. 6.  C. S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum, 7. 7.  Rabinovich, “Sobstvennye imena evreev,” Sochineniia III:69. Scott, Ivanhoe, in Waverley Novels IX:71. Williams, Adversus Judaeos, 134.

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Notes to Introduction 8.  Chubinskii, Trudy, 13–35. Kalir, “Jewish Service,” 51–80. Klier, Rossiia, 194. Kornblatt, “Vladimir Solov'ev,” 164. Manuel, Broken Staff, 108–61. Paperni, “Bibliia,” 170. Richard Popkin, “A Late Seventeenth-Century Gentile Attempt to Convert the Jews to Reformed Judaism,” in Almog, Israel, xxv–xxviii. Yosef Yerushalmi, “Medieval Jewry from Within and from Without,” in Szarmach, Aspects, 5. Shlomo Simonsohn, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on Jews and Judaism,” in Cohen, From Witness, 416. 9.  Chekin, “K analizu upominanii,” 40. Cohen, Friars, 188. Glassman, AntiSemitic Stereotypes, 12, 29. Halperin, “Judaizers,” 147–48, 155. 10.  See Arendt, Origins, 3–120. Buber, “The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today,” On Judaism, 185–86. Sartre, Réflexions, 30, 40–43, 51, 181, and passim. For Soviet examples, see: M. Gorev, Protiv antisemitov. Ocherki i zarisovki (Moscow-­ Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928). Iu. Larin, Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR (Moscow-­ Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929). For a critique of Said’s work see Derek Penslar and Ivan Kalmar, “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” in Penslar, Orientalism, xxi. 11.  Rosenberg, From Shylock, 18. 12.  This is the approach adopted by Elena Katz in her monograph Neither with Them, Nor Without Them, 17. 13.  Most recent examples include: R. L. Jackson, “If I Forget Thee,” 62, 66– 67. McLean, “Theodore the Christian,” 66n.2. For a critique of this approach see Dijkstra, Idols, ix. Morson, “Dostoevskij’s Anti-Semitism,” 302–17. “The jews” of Mickiewicz are discussed in: Duker, “Mystery,” 40–66; idem, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Anti-Jewish Period,” 311–43. On the Illiustratsiia affair, see: “Postupok Illiustratsii,” 132–35. “Dopolnitel'nyi spisok,” 245–47. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 108–10. A rather comic extrapolation of a writer’s personal attitude from the Illiustratsiia affair is found in Roman Smal-Stocki, Shevchenko and the Jews (Chicago: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1959). 14.  Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Cheyette, Modernity, 143–44, 148. Bulgakov, “Sud'ba Izrailia kak krest Bogomateri,” in Boikov, Taina, 349–50. 15.  See Henrietta Mondry’s critique of this tendency: “Vasilii Rozanov, evrei i russkaia literatura,” in Kurganov, Vasilii Rozanov, 158–59. See also Morson, “Dostoevskij’s Anti-Semitism,” 302–17. For an example of an otherwise insightful ­critic’s inability to free himself from the spell of his subject’s “artistic genius,” see the treatment of Dostoevskii’s Judeophobia in Leonid Grossman’s “Dostoevskii i iudaizm,” Ispoved' odnogo evreia, 173. 16.  See Langmuir, History, 275, 297; idem, Toward a Definition, 16. Schäfer, Judeo­phobia, 200–202. Sevenster, Roots, 1–4. On the history of the term, see Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr, 89, 91–95, 112. 17.  F. Kokoshkin, “Korni antisemitizma,” in Andreev, Shchit, 124. See also Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, xix–xx. Schäfer, Judeophobia, 11. 18.  My methodological approach to “the jews” of Russian literature, then,

Notes to Introduction could not be more different from Gary Rosenshield’s, who refuses to “employ the image of the Jew as a means of revealing the inner life of Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky,” because “[psychological] projection seems less relevant to the Russian writers of the first half of the nineteenth century than to English writers of the twentieth century” (Ridiculous Jew, 12)—a highly dubious claim that the critic does not even bother to substantiate. 19.  Greimas, Sémantique, 134, 174, 155–56, 180–81; idem, Du sens, 158–59; idem, Du sens II, 57, 66. 20.  For example, Richard Cumberland’s “The Fashionable Lover” (1772) and “The Jew” (1794); Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801), Moral Tales (1801), The Absentee (1812), and Harrington (1817). 21.  Cohen, Friars, 226–29. Kisch, Jews, 327, 341. Kostomarov, “Istoriia kozachestva v pamiatnikakh iuzhnorusskogo narodnogo pesennogo tvorchestva,” Slavianskaia mifologiia, 490. N.R.M. de Lange, “Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Empire,” and R. I. Moore, “Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Europe,” in Wood, Christianity, 26–27, 44–45. Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 209–98. For more examples of the interaction between ecclesiastical and folk imagination, see: Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 10–11. Mil'kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify, 8, 32, 41. Venetia Newall, “The Jew as Witch Figure,” in her Witch Figure, 107. Petzoldt, “Eternal Loser,” 42. In their recent monograph, “Evreiskii mif” v slavianskoi kul'ture [The Jewish myth in Slavic culture], Ol'ga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin pay special attention to the theological roots of the “jewish” image in east Slavic folklore as a factor that far outweighs a peasant’s personal experience of observing and interacting with Jewish neighbors. 22.  Boyd, Middle English Miracles, 116–18. R. W. Frank, “Miracles of the Virgin, Medieval Anti-Semitism, and the ‘Prioress’s Tale’,” in Benson, Wisdom, 177– 88. Lasker, Race, 163–64. 23.  See Grigorii Benevich, “The Russian Orthodox View of Post-Auschwitz Theology,” in Pecherskaia, Theology, 88–105. See also: A. L. Gurevich, ed., Pravoslavnaia tserkov' i evrei: XIX–XX vv. (Moscow: Rudomino, 1994). Sergei Hackel criticized this attitude in “Relevance of Western Post-Holocaust Theology,” 7–25. I am aware of two thoughtful responses to post-Auschwitz theology by Russian scholars: Khrostovskii, “Znachenie Shoakh,” 61–70. Lezov, “Natsional'naia ideia,” 148–60. For more examples of the unwillingness of theologians in post-Soviet Russia to reexamine the traditional topoi of Christian anti-Judaism and Judeo­ phobia, see Katsis, Krovavyi navet i russkaia mysl', 11–17, 486–87. 24.  See Kunitz, Russian Literature, passim. McLean, “Theodore the Christian,” 66. Elena Katz regards “the jews” of the Russian cultural imagination as the reflection of “a legacy of more than two hundred years of turbulent relationships between the Russians and the Jews” (Neither with Them, Nor Without Them, 1), effectively dismissing the rich Russian life of this mythical type before the partitions of Poland. Gary Rosenshield devotes much time to superficial intertextual links between Ivanhoe and “Taras Bul'ba” (Ridiculous Jew, 61–69) but almost completely

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Notes to Introduction ignores the folkloric and theological dimensions of Gogol’s story, which have little to do with Western influences, yet, as I show in the second part of this study, they shape the semantic structure of “Taras Bul'ba.” 25.  Katz, Emancipation, 72. Klier, Rossiia, 316–17; idem, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1–3, 133. Laqueur, Russia, 14–15, 51, 95. Langmuir, History, 322. For a survey of the dissemination of Western racial science in nineteenth-century Russia and its implications for the Russian vision of “the jews,” see the first chapter of Mondry’s Exemplary Bodies, 29–40. 26.  See Derzhavin’s Zapiski and “Mnenie ob otvrashchenii v Belorussii goloda i ustroistve byta evreev,” Sochineniia VI:799–802, VII:261–355. See also Klier, ­R ossiia, 176, 194. 27.  M.-H. Congourdeau, “Le Judaïsme, coeur de l’identité Byzantine,” and S.  Ivanov, “L’Attitude à l’égard des Juifs à Byzance était-elle moins intolérante qu’en occident?” in Dmitriev, Les Chrétiens, 17–42. Cunningham, “Polemic,” 46– 68. Dvornik, Making, 256. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I:28. Geanakoplos, Interaction, 83. Golubinskii, Istoriia I:2, 808–9. Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, 21–22, 157. Smith, Protestant Attitudes (Ch. 3). 28.  On translated Byzantine anti-Judaic treatises and exempla, see: Istrin, Ocherk, 214; idem, Knigy I:246–47, 316–17, 334–38, 362. On the translation of Chrysostom and Ephrem, see: Arkhangel'skii, Tvoreniia IV:88, 103. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I:42–47, 67–68, 74, 86–87, 91–92; II:34. Gattsuk, “Evrei,” II:39, 612–13. Pereswetoff, Grin I:66, 71–81, 232. 29.  Arkhipov, Po tu storonu, 53; idem, “K izucheniiu,” 24–25, 27, 39. Birnbaum, “On Some Evidence,” 230–31. Chekin, “Turks,” 127–29. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I:42–43, 383. Istrin, Ocherk, 22–23, 89–90, 213–14. Meshcherskii, Istoriia, 44–45, 120. Pereswetoff, Grin I:238–40. Petrukhin, “Zhidovskie vorota,” 52. Prestel, “Comparative Analysis,” 11–20. Pogorelov, Tolkovaniia, I:2–3, 5; II:61–62, 86. Shvartsband, “K voprosu,” 140–41. Vlasto, Entry, 257. 30.  Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I:42–49. Filaret, Obzor, 159. Golubinskii, Istoriia II:2, 299–300. Mil'kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify, 8, 32, 41. 31.  Belova, “Pir na prazdnike chuzhom,” 31. 32.  See “The Jew of Bourges,” in Young, Devils, 232–33. “O nemilostivem zhidovine,” in Istrin, Knigy I:246–47. “Slovo o nemilostevom zhidovine,” Izmaragd I:147–48. “Milostivaia zhena miloserdaia” and “Zhena Allilueva,” in Bezsonov, Kaleki II:117–20, 130–34. See also Geanakoplos, Interaction, 11, 56–57, 83, 98. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 21. Frank, “Miracles of the Virgin,” 177–88. 33.  See Boyd, Middle English Miracles, 118. Kraus, Living Theatre, 159. Lifschitz, Les Juifs, 124, 145. N. Petrov, O proiskhozhdenii, 1, 102, 207. Young, Devils, 204–5. “Slovo o Fedore kuptsi” and “Slovo o krest'ianine vzemshe zlato ou zhidovina,” Izmaragd I:26–30. “Kupets i zhidovin,” in Sadovnikov, Skazki II:87–89. On the disputation motif, see: Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki II:388–90. Tikhonravov, “Slovo o vere khristianskoi,” 66–78. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LVII:198–200. 34.  Dvornik, Making, 256. Golubinskii, Istoriia I:2, 808–9. Istrin, Ocherk, 22–

Notes to Introduction 23. Zguta, Russian Minstrels, 16–18. On the Dominican order, see Cohen, Friars, passim. 35.  Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 21. Peretts, Kukol'nyi teatr, 73. Veselovskii, “Opyty,” 4:347. Warner, Russian Folk Theatre, 87. On the Novgorod Cathedral, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:65–66; II: Figs. III.80–82. 36.  Filaret, Obzor, 246. Semennikov, Knigoizdatel'skaia deiatel'nost', 86–89. T. Oparina, “La Polémique anti-juive en Russie au XVIIe siècle,” in Dmitriev, Les Chrétiens, 165–82. Sobolevskii, Perevodnaia literatura, 38–39, 195–96, 239–40, 330, 359, 382–83. Williams, Adversus Judaeos, 170. 37.  Filaret, Obzor, 122–23. Golubinskii, Istoriia II:1, 605–6. Pereswetoff, Grin I:201–9. Sobolevskii, Perevodnaia literatura, 191–92, 396–99. On the role of these works in Western anti-Judaism, see: Cohen, Friars, 174–91. Ora Limor, “The Epistle of Rabbi Samuel of Morocco: A Best-Seller in the World of Polemics,” in Limor, Contra Iudaeos, 177–94. Williams, Adversus Judaeos, 229–32, 415. See also: Wieczynski, “Archbishop Gennadius and the West,” 374–89. 38.  Jeremy Cohen, “The Muslim Connection or On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” in Cohen, From Witness, 146; idem, Living Letters, 160–65. Corrigan, Visual Polemics, 5–6, 30, 60–61. Culter, Jew, passim. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 58. Gow, Red Jews, 53–58, 179. A. T. Kraabel, “Synagoga Caeca: Systematic Distortion in Gentile Interpretations of Evidence for Judaism in the Early Christian Period,” in Neusner, “To See Ourselves,” 219– 46. Manuel, Broken Staff, 169–70, 215. Olster, Roman Defeat, 13, 18–19, 116, 182. T. Parfitt, “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse,” in Penslar, Orientalism, 51– 53, 60–1. Esther Schor, “Scott’s Hebraic Historicism,” in Spector, British Romanticism, 115. H. Wegrzynek, “Boialas' li katolicheskaia tserkov' v Pol'she v nachale XVI veka obrashcheniia khristian v iudaizm?” in Burmistrov, Ksenofobiia, 7–15. Scott Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Tomasch, Text, 65–66. 39.  On the anti-Latin polemics, see: N. Petrov, O proiskhozhdenii, 222. Popov, Istoriko-literaturnyi obzor, passim. “Discourse 37. The pious prince Iziaslav’s inquiry about the Latins,” in Paterik, 213. On the “Judaizing heresy,” see: Ettinger, “­V liianie,” 12, 20–21. Halperin, “Judaizers,” 147–55. John Klier, “Judaizing Without Jews? Moscow-Novgorod, 1470–1504,” in Kleimola, Culture, 341–42, 348–49. On the polemics between the Old Believers and the Russian Church see: J. de Proyart, “L’Image du Juif dans l’oeuvre de l’Archiprêtre Avvakum,” in Dmitriev, Les Chrétiens, 183–99. “Interliudii, ili mezhduvbroshennaia zabavnaia igralishcha,” and “Interliudium ili igralishcha, byvshaia mezhdu stsenami,” in Derzhavina, P'esy, 489–94, 529–31. On the conflation of Russian protestants (Sabbatarians, Baptists) with “the jews,” see: Ol'ga Belova, “O ‘zhidakh’ i ‘zhivskoi vere’ v narodnykh predstavleniiakh vostochnykh slavian,” in Belova, Svoi ili chuzhoi? 163–64, 167, 173. J. E. Clay, “Orthodox Missionaries and ‘Orthodox Heretics’ in Russia, 1886–1917,” in Geraci, Of Religion and Empire, 57. Levanda, Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik, 141. 40.  Prokhorov, “Prenie Grigoriia Palamy,” 332–34. “O smiatenii i mezhdousobii i otstuplenii pskovich ot moskovskago gosudarstva” (17th c.), in Dmitriev,

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Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 Pamiatniki IX:150–42. See Russian epics, “Egorii Khrabryi” and “Fedor Tirianin,” in Bezsonov, Kaleki I:409–11, 433, 475, 480–81, 525–29, 542–47. See Ukrainian-­ Polish polemics in: Bantysh, Istoricheskoe izvestie, 146, 235, 270, 284, 300, 311. ­Istoriia Rusov, 34. Rawita, Bogdan Chmielnicki, 41–42. On the assimilation of cultural and religious outsiders to “the jews” in east Slavic popular cultures, see ­Belova, “Evreiskii mif,” 179–90. 41.  John D. Klier derives Russian Judeophobia from postpartition Polish influences, sidestepping the tradition of Kievan anti-Judaism and its impact on the Muscovite culture and on Russian folklore, which he inexplicably qualifies as indifferent to “the jews.” See his Rossiia sobiraet, 47–49, 57–58, 101–2; “Muscovite Faces and Petersburg Masks,” 131. Klier is contradicted by Ettinger in “Jewish Participation in the Settlement of Ukraine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 30. In my view, Elena Katz’s overreliance on Klier’s debatable theses accounts for the shortfalls of her own study (Neither with Them, Nor Without Them), which fails adequately to explicate “the jews” of Gogol', Turgenev, and Dostoevskii in the context of the Christian and post-Christian cultural space for the dissemination of the “jewish” image. 42.  For an informed analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s opus, see: Petrovskii-Shtern, “On Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Middle Path’,” 381–92. The continuity of the language of “jewish” difference in Russian cultural sphere after the Second World War has been insightfully explored in Henrietta Mondry’s Exemplary Bodies (chapters 5–11).

Chapter 1 1.  Braham, Origins, 2–3. Dumézil, Loki, 153–55, 164. Kermode, Genesis, 84–85. Maccoby, “Antisemitism,” 836, 840; idem, Sacred Executioner, 127–31; idem, Judas, vii; idem, Mythmaker, 12–13, 16, 184–205. Ruether, Faith, 114. 2.  See Bezsonov, Kaleki II:38, 196–98. Franko, “Do istorii,” LXXIII:24–25. Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedeniia I:364–65 and passim. Cf. Pope Gelasius I: “In the Bible, the whole is often named after the part: as Judas was called devil and the devil’s workman, he gives his name to the whole race” (Maccoby, Judas, 5–6). See also Hand, Dictionary, passim. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic ­Stereotypes, 32. 3.  Isaac, Jesus, 360–61. Ruether, Faith, 89. John Townsend, “The Gospel of John and the Jews,” in Davies, Antisemitism and the Foundations, 74. S. G. Wilson, “The Jews and the Death of Jesus in Acts,” in Richardson, Anti-Judaism, 156–57. On the folklore treatment of Christ’s Passion, see: Baum, “English Ballad,” 182. Belova, “Jews,” 117. Bezsonov, Kaleki I:277, 284, 309, 320, 326, 337, 120, 125, 128; II:139, 177, 182, 185, 187, 190–91, 202–3, 76, 79, 92–93. Gnatiuk, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi” XI.46:37–38; XI.49:168, 171; idem, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 8, 114, 116. Grushevs'kyi, “S'pivannyk,” 23. Sullivan, Unpublished Religious Song-Book, 19, 65–66, 68, 77, 97. 4.  Greimas, Sémantique, 179–80. See also Forsyth, Old Enemy, 4.

Notes to Chapter 1 5.  Muchembled, Une Histoire, 22. Wilson, “Jews,” 163. 6.  Bulgakov, “Rasizm i khristianstvo,” in Boikov, Taina, 393–95. Katz, Exclusiveness, 134, 138. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics, 2, 139, 162, 167. 7.  Ruether, Faith, 94–95, 245. See also Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 305–6. Langmuir, History, 288. Loewenstein, Psychanalyse, 58, 239. Maccoby, “Figure of Shylock,” 66. 8.  Chrysostom, Chrysostom’s Homilies, 4, 16, 40, 263; idem, Polnoe sobranie tvorenii I:2, 646, 653, 661, 758. References are given to Maxwell’s English translations of Chrysostom’s Homilies Against the Jews and Polnoe sobranie tvorenii sv. Ioanna Zlatousta I:2 (hereafter Chrysostom’s Homilies and PST I:2). See also Neumann, “Scapegoat,” 43–44. 9.  Girard, Le Bouc émissaire, 122; idem, Des choses cachées, 307–8. Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 7–8. See also Loewenstein, Psychanalyse, 235, 242. Townsend, “Gospel,” 73. Accordingly, Jews are used in medieval England, Byzantium, and ­Venice as public executioners: Roth, History, 102. Starr, Jews, 22ff., 202. Trachtenberg, Devil, 130. 10.  Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 305–6. Grunberger, Narcissisme, 69–71. Loewenstein, Psychanalyse, 68, 87, 244, 246. Maccoby, Judas, 20. Ruether, “Faith and Fratricide Discussion,” 233. Simon, Verus Israel, 12. 11.  Kniga vospominanii I:90–91. 12.  Edgeworth, Harrington, 79–80. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke XVI:163. See also Klaus Berghahn, “Patterns of Childhood: Goethe and the Jews,” in Berghahn, Goethe, 3–15. On Leskov’s story see: Andrei Leskov, Zhizn', 62–65. McLean, “Theodore the Christian,” 67–68. 13.  Isaac, L’Antisémitisme, 28–30. Langmuir, “The Faith of Christians and Hostility to Jews,” in Wood, Christianity, 81–82, 88. Parkes, Antisemitism, 12. 14.  Mark 2:22; John 1:17, 4:24, 5:9–17, 5:39ff., 8:17, 9:16, 10:34, 12:18–22, 15:1–17, 15:25. Cyprian, “Testimonies Against the Jews,” Writings II:78–79. Tertullian, “An Answer to the Jews,” Writings III:209–10, 215–16. Ephrem, “The Hymns on Virginity. Hymn 10,” and “Against Julian. Hymn 4,” Hymns, 257, 305. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 8, 42, 47–48; PST I:2, 648, 663–65. For Russian sources, see: Mil'kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify, 726–27. Filaret, Obzor, 50. “Slovo o vtorom zakone i ­pervom,” Izmaragd II:103–5. See also Didier Pollefeyt, “In Search of an Alternative for the Theology of Substitution,” in his Jews, 2–3. 15.  Aksakov, “Chto takoe ‘Evrei’ otnositel'no khristianskoi tsivilizatsii?” ­Sochineniia III:700–701. Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 95–96. Tertullian, “Answer,” 215– 16. Kirill Turovskii, “Slovo na novuiu nedeliu po pastse,” in Gudzii, Khrestomatiia, 56. Paleia, 139, 186. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 153. See also Loewenstein, Psychanalyse, 59–60. Gugelot, La Conversion, 178–79. 16.  John 15:1–8. Rom. 11:16–17. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 5, 162; PST I:2, 647, 713. Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 92. Hilarion, “The Sermon on the Law of Moses Given to Him by God, and on the Grace and Truth Brought to Earth by Jesus Christ,” in Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, 88; idem, “O zakone Moiseom dannem

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Notes to Chapter 1 emu i blagodati i istine Isus Khristom byvshim,” in Gudzii, Khrestomatiia, 31. ­Watrobska, Izbornik, 41 f. 41:409–12. Paleia, 42. 17.  See, for example: Granovskii, “Sud'by,” 133. Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” Polnoe sobranie XVII:207–9. Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, ­Oeuvres complètes VIII:144–56. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 62, 201, 499. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Prose Works III:84–91. See also Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art, passim. 18.  Bunin, “Kamen',” Sobranie sochinenii III:373. Pushkin, “V evreiskoi khizhine lampada,” III.1:44. See F. Melevskii’s diary (19.II.1827) concerning this poem, cited in Dudakov, Paradoksy, 512. See other Russian travelogues: Izmailov, Puteshestvie I:61–62. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in his Izbrannye sochineniia I:194. Sumarokov, Dosugi II:65, 87. Vel'tman, “Ursul,” in Sto russkikh literatorov III:355. 19.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 64; PST I:2, 672. Corrigan, Visual Polemics, 52. Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 80. Povest' vremennykh let, in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki I:100, 112, 120. Heinz Schreckenberg, “Josephus in Early Christian Literature and Medieval Christian Art,” in Schreckenberg, Jewish Historiography, 109. For more examples of the expropriation motif, see: Paleia, 147–48. Watrobska, Izbornik, 22 f. 22:256–57; 43 f. 43. 20.  See Duker, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Anti-Jewish Period,” 314–15, 322–23; idem, “Mystery of the Jews,” 40–66. Arthur Hertzberg, “The New England Puritans and the Jews,” and Richard Popkin, “A Late Seventeenth-Century Gentile Attempt to Convert the Jews to Reformed Judaism,” in Almog, Israel, xxv–xxvi, liii–lv. Ragussis, Figures, 15–17, 90–92. Solov'ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” Sobranie IV:141, 184. Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 78–79. See the image of Russia as “new Israel” in early modern drama: O prestavlenii kniazia Mikhaila Vasil'evicha Shuiskogo (1612); I. A. Khvorostinin, Slovesa dnei, i tsarei, i sviatitelei moskovskikh (1625), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki IX:70, 444. 21.  See Lukashevich, Ivan Aksakov, 167–68. Poliakov, Histoire II:84–85. 22.  Auerbach, Mimesis, 16, 48, 73. Bloom, “‘Before Moses Was, I Am’,” 4–5. Robbins, Prodigal Son, 12. 23.  See Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval, 56 (Fig. 59). Filaret, Obzor, 120. Golubinskii, Istoriia I:1, 737; II:2, 134. Kantemir, “Satira 9. K solntsu,” Izbrannye s­atiry, 33, 54, 60. Maccoby, Mythmaker, 12. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:103. Olender, Languages, 21–22. Paperni, “Bibliia,” 168–69, 173. Shachar, Judensau, 39–40 (Plate 36a). Vaiskopf, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 146–47. See also Pushkin’s letter of October 19, 1836, to Chaadaev (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii XVI:171–72). 24.  See Derzhavin, “Iz opery ‘Esfir’,” Sochineniia IV:662–63. Derzhavina, P'esy, 512, 642–63. Levitina, Russkii teatr I:27. Sokolovskii, Khever', 227–43. See also: “Biblical Military Imagery in the Political Culture of Early Modern Russia,” in Flier, Medieval Russian Culture, 182–99. Odesskii, “Evrei v doklassitsisticheskoi russkoi drame,” 107. Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 77–78; idem, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 126–28. 25.  “Strashnoe izobrazhenie vtorogo prishestviia gospodnia na zemliu” (1702);

Notes to Chapter 1 “Obraz torzhestva rossiiskogo” (1742), in Badalich, Pamiatniki, 157, 198. “Iudif'” (1674); “Iosif ” (1674–75); “O Navkhodonosore, Tsare, o tele zlate i o triekh ­otrotsekh, v peshchi ne sozhzhennykh” (1673–78); “Deistvie, na strasti Khristovy spisannoe” (late 17th c.), in Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedeniia I:175– 77, 282, 332–33, 550, 556. “Bozhie unichizhitelei gordykh unichizhenie” (1710), in Tikhonravov, ibid., II:429. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep, 151–52. “Slovo o zbureniu pekla” (17th c.), in Rezanov, Drama I:163. Cf. Ephrem, “Slovo o prekrasnom Iosife,” Tvoreniia II:28. 26.  Lyotard, Hyphen, 76 and passim. 27.  Augustine, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos,” Treatises, 392. Chrysostom’s Homilies 3; PST I:2, 646. John 5:19–47; 7:28; 8:19, 24–27, 47; 15:21; 16:3. Tertullian, “Answer,” 215–16. For Russian examples, see: Paleia, 136. “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” in Istrin, Knigy I:208–9. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 61–62. Greek, “Slovo o rozhdestve Gospoda,” Sochineniia I:40. See also Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 106–7. 28.  “Disourse 20. The Venerable Svjatosha,” Paterik, 136. Herbert, “Self-­ Condemnation,” English Works III:111. For more examples, see: John 2:3–11; 4:6– 15; 6:4–58; 10:1–18; 15:1–18. Augustine, City, 957–58. Burton, Anatomy III:378. See also Anna Abulafia, “Jewish Carnality in Twelfth-Century Renaissance Thought,” in Wood, Christianity, 59. 29.  Berdiaev, “Sud'ba evreistva” and “Khristianstvo i antisemitizm”; Bulgakov, “Rasizm i khristianstvo,” in Boikov, Taina, 309–405. Solov'ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” Sobranie IV:136–37. Rozanov, “Ob odnom prieme zashchity evreistva,” Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie, 99. Weininger, Sex, 314–15. See also Gugelot, La Conversion, 178–79. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” Collected Works III:170–74. Cf. the same view expressed in Gavriil Derzhavin’s “Mnenie” a century earlier (Sochineniia VII:280). 30.  Augustine, City, 827–28. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 5; PST I:2, 647. Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 92. Ephrem, “Homily on Our Lord,” Selected Prose, 308; idem, “Slovo na eretikov,” Tvoreniia II:296. “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” 273. Paleia, 35, 151, 170. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 126. See also Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 13–14. 31.  Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 37–47. See the Latin exempla illustrating the homology of “the jews” and women in Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews. For a Russian example, see “Povest' o nekoem kuptse Grigorii” (17th c.), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki X:95–97. 32.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 6, 9–10, 15, 26–27, 199; PST I:2, 647, 649, 651, 655–56, 729. Ephrem, “Against Julian,” 256. Paleia, 44, 136, 169. Watrobska, Izbornik, 74 f. 74:758–60. Greek, “Sovet k soboru pravoslavnomu,” Sochineniia I:54. 33.  Ol'ga Belova, “Inorodets,” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti II:414. 34.  See Tubach, Index, Motifs 2788, 2790–93, 2798, 2803, 3469, 3471. For Russian examples, see: Pereswetoff, Grin I:113–98. Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 367. 35.  Aksakov, “O Talmude,” Sochineniia III:802. See also Margaret Olin, “From Bezal'el to Max Liebermann: Jewish Art in 19th-Century Art-Historical Texts,” in Soussloff, Jewish Identity, 27.

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Notes to Chapter 1 36.  Arnold, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in Culture and Anarchy, 130–41. Kiukhel'beker, “Agasfer,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia II:83. 37.  Goldstein, “Wandering Jew,” 521–52. Gromeka, “Pol'skie evrei,” 197. Le Rider, Modernité, 285–86. 38.  See Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 112, 120. Ephrem, “The Hymns on Virginity. Hymn 8,” Hymns, 300; idem, “Homily on Our Lord,” Selected Prose, 300. Tertullian, “Answer,” 240–41. The Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate), in Elliott, Apocryphal Jesus, 4:1–4, 9:1. For Russian examples, see: “Povest' vremennykh let” (12th c.); Filofei, “Poslanie o zlykh dnekh i chasekh” (16th c.); Avraamii Palitsyn, “­Skazanie” (1620), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki I:100, VI:448, IX:180. Ephrem, “Slovo na Preobrazhenie Gospoda,” Tvoreniia II:52. Greek, “Slovo o rozhdestve,” 47. ­Izmaragd I:176, II:165. “Nikodimovo evangelie” and “Slovo sviatogo ottsa Mefodiia Tagan’skogo (Patarskogo) o poslednikh vremenakh,” in Mil'kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify, 700, 814–15, 816–17, 824, 829. Meshcherskii, Istoriia, Book 5, Ch. 5, Part 2:60; Book 6, Ch. 2, Part 1:62. “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” 218. Paleia, 49, 81, 110, 171, 202. Tikhonravov, Pamiatniki otrechennoi russkoi literatury, 36, 181, 189–90, 264. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 95, 282. On the Russian Orthodox service, see: Hackel, “Relevance,” 19. Theokritoff, “Orthodox Services,” 33–34, 42–43. See east Slavic folklore and religious drama: Maikov, Velikorusskie zaklinaniia, 50, 63, 67. Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedeniia I:548, 555. Rezanov, Drama, I:74, 95–96, 149, 154. See the deicide accusation in modern Russian thought (all references to Boikov’s anthology Taina Izrailia): N. Berdiaev, “Sud'ba evreistva,” 314, 323, 335; S. Bulgakov, “Sud'ba Izrailia,” 349–51; G. Fedotov, “Novoe na staruiu temu,” 458; V. Solov'ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” 140. 39.  Augustine, City, 960–61. For more examples, see: Chrysostom’s Homilies, 30, 235, 237; PST I:2, 657, 744, 745. Tertullian, “Answer,” 213. Paleia, 86, 95. ­Rezanov, Drama, I:95–96. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 268. Watrobska, Izbornik, 73 f. 73v:748. See also Aycock, “Mark,” 120–22. Cf. the sermon of Lutheran preacher Martin Niemoeller, a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance: “The gospel lessons of this Sunday throw a light upon the dark and sinister history of this [Jewish] people which can neither live nor die because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either. [. . .] Even Cain receives God’s mark, that no one may kill him; and Jesus’ command ‘love your enemies!’ leaves no room for exception. But we cannot change the fact that until the end of its days the Jewish people must go its way under the burden which Jesus’ decree has laid upon it: ‘Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!’” (Here Stand I!, 195). 40.  Dubnov, “Furor,” 27–28. Ettinger, “Vliianie,” 20–21. Gessen, Istoriia I:9. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, 304. For other examples, see: Aksakov, “Sleduet li dat' evreiam v Rossii zakonodatel'nye i administrativnye prava?” Sochineniia III:690–91. Rozanov, “Ob odnom prieme,” 98, 101. 41.  “Discourse 8. The Life of Our Venerable Father Feodosii,” “Discourse 16. Blessed Evstratij the Faster,” and “Discourse 17. The Meek and Long-Suffering

Notes to Chapter 1 Monk Nikon,” in Paterik, 73, 123–26. See the original texts in: Chizhevskii, Das Paterikon. Shakhmatov, Sbornik. Kniazevskaia, Uspenskii sbornik. See also Birnbaum, “On Some Evidence,” 230–31. Litavrin, “Kievo-Pecherskii paterik,” 66. Weinryb, “Beginnings,” 445–502. 42.  Chrysostom’s Homilies 11, 16, 27; PST I:2, 649, 651, 656. Greek, “Slovo oblichitel'no na ellinskuiu prelest',” Sochineniia I:62. “Nachalo romeiskykh ­tsarstvii,” 277. Paleia, 76–77. Rev. 2:9; 3:9. Tikhonravov, Pamiatniki, 284. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 282, 474. Watrobska, Izbornik, 68 f. 68v:658–59; 95 f. 95v:1161; 99 f. 99:1221; 102 f. 102:1279. 43.  On the Antichrist and “the jews” in Russian eschatological thought, see: Avvakum, “Iz ‘Knigi tolkovanii’” (1675–77), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki XI:428. ­Berdiaev, “Sud'ba evreistva,” 323. Paleia, 190–92. “Slovo sviatogo ottsa Mefodiia,” 701–2. Tikhonravov, “Lutsidarius,” 64. Watrobska, Izbornik, 70 f. 70:689–93. ­Filaret, Obzor, 204–5. See the same link in east Slavic folklore: Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 74, 390. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki I:258 (Figs. 219, 270–72). On the image of Napoleon as the Antichrist, see: Anchel, Napoléon et les Juifs, Ch. 4. Dubnov, Histoire I:376. 44.  Ephrem, “Homily on Our Lord,” 315, 318. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 162; PST I:2, 713. Langmuir, History, 288. Roth, Personalities, 57. 45.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 4, 17, 20, 31, 38, 40, 80, 88, 175, 194–95; PST I:2, 647, 651–53, 658, 661, 679, 683, 719, 727. Dubnov, “Furor,” 27–28. Greek, “Slovesa suprot­ivna protivu glav Samuila evreina,” Sochineniia I:61; idem, “Sovet k ­soboru pravoslavnomu,” 54. Sobolevskii, Perevodnaia literatura, 396–99. Volotskii, ­Prosvetitel', 123, 478, 482, 522–23, 533, 544. See also Klier, Rossiia, 54. Halperin, “Judaizers,” 147, 153–55. 46.  Birnbaum, “On Some Evidence,” 237. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 112. W. M. Foley, “Marriage,” in Hastings, Encyclopaedia I:133. Golubinskii, ­Istoriia I:1, 634, 637; I:2, 545. Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 58. Kisch, Jews, 205, 300–301, 327. Nirenberg, Communities, 130–33. Starr, Jews, 19, 25–26. Zeifman, “Evreiskii aspekt,” 135–36. 47.  Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, 158. “Khozhdenie Bogoroditsy po ­mukam,” in Mil'kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify, 615. See also: Belova, Slavianskii ­bestiarii,  88. Greek, “Slovesa suprotivna,” 57–58. Hilarion, “Sermon on the Law of Moses,” 88 (Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics); idem, “O zakone,” 31 (Gudzii, Khrestomatiia). “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” 293. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 123. 48.  Augustine, City, 827. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 111; PST I:2, 693. Tertullian, “Answer,” 253. The Gospel of Nicodemus, 92–93. For Russian examples, see: Greek, “Slovo o rozhdestve” and “Slovesa suprotivna,” 48, 55. Povest' vremennykh let (1113) and “Poslanie Gennadiia Ioasafu” (1489), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki I:100; V:548. Meshcherskii, Istoriia, Book 6, Ch. 2, Part 1:62; Book 4, Ch. 7, Part 1:59; Book 5, Ch. 5, Part 2:60. “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” 268–69. Paleia, 51–52, 148, 208. Watrobska, Izbornik, 68 f. 68:656. See also Duker, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Anti-­ Jewish Period,” 315, 322–23.

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Notes to Chapter 1 49.  Meletinskii, “O proiskhozhdenii literaturno-mifologicheskikh ­siuzhetnykh arkhetipov,” in his Literaturnye arkhetipy, 126. 50.  Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, 91, 165. Neusner, “To See Ourselves as Others See Us,” 464. Scott Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Tomasch, Text, 69. 51.  Goethe, Sämtliche Werke XVII:391–92. 52.  Gol'denberg, “Evreiskaia kontrabanda,” 120–24. Ora Limor, “Christian ­Sacred Space and the Jew,” in Cohen, From Witness, 58, 61–62, 66–72. 53.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 44, 178, 191; PST I:2, 720, 663, 725–26. Paleia, 45. Watrobska, Izbornik, 13 f. 13:109–12; 23 f. 23:276, 279–82. 54.  See, for example: Izmailov, Puteshestvie I:58–60. Lubianovskii, Puteshestvie, II:213–16. Karamzin, Pis'ma, 193–94. 55.  Kisch, Jews, 130–33, 147–50. Langmuir, History, 294–95. Lessing, Jews, in his Two Jewish Plays, 52. Ruether, Faith, 208–9. 56.  Augustine, City, 827–28, 830. For more examples, see: Pascal, Opuscules et ­pensées, 640. Semennikov, Knigoizdatel'skaia deiatel'nost' N. I. Novikova, 64 (Item 408). See also: Haynes, Jews, 27. Parkes, Conflict, 374. Poliakov, Histoire I:34. Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church,” in Almog, Antisemitism, 71. 57.  Augustine, City, 963. Gugelot, La Conversion, 198–99, 202. Isaac, Jesus, 364. S. Solov'ev, Zhizn', 405. S. Trubetskoi, “Smert' V. S. Solov'eva 31 iiulia 1900 g.,” in Averin, Kniga, 294. See translated tales of conversion in Istrin, Knigy I:246–47, 316–17, 334–38, 362. 58.  Augustine, “Tractatus,” 404. Cyprian, “Testimonies,” 91, 198. Isaac, L’Antisémitisme, 27–28. Tertullian, “Answer,” 202–3. For Russian examples, see: Paleia, 138, 147, 162, 185, 197. “Povest' o kreshchenii Rusi,” 64. “Nachalo romeiskykh tsarstvii,” 268–69. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 123. Hilarion, “Sermon on the Law of Moses,” 88; “O zakone,” 30–31. On “jewish” iconography, see: Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 58–61, 74 (Figs. 61–66, 80). Heinz Schreckenberg, “Josephus in Early Christian Literature and Medieval Christian Art,” in his Jewish Historiography, 37, 94, 130. See also Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 36–56. 59.  See Augustine, City, 828. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 8, 30, 235, 237–38; PST I:2, 648, 657, 744–45. Russkie liudi, 51–52, 55–56. On the link of theological anti-Judaism to anti-Jewish violence, see: Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 62; idem, “Faith of Christians,” 81–82, 88. Parkes, Conflict, 184. Poliakov, Histoire I:270, 463–65. ­Ruether, “Faith and Fratricide Discussion,” 234, 249–50. Simon, Verus Israel, 118– 19. On the responses of Christian authorities to anti-Jewish violence, see: Davies, Anti-Semitism, 59. Tamar Garb, “Modernity, Identity, Textuality,” in Nochlin, Jew, 21. Isaac, Jesus, 572. Langmuir, History, 292. Poliakov, Histoire I:120. Kisch, Jews, 141. 60.  Cohen, Friars, 76, 97. Israel, European Jewry, 7–9, 23. Starr, Jews, 24–25. On the Jewish experience in Orthodox lands, see: Borovoi, “Natsional'noosvoboditel'naia voina,” 116–17. Dubnov, History I:145. Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 180–82, 193. Levanda, Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik, 3. Naiman, “Tragediia,” 34. Weinryb, Jews, 205.

Notes to Chapters 1–2 61.  Annotated Brothers Grimm, 359–63. See also Aarne, Types of the Folktale, 218. 62.  Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 169.

Chapter 2 1.  Jung, Archetypes, passim; Symbols, 368. 2.  Arnold, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in Culture and Anarchy, 132. 3.  On the popular image of Jesus as a non-Jew, see: Belova, “Narodnaia ­Bibliia,” 336–37; “Evreiskii mif,” 146–47. Horton, Child Jesus, 136 (Fig. 69). See also Turgenev’s letter to P. V. Annenkov (11/23. II.1878), in his Polnoe sobranie, Pis'ma XII.1:280. On the association of unbaptised infants with “the jews,” see: Bächthold, Handwörterbuch IV:823. Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 13–14; idem, “Inorodets,” 415; idem, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 76. For the construction of Jesus as an “Aryan,” see: Chamberlain, Foundations I:200–213. Michelis, Non-Existent Manuscript, 137–38. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 129–30. Olender, Languages, 64–70. Tal, Christians, 280. 4.  On the place of “the jews” in Christmas and Easter folk customs, see: Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 495. Belova, “Pir,” 32; idem, “Otrazhenie,” 18; idem, “Iuda,” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti II:430. Bogatyrev, “Magicheskie deistviia, obriady i verovaniia Zakarpat'ia,” in his Voprosy, 220–21. Robert Bonfil, “The Devil and the Jews in the Christian Consciousness of the Middle Ages,” in Almog, Anti­semitism, 93, 97–98. Cala, Image, 163–64, 223. Fabre, La Bête, 190. Hole, British Folk Customs, 37–38. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 134. Petzold, “Eternal Loser,” 44. For evil’s euphemistic treatment and the attendant role of “the jews,” see: Belova, “Evreiskii mif,” 454–57. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 39. Kraus, Living Theatre, 155. Lifschitz, Les Juifs, 119. Oinas, Essays, 98. Shein, ­Belorusskii sbornik LXXII.4:100. Trachtenberg, Devil, 24–25. For Moses’ and Solomon’s commerce with daemons, and for the changing implications of Moses’ horns, see: Demidovich, “Iz oblasti,” 119–20. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 33. Goebel, Jüdische Motive, 69. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 7–8, 271. Mellinkoff, Horned Moses, 61–65, 106, 121–24, 136. 5.  See the Yom Kippur legends: Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 15–16. Demidovich, “Iz oblasti,” 109, 119–20. On the devil’s literal identification with “the jews,” see: Bächtold, Handwörterbuch I:1438; IV:815. Bonfil, “Devil,” 95. Cohen, Friars, 244. Grunberger, Narcissisme, 310–11. Lifschitz, Les Juifs, 83, 98, 103. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 155. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki II:293–94. Sylvia Tomasch, “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew,” in Tomasch, Text, 247–67. Trachtenberg, Devil, 23–26. Young, Devils, 29. 6.  For the stock image of “the jews” in Ukrainian nationalist historiography and mythology, see: Dragomanov, “Evreiskii vopros v Ukraine,” in his Sobranie II:527. Kulish, Zapiski o Iuzhnoi Rusi I:146. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 26. See a critique of this image in: Borovoi, “Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naia voina,” 81. Karpov, Kriticheskii obzor, 11–12, 45, 50–51, 128. Frank Sysyn, “The Jewish Factor in the

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Notes to Chapter 2 Khmelnytsky Uprising,” in Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 43–54. Zaslavskii, Mikhail Petrovich Dragomanov, 65–66, 110–12. 7.  Bezsonov, Kaleki II:175, 209. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 106, 109–11; idem, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi,” XI.46:41, XI.49:145. Herbert, “Self-Condemnation,” 111. Maksimov, Nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila, 18. Oinas, Essays, 98. A. Tolstoi, “Bogatyr',” in his Sobranie I:240. See also Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 33. Hunter, “Theology,” 221. Trachtenberg, Devil, 193. 8.  For the history of usury in the West, see: Kisch, Jews, 240. Nelson, Idea, 7, 11, 132. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 19–20, 34–35. Roover, Money, 124. For Byzantium and Rus', see: Pereswetoff, Grin II:51, 106–16. Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, 17. On the question of the Jewish presence in medieval Kiev, see: Birnbaum, “On Some Evidence,” 239–40. Chekin, “K analizu,” 39. Omeljan Pritsak, “The PreAshkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in Relation to the Khazars, the Rus' and the Lithuanians,” in Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 13. 9.  Berkov, Satiricheskie zhurnaly, 64, 75, 108, 176, 182–83. Geissler, “Die Juden,” 194–99. Güdemann, Geschichte I:127–46. Hoffmann, Der Geldhandel, 85. Kisch, Jews, 327–28. Maccoby, Judas, 6–7; idem, Sacred Executioner, 165–66. Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes,” 178–79. See also Slovar' Akademii Rossiiskoi II:450. 10.  Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 74. Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes, 70. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 68–69, 76. Granovskii, “Sud'by,” 125. Otto Ulbricht, “Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period,” in Hsia, In and Out of the Ghetto, 49–70. 11.  See another Russian example of the homology between Judas’ blood money and “jewish” usury: Pavel Kamenskii, “Iakov Mole,” in Sto russkikh literatorov III:561–62. 12.  On the mythical connotations of alcohol, see: Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 42. Likhachev, “Smekhovoi mir” drevnei Rusi, 26. Opalski, Jewish Tavern-Keeper, 13, 83–85. On the association of “the jews” with alcohol trade, see: Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 149. Levine, Economic Origins, 145. LeDonne, “Indirect Taxes,” 178, 186. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 311–12. On alcohol as a tool of “jewish” social subversion, see: Aksakov, “‘Liberaly’ po povodu razgroma evreev,” Sochineniia III:719, 723. Antonovich, Istoricheskie pesni II:20. Bulgarin, “O polozhenii evreev v Belorussii,” in Reitblat, Vidok Figliarin, 145. Dragomanov, “Istoricheskaia Pol'sha, Evreiskii vopros v Ukraine,” Sobranie I:236–37. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877 god. Mart,” Polnoe sobranie XXV:78–79. Kulish, Zapiski I:56. A. Tolstoi, “­Bogatyr',” 238. See also the German and French traditions about “the jews” trafficking goods in alcohol barrels: Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme I:375–76. Strickland, Making Monsters, 193. 13.  On the association of deviant sexuality with Satan and “the jews,” see: Chrysostom’s Homilies, 28; PST I:2, 656. Echeruo, Conditioned Imagination, 30. Edwardes, Erotica, 197, 179–80. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 55, 118. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 37. Maccoby, Judas, 82–83. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 28. Muchembled, Histoire, 29. Russell, Lucifer, 69. On the dogma of immaculate con-

Notes to Chapter 2 ception and its place in the image of “the jews,” see: Belova, “Otrazhenie,” passim; “Evreiskii mif,” 125. Boyd, Middle English Miracles, 116. Frank, “Miracles of the Virgin,” 183. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics, 153. Maksimov, Nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila, 638–39. Tubach, Index, Motifs 441, 2810. 14.  Cala, Image, 163. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik I:322–24. Mulkiewicz, “Changes,” 133, 135–39. 15.  For “jewish” sexual mediators in Russian literature, see: Bulgarin, Ivan ­Vyzhigin, in his Sochineniia, 47–49. Leskov, “Obman,” Polnoe sobranie XVIII:101–2. G. Uspenskii, “Zhidenok,” Polnoe sobranie II:656. Rafail Zotov, Leonid, ili Nekotorye cherty iz zhizni Napoleona, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana I:201. The lascivious “jews” soliciting favors from Christian women are found in William Hogarth’s print A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and in its dramatized version, Theophilus Cibber’s pantomime entertainment by the same title (1733); in the anonymous ballad opera, The Jew Decoyed (1735); in Henry Fielding’s farce, Miss Lucy in Town (1742); and in Charles Macklin’s Love à la Mode (1759). On the association of “the jews” with the prostitution industry, see: Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, 161–62. Bristow, Prostitution, 4, 35, 46–47, 82. Chekhov, Ostrov Sakhalin, in his Polnoe sobranie XIV–XV:327. Engelstein, Keys, 300–305. 16.  Fiedler, Stranger, 109–10. Gibbon, Decline II:431. Maccoby, “Figure,” 65. Zika, “Les Parties du corps,” 407–8, 411. 17.  On the deicidal actions of “the jews” as Satan’s minions, see: Bezsonov, Kaleki II:133–34, 136, 182, 201, 224, 239, 241–44. Gnatiuk, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi,” XI.46:38–39. For the graphic accounts of Christ’s suffering at the hands of “the jews,” see: Bezsonov, Kaleki II:179. Gnatiuk, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi,” XI.49:254–55; idem, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 115. Rezanov, Drama, 74, 95–96, 149, 154. Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedeniia I:548, 555. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia,” XXXII.4:243–44. 18.  See Catholic desecration narratives in: Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 104. Frank, “Miracles of the Virgin,” 185. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 24. Hsia, Myth, passim. Miri Rubin, “Desecration of the Host: The Birth of an Accusation,” in Wood, Christianity, 169–84. Tubach, Index, Motifs 1373, 2641, 2689b. See Orthodox desecration narratives in: Ol'ga Belova, “‘So svoim ustavom v chuzhoi monastyr’: ‘nastupatel'naia model’ v etnokonfessional'nom dialoge,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 127–28. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki galitsko-russkoi narodnoi slovesnosti, 8. Istrin, Knigy I:362. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik II:190. Parkes, Conflict, 291–93. Pokrov­ skii, Ocherki, 425. “Slovo Afanasiia, arkhiepiskopa alezandriiskogo o ikonakh,” ­Izmaragd I:94–95. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 521. 19.  Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind II:144–47. Geanakoplos, Interaction, 159. Golubinskii, Istoriia I.2:803, 822. Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 116. Katsis, Krovavyi ­navet i russkaia mysl', 47–48, 149–50, 358. Kraus, Living Theatre, 125. Langmuir, History, 300–301. Parkes, Conflict, 291–93. Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, 70–71. For Ukrainian desecration narratives, see: Antonovich, Istoricheskie pesni, II:21, 30. ­Istoriia Rusov, 41, 48–49, 57. Kulish, Zapiski I:57, 166. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik I:320–22.

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Notes to Chapter 2 Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina I.3:63, II.2:77. These narratives have not been seriously challenged in Ukrainian historiography. For a somewhat critical view of them, see: Grushevs'kyi, Istoriia XI.8.2:126. Franko, “Studii nad ukraïns'kymy ­narodnymy pisniamy,” Zibrannia XLIII:171–79. Kamanin, “Nauchnye i literaturnye proizvedeniia Gogolia po istorii Malorossii,” in Dashkevich, Pamiati, 106. 20.  On the mythical and satanic connotations of infanticide, see: Cohn, ­Europe’s Inner Demons, 1–2, 8–9. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 42, 47. Moore, Formation, 35–63. Popov, Vliianie, 381. Russell, Lucifer, 85; idem, Witchcraft, 89, 92. On the symbolism of the blood libel legend, see: Dundes, “Ritual Murder,” 356–57. Kermode, Genesis, 91–92. Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 268–78; idem, History, 298. Roth, Personalities, 65. Ruether, Faith, 172. Simon, Verus Israel, 201. Shachar, Judensau, 36–37. Trachtenberg, Devil, 130–33. 21.  On the anti-Judaic significance of the Christian calendar, see: Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath, 193–94, 197–98, 205–7. Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 13–14, 17–18; idem, “Pir,” 31; idem, “Evrei,” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti II:174. Natal'ia ­Evseenko, “Predstavleniia o Subbote v rannevizantiiskoi polemicheskoi literature,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 75. Elena Fedotova, “Paskha i Rozhdestvo: sviaz' s iudeiskoi i i­a zycheskoi traditsiiami,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 42–43, 47. Nikiforovskii, ­Prostonarodnye ­primet, 244. S. G. Wilson, “Passover, Easter, and Anti-Judaism: Melito of Sardis and ­Others,” in Neusner, “To See Ourselves,” 337–55. On the tradition of Easter ­pogroms, see: Klier, “The Pogrom Paradigm in Russian History”; Klier, Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1881–1884”; Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906”; Robert Weinberg, “The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study,” in Klier, Pogroms, 16, 19, 21–22, 40–41, 205, 251, 264. Zipperstein, Jews of Odessa, 121–22. 22.  On the opposition of infant Jesus and “the jews” in the Virgin cult, see: Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 81–82 (Figs. 86–88). Denise Despres, “Mary of the Eucharist: Cultic Anti-Judaism in Some Fourteenth-Century English Devotional Manuscripts,” in Cohen, From Witness, 375–401. Kolve, Play, 115. Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 154–59. Maikov, Velikorusskie zaklinaniia, 80, 153. Steinberg, Sexuality, 56–61. For the conflation of Communion and cannibalistic infanticide, see: Pokrovskii, Ocherki, 425. Tubach, Index, Motifs 1001, 1042. For the fusion of adult and infant Jesus in folk Passion narratives, see: Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 21, 137. Minkh, “Narodnye obychai,” 65–66. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik XLI.3:56–57, 146; LVII:617, 658–59, 660–61. See the use of diminutive suffixes in the Passion scenes and the assimilation of Herod to the persecutors of adult Jesus: Bezsonov, Kaleki II:175–76, 186, 331, 368. Fabre-Vassas, La Bête, 212. Gnatiuk, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi,” XI.46:36, XI.49:174–75. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 21. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik I:112. Popov, Vliianie, 78. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LXXII.4:126–50. Uspenskii, “V Balagane,” in his Polnoe sobranie III:291. 23.  On the blood libel legend in Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, see: ­Belova, “Jews,” 122; “Evreiskii mif,” 228–49. Dubnov, “Tserkovnye legendy,” 313–14. ­Dudakov, Istoriia, 39. Gekker, “Iudofobiia,” 439–54. Gessen, Istoriia I:96–98; idem, “Stareishie proizvedeniia,” 36–40; idem, “Na arene,” 3–17; idem, “Pisal

Notes to Chapter 2 li V. I. Dal',” 327–31. Guldon, “Accusation,” 99–140. Klier, Rossiia, 56–57; idem, “Pogrom Paradigm,” 19, 21–22; idem, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 422, 428, 434–36. Kulisher, “Pervoe pechatnoe izlozhenie,” 44–48. Lambroza, “Pogroms of 1903–1906,” 197–98. V. Petrukhin, “Evstratii Postnik i Vil'iam iz Norvicha— dve ‘paskhal'nye’ zhertvy,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 96. Stoklitskaia, “Pervyi ritual'nyi protsess,” 7–26. Tkachev, “Evrei,” 115n.9. See the Russian version of the tale about the Jewish boy saved by Mary: Istrin, Knigy I:246–47. Izmaragd I:147–48. 24.  For the Western traditions about the Antichrist’s “jewish” origins and army, see: Cohn, Pursuit, 61–63, 71. Emmerson, Antichrist, 46, 85–86. Gow, “Red Jews,” 7–24. R. Landes, “The Massacres of 1010: On the Origins of Popular AntiJewish Violence in Western Europe,” in Cohen, From Witness, 79–112. Strickland, Making Monsters, 213. Trachtenberg, Devil, 32–35, 39–41. Tubach, Index, Motif 147. For the east Slavic traditions, see: Demidovich, “Iz oblasti,” 103. Dudakov, Istoriia, 15. Ephrem, “Slovo na prishestvie Gospodne,” in his Tvoreniia II:250–60. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I:48–49. Halperin, “Judaizers,” 154n.67. Izvlecheniia iz ­rasporiazhenii, 73. Prokhorov, “Prenie,” 332–34. Paleia Tolkovaia, 190–92 cols. 380–83. “Slovo sviatogo ottsa Mefodiia,” 700–702. 25.  For the flight of Mary and Jesus from the Antichrist’s “jewish” army, see: Bezsonov, Kaleki II:117–20, 130–31, 133–34. Kolessa, Ukraïns'ka usna slovesnist', 196– 97. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik I:102–3. For the Russian epics, see: Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki II:491–98. Bezsonov, Kaleki I:409–11, 433, 475, 480–81, 525–29, 542–47. Khalanskii, “Velikorusskie byliny,” 401–2. For the south Slavic epics, see: Khalanskii, “Bylina o zhidovine,” 1–2. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia,” XX.6:3, LIII.6:163–65. On the etymology of the monster Chudo-Iudo, see Gattsuk, “Evrei,” II.11:167. 26.  Dumézil, Loki, 164. Fisch, Dual Image, 32. Kolve, Play, 140–42. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep, 93, 124, 176–77. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:170. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 120–23, 129. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LXXII.4:125–26, 134, 144. Trachtenberg, Devil, 193. Warner, Russian Folk Theatre 104, 112, 118, 170–71. 27.  See the interchangeability of the devil and “the jews” as objects of ridicule: Aarne, Types, 507 (Motif 1855A). Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki II:390–92. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 197–203, 223–24. Kelly, Petrushka, 66. Petzoldt, “Eternal Loser,” 28–30. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LVII:120–27, 300–304. See the comic intellectual contest in: Aarne, Types, 218 (Motif 592). Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki II:419. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 66–67. Grinchenko, Iz ust, 198–200. Shachar, Judensau, 13. Tikhonravov, “Slovo o vere khristianskoi,” 69–77. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia,” 32.4:198. 28.  Derzhavina, P'esy, 155, 529. Franko, “Do istoriï,” LXXII:57–60. Grushevs'kyi, “S'pivannyk,” 13–16. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 204. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep I:86–91. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 84–85. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 127. Shachar, Judensau, 32 (Plate 28). Wiszniewski, Historya Literatury Polskiej VII:161. See also Aleksandr Vel'tman’s story “Ursul,” where fleeing robbers comically trample a festive crowd of “the jews” whose children “carry wooden swords and arrows as a token of Israel’s past military might” (Sto russkikh literatorov III:355).

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Notes to Chapter 2 29.  Kolve, Play, 142. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:141, 233. Shachar, Judensau, 43. Walsh, “Divine Cuckold,” 278–97. Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 169–72. 30.  Jung, Symbols, passim; idem, Archetypes, 82. 31.  Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 64, 69, 108–9 (Figs. 70, 75, 123–24). Bulard, Le Scorpion, 20–21. Horton, Child, 36–45. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:219–20. Meredith, ­Staging, 207–10. Seiferth, Synagogue, 32–33. Warner, Alone, 25–33, 103–5. For Synagoga and Ecclesia in Russian iconography, see: Pokrovskii, Evangelie, 432, 453, 466– 67; idem, Ocherki, 430–31. 32.  See Bezsonov, Kaleki I:525–26. “The Jew of Bourges,” in Young, Devils, 232– 33. “O nemilostivem zhidovine,” in Istrin, Knigy I:246–47. “Slovo o ­nemilostevom zhidovine,” Izmaragd I:147–48. 33.  Brown, “Medieval Prototypes,” 227, 229–30. Echeruo, Conditioned Imagination, 33. Fiedler, Stranger, 111, 117–19. Fisch, Dual Image, 31. Klein, Portrait, 16, 91. Kulish, Zapiski o Iuzhnoi Rusi I:114. Maccoby, “Figure,” 56–69. Rosenberg, From Shylock, 34. Tubach, Index, Motifs 2800, 2804–5, 2807. Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 171–72. Walsh, “Divine Cuckold,” 278–97. 34.  Chateaubriand, “Walter Scott. Les Juives,” in Essai sur la littérature, 224. Edgeworth, Harrington, 145, 290–91. Lessing, Nathan, 135–36, 184. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 51, 57. Scott, Ivanhoe, 102, 247. Thackeray, “Rebecca and Rowena,” Works IX:155–56, 158. See Russian examples: Chirikov, Evrei, 28–29, 32, 47, 53–54. Krestovskii, T'ma egipetskaia, 35, 43, 142–43. Lermontov, “Ballada,” ­Sobranie I:353–54. Staniukovich, “Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa,” Sobranie VI:283–84. 35.  Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 172–76. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 66–67. Harriet Goldberg, “Two Parallel Medieval Commonplaces: Anti­ feminism and Antisemitism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition,” in Szarmach, Aspects, 87. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 8. Lifschitz, Les Juifs, 89. Rubin, “Desecration,” 178. Shachar, Judensau, 13. For Russian literary examples of the dangerous and repulsive “jewesses,” see: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, in his Sochineniia, 62. Nikolai Grech, Chernaia zhenshchina, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana II:74–75. Pisemskii, Meshchane, in his Polnoe sobranie III:569, 576. 36.  Barbara Breitman, “Lifting Up the Shadow of Anti-Semitism: Jewish Masculinity in a New Light,” in Brod, Mensch, 108, 112. Chubinskii, Trudy, 24–25, 35. Edwardes, Erotica, 171–72. Hyman, Gender, 134–35, 157–59. Lori Lefkovitz, “Coats and Tales: Joseph Stories and Myths of Jewish Masculinity,” in Brod, Mensch, 25. See, for example, the negative transformation of “the jewesses” in: Krestovskii, Ocherki, 137–39, 149, 157. Kuprin, “Zhidovka,” Sobranie III:222–26, 228, 231. 37.  S. Briggs, “Images of Women and Jews in 19th- and 20th-Century German Theology,” in Atkinson, Immaculate, 226–59. Charcot, Leçons II:11–12. Engelstein, Keys, 310–11. E. de Fontenay, “Sur un soupir de Kant. Le judaism hors la loi,” in Olender, Pour Léon Poliakov, 17, 25. Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” in Eilberg, People, 254; idem, “Unmanning,” 227–62; idem, “‘A Glance’,” 441. Gilman, Jew’s Body, 55–76; idem, Difference, 155–62. Glenn, “Circumcision,” 395–98. Goldstein, “Wandering Jew,” 521–52. Johnson, “Myth,”

Notes to Chapters 2–3 273–95. Katz, “Shylock’s Gender,” 440–62. Le Rider, Modernité, 9. Poliakov, Histoire II:211. Resnick, “Medieval Roots,” 241–63. Rozanov, “Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi,” in his Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie, 24–25. Townsend, “Stereotypes,” 205–29. Weininger, Sex, 310–21, 329–30. 38.  On the Renaissance equation of Jewish women with prostitutes, see: Hughes, “Earrings,” 163–64; idem, “Distinguishing Signs,” 38. See east Slavic traditions: Maksimovich, Ukrainskie narodnye pesni, 31–32. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep, 82–83. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik XLI.3:490–91. Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina I.1:108–9. In a parodic inversion of the Christian image of “the jewesses,” Kiev’s Jews called Jewish prostitutes “Andreev Hill converts,” because the brothel district’s establishments employed baptized prostitutes only (Agursky, “Conversions,” 70, 72). 39.  See Harrowitz, Antisemitism, 56–57, 61. 40.  For some manifestations of this logic in east Slavic folklore, see: Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 198–99. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik XLI.3:490–91.

Chapter 3 1.  Belova, Slavianskii bestiarii, 14–15. Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 64. Edwardes, Erotica, 172. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 1–6. Muchembled, Histoire, 49. ­Pereswetoff, Grin I:68–69. Poliakov, Histoire I:252. Porfir'ev, Apokrificheskie skazaniia, 139. Salisbury, Beast, 79, 81. Slipushko, Davn'oukraïns'kyi bestiarii, 8–12. Trachtenberg, Devil, 162, 187. 2.  Mat. 7:6–15; 10:16; 15:26–27; Mark 7:27–28; Acts 20:29; Rev. 22:14–15. Belova, “Evrei,” 174. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 33, 124. Alberto Ferreiro, “Simon Magus, Dogs, and Simon Peter,” in his Devil, 45–89. G. Kabakova, “Zapakh,” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti II:269. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 38. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 19, 155. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 4–5. Woods, Devil, passim. DaleGreen, Dog, 67–81, 148, 185. B. Uspenskii, “Mifologicheskii aspekt,” 48–80. On “the jews” as canines in visual arts, see: Corrigan, Visual Polemics, 49, 228 (Fig. 6). Strickland, Making Monsters, 21, 160. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “The Demonization of the ‘Other’ in the Visual Arts,” in Wistrich, Demonizing the Other, 50–51. 3.  “On the Hyena,” Physiologus, 53. “Povest' o nekotorom kuptse” (17th c.), in Dmitriev, Pamiatniki X:72. See also Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 145, 150; “Sex in the Bestiaries,” in her Mark of the Beast, 74–75. Woods, Devil, 23. 4.  Dale-Green, Dog, 146. Glanz, “‘Jewish Execution’,” 3–26. Kisch, “‘Jewish Execution’,” 103–32. Otto Ulbricht, “Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period,” in Hsia, In and Out, 66–67. Scott, Ivanhoe, 68, 77, 81, 98, 105, 107, 170, etc. The motif of hanging “the jews” upside down and in canine company survives in modern Slavic literatures: Gogol', Taras Bul'ba, 51–53. Mickiewicz, “Nocleg,” Dziela I:347–48. 5.  Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 64 (Fig. 70). Bonfil, “Devil,” 95. Chrysostom’s Homilies, 15; PST I:2, 651. Ephrem, “Against Julian. Hymn 2,” Hymns, 235. Mellinkoff, Anti­semitic Hate Signs, 28 (Figs. 25–26); idem, Outcasts I:48–50. Trachtenberg,

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Notes to Chapter 3 Devil, 46–47. For folklore examples, see: Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 494. ­Gnatiuk, “Ugrorus'ki dukhovni virshi,” XI.47:115–16. Nikiforovskii, ­Prostonarodnye primety, 156. For literary examples, see: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 67. Somov, “Skazki o kladakh,” in his Kupalov vecher, 177. 6.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 15; PST I:2, 651. Kisch, Jews, 282–83. Nikiforovskii, Prostonarodnye primety, 156. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 19. Petzoldt, “Eternal Loser,” 38–39. Shachar, Judensau, passim. For folklore examples, see: Bartoszew­ ski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 493, 496. Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 12; idem, “Evrei,” 174. Chubinskii, Mudrist', 53. Dal', Poslovitsy, 348. Fabre-Vassas, La Bête, 114–15. ­Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 66–67. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 8. 7.  Janson, Apes, 14–20, 36–37. Kisch, “‘Jewish Execution’,” 122. Mellinkoff, ­ Antisemitic Hate Signs, 28. Physiologus, 39. 8.  See Bashkirtseva’s diary in Berlin, “Russkaia literatura,” 95–96. 9.  On the “jewishness” of the cuckoo and the owl in medieval thought, see: Belova, Slavianskii bestiarii, 105, 118–20. Bestiary of Guillaume, 25–26. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 45–46. Mariko Miyazaki, “Misericord Owls and Medieval Anti-Semitism,” in Hassig, Mark of the Beast, 27–34. Paleia, 42 cols. 83–84. ­Physiologus, 11–12. See the same in folklore: O. Belova, “Otrazhenie predstavlenii o drevneevreiskoi kul'turnoi traditsii v pamiatnikakh drevnerusskoi knizhnosti,” in El'iashevich, Evrei, 268; Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 182; idem, “Evrei,” 174. Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 495. Kabakova, “Zapakh,” 269. 10.  Belova, “Narodnaia Bilbiia,” 351–54; idem, “Pir,” 32. Chubinskii, Mudrist', 65– 66. Dal', Poslovitsy, 516. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 117. A. Gura, “Vorobei,” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti I:431. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 20. Nikiforovskii, Prostonarodnye primety, 212. Rowland, Birds, 157. Tokarev, ­R eligioznye verovaniia, 51. Zabylin, Russkii narod, 262. For literary examples, see: Grebenka, Chaikovskii, 99. Myrnyi, Khiba revut' voly iak iasla povni, in his Tvory I:356–57. 11.  On the goose in pagan and Christian mythology, see: Armstrong, Folklore, 28–29, 230, 237. A. Gura, “Gus',” in Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti I:572–74. Rowland, Birds, 67–68, 77. 12.  On the goose’s place in the Ashkenazi culture, see: Cooper, Eat, 189, 192. Chubinskii, Trudy, 54. Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen, 104. Pomiane, Jews, 166–67. Roden, Book, 120, 125–26, 130. Sternberg, Yiddish Cuisine, 101, 122. 13.  Rozanov, “Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie,” 24–25. See the link of the goose to “jewish” sexuality: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 67–71. GarinMikhailovskii, “Detstvo Temy,” Sobranie I:102. Grinchenko, Iz ust, 267–68. Serafimovich, “Pokhod,” Sobranie I:306–8. Uspenskii, “Zhidenok,” 645, 659. See bird imagery in the description of effeminate “jewish” males: Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Itska i Davydka,” Sobranie III:193–94, 197–98; idem, “Revekka,” IV:62–63. See flying down as a pogrom symbol: Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Evreiskii pogrom,” Sobranie IV:642. Korolenko, “Dom nomer 13,” Sobranie IX:415, 418. Machtet, “Zhid,” in Gir, Zhid, 68. Serafimovich, “Pogrom,” Sobranie II:339. See also Khazan, Dovid Knut, 21.

Notes to Chapter 3 14.  On the Fool-figure, see: Billington, Social History, 18–20, 31. Gifford, “Iconographical Notes,” 336–40. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:89. Tubach, Index, ­Motifs 1412– 30. Welsford, Fool, 201–5, 291–93. Willeford, Fool, 10. On the traditional Russian view of jesters and musical entertainment, see: Golubinskii, Istoriia I:1, 826–27. Fedorova, “Skomorokhi,” 206, 221. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind II:104–5, 317– 20. Izmaragd I:176–78; II:132. Likhachev, “Smekhovoi mir” drevnei Rusi, 131, 147. Riazanovskii, Demonologiia, 90–93. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia,” XXXII.4:196–99, 220–21. Zguta, Russian Minstrels, 31. 15.  Chrysostom’s Homilies, 9–10, 26, 199; PST I:2, 649, 655, 729. Dickens, ­Oliver Twist, in his Works III:85. Gazeau, Les Bouffons, 40. Gifford, “Iconographical Notes,” 338. Janson, Apes, 170, 211. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:89–90 (Figs. III.7, III.56, III.62, III.114). Riazanovskii, Demonologiia, 56. Shachar, Judensau, 6, 43. Strickland, Making Monsters, 138–40. Welsford, Fool, 304–5. Willeford, Fool, 11. Wright, Vengeance, 90. Zguta, Russian Minstrels, 48–50. 16.  Belova, “Evrei,” 173. Dal', “Evrei i tsygane,” Sochineniia V:318–29. Du Maurier, Trilby, 55. Fabre-Vassas, La Bête, 131. Kelly, Petrushka, 66, 104–5, 123, 213. Mulkiewicz, “Changes,” 135–36. Opalski, Poles, 18. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia,” XXXII.4:198. Warner, Russian Folk Theatre, 98, 104, 112, 118, 170–71. See “the jews” as objects of (didactic) laughter: Aarne, Types, 507 (Motif 1855A). Afanas'ev, ­Narodnye russkie skazki II:419. Grinchenko, Iz ust, 167–68, 198–200, 267–68. ­Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 197–203, 223–24. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LVII:120–27, 200, 238–39, 242–44, 300–304. 17.  Aycock, “Mark,” 124–25. Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v ­romane,” Voprosy, 309–13. Karl Kerényi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology,” in Radin, Trickster, 180. Lotman, Struktura, 282. Meletinskii, Vvedenie, 22, 228; idem, “O proiskhozhdenii,” 141. 18.  Amishai-Maisels, “Demonization,” 53. Jeremy Cohen, “The Muslim Connection, or On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” in Cohen, From Witness, 146–48, 162; idem, Living Letters, 160–65. Disraeli, Novels X:261. Ivan Kalmar, “Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban,” in Penslar, Orientalism, 10– 16. Strickland, Making Monsters, 68. 19.  Bechtel, La Sorcière, 89–91. Brody, Disease, 64–65, 119–34. Edwardes, Erotica, 223. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 38–39. Hughes, “Distinguishing signs,” 36–37; idem, “Earrings,” 162–63. Moore, Formation, 58–65. Poliakov, Histoire I:154. 20.  On Western Talmudophobia and equation of “the jews” with heretics, see: Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 33 (Fig. 26). Cohen, Friars, 63–67; idem, Living Letters, 157–59, 363. Langmuir, History, 295–96. Lipton, “Jews,” 362–63, 371–74. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:93 (Fig. III.124). For Russian examples, see: Aksakov, “O Talmude,” 802–18. Belova, “Evrei,” 174. Filaret, Obzor, 120. Granovskii, “Sud'by,” 122. Grosser, Anti-Semitism, 213. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 133; idem, “German Antisemitism,” 526; idem, Rossiia, 316–17. Paleia Tolkovaia, 49 col. 97. Volotskii, Prosvetitel', 533, 544–45. Watrobska, Izbornik, 16 f.16:136–37. 21.  On the role of “the jews” in the genesis of the Witch-figure, see: Bechtel,

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Notes to Chapters 3–4 La Sorcière, 224. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 101. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 71–72, 80. Moore, Formation, 35–36. Muchembled, Histoire, 56–58. Newall, “Jew,” 104–5. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, “Witchcraft, Magic, and the Jews in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany,” in Cohen, From Witness, 419–33. Poliakov, Histoire I:317, 335. Russell, History, 55, 75; idem, Witchcraft, 24, 61, 167, 204, 238–49. Trachtenberg, Devil, 59–74, 92–97, 210. Zguta, “Was There a Witch Craze in Muscovite Russia?” 119; idem, “Witchcraft Trials in 17th-Century Russia,” 1205. On the kinship of “the jews” and witches in folklore, see: Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 495–98. Belova, “Pir,” 32–33; idem, “Otrazhenie,” 17–18; idem, “Evrei,” 176; idem, “­I norodets,” 416. Bylina, “Magie,” 186. Chubinskii, Mudrist', 94. Dubnov, History I:147. Gnatiuk, “Znadoby,” 141. “Kosti evreia,” 204. Kulish, Zapiski I:153–54. Nikiforovskii, Prostonarodnye primety, 17n.265, 198. Sadovnikov, Skazki I:147–48. 22.  Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 67. Glinka, “Pis'ma k drugu,” Pis'ma k drugu, 212–13. Karamzin, Pis'ma, 194. Nikolai Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, ili Smolensk v 1812 godu, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana II:334. Somov, “Skazki o kladakh” and “Kievskie ved'my,” Kupalov vecher, 105–6, 178. Vel'tman, Strannik III:32. 23.  Bechtel, La Sorcière, 588–94. Chubinskii, Mudrist', 94. Grinchenko, Iz ust, 150, 160. Muchembled, Histoire, 58–60, 87–88. Rouart, Littérature, 15. Russell, Witchcraft, 37, 252. Summers, Malleus, Part II Ch. XIII: “How Witch Midwives Commit Most Horrid Crimes.” Trachtenberg, Devil, 212. Zika, “Les Parties du corps,” 411. 24.  On the association of the aspen tree with Judas and vampires, see: Afanas'ev, “Poetic Views,” 160, 165. Azbelev, Biblioteka, 531–32. Chubinskii, ­Mudrist', 94. Belova, “Iuda,” 430; idem, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 326, 361–62. Demidovich, “Iz oblasti,” 119–20. Markevich, Obychai, 86. Nikiforovskii, Prostonarodnye primety, 130. Oinas, Essays, 120–24. Tokarev, Religioznye verovaniia, 64. See “the jews” as the undead in Slavic folklore: Belova, “Otrazhenie,” 13. Chubinskii, Mudrist', 19. Gnatiuk, “Znadoby”; idem, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 116. Iavorskii, Pamiatniki, 233, 262. Kylymnyk, Ukraïns'kyi rik II:61–62. On the legend of the Wandering Jew, see: Adrianova, “K istorii,” 218–24. Anderson, Legend, 73–75, 95. Baum, “Mediaeval Legends,” 481. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 59. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 15. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni ­legendy,” 201–2. Isaac-Edersheim, “Ahasver,” 204–5. Maccoby, Judas, 82–84. Mellinkoff, “Cain,” 16–38; idem, Outcasts I:61–62. Maccoby, Sacred Executioner, 7–8, 132, 142. Malek, “Kanonicheskie i apokrificheskie ‘bibleiskie skazaniia’,” 32–33.

Chapter 4 1.  Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 13, 25, 37, 88, 135. J. Cohen, Friars, 244. R. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 66–67. Corrigan, Visual Polemics, 240 (Fig. 24), 255 (Fig. 42), 269 (Fig. 60). Gilman, Jew’s Body, 235. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 32. Hart, “Picturing Jews,” 161–62. Kisch, “‘Jewish Execution’,” 109–10. Moore, “Anti-Semitism,” 54–55. Revel, Image, 100–110. Rubens, History, 104. Shachar, Studies, 325. Trachten-

Notes to Chapter 4 berg, Devil, 208. See also Finkielkraut, Le Juif, 106. Sternhell, Ni droite, 161–62. Winock, Nationalisme, 81. 2.  Schudt, Jüdische Merckwurdigkeiten, cited in Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:129. See also Amishai-Maisels, “Demonization,” 49–51. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 39, 41. Kraus, Living Theatre, 140. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:65–66, 113–15, 135 (Figs. III.80– 82). Maccoby, Judas, 82–38. Muchembled, Histoire, 25, 29. Russell, Lucifer, 69; idem, Witchcraft, 114. Trachtenberg, Devil, 44–45. Shachar, “Emergence,” 339–48, 356–58. Vinogradov, “Povest' N. V. Gogolia ‘Vii’,” 101–3. 3.  Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger,” 33–34. Sonnenfeld, “Poetics of AntiSemitism,” 89. Weiner, Richard Wagner, 13, 21, 84–85, 177, 210, 327. 4.  On the place of red hair and freckles with the “jewish” image, see: Belova, “Iuda,” 429; idem, “O ‘zhidakh’ i ‘zhidovskoi vere’ v narodnykh ­predstavleniiakh vostochnykh slavian,” in Belova, Svoi ili chuzhoi, 171. Fabre-Vassas, La Bête, 122– 26. Gow, “Red Jews,” 11. Franko, “Do istorii,” LXXIII:50. Hand, Dictionary, 305, 316–17, 322–23. Maccoby, Judas, 114. Mellinkoff, “Cain,” 33–36; idem, “Judas’ Red Hair,” 31–32, 45–46. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik XLVII:238–39. On the billygoat beards and damaged hair of “the jews,” see: Afanas'ev, Narodnye russkie skazki II:419. Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 32–33 (Figs. 23–25). Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 168. Grinchenko, Iz ust, 198–200. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 131. Strickland, Making Monsters, 79. Trachtenberg, Devil, 46. See also Gogol', Taras Bul'ba 1835:139/1842:83–84. 5.  Anderson, Legend, 119, 188–89. Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 36 (Fig. 32). Chamberlain, Foundations I:387–89, 491. Devisse, Image, 72–76, 80 (Figs. 29, 35). Gilman, Jew’s Body, 99–101. Gurowski, America, 177. Ragussis, Figures, 25–26. Gray, About Face, 108–9. For literary examples, see: Eliot, Daniel Deronda XI:379, 408. Kuprin, “Trus,” Sobranie III:88, 90. Pisemskii, Meshchane and Vzbalamuchennoe more, in his Polnoe sobranie III:569; IV:281. Staniukovich, “Isaika,” Polnoe sobranie IV:429. 6.  On the skin of “the jews” in premodern iconography and in modern ­racial science, see: Gilman, Jew’s Body, 97–101. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 15. Knox, Races of Men, 447. Mellinkoff, “Judas’ Red Hair,” 32; idem, Outcasts I:233. Trachtenberg, Devil, 26. On the “jewish” skin condition and its relation to canine mange, see: Beauplan, Opisanie, 82–83, 157–58. Belova, “Pir,” 31; idem, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 367–68. Bogatyrev, “Magicheskie deistviia,” 239–40. Chubinskii, Trudy, 35. Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-rus'ki narodni legendy,” 33. Leskov, “Zhidovskaia kuvyrkollegiia,” Polnoe sobranie XVIII:147. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:135. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 272. B. Uspenskii, “Mifologicheskii aspekt,” 66. Trachtenberg, Devil, 148–49. 7.  Douglas, Purity, passim. Du Maurier, Trilby, 55, 64–65. 8.  See Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 492. Bonfil, “Devil,” 94. Dundes, Life, 119–31. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 45. Lifschitz, Les Juifs, 93–94. Maccoby, Judas, 82–83. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:108 (Fig. IV.23). Shachar, Judensau, 22, 62, 90n.264, 93n.294 (Plates 15b, 56d). Tubach, Index, Motif 2795. Vaiskopf, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 284–85. Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 251. 9.  Bartoszewski, “Polish Folk Culture,” 492. Burton, Anatomy I:205, 211.

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Notes to Chapter 4 Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 53–54, 72–74 (Figs. 55–57, 78, 80). Chubinskii, Mudrist', 204; idem, Trudy, 13, 15. Du Maurier, Trilby, 60, 132, 416–17. Lewis, Monk, 168. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep, 19–20. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 45–46. 10.  Maud Ellmann, “The Imaginary Jew,” in Cheyette, Between “Race,” 85. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 85–87. Gilman, Jew’s Body, 64–72. Hess, Germans, 86. Murray, World I:249. Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei, 206–7. Pick, “Powers of Suggestion,” in Cheyette, Modernity, 116. For Russian literary examples, see: Chekhov, “Perekati-pole,” Sobranie VI:257. Pisemskii, Vzbalamuchennoe more, in his Polnoe sobranie IV:287. 11.  On the symbolism of Satan’s nose and its place in “jewish” iconography, see: Amishai-Maisels, “Demonization,” 53. Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 30–33 (Figs. 20, 21, 23–25). Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 162. Gilman, Jew’s Body, 126. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 24 (Fig. 66). Russell, Lucifer, 84, 132, 212. Strickland, Making Monsters, 77–78. On the foetor judaicus, see: Blumenkranz, Le Juif, 64, 108 (Figs. 70, 123). Bonfil, “Devil,” 94. Burton, Anatomy, III:391. Ephrem, “Against Julian. Hymn 2,” Hymns, 235. Fortunat, Poésies mêlées, 134. Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 28 (Figs. 25, 26). Trachtenberg, Devil, 47–49. Young, Devils, 215. On the symbolism of bad smell in east Slavic folklore, see: Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia,” 296; idem, “‘Drugie i ‘chuzhie’: predstavleniia ob etnicheskikh sosediakh v slavianskoi narodnoi kul'ture,” in Tolstaia, Priznakovoe prostranstvo, 75. Kabakova, “Zapakh,” 267, 269. Oinas, Essays, 113. 12.  For the scientific rationalization of the “jewish” nose and odor, see: Asch­ heim, Brothers, 60. Chubinskii, Trudy, 22. Corbin, Le Miasme, 170. Fabre-Vassas, La Bête, 120. Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology,” 247, 253. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 29. Parfitt, “Use of the Jew,” 60–61. Zhou Xun, “The ‘Kaifeng Jew’ Hoax: Constructing the ‘Chinese Jew’,” in Penslar, Orientalism, 75. For some examples of the “jewish” nose and odor in English literature, see: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, in his Works XXIII:314. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, in her Works XI:378. Thackeray, “Codlingsby,” Works VI:479. Trollope, Way We Live Now I:31. See the same in Russian literature: Kuprin, “Iama,” Sobranie V:35. Lazhechnikov, Vnuchka pantsyrnogo boiarina, in his Polnoe sobranie IV:191. Leskov, “Zhidovskaia ­k uvyrkollegiia,” Polnoe sobranie XVIII:151. Staniukovich, “Isaika,” Polnoe sobranie IV:427; idem, “­Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa,” Sobranie sochinenii VI:270. 13.  See Simoons, Plants, 140–45. Rainer Barzen, “Jewish Regional Organization in the Rhineland: The Kehillot Shum Around 1300,” in Cluse, Jews of Europe, 233–42. 14.  On the exegetical tradition informing Chaucer’s Summoner (Works, 10), see: Kaske, “Summoner’s Garleek,” 481–84. Tubach, Index, Motif 3159. On garlic’s link to “the jews,” see: Belova, “Evrei,” 174; idem, “Inorodets,” 430; “Evreiskii mif,” 405. Maria Diemling, “‘As the Jews Like to Eat Garlick’: Garlic in Christian-­ Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Greenspoon, Food, 215–34. Fuchs, Die Juden, 282–83. Kabakova, “Zapakh,” 267–69. Kafka, “Travel Diary: Weimar and Jungborn, June 28–July 29, 1912,” Diaries, 301. 15.  Diemling, “As the Jews,” 215, 234. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prykazky, 20, 264. See

Notes to Chapter 4 also Grebenka’s novel Chaikovskii (1843), where Cossacks find “the jews” by their unpleasant smell reminiscent of garlic and onions (90). 16.  Dal', Poslovitsy, 348. Shabel'skaia, Satanisty, 51–52. 17.  Devisse, Image, 72–73, 76, 80 (Figs. 29, 35). Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 83. Gilman, Difference, 31, 35. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:127–29, 135–37, 213. Starr, Jews, 20–21. Tubach, Index, Motif 2811. Young, Devils, 211–12, 220–21. 18.  On the motif of spitting as an anti-Christian act and the attendant association of “the jews” with the toad, see: Bax, Hieronymus Bosch, 39–41. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 84. Higgs, Saracens, 22 (Plate 10). Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 41. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep I:124. Pushkin, “Gusar,” “Feodor i Elena,” Polnoe sobranie III.1:302–3, 343–44. Réau, Iconographie II:2, 447. Trachtenberg, Devil, 212. Tubach, Index, Motif 4881. Warner, Russian Folk Theatre, 98. Young, Devils, 34, 49–50. Zabelin, Russkii narod, 237–38. For the literary examples of “the jews” who spit when praying, see: Gogol', Taras Bul'ba, 79, 135. Dostoevskii, ­Zapiski, 95. Leskov, “Rakushanskii melamed,” Polnoe sobranie XIV:138. See also Svengali’s proclivity for spitting in the face of his foes: Du Maurier, Trilby, 347–48, 356. On the stigmatization of journalism, see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 145–46. 19.  See the shared linguistic peculiarities of Satan and “the jews”: Gilman, Jew’s Body, 12–17. Kelber, Oral and the Written Gospel, passim. Riazanovskii, Demonol­ ogiia, 56. Trachtenberg, Devil, 41. On the Russian ecclesiastic equation of foul language with the speech of “the jews,” see Belova, “Inorodets,” 414. 20.  See the various manifestations of the “jew-speak”: Antonovich, Istori­cheskie pesni II:21. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 80. Franko, “Do istorii,” LXXIII:61. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 24, 68–69, 72, 76. Gnatiuk, “­Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 33. Kelly, Petrushka, 104–5, 123. Kulish, Zapiski I:57, 285. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:107–8. Mulkiewicz, “Changes,” 136. I. Pivovarchik, S. Pivovarchik, “­Otrazhenie etnicheskikh stereotipov v belorusskom narodnom teatre ‘batleika’,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 200–219. Shein, Belorusskii sbornik LXXII.4:125–26, 134, 144. Warner Russian Folk Theatre, 98, 105. 21.  On the inability of “the jews” to master the languages of majority cultures, see: Aksakov, “Chto takoe ‘Evrei’,” 707. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67–84, 145. Dudakov, Paradoksy, 261. Gilman, Jew’s Body, 20, 145–46. Landa, Jew in Drama, 119–21, 170–71. Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh upadka,” 208–9. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 38–44. Olender, Languages, 64, 67, 70. Serman, “Spory,” 167–74. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 84–90. See also an unwittingly comic attempt by a Russian ethnographer to describe and explain the linguistic deficiencies of “the jews”: Chubinskii, Trudy, 15–21. 22.  Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 86–87. Kalir, “Jewish Service,” 58–60. Mellinkoff, Mark, 44. Opalski, Jewish Tavern-Keeper, 13. Trachtenberg, Devil, 46–48. 23.  Gilman, Jew’s Body, 39–40, 55; idem, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” in Nochlin, Jew, 105; idem, Difference, 155. Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei, 183, 194–96, 203–5, 237, 345. Stowe, Key, 45. For Russian literary examples, see: Andreev, K zvezdam, in his Sobranie II:319. Chirikov, Evrei, 2. Reshetnikov,

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Notes to Chapters 4–5 “Budni i prazdniki Iankelia Dvorkina i ego semeistva,” Polnoe sobranie, 759, 791. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sovremennaia idilliia, in his Sobranie XV:251. 24.  Chirikov, Evrei, 2, 6–7. Chubinskii, Trudy, 13, 15, 22, 35. Philip, “Prado Epiphany,” 269. Rosenberg, From Shylock, 36. Young, Devils, 177. For a discussion of this cliché in Russian art and journalism in the 1820s–1840s, see Vaiskopf, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 279–85.

Chapter 5 References to “Taras Bul'ba” follow the Prokhorov-Stepanov edition (1963). Other references to Gogol’s writings follow his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 1.  David Goldstein thinks that this conflation is a deliberate device transforming Iankel' into a sign that triggers an amalgam of Gogolian associations necessary for the creation of the “jewish” image in the novel’s economy (Dostoïevski, 53–56). 2.  Gogol’s spiritual crises are discussed in: Chizhevskii, “Neizvestnyi Gogol',” 139, 142–43. Gippius, Gogol', 9. On the popularity of Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin, see Senkovskii, “Istoricheskii roman,” Sobranie sochinenii VIII:52. Bulgarin’s “jews” are analyzed in relation to his own cultural identity in E. Katz’s “Faddei Bulgarin’s Polish Jews,” 406–23. 3.  See V. Guminskii, “‘Taras Bul'ba’ v ‘Mirgorode’ i ‘Arabeskakh’,” in ­Kozhinov, Gogol', 242. Reviewing the new redaction of “Taras Bul'ba,” Vissarion Belinskii wrote: “As befits a great poet and artist faithful to the idea he has once chosen, Bul'ba’s bard adds to his poema nothing that is alien to its spirit; he only develops many details previously contained in the work’s main idea” (“Retsenzii i zametki, ianvar' 1843 g.,” Polnoe sobranie VI:661). 4.  Gogol' spelled out his view of “Taras Bul'ba”’s political message in a letter (18.IV.1837) to Vasilii Zhukovskii (XI:98). On fabricated historical and folkloric sources, see: Grabovych, “Evreis'ka tema v ukraïns'kii literaturi XIX ta pochatku XX storichchia,” Do istoriï, 242. Vozniak, Psevdo-Konys'kyi, 26. See also P. Kulish’s letters in Zviniatskovskii, Nikolai Gogol', 281, 286. Istoriia Rusov is discussed in: Masanov, V mire psevdonimov, 94–98. Karpov, Kriticheskii obzor, 45, 121. Mashinskii, Istoricheskaia povest', 98–99. Oksman, “Neosushchestvlennyi zamysel,” 215–20. Vozniak, Psevdo-Konys'kyi, 91, 135–53. For the discussion of “Taras Bul'ba”’s other sources, see: I. Kamanin, “Nauchnye i literaturnye proizvedeniia Gogolia po istorii Malorossii,” in Dashkevich, Pamiati, 78. S. Krasil'nikov, “Istochniki ­sobraniia ukrainskikh pesen N. V. Gogolia,” in Gippius, N. V. Gogol' II:377–406. Mashinskii, Istoricheskaia povest', 167. E. Prokhorov, “Istoricheskie i fol'klornye istochniki ‘Tarasa Bul'by’,” in Gogol', Taras Bul'ba, 201, 207. Vozniak, PsevdoKonys'kyi, 24–26. 5.  See Gogol’s letters to I. Sreznevskii (6.III.1834) and S. Shevyrev (25. VIII.1839), Polnoe sobranie X:298–99; XI:241. Pushkin, “Sobranie sochinenii ­Georgiia Koniskogo” (XII:18–19) and “Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki” (XII:27). Senkovskii, “Istoricheskii roman,” 49. See also Dolinin, Istoriia, 121, 207. Kar-

Notes to Chapters 5–6 pov, Kriticheskii obzor, 11–12. Kulish, “Ob otnoshenii malorossiiskoi slovesnosti k obshche-russkoi,” Chernaia rada, 237. 6.  Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 78. Pogodin, “‘Nevskii al'manakh’ na 1827 god,” 194–96. 7.  Poliakov, Histoire II:194. Vaiskopf, Poktyvalo Moiseia, 59–63. See some contemporary reviews of “Taras Bul'ba”: Belinskii, “O russkoi povesti i povestiakh g. Gogolia” (I:292–93, 305). Pogodin, “Pis'mo iz Peterburga,” 445. Senkovskii, “­Literaturnaia letopis'. Mart, 1835,” 31; idem, “Literaturnaia letopis'. Fevral' 1843,” 23. 8.  Mark Al'tshuller gives too much credit to Ivanhoe’s spirit of tolerance, claiming that “if Scott had written ‘Taras Bul'ba,’ his Andrii would have married the fair Polish woman and the old Taras would ultimately have blessed their union” (Epokha, 259–60). I think the critic misreads Ivanhoe, whose protagonist marries his religious and ethnic kin despite Rebecca’s charm because, as Scott’s narrator clearly states, the knight is revolted by the very idea of Rebecca’s “jewishness” (312). 9.  See Robbins, Prodigal Son, 10. 10.  Belyi, Masterstvo, 50–51, 69–70.

Chapter 6 1.  On the archetypal significance of the story’s first scene, see Meletinskii, “Transformatsii arkhetipov v russkoi klassicheskoi literature,” Literaturnye arkhetipy, 161. For an example of the Christological use of Isaac’s near-sacrifice, see the Ukrainian Passion Play, “Deistvie na strasti Khristovy spisannoe” (Kiev, 17th c.): “Scene 7: Isaac, to be sacrificed by his father to God the father, walks, carrying his own firewood and prefiguring Christ, who carries his cross to the Golgotha” (Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedeniia I:550). 2.  Kamanin, “Nauchnye i literaturnye proizvedeniia,” 122–23. Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 84. 3.  See Mary’s designation as panna, panianka, and matka i panna in “Uryvky rizdvianoï misteriï” (17th c.) and “Dialogus de Passione Christi” (1670), in Rezanov, Drama I:179–80, 193. See Mary’s exchange with Jesus in “Dialogus de Passione Christi” (idem, 188–90, 193). Jesus’ rebuke to Mary in this play is traceable to John (2:3–5) and Luke (2:44–50). 4.  See Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 92. McLean, “Gogol’s Retreat from Love,” 233–36. 5.  Somov, Kupalov vecher, 109. 6.  As in the following statements, for example: “Look at this saber—this is your mother! [. . .] A Cossack is not made for mixing with women” (1835:98/1842:6). “When the entire army left Zaporozh'e, all heads turned back: ‘Farewell, our mother!’ they said almost in unison” (1835:119/1842:32). Cf. the same motif in “Strashnaia mest'”: “We’d be good for nothing if we listened to our wives[. . . . ] The pipe is our wife, and the sharp saber” (I:247). 7.  “Dialogus de Passione Christi,” 194.

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Notes to Chapters 7–8

Chapter 7 1.  Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 83–84. On the Jewish participation in warfare, see: Borovoi, “Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naia voina,” 90, 119–20. Shmuel Ettinger, “Jewish Participation in the Settlement of Ukraine”; and Frank Sysyn, “The Jewish Factor in the Khmelnytsky Uprising,” in Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 25–26, 48. Frank Sysyn, “Ukrainian Social Tensions Before the Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising,” in Baron, Religion, 57–59. 2.  Bulgarin, Mazepa, Sochineniia, 517. See some contemporary examples of “jewish” cowardice and effeminacy: Lazhechnikov, Basurman, Polnoe sobranie X:218. Narezhnyi, Bursak, Sochineniia II:179. Somov, “Gaidamak,” Kupalov vecher, 25, 32. 3.  Cf. Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, Sochineniia, 62. Pearls in the image of “the jewesses” may also allude to the Russian proverb about “a pearl in a dung heap” (­burmidskoe zerno v navoznoi kuche), thus evoking the traditional association of “the jews” with excrement (see Part I Ch. 4). For the role of pearls in the traditional costume of Ashkenazi women, see Rubens, History, 105–7. 4.  “Byla bym sia z Angelom, kelikh bym otniala,/Alem ne est' Iakovom, pevne bym prograla” (“Dialogus de Passione Christi,” 189).

Chapter 8 1.  See the fortress of faith allegory in Ukrainian religious drama: “Bor'ba tserkvi s diavolom. Explicatio Exempli” (1737), in Derzhavina, P'esy, 155. For Gogol’s conceptualization of sacred and profane spaces, see Connolly, Intimate Stranger, 44. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 82. See also Gogol’s letters (XI:62, 108, 268–69) to N. Prokopovich (27.IX.1836), N. Smirnov (3.IX.1837), V. Zhukovskii (4.I.1840). 2.  On Gogol’s familiarity with Nie-Boska komedia, see Petr Semenenko’s letter to Bohdan Janski (17.III.1838) in Veresaev, Gogol', 236. 3.  Emmerson, Antichrist, 84. 4.  See “Dialogus de Passione Christi,” 197, 199. 5.  Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 214, 216–17. 6.  Istoriia Rusov, 41, 48–49, 57. Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina I.3:144–45; II.2:108. Pushkin, “Sobranie sochinenii Georgiia Koniskogo,” XII:24. On the Unia’s history, see Gudziak, Crisis, 209–44. 7.  Gogol' shows familiarity with Polish sources in a letter to Sreznevskii (6.III.1834, X:298). A catalog of profanations perpetrated by Cossacks is found in Pawel Ruszel’s Fawor niebieski [Heaven’s favor] (1649). Incidentally, this Polish source accuses “the jews” of leasing Catholic churches, thus lumping them together with the Cossacks as religious pollutants in the same way Ukrainian sources lump together “the jews” and the Poles (Frank Sysyn, “A Curse on Both Their Houses: Catholic Attitudes Toward the Jews and Eastern Orthodox During the Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising in Father Pawel Ruszel’s Fawor niebieski,” in Almog, Israel, xi–xxi). See also Sysyn, “Jewish Factor,” 45–49.

Notes to Chapter 8 8.  On the Eucharist in Russian anti-Catholic polemics, see: Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 204–5. Popov, Istoriko-literaturnyi obzor, 83, 102, 212, 220, 225. On Eucharistic symbolism in “Taras Bul'ba,” see Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 277–78. Vaiskopf, Siuzhet, 447–50. 9.  Kulish, Chernaia rada, 6–7. Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina I.3:13, 63; II.2:1–2. Cf. the interpretation of this image in Pawel Ruszel’s Fawor niebieski: “Christians, redeemed through Christ’s blood, are sold by their lords, through leaseholds of estates, into slavery to the godless Jews who by God’s law should be the slaves” (cited in Sysyn, “Curse on Both Their Houses,” xxiii). See ­examples of the “jewish” exploitation motif in Ukrainian religious drama and in the writings of Gogol’s contemporaries: “Paskhal'naia p'esa Dovgalevskogo” (1737), in Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 107–8. Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 41, 62, 169; idem, “Parokhod,” Sochineniia Faddeia Bulgarina I.2:48. Glinka, “Luka da Mar'ia,” Pis'ma k drugu, 381. Somov, “Kievskie ved'my,” 97. Zotov, Leonid, ili nekotorye cherty iz zhizni Napoleona, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana I:225. 10.  Cf. Taras’ view of Catholics with that expressed in Gogol’s earlier story: “Father Afanasii declared that anyone dealing with Basavriuk will be considered a Catholic, an enemy of Christ’s church and of all humanity” (“Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala” [St. John’s eve], I:140). See the criticism of Ukrainian historiography: Borovoi, “Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naia voina,” 81. Ettinger, “Jewish Participation,” 29. Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, 4, 76, 207. Kohut, “Khmelnytsky Uprising,” 141–63. J. Pelenski, “The Cossack Insurrections in Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” in Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 38–39. Sysyn, “Jewish Factor,” 49–50. 11.  Granovskii, “Sud'by evreiskogo naroda,” 117–21. “Chomu Rusyny gaidamaky?” in Gnatiuk, “Galyts'ko-Rus'ki narodni legendy,” 114.­ 12.  We find the same usage of the verb krestit' in Evgenii Grebenka’s Chaikovskii (1843), 102. For some examples of such specifically “jewish” executions, see: Bulgarin, Mazepa, 430–32. Lermontov, “Prestupnik,” Sobranie II:48–49. SaltykovShchedrin, Sovremennaia idilliia XV:265–66. Somov, “Gaidamak,” 32–34. Zotov, Leonid, 229, 241–42. 13.  Grosser, Halperin, Anti-Semitism, 168, 179. “Zhydy shukaiut' Khrysta,” in Kolessa, Ukraïns'ka usna slovesnist', 196. Poliakov, Histoire I:371. Rubens, Jewish Iconography, 101 (Fig. 957). Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 60–61. Sreznevskii, ­Zaporozhskaia starina I.3:74. Vitte, Vospominaniia II:210. “The Monk and Jew,” in New Winter Evening’s Companion, 20–21. 14.  See “Slovo o zbureniu pekla” (17th c.), in Rezanov, Drama Ukraïns'ka I:159–60. For more examples of (religious) laughter accompanying the execution of “the jews” in literature and folklore, see: Bulgarin, Dmitrii Samozvanets II:119–20. Nikolai Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, ili Smolensk v 1812 godu, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana II:323. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep I:88–91. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 133–34. The early draft of “Taras Bul'ba” is cited in Gippius, Gogol', 75. Elena Katz’s reading of the mob’s laughter as a testimony “to the fact that Jews look far

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Notes to Chapters 8–9 too powerless for Gogol to have thought of them as devils” (Neither with Them, Nor Without Them, 67) illustrates the danger of inattention to traditional imaginative patterns in secular art. As does Gary Rosenshield’s statement that “when the Cossacks laugh at the Jews drowning in the river, they are not laughing because their enemies’ death is amusing to them [. . .] but because they cannot help laughing; the dangling legs of the Jews encased in outlandish shoes and stockings elicit laughter from Cossacks just as would someone tripping on a banana peel” (Ridiculous Jew, 59). 15.  See Stepan Lukoms'kyi’s treatise in Franko, “Studiï nad ukraïns'kymy ­narodnymy pisniamy,” Zibrannia XLIII:171–73. Wojciech Miaskowski, “Diary of a Journey to the Zaporozhian Host,” in Sysyn, “Jewish Factor,” 43. Glinka, “­Zinobii Bogdan Khmel'nitskii,” Pis'ma k drugu, 333. Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, 4. 16.  Zviniatskovskii, Nikolai Gogol', 300. See also Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, 119, 207–9. Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 79. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 282–83. Gary Rosenshield, who claims to have “deconstructed” this deceptive gap between the Cossacks’ lifestyle and theological status, unwittingly demonstrates to what extent today’s critics can miss the resonance of “Taras Bul'ba” in Gogol’s interpretive community by underestimating the power of traditional religious patterns in secular art (Ridiculous Jew, 76–84). 17.  Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 8–42; idem, Russia, Poland, 344– 45. Gleb Struve, “Mickiewicz in Russian Translation and Criticism,” in Lednicki, Adam Mickiewicz, 128, 137. Veresaev, Gogol', 235–36. See also Gogol’s letter (23.V.1838) to A. S. Danilevskii, where the writer requests his own copy of Pan Taseusz (XI:133). 18.  See Duker, “Mystery of the Jews,” 40–66; idem, “Adam Mickiewicz’s AntiJewish Period,” 311–43.

Chapter 9 1.  See the preface to the novel’s 1830 edition, where Scott explains his decision not to unite Rebecca and the Christian knight (Ivanhoe, 14–15). 2.  Gogol’s problematic identity is discussed in Ermakov, “Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N. V. Gogolia,” Psikhoanaliz literatury, 179. For Gogol’s family legend, see: Magarshak, Gogol, 17. Stilman, Gogol, 40–55. 3.  Stilman, Gogol, 45–46. See also Gregg, “À la recherche du nez perdu,” 365–77. 4.  Bohdan Zaleski recalled in 1859, “The famous Russian poet Gogol was our guest in Paris. There was a close friendship between him and Mickiewicz, as well as between us, fellow-Ukrainians. We used to meet frequently at that time, gathering at night for literary and political conversations[. . . . ] We talked about Russians who were as much distasteful to him as to us. The question of their Finnish origin was our permanent subject. Gogol corroborated this vehemently with Ukrainian wholeheartedness” (cited in Hryshko, “Nikolai Gogol',” 122–25). See the discussion of Gogol’s attitude to Catholicism: Annenkova, “Katolitsizm,” 22–49. Hryshko,

Notes to Chapter 9 “Nikolai Gogol',” 122–25. Kochubinskii, “Budushchim biografam,” 651–75. Rozanov, “Zagadki,” 31. Veresaev, Gogol', 235–40. Vinogradov, “‘Taras Bul'ba’,” 31–47. 5.  See Gogol’s letter to M. I. Gogol' (22.XII.1837, XI:118–19). See also Annenkova, “Katolitsizm,” 26–27. Chizhevskii, “Neizvestnyi Gogol',” 126–58. 6.  See a selection of characteristic texts in Lednicki, Pouchkine et la Pologne, 73–92. 7.  Gibbon, Decline II:232. 8.  See Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, passim. Veresaev, Gogol', 256. 9.  Merezhkovskii, “Gogol' i chert,” V tikhom omute, 214. See also Annenkova, “Katolitsizm,” 31. Mochul'skii, Dukhovnyi put', 48. 10.  Propp, Istoricheskie korni, 202, 204. Vaiskopf, Siuzhet, 76. 11.  See the same motif in Bulgarin’s Mazepa (493) and Somov’s “Gaidamak” (25). 12.  See Somov, “Gaidamak,” 25, 32. Ioanikii Volkovich, “Rozmyshlian'e o ­mutse Khrista Spasitelia nashego” (1631), in Rezanov, Drama I:95–96. The Cossacks’ repudiation of brotherhood with “the jews” may function, among other things, as an implicit debunking of the Judeophile millenarianism of the protestant thinker Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, whose writings had adepts in Russia well into the 1830s. Stilling argued for the brotherhood of Christians and “the jews” whose baptism and return to the land of Israel were indispensable for Christ’s second coming (Toska po otchizne [Das Heimweh] III:22–23). See Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 78–79, 87, 89–90. Vinitskii, “Nikolai Gogol',” 181–82. 13.  The comic sage Mardokhai may be Gogol’s parodic response to the character of the sympathetic and learned “jewish” disciple of Moses Mendelsson encountered by Karamzin’s liberal-minded hero-narrator in Frankfurt (Pis'ma, 100, 193–95). 14.  Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 73–74. 15.  See Ivanitskii, “Arkhetipy Gogolia,” in Meletinskii, Literaturnye arkhetipy, 259–60. 16.  Cf. the same role distribution in Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter (1836), whose hero is prompted by his (demonic) servant, Savel'ich, to pledge allegiance to the impostor Pugachev and thus escape sure death by means of a dishonoring compromise (VIII.1:325). 17.  Povest' vremennykh let, in Dmitriev, Likhachev, Pamiatniki I:118. “­Torzhestvo estestva chelovecheskago” (Kiev, 1706), in Rezanov, Drama Ukraïns'ka III:243, 251. 18.  “Slovo vtoroe o tom zhe o velikom sviatiteli Ioanne, arkhiepiskope ­velikogo Novagrada,” in Dmitriev, Likhachev, Pamiatniki IV:454–56. See also V. N. ­Toporov, “Prostranstvo i tekst,” in Tsiv'ian, Tekst: semantika i struktura, 259. 19.  For some parodies of the “jewish” exit, see: Senkovskii, “Fantasticheskie puteshestviia Barona Brambeusa,” Sochineniia Barona Brambeusa, 42. Vel'tman, Strannik I:48. 20.  See, for example, Bulgarin, Mazepa, 519–22, 596. Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, 321–23. In Mazepa (521–22), a “jewish” guide takes Ognevik to a prison cell,

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Notes to Chapters 9–10 where the Poles keep his father in a coffin. See a similar situation in contemporary historiography: Istoriia Rusov, 52. On the travel motif in Slavic burial laments, see Nevskaia, “Semantika dorogi,” 229–31. 21.  See, for example: “[Jesus] whom you killed by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30); “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39).

Chapter 10 1.  Gogol', “Obozrenie vseobshchei istorii,” in Neizdannyi Gogol', 53. For more examples of “the jews” as professional spies and information traffickers, see: ­Istoriia Rusov, 52, 55, 106. Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 41, 47, 49. Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, 236. Narezhnyi, Bursak, 152–57. Somov, “Gaidamak,” 27. Zotov, Leonid, 184. See also Duker, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Anti-Jewish Period,” 336; idem, “Polish Political Émigrés,” 70–73, 79; idem, “Polish Insurrection’s Missed Opportunity,” 224–25. See the motif of “the jews” as donors equipping and assisting the hero: Bulgarin, Dmitrii Samozvanets II:130–31. Karamzin, Pis'ma, 89. Lazhechnikov, ­Basurman X:216. Narezhnyi, Dva Ivana, ili strast' k tiazhbam, Sochineniia II:416. “O smerti Ivana Konovchenka,” in Tsertelev, Opyt, 31. Vel'tman, Strannik I:46–48, 140–41. Zotov, Leonid, 184, 202, 265, 268, 282. 2.  Cf. the use of personal pronouns in the following scenes (emphasis added). Ivanhoe: “Unbelieving dog, said the Templar to Isaac the Jew [. . .] dost thou bend thy course to the tournament? I do so propose, replied Isaac, bowing in all humility, if it please your reverend valor” (77); “But rich it is well known thou art. I swear to you, noble knight, said the Jew[. . . . ] Perjure not thyself, said the Norman” (243). Pushkin’s Skupoi rytsar' [The covetous knight] (1826–30): “Zhid: Sluga vash nizkii. Al'ber: [. . .] Tak ty, ia slyshu, ne verish' v dolg” [Jew: Your humble servant. Albert: [. . .] I hear thou trusteth not thy debtor] (VII:104). “Taras Bul'ba”: “[Iankel'] zhalkim golosom molil: [. . .] Ia znal i brata vashego, pokoinogo ­Dorosha.—Ty znal brata?—sprosil Taras” [[Iankel'] begged pitifully: [. . .] I knew your late brother ­Dorosh. . . . Thou didst know my brother?—inquired Taras] (1835:118/1842:31). 3.  For more examples of “the jews” as subservient dogs, see: Lazhechnikov, Basurman X:216, 220–25. Zotov, Leonid, 559. See also Krivonos, “Sobach'ia tema,” 143–49. 4.  Cf. spitting as part of the “jew-speak” in Krasi ński’s Nie-Boska komedia, 71, 75, 103. 5.  Bulgarin, Mazepa, 510. Senkovskii, “Fantasticheskie puteshestviia,” 42. ­Somov, “Gaidamak,” 24–25. Vel'tman, “Ursul,” 355. Zotov, Leonid, 559. 6.  Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit I.4, Sämtliche Werke XVI:163. See also ­Ehrhard Bahr, “Goethe and the Concept of Bildung in Jewish Emancipation,” in Berghahn, Goethe, 18–19. Gogol' saw Frankfurt as a “jewish” city par excellence. See his letters (XI:62, 108) to N. Prokopovich (27.IX.1836) and N. Smirnov (3.IX.1837). 7.  Cf. Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (70), where “the jews” smuggle valuables hidden in tar and potash.

Notes to Chapter 10 8.  For some examples of the (satanic) link between “the jews” and vodka, see: Bantysh, Istoricheskoe izvestie, 93. Franko, “Studiï nad ukraïns'kymy ­narodnymy ­pisniamy,” Zibrannia XLIII:177. Kulish, Chernaia rada, 32. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep I:82–83, 86, 89. Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina I.2:110; I.3:55, 66. Gogol’s financial dependence on his family’s alcohol distillation business is discussed in: Magarshak, Gogol, 17. Stilman, Gogol, 62. 9.  Cf. the appearance and movements of Gogol’s devils and “the jews” in “Get'man” (III:279), “Noch' pered rozhdestvom” (I:202), “PG” (I:188), “Shpon'ka” (I:286), “Sorochinskaia iarmarka” [The fair in Sorochintsy] (I:125), and “Taras Bul'ba” (1835:118, 135–39/1842:31, 53–54, 80–83, 86). See also Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep I:19–20. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 123–25. Cf. similar physical representations of “the jews”: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 66; idem, Mazepa, 426; idem, “Parokhod,” 48, 50. Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, 323. Somov, “Gaidamak,” 27; idem, “Skazki o kladakh,” 175, 178; idem, “Kievskie ved'my,” 104. Zotov, Leonid, 229. 10.  For other examples of both comic and sinister “jewish” riders, see: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 69; idem, Mazepa, 425. Konshin, Graf Oboianskii, 320–23. ­L azhechnikov, Vnuchka pantsyrnogo boiarina IV:190–91. Senkovskii, “Fantasticheskie puteshestviia,” 42. Somov, “Gaidamak,” 26; idem, “Skazki o kladakh,” 180. 11.  Gogol', “Zapisnaia kniizhka. 1842–1844,” IX:551. For an analysis of the image of the golden eye in its connection to Gogol’s identity, see Gregg, “À la recherché du nez perdu,” 367–70, 375–77. 12.  Borovoi, “Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naia voina,” 108–9. Istoriia Rusov tells the same story about Hetman Pereviazka’s capture and liberation (52). Cf. the logic of the “jewish” helper’s execution in Bulgarin’s Dmitrii Samozvanets: “Mercy! didn’t Iudka [little Judas] serve you faithfully?—You served the devil, not me [. . .] replied the Cossack calmly” (119). 13.  See Gogol’s “Zapisnaia knizhka” (IX:545) and letters to V. Zhukovskii (4.I.1840, XI:268–69; 8.I.1844, XII:245) and M. Maksimovich (9.XI.1833, X:284). 14.  “Deistvie na strasti Khristovy spisannoe” and Ioanikii Volkovich, “Rozmyshlian'e o mutse Khrista Spasitelia nashego,” in Rezanov, Drama I:95–96; III:95. Levitina, Russkii teatr I:127–28. 15.  B. Gorev, “Russian Literature and the Jews,” in L'vov-Rogachevskii, History, 17. Mashinskii, Istoricheskaia povest', 84. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 135. One Soviet critic has even argued that Iankel' helps Taras because “he is a family man and a father too,” thus confusing Taras’s Warsaw host with the childless Iankel' (cited in Zviniatskovskii, Nikolai Gogol', 306). 16.  See Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 68–70. Echeruo, Conditioned Imagination, 35–37, 42–43. Hunter, “Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” 238–40. Maccoby, “Figure,” 57, 69. Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:219–20. Rosenberg, From Shylock, 84, 89, 100–101. 17.  See Kukol'nik, Statuia Kristofa v Rige, ili Budet voina! in his Sochineniia II:331–32. Rozov, “Traditsionnye tipy,” 125–26, 131. Zotov, Leonid, 201. See also Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 91.

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Notes to Chapters 10–11 18.  Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel'’ Gogolia,” O proze, 320–21. See also Vaiskopf, “Sem'ia,” 90. 19.  See, for example, Kulish, “Peredovye Zhidy,” 136. 20.  Published in 1829 and cited in Dolinin, Istoriia, 220.

Chapter 11 1.  References to Turgenev’s literary works follow the 1978–83 edition of his ­ olnoe sobranie sochinenii; Turgenev’s correspondence is cited from the 1961–63 ediP tion of his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS. Pis'ma). Chekhov’s stories and correspondence (hereafter PSS. Pis'ma) are cited from the 1974–82 edition of his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 2.  A. S. Dolinin, “Turgenev i Chekhov,” in Brodskii, Tvorcheskii put', 282–83. Mints, “Mesto ‘turgenevskoi kul'tury’ v ‘kartine mira’ molodogo Chekhova,” ­Poetika, 269. 3.  See Dostoevskii’s letters (I.1844, 30.IX.1844) to his brother Mikhail in Pis'ma I:69, 73. See M. P. Gromov’s and I. Iu. Tverdokhlebov’s commentary in Chekhov (XI:388). 4.  See Chekhov’s letters to I. L. Leont'ev (9.III.1892) and A. S. Suvorin (17. III.1892), PSS. Pis'ma V:20, 25. Turgenev’s letters to E. E. Lambert (28.X.1862; 22.VIII.1864; 28.II.1865), PSS. Pis'ma V:71, 278, 352. 5.  Lea, “Tolerance Unlimited,” 166–77. 6.  Bulgarin, “O tsenzure v Rossi i o knigopechatanii voobshche,” Vidok ­Figliarin, 51, 55n.15. Levitina, Russkii teatr I:137–38, 147. On Lermontov’s “­Ispantsy,” see Grossman, “Lermontov i kul'tury vostoka,” 716–18. On Rossiiskii Zhilblaz, see ­Iurii Mann, “Primechaniia,” in Narezhnyi, Sochineniia I:610. See also Drizen, Dramaticheskaia tsenzura, 102–3. 7.  Z. Z., “Novye knigi,” 1–2. 8.  See contemporary reactions to Shchepkin’s performances as Isaac and Sheva, including Gertsen’s letter to N. Ketcher (17.I.1844) and Verstovskii’s letter to A. Gedeonov (31.I.1846), in Grits, M. S. Shchepkin, 324, 356. See also Levitina, Russkii teatr I:140. 9.  See “Dnevnik znakomogo cheloveka,” 157–59. “Dopolnitel'nyi spisok lits,” 245–47. “Postupok Illiustratsii i protest,” 132–35. 10.  “Dopolnitel'nyi spisok lits,” 246. 11.  Goldstein, Dostoïevski, 82–111. Kostomarov, “Iudeiam,” 52. 12.  Erich Haberer, “Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism and Populism: A Reappraisal of the Russian and Jewish Response to the Pogroms of 1881–1882,” in Klier, Pogroms, 102, 107. Haberer, Jews, 208–10. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 290–310. Moshe Mishkinsky, “‘Black Repartition’ and the Pogroms of 1881–1882,” in Klier, Pogroms, 71–82. Rogger, Jewish Policies, 122–34, 173. Silberner, Anti-Semitic Tradition, 2–7, 13–15. Robert Wistrich, “Social Democracy, the Jews, and Anti-

Notes to Chapter 11 semitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” in Reinharz, Living with Antisemitism, 194–95, 197. Zipperstein, Jews of Odessa, 124–25. 13.  See, for example, Nekrasov, “Sovremenniki” (1875–75), Polnoe sobranie III:303–4. Reshetnikov, “Sutki v evreiskom gorode” (1868) and “Iarmarka v evreiskom gorode” (1868), Polnoe sobranie II:739–42, 759. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dnevnik provintsiala v Peterburge (1872), Sobranie X:507–11, 517; idem, ­Sovremennaia idilliia (1883), Sobranie XV:250, 254. Staniukovich, “Zhidy” (1879), Polnoe sobranie VII:137. 14.  See, for example, Ivan Aksakov, “Iudaizm kak vsemirnoe iavlenie” (1881) and “Obezvrediatsia li evrei, preobrazovavshis' v kul'turnyi sloi” (1883), Sochineniia III:726–31, 787–99. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877 god. Mart,” Polnoe ­sobranie XXV:74–93. Iurii Samarin’s letter to baroness Rahden (4.IV.1876), Correspondence, 255–56. On Jews and the perceived role of “the jews” in the Russian revolutionary movement, see: Haberer, Jews, xi, 94–95, 203–4, 253–55. S. G. Svatikov, “Evrei v russkom osvoboditel'nom dvizhenii,” in Budnitskii, Evrei, 93, 116–17. See also Goldstein, Dostoïevski, 128, 326. Lukashevich, Ivan Aksakov, 167–68. Rosenshield, “Dostoevskii’s ‘The Funeral’,” 490. 15.  Drizen, Dramaticheskaia tsenzura, 236. 16.  Haberer, Jews, 9–13. 17.  On the predominantly negative reaction to Jewish assimilation throughout Europe, see: Aschheim, Brothers, 63–64. Duker, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Anti-Jewish Period,” 343. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, 10–11, 300, 307. Katz, Out of the Ghetto, 86, 99, 100, 106–7. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 132. Ragussis, Figures, 92, 236. Safran, Rewriting the Jew, passim. For the popular image of the baptized “jews,” see: Belova, “Inorodets,” 415–18; “Evreiskii mif,” 142–43. Grinchenko, Iz ust naroda, 283. Nomys, Ukrains'ki prysliv'ia, 155. Vaisenberg, “Evrei,” 229. Veinberg, “Vykrestilsia,” Stseny, 150–51. On crypto-Judaism, see: Avrutin, “Returning to ­Judaism,” 90–110. Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei, 149–64. The discrimination against Jewish converts in late imperial Russia is discussed in: Maksim Kovalevskii, “Ravnopravie evreev i ego vragi,” Andreev, Shchit, 116. Rogger, Jewish Policies, 35–36. 18.  Goncharov, Fregat Pallada (1858), Polnoe sobranie VI:175–76, 184, 186–87. Kiukhel'beker, Poslednii Kolonna (1832–43), Puteshestvie, 530. Zagoskin, “Puteshestvennik” (1820–21), Sobranie III:401. 19.  Lermontov, “Maskarad,” Sobranie III:261–62. Lerner, “Prototip Zagoret­s­ kogo,” 608–13; idem, “Odin iz geroev,” 40. Pushkin, “Avtobiografiia, ­vospominaniia, dnevniki,” Polnoe sobranie XII:307. While no positive proof of El'kan’s origin exists, he does share his surname with members of Petersburg’s Jewish community. See Epshtein, “K istorii,” 106. Gessen, Istoriia I:141. For other examples of early Russian responses to Jewish assimilation, see Vaiskopf, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 289–97. 20.  See Bering, Stigma, 53, 57, 74, 110–13. Dubnov, “Furor judeophobicus,” 57. Rubens, History, 105. Michael Stanislawski, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 192–93. Verner, “What’s in a Name?” 1058–60.

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Notes to Chapters 11–12 21.  Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 42–43, 67–68. For a literary example, see Pisemskii, Vzbalamuchennoe more (1863) and “Vaal” (1873), Polnoe sobranie IV:281; VIII:353. See the traditional belief in Satan’s and Antichrist’s polyglotism: Riazanovskii, Demonologiia, 56. Adrianova, “K istorii legendy,” 228. For the same quality in the image of “the jews” in disguise, see: Bulgarin, Mazepa, 515–16; Ivan ­Vyzhigin, 162. Goncharov, Fregat Pallada, 175–76. Lermontov, “Maskarad,” 262. See also R­a fail Zotov, “Priezd vitse-gubernatora” (1839), in Sto russkikh literatorov I:202–4. 22.  Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Izbrannye sochineniia I:195. See Rachel Mordecai’s letter to Maria Edgeworth in Neville Hoad, “Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington: The Price of Sympathetic Representation,” in Spector, British Romanticism, 121–37. 23.  Bogrov, “Talmud i Kabbala po ‘Russkomu vestniku’” (1878), ­Sobranie VII:205, 212–14. See also Rabinovich, “Po sluchaiu dobrogo slova” (1858), “­Ustarelye vzgliady pri dnevnom svete” (1858), “Sobstvennye imena evreev” (1859), Sochineniia III:31–33, 42, 69, 104–5, 107. 24.  Gromeka, “Pol'skie evrei,” 183–200; idem, “Vynuzhdennoe ob'iasnenie,” 90– 95. Rozenblat, “Gromeka, ‘Pol'skie evrei’,” 69–80. “Torzhestvo ­blagonamerennosti,” 287-90. 25.  See Spektor, “M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin i evreiskii vopros,” 296–97. 26.  See Turgenev’s letters to P. V. Annenkov (15.I.1857), E. Ia. Kolbasin (27.V/8. VI.1882), L. N. Tolstoi (15.I.1857), A. I. Gertsen (27.II./11.III.1869), and G. I. ­Bogrov (16/26.III.1882), PSS. Pis'ma III:73, 76; VII:323; XIII.1:219, 269. See also N. A. Ostrovskaia, “Vospominaniia o Turgeneve,” in Piksanov, Turgenevskii sbornik, 105. Vries-de Gunzburg, “Some Letters,” 76. 27.  See Chekhov’s letters to M. M. Chekhov (29.VII.1877), F. O. Shekhtel' (12.VIII.1887), A. N. Pleshcheev (15.IX.1888), M. P. Chekhov (19.III.1891; 10.II.1899), A. A. Dolzhenko (29.VII.1891), PSS. Pis'ma I:25; II:109, 333; IV:199, 254; VIII:86. On the censorship of Chekhov’s correspondence, see Levitina, Russkii teatr I:193, 225–26.

Chapter 12 1.  For the historical evidence concerning Jewish participation in Russia’s war against Napoleon, available in Turgenev’s time, see Ginzburg, Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda, 47, 51–52, 58–59, 70–78, 81, 124–29. 2.  See Rosenshield, Ridiculous Jew, 114–28. 3.  See, for example, the execution scene in Somov’s “Gaidamak” (1825), ­Kupalov vecher, 32–34. The Enlightenment approach is fully developed in such plays as Lermontov’s “Ispantsy” and Lazhechnikov’s “Vsia beda ot styda.” 4.  See Turgenev, “Pis'mennye otvety,” 99. See also Shapiro, Turgenev, 22–23. 5.  See Turgenev’s letter to E. I. Ragozin (13/25.VIII.1872), PSS. Pis'ma IX:311. 6.  E. A. Gitlits, in fact, suggests Turgenev’s own father as Nikolai’s rather

Notes to Chapter 12 transparent prototype (“Struktura i smysl rasskaza Turgeneva ‘Zhid’,” in Mostov­ skaia, I. S. Turgenev, 67). 7.  See Turgenev’s letter to Maréchal (11/23.III.1869), PSS. Pis'ma VII:340. 8.  See annotations to “Zhid” in Turgenev IV:578. 9.  Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1847 goda,” Sobranie VIII:404. 10.  P. V. Annenkov, “Molodost' I. S. Turgeneva,” in Petrov, I. S. Turgenev I:97. See P. V. Turgeneva’s letter to her son in Petrov, I. S. Turgenev I:491–92. 11.  Panaeva, Vospominaniia, 95. Turgenev, “Un incendie en mer,” XI:294–95. See also annotations to “Un incendie en mer” in Turgenev XI:522–23. 12.  See Panaeva, Vospominaniia, 111–12. 13.  See also Zviguilsky, “Ivan Tourguéniev,” 91–92. 14.  Narezhnyi, Sochineniia II:106–8. 15.  Rozanov, “Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi,” Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie, 24–25. Cf. a revealing suggestion in Zinaida Gippius’s memoirs of the same sadomasochistic dynamic in Rozanov’s own attitude toward “the jews”: “Were Rozanov’s articles ‘pogrom-mongering’? Of course they were not, and of course they were. They were not because Rozanov never stopped loving the Jews passionately, corporeally[. . . . ] Yet these articles were de facto pogromist by virtue of their timing” (Gippius, “Zadumchivyi strannik. O Rozanove,” in her Zhivye litsa II:118–19). This reasoning cannot but remind us of the already cited French maxim that “a philosemite is an antisemite who loves the Jews.” For a discussion of sadomasochism in its relation to “the jews” in Rozanov’s thought, see Katsis, Krovavyi navet i russkaia mysl', 417–18. 16.  See Anikin, Iz istorii, 69–72. Bering, Stigma, 53. Finkielkraut, Le Juif, 84. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews, 80. Klier, “Zhid: Biography,” 1–5; idem, Klier, Rossiia sobiraet, 105–6. Susan Manly, “A Note on the Text,” in Edgeworth, ­Harrington, 62. Poliakov, Histoire II:154. 17.  Ostrovskaia, “Vospominaniia o Turgeneve,” 105. 18.  Lazhechnikov, “Vsia beda ot styda,” Polnoe sobranie XI:30. 19.  Gattsuk, “Evrei v russkoi istorii i poezii,” Sion II:1, 7.VII.1861, 4–5. Kostomarov, “Iudeiam,” 38–58. Kulish, “Peredovye zhidy,” 136. 20.  See, for example, Bulgarin, “O Platonove” (1827), Vidok Figliarin, 243–44. Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom (1835), Polnoe sobranie VII:111. Somov, “Gaidamak” (1825–30), Kupalov vecher, 86. Sreznevskii, Zaporozhskaia starina II.3:47. Zotov, “Priezd vitse-gubernatora,” 202–13. 21.  Thus, even Elena Katz’s study, which focuses on Gogol’s artistic uses of “the jews,” fails to make sense of the vocabulary of “jewish” difference deployed in “Portret” (Neither with Them, Nor Without Them, 69–70). 22.  See Turgenev, “Igra v portrety,” Iz parizhskogo arkhiva, 456–531. 23.  Danilov, “Turgenevskii ‘blagopotrebnyi starets’,” 319–23. Diktiadis, “­K ratkoe svedenie,” 48–57. 24.  In a letter to Fedor Dostoevskii, N. N. Strakhov, for example, treats Turgenev’s story as one of his most outdated [nesovremennye] pieces (cited in Turgenev

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Notes to Chapter 12 VIII:456). See also Turgenev’s letters to Ia. P. Polonskii (27.II/11.III.1869) and V. P. Botkin (4/16.III.1869), PSS. Pis'ma VII:328, 331. 25.  We find an early Russian expression of this logic in Lazhechnikov’s longunpublished drama “Vsia beda ot styda.” 26.  See Turgenev’s letter to I. P. Borisov (16/28.XI.1868), PSS. Pis'ma VII:240. 27.  See Prosper Mérimée’s letters to Turgenev (19.XII.1861; 25.IX.1866) and G. Delessert (22.XII.1861), Correspondance IV:428–29, 434; VII:229. 28.  See annotations to “Neschastnaia” in Turgenev VIII:445. 29.  We find an additional proof of a strong connection between “Zhid” and “Neschastnaia” in “Istoriia leitenanta Ergunova” [The tale of lieutenant ­Ergunov] (1868), which Turgenev completes shortly before beginning his work on “­Neschastnaia.” This story is a virtual laboratory for transposing and elaborating the tropes, motifs, and preoccupations of “Zhid” in the semantic structure of “­Neschastnaia.” Here again Turgenev is indebted to Lermontov, whose story “­Taman',” from Geroi nashego vremeni [A hero of our time] (1840), provides the subtextual foundation for “Ergunov” as a bridge between “Zhid” and “Neschastnaia.” 30.  Backès, “Naissance,” 56. 31.  See annotations to “Un incendie en mer” in Turgenev XI:522. 32.  Backès, “Naissance,” 45. See annotations to “Neschastnaia,” VIII:444. 33.  See Sendrey, Music of the Jews, 353. Idelson, Jewish Music, 457. 34.  Disraeli, Coningsby or the New Generation, Novels VIII:267. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Works XI:249. Thackeray, “Codlingsby,” Works VI:486. See also Auerbach, Maestros, 21. Idelson, Jewish Music, 472–74. Sendrey, Music of the Jews, 353–58. On the rise of the critical awareness of and preoccupation with “the jews” in music in 1830s Russia, see Vaiskopf, Pokryvalo Moiseia, 77–81. 35.  See Turgenev’s diary-style letter to Viardot (29.III-1.IV/10–13.IV.1850) in: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (30 vols.), Pis'ma II:10. 36.  See Turgenev’s letter to P. V. Annenkov (11/23.II.1878), PSS. Pis'ma XII.1:280. 37.  Mlagozhata Sviderska, “I. S. Turgenev i R. Vagner,” in Kataev, Rikhard Vagner v Rossii I:97–109. Zviguilsky, “Ivan Tourguéniev,” 84–85. 38.  Weiner, Richard Wagner, 123. For a discussion of Wagner’s work on the pamphlet’s revised version see Cosima Wagner’s diary: Die Tagebücher I:22–23, 29. 39.  See Wagner’s attacks on “jewish” singing in “Judaism in Music,” Prose Works III:83, 86–87. On the Viardot-Wagner exchange after the pamphlet’s republication and Wagner’s view of Viardot as “jewish,” see: Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher I:72, 303. Zviguilsky “Ivan Tourguéniev,” 91–92. See Viardot’s consistently negative associations with “the jews” in Turgenev’s “Igra v portrety,” Fig. 26 (p. 471), Fig. 88 (p. 513), Fig. 125 (p. 539), Fig. 127 (p. 541), Fig. 139 (p. 549), Fig. 148 (p. 555). 40.  Zviguilsky, “Ivan Tourguéniev,” 83–84. 41.  See Turgenev’s letters to William Ralston (2/14.IV.1869), Charles de

Notes to Chapters 12–13 ­ outouly (28.VI/10.VII.1869), and Julian Schmidt (3/15.XII.1869), PSS. Pis'ma C VIII:7–8, 59, 141. See also Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, I:174. 42.  See Turgenev’s letters to I. P. Borisov (16/28.XI.1868) and A. A. Fet (13/25.I.1869), PSS. Pis'ma VII:240, 285. 43.  Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher I:173. See Fuchs, Kreowski, Richard ­Wagner, Fig. 46 (p. 40), Figs. 62, 63 (p. 58–9), Fig. 106 (p. 95), Fig. 123 (p. 111), Fig.  89 (p. 175). 44.  See, for example, Bulgarin, Dmitrii Samozvanets III:262, 264. Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, 2. Somov, “Kievskie ved'my,” “Gaidamak,” “Skazki o ­k ladakh,” Kupalov vecher, 22, 104, 202. 45.  See Turgenev’s letters to P. V. Annenkov (16/28.XI.1868) and I. P. Borisov (16/28.XI.1868), PSS. Pis'ma VII:239–40. 46.  Backès, “Naissance,” 56. 47.  See Turgenev’s letters to M. M. Stasiulevich (2/14.XII.1881) and M. G. ­Savina (3/15.XI.1881), PSS. Pis'ma XIII.1:155–56. 48.  Zviguilsky, “Ivan Tourguéniev,” 91. 49.  See Chekhov, “Sara Bernar” and “Opiat' o Sare Bernar,” XVI:8, 16–18.

Chapter 13 1.  See Turgenev’s letters to E. Ia. Kolbasin (27.V/8.VI.1882) and Mark Antokol'skii (1/13.VII.1881), PSS. Pis'ma XIII.1:99–100, 268–69. See also Lev Tolstoi’s letter to Sholom-Aleichem (6.V.1903), in his Sobranie XVIII:331. 2.  Gor'kii, “Publika” (1900), Iz literaturnogo naslediia, 76. See also Zinaida Gippius’s view of Judeophilia as “the sancta sanctorum of the intelligentsia’s soul,” in her essay “Antisemitizm?” (1921), Mechty i koshmar, 181. On the incident between Shchedrin and E. Kolbasin, see A. Zhuk’s and S. Makashin’s annotations in Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii XV:357. 3.  See I. Baudoin de Courtenay, “Svoeobraznaia ‘krugovaia poruka’,” in ­A ndreev, Shchit, 145. Homo Novus, “22 neschastiia,” in Muskatblit, Po Vekham, 107–8. Krestovskii, Torzhestvo Vaala (1892), 52. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, “Evreiskii vopros, kak russkii”; and Pavel Miliukov, “Evreiskii vopros v Rossii,” in Andreev, Shchit, 164–65, 167. 4.  Levitina, Russkii teatr I:146, 149; II:14–20. McLean, Nikolai Leskov, 433. “Daty zhizni i tvorchestva K. M. Staniukovicha,” in Staniukovich, Sobranie VI:764. 5.  Faresov, Protiv techenii, 301. Gor'kii, Iz literaturnogo naslediia, 277. On Bulgakov’s participation in the Judeophile collection Shchit (1916), see Kel'ner, “Dva intsidenta,” 267. For his Judeophobe sermons, see Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei, 270– 74. On Petliura’s public appreciation of Evgenii Chirikov’s Judeophile play, “Evrei” [The Jews] (1906), see Abramson, Prayer, 136–37. 6.  Kolodziej, Eliza Orzeszkowa’s Feminist and Jewish Works, 433–34, 436. 7.  On Uspenskii’s stories, see Mondry, Pisateli-narodniki, 15–21.

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Notes to Chapter 13 8.  See, for example, its contemporary assessment by critic V. Zelinskii, ­Sobranie, 82. 9.  See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 265–67. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, xiii. 10.  Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 308–9, 342–43, 345–59. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 497. 11.  Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, xiii. 12.  See P. V. Annenkov’s letter (12.IV.1853) to Turgenev and the writer’s reply (21.IV.1853), in Turgenev’s PSS. Pis'ma II:144, 492. For an overview of the novel’s Russian reception in the 1850s, see Orlova, Khizhina, 68–86. 13.  Drizen, Dramaticheskaia tsenzura, 235. Grits, M. S. Shchepkin, 324, 356. 14.  “Nathan. What makes me Christian in your eyes is that which makes you seem a Jew in mine!” (“Nathan the Wise,” in Lessing’s Two Jewish Plays, 158). 15.  On “the jews” as the embodiment of Christian values, see: Artsybashev, Sanin (1907), 182, 225–28, 238. Gor'kii, “Kain i Artem” (1899), Iz literaturnogo ­naslediia, 36–37. Kuprin, “Molokh” (1896) and “Iama” (1915), Sobranie II:25; V:35. Leskov, “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine,” Polnoe sobranie XXX:104. Machtet, “Zhid” (1887), in Gir, Zhid, 27. Staniukovich, “Isaika” (1894), Polnoe sobranie IV:428–30, 438. On the economically anodyne “jews,” see: Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Itska i Davydka” (1892), Sobranie III:200–201. Korolenko, “Sudnyi den'” (1891), Sobranie II:312. Machtet, “Zhid,” 42–46. See some foreign and domestic precedents of this Judeophile approach: Edgeworth, Harrington, 95, 158, 236. JungStilling, Toska po otchizne I:77–81. Orzeszkowa, “Moguchii Samson,” 510–40. Narezhnyi, Rossiiskii Zhilblaz, Sochineniia I:124, 557–58, 584. Scott, Ivanhoe, 263–65. Uspenskii, “Zhidenok,” Polnoe sobranie II:644–66. 16.  For some examples of this argument in the Judeophile discourse, see: ­A ndreev, “K zvezdam” (1906), Sobranie II:355. Disraeli, Coningsby, xviii–xix; and Tancred or the New Crusade, Novels X:176, 194, 202. Lessing, “Nathan the Wise,” 157. 17.  See, for example, Garin-Mikhailovskii, Detstvo Temy (1892), Sobranie I:96; idem, “Itska i Davydka,” 193–94. Gor'kii, “Publika,” 73, 75–76. Korolenko, “Brat'ia Mendel'” (ca. 1915), Sobranie II:403–4, 409. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Iiul'skoe ­veianie,” 237. Serafimovich, “Serezha” (1903–7), Sobranie II:467, 474. Staniuko­ vich, “Isaika,” 427. See also Orzeszkowa, Meir Ezofowicz, Pisma IV:9–10. 18.  See, for example, Andreev’s “K zvezdam,” Gor'kii’s “Kain i Artem,” ­Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” and Machtet’s “Zhid.” See also the same procedure in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Edgeworth’s Harrington, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Lessing’s “The Jews,” and Scott’s Ivanhoe. 19.  Cf. Richard Cumberland’s “The Fashionable Lover” and “The Jew”; Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend; Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Belinda, Moral Tales, The Absentee, and Harrington; Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Surgeon’s Daughter. 20.  Aleksandr Kuprin is another example. Cf. his Judeophile stories, “­Gambrinus” (1907) and “Svad'ba” (1908), with their ideological opposites, “Kievskie tipy. Zaiats” (1895) and “Iama” (1915).

Notes to Chapter 13 21.  See Safran, Rewriting the Jew, 90–92, 97. 22.  See Leskov, “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine,” 88–111. “Slovo o Feodore kuptsi” and “Slovo o krest'ianine, vzemshe zlato ou zhidovina,” in Izmaragd I:26– 30. “Kupets i zhidovin,” in Sadovnikov, Skazki II:87–89. Petrova, O p­roiskhozhdenii, 1, 102, 207. See also Boccaccio, Decameron, 25–28. McLean, Nikolai Leskov, 248–49, 424, 431; idem, “Theodore the Christian,” 65–98. 23.  See Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Itska i Davydka,” 202. Gor'kii, “Kain i Artem,” 45. Machtet, “Zhid,” 18. Cf. similar didacticism in Lazhechnikov’s “Vsia beda ot styda,” 4, 12, 30, 96. See also the Judeophile versions of Shylock’s monologue in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Works XXIV:830; and Lessing’s “The Jews,” 24. 24.  See Andreev, “K zvezdam,” 359. Artsybashev, Sanin, 170, 181, 223. Gor'kii, “Kain i Artem,” 35. S. Gusev-Orenburgskii, “Evreichik,” in Andreev, Shchit, 70–75. Kuprin, “Gambrinus,” Sobranie IV:157–58, 161–62, 164. Staniukovich, “Isaika,” 427. See also Orzeszkowa, “Moguchii Samson,” 526–27. 25.  See, for instance, the crying and hysterical “jews” in: Andreev, “K zvezdam,” 327, 345–46. Artsybashev, Sanin, 183, 212, 228. Leonid ­Dobronravov, “Zhivotvoriashchee,” in Andreev, Shchit, 86–87. Chirikov, Evrei, 2. Machtet, “Zhid,” 73. ­Staniukovich, “Isaika,” 444. See also Orzeszkowa, “Moguchii Samson,” 544. Rabino­vich, “Shtrafnoi,” Sochineniia I:28. 26.  Kuprin, “Gambrinus,” 161–62, 177. Machtet, “Zhid,” 36. See also ­Orzeszkowa, “Moguchii Samson,” 516–17, 526–27. 27.  Gusev-Orenburgskii, “Evreichik,” 70, 75. F. Kriukov, “Sestra Ol'shvanger”; and Fedor Sologub, “Svet vechernii,” in Andreev, Shchit, 141–42, 216. Machtet, “Zhid,” 53, 73. 28.  See Garin-Mikhailovskii, Detstvo Temy, 102–5. Gor'kii, “Kain i Artem,” 44–45. Staniukovich, “Pokhozhdeniia odnogo matrosa,” 273, 278. Lev Tolstoi’s letter to N. I. Storozhenko (27.IV.1903), in Sobranie XVIII:330–31. 29.  Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 496. Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” Standard Edition XII:180. On sadomasochism in Stowe’s novel, see Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Rosenthal, Routledge Literary Sourcebook, 58–59. 30.  See, for example, Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Evreiskii pogrom” (1914), ­Sobranie IV:642. Gor'kii, “Pogrom” (1901), Iz literaturnogo naslediia, 81–82. Korolenko, “Dom nomer 13” (1903), Sobranie IX:415–18. Serafimovich, “Pogrom” (1906), ­Sobranie II:339–43. 31.  Gor'kii, “Pogrom,” 80–83. See also Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Itska i ­Davydka,” 194–98. 32.  Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Revekka” (1896), Sobranie IV:62–63. For the east Slavic folk traditions in question, see Grinchenko, Iz ust, 198–99, 267–68. 33.  See, for example, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sovremennaia idilliia, 265–66. Staniu­kovich’s “Isaika,” 434–45. Uspenskii’s “Zhidenok,” 666. See also Leskov’s “­Zhidovskaia kuvyrkollegiia” (1882), Polnoe sobranie XVIII:148.

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Notes to Chapters 13–14 34.  Andreev, “Anatema” (1908), P'esy, 313. Chirikov, Evrei, 6–7. Dobronravov, “Zhivotvoriashchee,” 87. Serafimovich, “Pogrom,” 344. 35.  See Michael Galchinsky, “Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Scots: Jewish and Other Questions in the Age of Empire,” in Cheyette, Image, 57. 36.  Gruzenberg, Vchera, 442. Zhabotinskii, “V traurnye dni” (1906), Izbrannoe, 44. See also Zhabotinskii, “Russkaia laska” (1909), Izbrannoe, 90. A. Gornfel’d, “Russkoe slovo i evreiskoe tvorchestvo,” in Kaufman, Evreiskii al'manakh, 178–79. 37.  See Chukovskii, “Evrei i russkaia literatura” (1908), in Ivanova, Chukovskii, 118. See Gor'kii’s letters (6.III.1908; 20.V.1908), in his Pis'ma k K. P. Piatnitskomu, 236, 253. See a similar opinion of Judeophile art in Aleksandr Amfiteatrov’s letter to A. Kugel' (15.XI.1906), cited in Levitina, I evrei—moia krov', 106. 38.  Zhabotinskii, “Dezertiry i khoziaeva,” Izbrannoe, 70. 39.  See the full text of Kuprin’s letter to F. D. Batiushkov (18.III.1909), in Levitina, Russkii teatr i evrei II:185–93. 40.  See Petr Struve, “Intelligentsiia i natsional'noe litso,” in Muskatblit, Po Vekham, 34–36. Korolenko, “Brat'ia Mendel',” 410–12. Zhabotinskii, “Asemitizm” (1909), Izbrannoe, 75. For an example of such censorship, see Gor'kii’s editorial rejection (9–10.II.1908) of Semen Iushkevich’s novel Leon Drei, Pis'ma k K. P. ­Piatnitskomu, 231. For an overview of Russian antisemitic literature at the turn of the century, see Zolotonosov, “Master i Margarita.” 41.  See, for example, Aleksandr Amfiteatrov’s letter to David Aizman (25. IX.1912), in Levitina, I evrei—moia krov', 211. Petr Struve, “Polemicheskie ­zigzagi i nesvoevremennaia pravda,” in Muskatblit, Po Vekham, 45. Zhabotinskii, “Asemitizm,” 73–79. 42.  See Barats, Tolstoi i evrei, 7–15. McLean, Nikolai Leskov, 434–35. Vassena, “Jewish Question,” 64–65. 43.  See Kel'ner, “Dva intsidenta,” 264–70. 44.  Rozanov, “Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie,” 24–25.

Chapter 14 1.  Freedman, Temple of Culture, 56. 2.  See Chekhov’s statement that he did not read English, in his letter (9.VIII.1900) to O. Vasil'eva (PSS. Pis'ma IX:97). 3.  See, for example, Chekhov’s letters to M. M. Chekhov (29.VII.1877), the Chekhov family (11.V.1887), F. O. Shekhtel' (12.VIII.1887), D. V. Grigorovich (12. II.1888), A. N. Pleshcheev (9.II.1888; 15.IX.1888), M. P. Chekhova (19.III.1891), A. A. Dolzhenko (29.VII.1891), L. S. Mizonova (16.VII.1892), A. S. Suvorin (19. VIII.1899), PSS. Pis'ma I:25; II:81, 83, 109, 173, 195, 333; IV:199, 254; V:94; VIII:242. 4.  See his letters to N. A. Leikin (15.IX.1884), the Chekhov family (13.III.1887), A. N. Pleshcheev (3.III.1888), N. N. Oblonskii (IV.1889), A. S. Suvorin (8.IV.1889; 20.V.1890), Al. P. Chekhov (8.III.1896; 17.III.1900), PSS. Pis'ma I:126; II:38, 185; III:183–84; IV:93; VI:127; IX:73.

Notes to Chapter 14 5.  See, for example, Ivan Goncharov’s letter to K. K. Romanov (13–15.IX.1886), which places Dmitrii Merezhkovskii among “the jews” (cited in Dudakov, ­Paradoksy, 261); and Aleksandr Kuprin’s letter to Ivan Bunin (VII.1909), which does the same to Aleksandr Blok (cited in Levitina, Russkii teatr II:180). 6.  See Chekhov’s letter to Solomon Kramarev (8.V.1881), PSS. Pis'ma I:39. For his opinion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and “Zhid,” see Chekhov’s letters to M. P. Chekhov (IV.1879) and A. S. Suvorin (21.XII.1886), PSS. Pis'ma I:29, 281. 7.  See Chekhov’s letter to V. V. Bilibin (28.II.1886), PSS. Pis'ma I:39, 204. 8.  See Tolstaia, Poetika razdrazheniia, passim. 9.  Clyman, “Chekhov’s Mire,” 314–15. 10.  Senderovich, Chekhov, passim. 11.  On Gogol’s presence in “Step',” see Chekhov’s letter to D. V. Grigorovich (5.II.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:190. 12.  Cf. a similar scene in Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin, 67. 13.  See Chekhov’s letter to D. V. Grigorovich (5.II.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:190. On the symbolism of food in “Step',” see Finke, “Chekhov’s ‘Steppe’,” 106–8. 14.  Huysmans, À Rebours, 34, 145–46, 150–53, 183. 15.  Chekhov makes this point explicitly in his letter (III.1886) to his brother Nikolai (PSS. Pis'ma I:224). 16.  See also Dijkstra, Idols, 220–21. 17.  See, for example, Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 64. Maksimovich, Ukrainskie narodnye pesni, 31–32. Markovs'kyi, Ukraïns'kyi vertep, 82–83, 86. Somov, “Skazki o kladakh,” 175, 188. 18.  See Senderovich, “O chekhovskoi glubine,” 320. 19.  “Die tiefste Korruption der deutschen Dichtung,” in Hermand, Das Junge Deutschland, 337–38. See the same olfactory device in Pisemskii’s Vzbalamuchennoe more, 297. 20.  Chekhov, “Zapisnaia knizhka (1891–1904),” XVII:53, 161. 21.  As Henrietta Mondry shows, Chekhov was thoroughly familiar with scientific literature on the subject (Exemplary Bodies, 41–63). Furthermore, the Wandering Jew motif is prominent in Chekhov’s notebooks: “Zapisnaia knizhka (1891–1904),” XVII:58, 132, 163. On the prototype of the story’s “jewish” hero, see Ardov, “Zhivoi original ‘Perekati-polia’,” in his Otrazheniia lichnosti, 218–29. ­Tolstaia, Poet­ika ­razdrazheniia, 43–44. On the construction of “jewish” neuroticism by modern psychiatric science, see: Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” in Eilberg-Schwartz, People of the Body, 256. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 155. 22.  Safran, Rewriting the Jew, 168. 23.  For some Russian examples, see Kiukhel'beker, Poslednii Kolonna, 531–32. Leskov, “Vladychnyi sud” (1877), Polnoe sobranie XXII:112–13. 24.  Cf. Chekhov’s letter to Suvorin (9.III.1890) explaining student unrest as the product of incitement by “the jews” and women “seeking admission to the university despite being five times less prepared for it than a man” (PSS. Pis'ma IV:33).

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Notes to Chapter 14 25.  See Dijkstra, Idols, 386–87, 400–401. Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” in Nochlin, Jew in the Text, 113–15. Sine, “Cases of Mistaken Identity,” 9–29. Wilde, Salome, 2–3, 66. See also Huysmans, À Rebours, 101. 26.  See Davison, Anti-Semitism, 120–35. Dijkstra, Idols, 343. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 86–93. Zanger, “Sympathetic Vibration,” 33–44. 27.  Stoker, Dracula, 23–24. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I:140. 28.  This implicit cultural code is also found in the early cinematic adaptations of Dracula. See McBride, “Dracula and Mephistopheles,” 116–21. 29.  Christopher Frayling, “Bram Stoker’s Working Papers for Dracula,” in Stoker, Dracula, 339–50. Gerard, Land Beyond the Forest I:320–21; II:40–41. 30.  See Chekhov’s letters to A. S. Suvorin (11/23.IX.1897) and Al. P. Chekhov (5.II.1899), PSS. Pis'ma VII:49; VIII:77. See some typical depictions of “jewish” social striving and ambition in: Pisemskii, Vzbalamuchennoe more, 293–96. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sovremennaia idilliia, 259. See also Kuprin’s letter to Batiushkov, 186. For another example of the use of the term “Jerusalem nobility,” see Leskov, “Vladychnyi sud,” 112–13. 31.  On the circulation of Wagner’s “Judaism in music” in Russia, see Klier, “German Antisemitism and Russian Judeophobia,” 526. For an example of its influence, see Viktor Burenin’s attacks on assimilated Jewish artists and critics in Novoe vremia: “Portret izraileva syna,” 2; “G. Antokol'skii i ego proroki,” 2. For some examples of the motif of the “jewish” invasion in Russian literature, see: Kuprin’s letter to I. A. Bunin (VII.1901), cited in Levitina, Russkii teatr II:180. Kornei Chukovskii, “Evrei i russkaia literatura,” in Ivanova, Chukovskii, 111–12. See also Kuprin, “Kor'” (1904), Sobranie III:198. 32.  Burenin, “Kriticheskie ocherki,” 2. 33.  Chekhov, “Zapisnaia knizhka (1891–1904),” 224. See also Chekhov’s letters to A. N. Pleshcheev (4.X.1888) and M. O. Men'shikov (28.I.1900), PSS, Pis'ma, III:11; IX.30. Russian theologian and Chekhov’s contemporary, Pavel Florenskii, furnishes another example of the same usage, invoking “the smell of garlic” in his epistolary discussion of contemporary mysticism (see Katsis, Krovavyi navet i russkaia mysl', 331–32). 34.  See Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture,” 75–78. Tolstaia, Poetika razdrazheniia, 37–38. 35.  Clyman, “Chekhov’s Mire,” 313. Senderovich, “O chekhovskoi glubine,” 327. Tolstaia, Poetika razdrazheniia, 31. 36.  For an example of “Neschastnaia”’s contemporary reception as a Judeophile work, see Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 112. 37.  See Weiner, Richard Wagner, 215. Chekhov recycles this suggestive term in “Ivanov”: a Judeophobe personage taunts the play’s assimilated “jewish” heroine with the exclamation “pekh” (XI:231). 38.  “The jews” of Chekhov’s imagination owe their bird symbolism to Gogol'.

Notes to Chapter 14­ See Chekhov’s “Step'” (VII:30–31) and his letter to A. N. Pleshcheev (28.VI.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:290. 39.  See Veinberg’s Stseny iz evreiskogo byta. See also Korolenko’s “Brat'ia ­Mendel',” 412. 40.  Viewing “Tina” as attuned to French Naturalism, Chekhov places it among those of his stories “most fit for the French reader” (V:660–63). See his discussion of “Tina” in relation to French Naturalism in a letter to M. V. Kiseleva (14.I.1887), PSS. Pis'ma II:10. 41.  See Chekhov’s letters to V. V. Bilibin (1.II.1886; 11.III.1886), PSS. Pis'ma I:190, 213. 42.  See Chekhov’s letters V. V. Bilibin (1.II.1886) and M. V. Kiseleva (29.X.1886), PSS. Pis'ma I:190, 271. See also his “Zapisnaia knizhka (1891–1904)” and “Dnevnikovye zapisi 1897,” XVII:42, 224. 43.  Cf. Chekhov’s comment to V. V. Bilibin (1.II.1886) about his possible marriage to Efros: “If a rich little Jewess musters the courage to convert to Orthodoxy, accepting the consequences—so be it; if she does not—no big loss” (PSS. Pis'ma I:190). 44.  See Chekhov’s explanation of the play’s male protagonist in letters to ­Suvorin (30.XII.1888; 7.I.1889), and his disappointement with the play as expressed in a letter to A. N. Pleshcheev (23.I.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:183; III:110, 132. 45.  See Chekhov’s letters to M. P. Chekhova (6.V.1886; 11–12.III.1887), M. V. Kiseleva (21.IX.1886; 13.IX.1887), and A. S. Suvorin (29.III.1890), PSS. Pis'ma I:241, 262; II:37, 119; IV:50. 46.  Biale, “Masochism and Philosemitism,” 305–24. 47.  See Chekhov’s letters to O. L. Knipper (14.II.1900; 14/27.XII.1900; 7.III.1901), PSS. Pis'ma IX:51, 151, 218. Senderovich, “O chekhovskoi glubine,” 323. 48.  Gleb Uspenskii, “Krest'ianin o sovremennykh sobytiiakh. Zametka po povodu evreiskikh pogromov” (1882), in his Polnoe sobranie VI:730. 49.  See Chekhov’s letters to M. V. Kiseleva (14.I.1887) and A. N. Pleshcheev (4.X.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:10; III:11. See also Senderovich’s analysis of the initial reaction to “Tina,” in “O chekhovskoi glubine,” 306. 50.  See Chekhov’s letters to N. A. Leikin (8.II.1887) and to Al. P. Chekhov (19– 20.II.1887), PSS. Pis'ma II:27, 32. Cf. the same jibe about “pharmacists” in Kuprin’s epistolary outpouring about the Chirikov incident (Levitina, Russkii teatr II:186). 51.  See L. I. Pal'min’s letter to Chekhov, cited in the annotations to “Tina” (V:660); and Chekhov’s own letters to A. N. Maslov (7.IV.1888) and V. M. Lavrov (10.IV.1890), PSS. Pis'ma II:237; IV:54–56. 52.  See Chekhov’s letters to N. A. Leikin (11.IX.1887), A. N. Maslov (7.IV.1888), K. S. Barantsevich (14.IV.1888), A. N. Pleshcheev (4.X.1888), A. S. Suvorin (6.VII.1892), N. O. Men'shikov (28.I.1900), PSS. Pis'ma II:118, 237, 243; III:11; V:90; IX:30. 53.  See Chekhov’s letter to A. N. Pleshcheev (4.X.1888), PSS. Pis'ma III:11. 54.  Tolstaia, Poetika razdrazheniia, 63–64, 97. See Chekhov’s letter to Al. P. Chekhov (11–12.IV.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:241.

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Notes to Chapter 14 55.  On “Ivanov”’s tenuous Judeophilia, see Tolstaia, Poetika razdrazheniia, 51–52. 56.  See Chekhov’s letters to Al. P. Chekhov (24.X.1891; 4.IV.1893), I. Ia. Pavlovskii (5.V.1899), and M. P. Chekhov (22.II.1901), PSS. Pis'ma IV:288; V:197–98; VIII:167; IX:208. See also A. V. Amfiteatrov, “Starik Suvorin,” in Levitina, Russkii teatr I:223–24. 57.  See his letter to V. F. Komissarzhevskaia (19.I.1899), PSS. Pis'ma VIII:27. 58.  Incidentally, his brother Aleksei, writing Chekhov (4.III.1888) about the personages of “Step',” remarked that they were “all like real, except for the Jews” [Litsa—krome zhidov—kak zhivye] (cited in the annotations to the story, VII:636). 59.  See Orzeszkowa, “Moguchii Samson,” 510. See also Chekhov’s own invocation of Rothschild as a symbol of “jewish” exploitation in his aforementioned letter to Solomon Kramarev (8.V.1881), PSS. Pis'ma I:39. 60.  Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew, 116. See, for example, Maksim Gor'kii’s imaginative dependence on this scene in “Kain i Artem,” 44–45. 61.  See Gleb Uspenskii, “V balagane,” Polnoe sobranie III:296–97. See the same device in Kuprin’s “Gambrinus,” 162. 62.  See the same mockery of sentimental art by the metaphor of difficult digestion in Chekhov’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a letter to his brother Mikhail (IV.1879): “Did Mme Beecher Stowe squeeze some tears out of your eyes? I once read her and then reread half a year ago as a scientific experiment, and this reading left me with the unpleasant sensation a mortal feels after overdosing on raisins or cinnamon” (PSS. Pis'ma I:29). 63.  Jackson, “If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem,” 67. 64.  Dostoevskii, “Pokhorony ‘Obshchecheloveka’. Edinichnyi sluchai,” Polnoe sobranie XXV:91. Rosenshield, “Dostoevskii’s ‘The Funeral of the Universal Man’,” 487–504. For an example of such a transaction in Russian folklore, see Popov, Vliianie, 90. 65.  Jackson, “If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem,” 62. 66.  See the story’s initial plan in Chekhov’s “Zapisnaia knizhka II (1891– 1896),” XVII:109. See also Aleksandr Potapovskii, “K probleme rekonstruktsii bibleiskikh i liturgicheskikh alliuzii v ‘Skripke Rotshil'da’ Chekhova”; and Ol'ga ­Komissarova, “‘Gamletovskoe’ v ‘Skripke Rotshil'da’,” in Akhmetshin, Molodye issledovateli, 84–98. 67.  See I. Tolstoi, V. Usacheva, “Verba,” in N. Tolstoi, Slavianskie drevnosti I:335. 68.  For some examples of deforestation as caused by “the jews,” see Reshetni­ kov, “Budni i prazdniki Iankelia Dvorkina i ego semeistva” (1869), Polnoe sobranie II:763. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sovremennaia idilliia, 253, 255. In Shchedrin’s Sovremennaia ­idilliia the “jewish” capitalist is also symbolized by a goose (261). 69.  See, for example, Chirikov, Evrei, 58. Maksim Gor'kii’s letters (6.III.1908; 20.V.1908), in his Pis'ma K. P. Piatnitskomu, 236, 253. 70.  Rosenshield, “Dostoevskii’s ‘The Funeral of the Universal Man’,” 499, 502.

Notes to Chapter 14 71.  Cf. the combination of these motifs (Rothschild, liberal Moscow, antiJewish violence) in the jocular comment on pogroms Chekhov makes in his letter to Solomon Kramarev (8.V.1881): “Here no one is beating the Beaconsfields, the Rothschilds, and the Kramarevs. Where people are busy working no one has time for fights, and in Moscow everyone is busy. When they start beating you in Khar'kov, drop me a line—I’ll come to visit. I love beating your kind, the exploiters” (PSS. Pis'ma I:39). 72.  The only exception, to the best of my knowledge, can be found in Elena Tolstaia’s brief comment on the subject (Poetika razdrazheniia, 98). 73.  Burenin, “G. Antokol'skii i ego proroki,” 2. 74.  On the place of this plot in Russian literature, see Kats, Muzykal'nye kliuchi, 217. 75.  For a contemporary application of this view to Russian letters, see Ivan Goncharov’s letter to K. K. Romanov (13–15.IX.1886), in his Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i, 341. 76.  This is one of the rare real-life observations of Jewish customs incorporated into the image of “the jews” in east Slavic popular cultures. See Belova, “Evreiskii mif,” 374–75. 77.  Shklovskii, Povesti o proze II:369. 78.  Chekhov, “Opiat' o Sare Bernar,” XVI:15–18. See also the explanation of the reasons behind Chekhov’s row with the liberal review Russkaia mysl' in A. S. Lazarev’s letter to N. M. Ezhov (25.IV.1888), cited in the annotations to Chekhov’s letter to A. N. Maslov (7.IV.1888), PSS. Pis'ma II:237. 79.  Gilman, “Einstein’s Violin,” 219–36. Idelson, Jewish Music, 458. For representative statements about “the jews” as virtuoso musicians lacking spiritual intuition, see “Dnevnik znakomogo cheloveka,” 158. Georgii Fedotov, “Novoe na staruiu temu,” in Boikov, Taina, 452. Metner, “Estrada,” 80. 80.  Jenkins, “Trilby,” 228–30. 81.  See Chekhov’s letters to M. P. Chekhova (14.VI.1896; 20.VI.1896) and E. M. Shavrova-Iust (27.XII.1899), in PSS. Pis'ma VI:155, 159; VIII:337. 82.  Chirikov, Evrei, 34. 83.  Burenin’s article (Novoe vremia 4494 [1888], 2) is quoted from Levitina, I evrei—moia krov' (286n.5). 84.  See Chekhov’s letters to A. S. Suvorin (20.V.1890) and M. P. Chekhova (10. II.1899), PSS. Pis'ma IV:93; VIII:86. 85.  Senderovich, Chekhov, 111–14. 86.  See Belyi, “Shtempelevannaia kul'tura,” 72–80. Bezrodnyi, “O ‘iudoboi­ azni’,” 109, 121. 87.  See Fuchs, Kreowski, Richard Wagner, Fig. 63 (p. 59), Fig. 189 (p. 175), Fig. 196 (p. 181). 88.  See, for example, his letters to Al. P. Chekhov (23.I./7.III.1898; 28.XI.1898), F. D. Batiushkov (23.I/ 4.II.1898), I. Ia. Pavlovskii (28.IV/10.V.1898), A. S. Suvorin (4/16.I.1898; 6/18.II.1898), VII:143, 157, 167, 175, 209, 343.

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Notes to Chapters 14–15 89.  Zanger, “Sympathetic Vibration,” 36. 90.  This pleasure is clearly too subtle for some of Chekhov’s readers. See, for example, the “correction” of “Skripka Rotshil'da” in Kuprin’s Judeophile story “Gambrinus” whose “jewish” hero loses both his violin and the control of his left hand during a pogrom and switches to an improvised wind instrument (IV:181– 83). Kuprin thus removes him as a contender in the field of cultural production, combining the resolution of the issue of “the jews” in art with taboo indulgence in the physical abuse of the effeminate “jews.”

Chapter 15 Unless indicated otherwise, Isaak Babel’s writings and correspondence are cited from his Sochineniia in two volumes (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991). 1.  See Hess, Germans, 9. Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” On Jews, 61. 2.  See Christoph Daxelmüller, “Organizational Forms of Jewish Popular Culture Since the Middle Ages,” in Hsia, In and Out of the Ghetto, 34–37. For a striking example of such de-Christianizing adaptation of Gentile culture by premodern Jewish communities, see Curt Leviant’s King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969). 3.  Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Sämtliche Werke XVII:391–92. 4.  Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs, 16–18, 28–42, 58. See also Mellinkoff, Outcasts I:91. 5.  Ben Halpern, “Reactions to Antisemitism in Modern Jewish History,” in Reinharz, Living with Antisemitism, 6–7. Harrowitz, Antisemitism, 69. Rider, ­Modernité viennoise, 12. See also Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews, 125–27. Haberer, Jews and Revolution, 5–8. Israel, European Jewry, 253. 6.  Konstantin Burmistrov, “Krovavyi navet v Rossii: problema istochnikov,” in Burmistrov, Ksenofobiia, 33–34. 7.  See Pasternak’s letter to Maksim Gor'kii (7.I.1928), in his Sobranie V:238–39. 8.  Bogrov, “Zapiski evreia” (1870–71), Sobranie I:2, 4, 6–8, 74. Rabinovich, “Sobstvennye imena evreev” (1859) and “Shtrafnoi” (1859), Sochineniia I:41–43; III:65–99. See also Zhabotinskii, “Toska o patriotizme” (1903), in Ivanova, ­Chukovskii, 55–57. 9.  Buber, “The Silent Question,” On Judaism, 208. See also Harrowitz, Antisemitism, 50. Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature, 20. 10.  On the influence of the Wagnerian discourse about “the jews” on Mandel'shtam, see Katsis, Osip Mandel'shtam: muskus iudeistva, 208–50. 11.  See I. A. Kleinman, “Evrei v noveishei russkoi literature,” in Ginzburg, Evreiskii vestnik, 160, 166. Kobrinskii, “K voprosu,” 111. L'vov-Rogachevskii, History, 71. 12.  Gor'kii, Pis'ma, 231. Levitina, . . . I evrei, 151–53, 155–56, 161–66, 190–91, 208. 13.  Cited in Dudakov, Paradoksy, 261. For some examples of the Wagnerian

Notes to Chapter 15 rhetoric in Russian cultural criticism, see: Belyi, “Shtempelevannaia kul'tura” (1909), 72–80. Chukovskii, “Evrei i russkaia literatura” (1908), in Ivanova, ­Chukovskii, 111–13. Metner, “Estrada” (1908), 77–108. See also Serman, “Spory 1908 goda,” 167–69. It is noteworthy that Kornei Chukovskii’s prominence in the castigation of “the jews” in art goes hand in hand with his unresolved identity problem—his natural father was Jewish (Ivanova, Chukovskii, 19–20). Cf. Kuprin’s reference to Chukovskii as “a dirty Jew from Odessa” (letter to Batiushkov [24. III.1910], cited in Levitina, Russkii teatr II:180). 14.  See the earliest examples of this practice in “Stefanotokos” and “Deklamatsiia ko dniu rozhdeniia Elizavety Petrovny” (Derzhavina, P'esy, 465, 489–94, 529–31). For its literary applications, see: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin and Mazepa, in Sochineniia, 67–70, 494–95. Gogol', “Taras Bul'ba” (1835:124, 141/1842:53, 87). ­L azhechnikov, Basurman, Polnoe sobranie IX:130. Somov, “Skazki o kladakh,” ­Kupalov vecher, 176, 188. Rafail Zotov, Leonid, in Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana I:201, 265, 268. Characteristically, the “jewish” hero of Lazhechnikov’s “Vsia beda ot styda” speaks correct Russian, despite hailing from Bialystok, because he is eager to be baptized (Polnoe sobranie XI:95). 15.  Faddei Bulgarin’s “jewish” characters, for example, do not differ linguistically from their Christian counterparts, save for occasional Yiddish expressions adding some couleur locale to their speech (Dmitrii Samozvanets II:120). We find the same practice in: Nikolai Konshin, Graf Oboianskii (Troitskii, Tri starinnykh romana II:320). Somov, “Gaidamak,” Kupalov vecher, 25. By contrast, Rafail Zotov’s “Priezd vitse-gubernatora” lays stress on “jewish” linguistic difference as a means of detecting “the jews” in disguise (Sto russkikh literatorov I:202–4). See also Pisemskii, Vzbalamuchennoe more, in Polnoe sobranie IV:281, 288. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dnevnik provintsiala v Peterburge and Sovremennaia idilliia, in Sobranie X:508; XV:251. 16.  See, for example, Garin-Mikhailovskii, “Itska i Davydka,” Sobranie III:198, 202. Staniukovich, “Isaika,” Polnoe sobranie IV:428. Characteristically, in ­K restovskii’s T'ma Egipetskaia, the same “jews” speak alternately with and without a marked accent (16–32, 87). 17.  Le Rider, Modernité, 316–17. 18.  Levanda, Goriachee vremia, 206–7. Mandel'shtam, “Shum vremeni” and “O prirode slova,” in Sochineniia II:14, 20–22, 176. Pasternak, “Pis'ma k Konstantinu Loksu,” 182; Perepiska, 224; letter to Maksim Gor'kii (7.I.1928), in Pasternak, ­Sobranie V:238–39. Pasternak, Bobrov, Pis'ma chetyrekh desiatiletii, 59. See also Iurii Freidin, “Evreiskie prazdniki v stikhakh i proze Osipa Mandel'shtama,” in Belova, Prazdnik, 283–85. For another example, see the memoirs of the futurist poet Benedikt Livshits, Polutoraglazyi strelets [The one-and-a-half-eyed archer] (1933), marked by the leitmotif of the cultural discomfort experienced by a fully assimilated artist of Jewish origin in the early-twentieth-century Russian field of cultural production. 19.  Parnakh, “Pansion Mober,” 28–29, 34. Zhabotinskii’s translated essay, “Zumer kemps un loshn koydesh” (1926), is cited in Wolf Moskovich, “Iubileinye zametki o V. Zhabotinskom” (Moskovich, Evrei Rossii, 13). See also Markish,

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Notes to Chapter 15 “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 244–45. Andrei Sedykh, “Russkie evrei v emigrantskoi literature,” Kniga o russkom evreistve, 429–30. See Kornei Chukovskii’s letter to R. P. Margolina (11.V.1965) and Vasilii Rozanov’s essay, “Pestrye temy” (1908), in Ivanova, Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii, 10, 177–78. 20.  See Iushkevich’s letter to K. P. Piatnitskii (8.VII.1909), in Levitina, . . . I evrei, 208. 21.  Leonid Katsis forcefully makes this argument in his Osip Mandel'shtam: muskus iudeistva. 22.  Babel', “Avtobiografiia,” in I. E. Babel'. Stat'i i materialy, 7–9. Fel'zen, “Avto­biografiia,” 121. 23.  For the latest figures, see: Haberer, Jews, 94–95, 253–55. Oleg Budnitskii, “V  chuzhom piru pokhmel'e: evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia”; and L. Krichevskii, “Evrei v apparate VChK-OGPU v 20-e gody,” in Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia ­revoliutsiia, 14, 327–32. 24.  See Brym, Jewish Intelligentsia, 44–45. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877 god. Mart. Aprel',” Polnoe sobranie XXV:77, 97. Haberer, Jews, 204, 218, 222, 265. Rossman, “Prizraki XIX veka,” 11–52. 25.  Gor'kii’s letter to K. P. Piatnitskii (1–2.X.1901), Pis'ma 38. For an example of this literary subtype, see the character of David Kon in Boris Savinkov’s novel, To, chego ne bylo [That which never was] (1912), 39–44, 74–89, 186, 253. 26.  See Budnitskii, “V chuzhom piru pokhmel'e,” 16; idem, Rossiiskie evrei, 95; idem, “Russian Liberalism in War and Revolution,” 159–63. Izmozik, “‘Evreiskii vopros’,” 174. 27.  See Gippius, “Antisemitizm,” Mechty i koshmar, 180–81; and her diary (13.II.1918; 16.II.1918; 6.III.1918; 22.X.1918; 23.X.1918), in Dnevniki I:84, 90–91, 104, 148–49. See Bulgakov’s diary (17.IV.1924; 20–21.XII.1924; 23.XII.1924; 28.XII.1924; 2.I.1925; 5.I. 1925), in Dnevnik, 39, 45, 49, 51–52, 55. The BureninVolynskii legend is related, among other sources, in Adamovich’s “Table Talk,” 105. See the follow-up discussion of this legend in Roman Gul’s letter to Adamo­ vich (22.II.1961). Roman Gul' Papers, Box 18, Folder 412 “Adamovich, Georgii,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 28.  Akim Volynskii’s manuscript is cited in Levitina, I evrei—moia krov', 289n.2. 29.  See, for example, Gir’s 1929 collection of original and reprinted Judeophile stories, Zhid. Characteristically, a Soviet censor suppressed as Judeophobe a 1928 play based on Iushkevich’s tales (Levitina, . . . I evrei, 325n.131). See also Blium, Evreiskii vopros, 70–86. 30.  Parnakh, “Pansion Mober,” 81. Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura i Isaak Babel',” in Babel', Detstvo, 331–32. 31.  Aron Shteinberg observed in 1928, “Of course, in Russia and among Russians we are not Russian; but outside Russia and even among foreign Jews we realize just how Russian we are” (“Otvet L. P. Karsavinu,” in Boikov, Taina Izrailia, 466). 32.  See, for instance, Petr Struve’s charge, in a letter to N. I. Astrov (12.

Notes to Chapter 15­ IV.1921), that the “majority of [exiled] Jews view Russian history from the sole angle of ‘Jewish pogroms’” (cited in Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, 285). See a similar statement in Zinaida Gippius’s letter (5.XI.1922) to Vladimir Zlobin (Stranitsy iz proshlogo, 310–11). 33.  See Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei, 119–25, 192–210, 479–94; “Belye i evrei (Po materialam rossiiskogo posol'stva v Parizhe i lichnogo arkhiva V. A. Maklakova),” in Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, 287. Cohn, Warrant, 119. Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Klier, Pogroms, 294– 307. For an example of Soviet attacks on exiled Russian-Jewish intellectuals, see Ostrovskii, Evreiskie pogromy, 21. For the contribution of Russian-Jewish exiles to the study of anti-Jewish violence, see bibliographic entries for individual authors in Livak, Russian Émigrés. 34.  See Vadim Rudnev’s letter to Tsvetaeva (31.XII.1933) and her reply (4.I.1934), in Tsvetaeva, Nadeius'—sgovorimsia legko, 41–42. Gippius’s letters to Ivan Bunin (4.VII.1921; 7.VII.1921) and Vladimir Zlobin (5.XI.1921; 18.II.1922), ­Stranitsy iz proshlogo, 83–85, 310–11, 315. Asemitizm caught up with Tsvetaeva even after her death. Her private notes were posthumously purged by well-meaning émigré editors. See Mark Slonim’s letter to Gleb Struve (30.XI.1971): “I think that, not for my sake but for the sake of Marina Ivanovna’s memory, you should not publish her surprising antisemitic attack [against Slonim] in the passage dated November 25, 1924. This passage shocked me for various reasons (including the Jewish origin of her husband and our conversations about Jewishness during which she stressed her impatience with religious and racial distinctions). She knew (we discussed this as well) that my father had converted to Russian Orthodoxy; that I had been brought up outside the Jewish religion, tradition, and milieu; and that my maternal uncles, for example Iulii Aikhenval'd, were also baptized and ‘assimilated’ [. . .] I believe that if Marina Ivanovna were alive, she would purge these lines herself. And I can only agree with your editorial decision to omit this passage” (Gleb Struve Collection, Box 137, Folder 1 “Slonim, Mark Correspondence,” Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University). See also Anatolii Shteiger’s letter to Zinaida Shakhovskaia (9.XII.1935), who purged the following lines when publishing it in her autobiography (Otrazheniia, 98): “I understand antisemitism but I am not an antisemite—in your letters antisemitism is more and more persistent. Is it deliberate or not?” (Schakhovskoy Family Papers, Series I, Zinaida Schakhovskoy Papers, Box 1, Folder 41, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College). 35.  See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 179. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 175–76. Schiff, Véra, 350. For a survey of “the jews” in Nabokov’s Russian and English fiction, see Maxim Shrayer, “Jewish Questions in Nabokov’s Art and Life,” in Connolly, Nabokov, 73–91. That Nabokov was keenly aware of the problems posed by the lexicon of “jewish” difference for the artistic representation of “the jews” is abundantly clear from his discussion of such representation with Mark Aldanov. See Nabokov’s letters (21.I.1942; 6.V.1942; 20.V.1942) and Aldanov’s responses (23.I.1942; 13.V.1942; 31.V.1942) in Mark Aldanov’s collection, Box 6, Folder “Nabokov, Vladimir Vl,”

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Notes to Chapter 15 Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 36.  See Shmuel Bunim, “Russes et Juifs russes dans les colonnes du Parizer Haynt des années 20 et du début des années 30,” in Moskovich, Evrei Rossii, 158, 166–67. On the anti-Jewish sentiment among Russian exiles, see Izmozik, “ ‘­Evreiskii vopros’,” 167–78. On the role of Russian émigrés in the spread of the Protocols and the émigré contribution to Hitler’s movement, see: Laqueur, Russia and Germany, 53–79, 108–17, 122–25. Kellogg, Russian Roots of Nazism, passim. See also R. Ganeli, “N. E. Markov 2–i o svoem puti ot chernosotenstva k gitlerizmu,” in El'iashevich, Evrei v Rossii, 213–14, 216–17. 37.  See Dovid Knut’s account of his public reading in 1937: “To mark the centennial of Pushkin’s death, Sergei Lifar’ organized in Paris an exhibit[. . . . ] Several Russian poets were asked to participate in the opening ceremony. I knew that the audience surely counted, among others, a number of former Black Hundred heroes and the surviving members of the Romanov dynasty in whose opinion the Russian revolution was the work of a Yid gang. I recited my poem about a Jewish funeral in Kishinev under the pretext that it contained a few lines about Pushkin. After I had finished, the hall fell silent and I knew the reason perfectly well[. . . . ] I do not know how long this tense silence would have lasted had not Bunin risen to the podium and embraced me. And at that very moment I heard applause” (“Bunin v bytu” [Bunin in everyday life] [1953], cited in Khazan, “Dovid Knut v Palestine i Izraile,” 354–56). See also Otsup, “Iz dnevnika,” 157–58. 38.  On the role of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in émigré cultural life, see: Adamovich, “Table Talk,” 110–11. Berberova, Kursiv moi, 344, 346. Ianovskii, ­Polia Eliseiskie, 97, 128. Vladislav Khodasevich’s letter to Nina Berberova (8.IV.1938) in his “Pis'ma,” 319. I. Levitan, “Russkie izdatel'stva v 1920-kh gg. v Berline,” in Kniga o russkom evreistve, 448. Nosik, “‘ . . . Ne vyshlo by ni odnoi strochki po-russki’,” 501–6. Sedykh, “Russkie evrei v emigrantskoi literature,” in Kniga o ­russkom evreistve, 426–47. Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia, 43–44, 144. See also the ongoing series, edited by Mikhail Parkhomovskii, Evrei v kul'ture russkogo zarubezh'ia (1992–). For an example of the right-wing discourse on Russian émigré literature and the role of “the jews” in it, see the Russian supplement to the Nazi journal, Judenkenner—Zhidoved (no. 5, XI.1935). See also Garf, “Literaturnye pelenki,” 6. Odinokii, “Iz dnevnika,” 5. 39.  Iuniverg, “Evrei izdateli,” 137. Shteiger’s letter to Zinaida Shakhovskaia (5.VII.1935) is cited in Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia, 177. See also Vasilii Maklakov’s letter to Vasilii Shul'gin (23.XII.1929), in Oleg Budnitskii, “‘Ostavim sviatochnye temy i pereidem k evreiskomu voprosu’,” in Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, 414. An anonymous letter, signed “Antisemite,” to Zinaida Gippius (5.VII.1921) describes the lot of Russian émigré writers as “very difficult because you depend on Jewish money, whereas the purely Russian press is nowhere to be found in emigration” (Zinaida Gippius Papers, Series 1, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 17, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College).

Notes to Chapter 15 40.  A striking example of the former attitude is found in the collective Jewish mea culpa by I. M. Bromberg, G. A. Landau, I. O. Levin, D. O. Linskii, V. S. Mandel', and D. S. Pasmanik, Rossiia i evrei (Berlin: Osnova, 1924). The second attitude is exemplified by the Russian-Jewish journal Evreiskaia tribuna [Jewish tribune], whose collaborators will later challenge Nazi propaganda, engineering the Bern trial against The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with the help of political liberals among Russian émigré writers and politicians. See Budnitskii, “S. G. Svatikov i ego bor'ba na ‘evreiskom fronte’,” in his Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, 25. Evreiskaia tribuna also appeared in French. See bibliographical entries for individual authors in Livak, Russian Émigrés. 41.  See the Shestov-Bulgakov exchange (22.X.1938; 26.X.1938) and Berdiaev’s letter to Shestov (11.IV.1924), in Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn' L'va Shestova I:289–91; II:191–93. 42.  Varshavskii, Nezamechennoe pokolenie, 227–28. 43.  See Il'ia Bunakov-Fondaminskii’s letter to Gippius (23.XII.1926) in Zinaida Gippius Papers, Series 1, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 77, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College. Vladimir Varshavskii’s letter to Iurii Ivask (3.IX.1956), in Iurii Ivask Papers, Series 1, Correspondence, Box 6, Folder 53, Amherst Center for Russian Culture. On Fondaminskii, see also: Berberova, ­Kursiv moi, 345. Gippius’s diary (11.VII.1908; 1.V.1914), Dnevniki I:140. Fedotov, “I.  I. Fondaminskii v emigratsii,” 320–22. Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 99, 214. For other examples, see: Ol'ga Margolina-Khodasevich’s letters to Nina Berberova (1939–40), in Sylvester, Unpublished letters, 87, 95–96, 106–7. Subbotnik, “Pod zheltoi zvezdoi,” Russkaia mysl' 475 (13.VIII.1952), 6; 498 (31.X.1952), 7; 499 (5.XI.1952), 8. 44.  Gugelot, La Conversion des intellectuels, 169–71, 174–75. 45.  Gippius, Dnevniki, I:403. See also Georgii Adamovich’s comment, in a letter to Iurii Ivask (24.II.1957), on the hostility of Mariia Tsetlina, the RussianJewish publisher of the review Opyty [Experiments], to the religious agenda of her émigré colleagues: “And if Mariia Samoilovna thinks that ‘there is too much Christianity’ in Opyty, you can tell her that she is an idiot. One can always put it nicely” (Iurii Ivask Papers, Series 1, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 3, Amherst Center for Russian Culture). 46.  On the stylistic and genre experimentation in early Soviet literature, see: Chudakova, Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi, 18–57. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 97–98. Nikolai Stepanov, “Novella Babelia,” in I. E. Babel'. Stat'i i materialy, 41. On the émigré reaction to the stylistic and narrative experiments in Soviet literature, see Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 28–35. In his letter to Gor'kii (7.I.1928), Pasternak writes, “I should not have been born a Jew[. . . . ] Without this, how much freer I would have been! It is not just with regard to the fascinating, dislocating life of the language that I always restrain my role and destiny with fatal deliberation. I restrain myself in everything. Does not the same fact [of Jewish birth] determine my almost immobilizing self-restraint in the midst of a society living through a revolution?” (Sobranie V:238).

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Notes to Chapters 15–16 47.  See Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn' L'va Shestova I:211. Bulgakov’s diary (17. IV.1924; 23.XII.1924), Dnevnik, 39, 49. Gippius’s diary (1.IX.1918; 5.I.1919), Dnevniki I:140, 163. Osorgin, “Russkoe odinochestvo,” 4. On Gippius’s recitation of Burenin’s epigram targeting Nikolai Minskii, see Adamovich’s “Table Talk,” 105. See also Roman Gul’s reply to Adamovich (22.II.1961) debunking the view that Minskii spoke accented Russian. Roman Gul' Papers, Box 18, Folder 412 “Adamovich, Georgii,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 48.  See Nina Berberova’s description of Dovid Knut’s language as “incorrect” due to his cultural background (Kursiv moi, 317–19). For other examples, see Khazan’s Dovid Knut (7–9, 145–46 n.37). On the polemics about the postrevolutionary language of Russian literature in relation to “jewishness,” see Katsis, Osip Mandel'shtam: muskus iudeistva, 396–405. 49.  See Babel’s letters to I. L. Livshits (10.I.1928) and L. V. Nikulin (30. VII.1933), I:260, 331. See also Annenkov, Dnevnik I:305–6. 50.  Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature, 71, 76. See also Shimon Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura i Isaak Babel',” 326–27. Zipperstein, Jews of Odessa, 39. 51.  M. N. Berkov, “My byli znakomy s detstva,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia, 203. Fel'zen, “Avtobiografiia,” 121. On anti-Jewish discrimination in Russian military academies and in matters of promotion to officer rank, see D. Raskin, “Evrei v sostave rossiiskogo ofitserskogo korpusa v XIX-nachale XX veka,” in El'iashevich, Evrei v Rossii, 171–72. 52.  Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature, 85. 53.  Gippius, Dnevniki I:446. See also Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 18, 35–36, 52. Morkovin, “Vospominaniia,” 227. Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii, 300.

Chapter 16 1.  For some examples of this critical approach to Babel’s oeuvre, see Carden, Art of Isaac Babel, 154. Falen, Isaac Babel, 126. Rubin, Jewish Gangsters, 18. Ephraim Sicher, “Midrash and History: A Key to the Babelesque Imagination,” in Bloom, Isaac Babel, 215–17. See also Babel’s admission of the largely fabricated nature of his “autobiographical” stories in his letters to the review Oktiabr' (IX–X.1924) and to F. A. Babel' (14.X.1931), I:240, 319. 2.  Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 86. 3.  Cf. this artistic treatment of “jewish” worship with Babel’s diary (23. VII.1920) describing his participation in the Friday night service at a Hassidic synagogue. The service surprises him as “quiet” and “natural” by contrast to his expectations from the unassimilated “jews” (“Dnevnik 1920 goda,” I:385). 4.  Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (IV:95–96). On Isai’s prototype, see the annotations in Dostoevskii’s Polnoe sobranie (IV:283–84). See also an analysis of this scene in Goldstein, Dostoïevski et les Juifs, 65. Rosenshield’s inattention to the theological dimension of Russian literature’s “jews” makes him miss the inap-

Notes to Chapter 16 propriate attributes of Isai’s “jewish” worship which the critic construes as serious and genuine despite Dostoevskii’s efforts to the contrary (Ridiculous Jew, 177–78). 5.  On “Zakat”’s reception, see: Babel’s letter to A. G. Slonim (32.X.1927), I:255. Levitina, Evreiskii vopros, 71. 6.  Cf. a similar opposition between the healthy Gentile body and the sickly “jewish” one in Bogrov’s Zapiski evreia, 74. See also David Biale, “Zionism as an Erotic Revolution,” in Eilberg-Schwartz, People of the Body, 285, 298. Breines, Tough Jews, 165–66. Marina Mogil'ner, “Evreiskaia antropologiia v Rossii v kontekste ­evropeiskikh rasovykh issledovanii (XIX–XX vv.),” in Budnitskii, Istoriia i kul'tura, 116–37. Marilyn Reizbaum, “Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle,” in Cheyette, Image of the Jew, 132. Like most contemporary Russian-Jewish intellectuals who take their cue from European racial biology, Babel' believes in the existence of a distinct “jewish” race (see an entry [25.VIII.1920] in his “Dnevnik 1920 goda,” I:421). 7.  Mandel'shtam, Shum vremeni [The noise of time] (1925), II:13. See Babel', “Detstvo. U babushki” (1915), I:38; “Uchenie o tachanke” (1923), II:43; “Berestechko” (1924), II:70; “Rabbi” (1924), II:35; “Syn rabbi” (1924), II:128; “Zakat” (1926–28), II:297–98. See also Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 75. 8.  See also Babel’s war diary ([23.VII.1920], “Dnevnik 1920 goda,” I:385). On Hershel Ostropolier, see Joel Shatzky, “Schlemiels and Schlimazels,” in Janik, Fools and Jesters, 392–93. 9.  See, for example, the parallelism of the exam scene in Babel’s “Istoriia moei golubiatni” (II:143) and Veinberg’s “Ekzamen v evreiskom uchilishche” (Stseny iz evreiskogo byta, 10–28). On Babel' as a Veinberg-like raconteur of “jewish” jokes, see G. Munblit, “Iz vospominanii,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia o Babele, 92. 10.  See, for example, the strong similarity of the depictions of “jewish” musicians in Babel’s “Probuzhdenie” (II:171–72), Shabel'skaia’s Satanisty (7–8), and Metner’s “Estrada” (80). 11.  See Konstantin Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia, 29, 40–41. 12.  See, for example, an allusion to a title in the Odessa cycle (“Kak eto delalos' v Odesse”) in Babel’s description of his literary craft: “I’ll show you how I do it [kak eto u menia delaetsia]” (Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” 28.). See also the legend he tells on several occasions about being mistaken for a robber: Babel', “Nachalo” [The beginning] (1937), II:368. Il'ia Erenburg, “Babel' byl poetom,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia, 45–46. On the merger of art and crime in the Odessa cycle, see Rubin, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, 2, 16, 24. 13.  On the association of “the jews” and their language with common crime in Russia and in the West, see Il'ia Gerasimov, “Pis'ma odesskikh vymogatelei i problema evreiskoi prestupnosti v Odesse nachala XX veka,” in Budnitskii, ­Istoriia i kul'tura, 150–51, 163. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 68–69, 76. S. M. Ginzburg, “­Evrei-razboinik,” in Kaufman, Evreiskii al'manakh, 125–33. Otto Ulbricht, “Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period,” in Hsia, In and Out of the Ghetto, 49–50, 55. For some examples of “jewish” robbers in ­Russian

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Notes to Chapter 16 literature, see: Pushkin, “Brat'ia-razboiniki” (1821–22), IV:145. ­L ermontov, “Prestupnik” (1829), II:47–49. 14.  On the noble bandit type in Russian popular culture, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 168–84. The kinship of Babel’s Cossacks and gangsters is pointed out by contemporary critics. See, for example, Nikolai Stepanov, “Novella Babelia,” in I. E. Babel'. Stat'i i materialy, 19–20. 15.  Babel' privately admitted that his status in Petersburg was legal (Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” 41), whereas his comfortable social and material situation there has been noted by several students of his art and life. See, for example, Nilsson, “Isaac Babel’s Story ‘Guy de Maupassant’,” in his Studies, 215–16. 16.  Falen, Isaac Babel, 164. 17.  See “Kostel v Novograde” (1923), II:8–10. “Konets sviatogo Ipatiia” (1924), I:112–13. “U sviatogo Valenta” (1925), II:88. Cf. Bulgakov’s diary observation (5.I.1925) that Soviet antireligious propaganda is fueled by “the jews,” who persist in their perennial struggle with Christianity: “Today I purposely went to the editorial office of Bezbozhnik [The godless] which is staffed by incredible scum[. . . . ] Like in a synagogue, said M. when we were leaving. At home, at night, I flipped through an issue of Bezbozhnik and I was shocked. Profanation, however boundless, is not the point. The point is in the clearly traceable message: Jesus Christ is depicted as a scoundrel and a fraud, no one else but him. It is not difficult to imagine whose work this is. This crime is unforgivable” (“Dnevnik,” 55). 18.  The image of “jewish” writers who, like the crowd of demons in Gogol’s “Vii,” vainly try to penetrate the enchanted circle protecting the temple of Russian literature is a fin-de-siècle critical cliché. See, for example, Chukovskii, “Evrei i russkaia literatura,” 111–12. 19.  For another example of Babel’s use of Christian symbolism to describe emancipation from “jewishness,” see Falen’s analysis of “Liubka Kazak” (Isaac ­Babel, 111–12). 20.  See, for example, Bogrov’s Zapiski evreia, 91–97. 21.  Babel', “Avtobiografiia,” 8. “Nachalo,” II:367–69. “Vystuplenie na zasedanii sekretariata FOSP,” II:373. 22.  See Babel’s letters to M. E. Shaposhnikova (12.V.1925), I. L. Livshits (23. XI.1928), V. P. Polonskii (13.X.1931), F. A. Babel' (14.X.1931; 16.IV.1938), E. D. ­Zozulia (14.X.1938), I:241, 290, 319–20, 357–58. 23.  Zholkovskii, Babel', 8, 267. 24.  Nilsson, “Isaac Babel’s Story ‘Guy de Maupassant’,” 214. 25.  On Babel’s anti-Tolstoian polemics, see Rougle, “Art and the Artist,” 176– 77. Sicher, “Maupassant en Russie,” 387–88. 26.  For an analysis of Kazantsev’s fantasy world, see Zholkovskii, Babel', 229. On the motifs of madness and delusion in “Guy de Maupassant,” see Carden, Art of Isaac Babel, 207. 27.  Babel' may have borrowed Raisa’s surname from that of the Russian-Jewish publisher Iakov Povolotskii, whose real surname was Benderskii. The books of

Notes to Chapter 16 Povolotskii’s Paris-based publishing house, including many translations from the French, circulated in Soviet Russia in the 1920s. 28.  Falen, Isaac Babel, 113. See, for example, Babel’s stories “Korol',” I:124, 126; “Otets” (1924), I:138, 142–43; “Liubka Kazak” (1924), I:148–49, 151–52. On the acceptance of the stereotype of “jewish” effeminacy by assimilated Jewish intellectuals, including Zionists, see: Daniel Boyarin, “Goyim Naches, or, Modernity and the Manliness of the Mentsh,” in Cheyette, Modernity, 81. Barbara Breitman, “Lifting up the Shadow of Anti-Semitism: Jewish Masculinity in a New Light,” in Brod, A Mensch among Men, 102–4, 112. John Hoberman, “Otto Weininger and the Critique of Jewish Masculinity,” in Harrowitz, Jews and Gender, 141–153. Ritchie Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew,” in Cheyette, Modernity, 23–39. 29.  See, for example, “IMG” (II:149); “KDO” (I:127); “Otets” (I:144); “Syn rabbi” (II:129). 30.  A century earlier this point was forcefully made in Narezhnyi’s Rossiiskii Zhilblaz, where one “jewish” character instructs another: “Remember the danger of such liaisons, especially for the Jews! Plenty of Christians seduce Jewesses, throwing them into the abyss of carnal passion, and people find this amusing. But God’s archangel save you from a liaison with a Christian woman!” (I:582). 31.  To my knowledge, only one scholar has commented, albeit summarily, on the thematic affinity of “Guy de Maupassant” and “Tina.” See Sicher, “Maupassant en Russie,” 390. 32.  Cf. Babel’s sensitivity to onomastics in the letter to M. E. Babel' (23. VII.1929) discussing his newborn daughter: “Natasha is a nice name, although her patronymic will spoil it somewhat. I had asked Zhenia to give her a Hebraic ‘label’ (I like Judith very much) but she didn’t heed my request. I don’t resent it—she is in a better position to judge” (Babel', Lonely Years, 127). 33.  Zholkovskii, Babel', 229. 34.  Babel’s obsessive preoccupation with linguistic mastery has been described as an outcome of his cultural marginality (Zholkovskii, Babel', 267). For Babel’s own comments on his stylistic work, see Paustovskii, “Rasskazy o Babele,” 17, 28, 30. 35.  Cf. the refusal of Zhabotinskii’s narrator in Piatero to emulate the stylistic perfectionism of Babel’s alter ego, a refusal serving as a farewell sign to Russian art and culture (12, 86–7). 36.  See Carden, Art of Isaac Babel, 84. Falen, “The Odessa Tales: An Introduction,” in Bloom, Isaac Babel, 145, 149, 151. Cukierman, “The Odessan Myth and Idiom,” 41–3. 37.  See Babel’s letters to A. M. Gor'kii (25.VI.1925) and I. L. Livshits (31. VIII.1928), I:242, 284. See also Munblit, “Iz vospominanii,” 91. 38.  Babel', “O tvorcheskom puti pisatelia” (1937), II:402. Erenburg, “Babel' byl poetom,” 50. See, for example, some metaphors and similes from Maupassant’s “Miss Harriet” and “L’Aveu,” which the hero and Raisa are translating. “Miss Harriet” (Contes et nouvelles I:876): “Les avoines et les blés fauchés qui couvraient le

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Notes to Chapter 16 sol comme une barbe mal rasée” [Mowed oats and wheat covered the ground like stubble on a badly shaved chin]; “La campagne paraissait [. . .] ôter, comme une fille qui sort du lit, sa chemise de vapeur blanche” [The countryside seemed to be taking off its nightgown of white vapor like a girl who gets out of bed]. “L’Aveu” (II:192): “Les avoines d’un vert clair, les trèfles d’un vert sombre, étalent un grand manteau rayé, remuant et doux sur le ventre nu de la terre” [Light green oats, dark green clover spread their large striped coat, soft and restless, on the earth’s bare belly]. 39.  Babel’s disappointment with France is a leitmotif in his letters from Paris. Even allowing for a Soviet artist’s political circumspection, it is clear that he did not find the imaginary land eulogized in his youthful manifesto. See his letters to A. G. Slonim (4.X.1927; 26.I.1928; 31.VII.1928), I. L. Livshits (28.X.1927; 10.I.1928), and F. A. Babel' (20.X.1928), I:252–53, 255, 260, 262, 280, 287. See Babel’s ironic reflection on his youthful literary ambition: “Possesed by demonic pride [. . .] I thought that writing worse than Lev Tolstoi was not worth my time” (“Moi pervyi gonorar,” II:246; cf. the anti-Tolstoian polemic in “Guy de Maupassant,” II:219–20). 40.  Viktor Shklovskii, “Isaac Babel: A Critical Romance,” Bloom, Isaac Babel, 14. Cf. Babel’s own statement: “My imaginary reader must be intelligent, educated, and endowed with a healthy and demanding taste. Generally, I think that it is best to read a story to a very intelligent woman because the good exemplars of this half of humanity possess at times an absolutely impeccable taste. The secret is to imagine a reader as exigent as possible” (“O tvorcheskom puti pisatelia” [1937], II:403–4). 41.  For some additional symbolism of the year 1883, see Zholkovskii, Babel', 80. 42.  See Nilsson, “Isaac Babel’s Story ‘Guy de Maupassant’,” 219. 43.  See, for example, Babel’s “Vystuplenie na zasedanii sekretariata FOSP” (II:373) and his letter to M. E. Babel' ([1.I.1926], Lonely Years, 67). Cf. the assimilation of artistic activity to prostitution in Babel’s “Moi pervyi gonorar.” 44.  Reproduced in Gilman, Jew’s Body, 10 (Plate 22). 45.  Rougle, “Art and the Artist,” 177. 46.  See, for example, the narrator’s interjections, whose syntactic monotony stresses the schematic unidimensionality of the “jewish” mother in the Childhood cycle (emphasis added): “Even the mother laughed at him” (“PL,” II:157); “Even the mother tasted some vodka although she did not like it and did not understand how one could like it, consequently considering all Russians as crazy” (“IMG,” II:146). 47.  See Babel’s letter to A. G. Slonim (7.IX.1928), I:284–85. 48.  See Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 27–29, 46–47. 49.  Il'f, Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 303, 314–15. 50.  See Levka Krik’s statement that “a Jew who mounts a horse stops being a Jew and becomes a Russian” (“Zakat,” II:278). Cf. the coachman Mendel' Krik’s nickname—Pogrom—and his penchant for vodka, violence, and Russian women (“KDO,” I:127; “Zakat,” II:286). For Babel’s assimilation of women to horses as objects of masculine self-assertion, see: “Argamak” (1924–32), II:131–35; “Istoriia odnoi loshadi” (1924), II:65; “U bat'ki nashego Makhno” (1923), I:111; “U sviatogo Valenta” (1924), II:87. For “the jews” as horse-traders and thiefs in east Slavic folk-

Notes to Chapter 16 lore, see Opalski, Jewish Tavern-Keeper, 40. For some examples of “jewish” riders in Russian literature, see: Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin, 69; Mazepa, 425. Gogol', “Taras Bul'ba” (1835:136/1842:81). Somov, “Skazki o kladakh,” Kupalov vecher, 190. Turgenev, “Konets Chertopkhanova,” III:301. On the poor riding skills of “the jews” as part of their general unfitness for military service, see S. Gusev-Orenburgskii, “Evreichik,” in Andreev, Shchit, 70. Krestovskii, Ocherki kavaleriiskoi zhizni, 99–100. For an example of the stereotype’s endurance, see Russian émigré writer Boris Zaitsev’s letter to his fellow exile, philosopher Fedor Stepun (3.II.1956): “I used to like riding, I was not a bad rider even as a child. (My father taught me, ‘Heels apart, heels apart!’ He made me ride in long pants, making sure they don’t roll up. I had to hold on with my knees only. This I still remember.) P.P.S. The Jews, because of their nervousness, cling to the horse’s sides with their calves—the result is not so good. (But don’t tell this to Vishniak. He will accuse me of antisemitism.)” Fedor Stepun Papers, Box 38, Folder 1327, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 51.  Cf. Babel’s description of his wife as being “in excellent form: she looks better than ever and her coat is glossy, as they say of horses” (letter to M. E. Babel' [19.IX.1932], Lonely Years, 219); and his comparison of the stylistic evolution of his art to “a move into the next ‘class’ (as they say of horses and boxers)” (letter to I. L. Livshits [31.VIII.1928], I:284). See also his discussion of the good royalties he receives from the Red Cavalry cycle, which is “a horse that will carry us on its back until the spring. A second-rate horse, to be sure, but the reader’s mind works in mysterious ways” (I:312). 52.  See Kirill Levin, “Iz davnikh vstrech,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia o ­Babele, 150. See also V. Fink’s testimony suggesting that Babel' consciously juxtaposed “jewishness” and horse riding: “He once came to see us after an unusually long absence, told us various stories, drank tea and asked my wife to invite him as soon as possible to a gefilte fish dinner because he missed good Jewish cuisine after spending all this time somewhere in the Voronezh district at a horse farm where no one has ever heard of gefilte fish” (“Ia mnogim emu obiazan,” in Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia o Babele, 102). 53.  Cf. the same episode in Babel’s “Dnevnik 1920 g.” (I:426). Symptomatically, Benia Krik undergoes the same Cossack-like transformation vis-à-vis “the jews” during the civil war: “Benia in a fanciful costume rides a horse [. . .] Tarta­ kovskii and his trepidating companions enter the courtyard. The commander of the N. ‘revolutionary’ regiment spurs his horse and raises his whip, riding toward the crouching fatmen. Tartakovskii hands to Benia a velvet pouch with unknown contents” (Babel', “Benia Krik” [screenplay], II:437). Petrovskii-Shtern points out that Babel' violates historical facts by depicting the Jewish population of the Ukrainian and Polish towns his alter ego visits as predominantly Hassidic (Evrei v russkoi armii, 402). But the scholar misses a crucial point: Babel' exercises his artistic license, transporting the reader not back in history but in Russian literature which, throughout the nineteenth century, endows its male “jews” with Hassidic appearance in order to stress their radical difference.

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Notes to Chapter 16 54.  Slivkin, “Evrei bezoruzhnye i vooruzhennye,” 141–44. See also Breines, Tough Jews, 132–35. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 141–42. Sicher, Jews in ­R ussian Literature, 76. Maksim Gor'kii particularly appreciated Sholem Ash’s simpleminded “jewish” toughs as a breath of fresh air in a literary field dominated by the hackneyed Judeophile formula and its ideological opposite (see his letter to K. P. Piatnitskii [20.V.1908], Pis'ma, 253). What the students of Babel’s art seem to ignore is the fact that Babel' is not the first to use the ba’al guf in Russian literature. ­Kuprin attempts to do so two decades earlier in his stories “Svad'ba” [The wedding] (1908), IV:375; and “Trus” [The coward] (1903), III:94–95. 55.  For a discussion of “the jews” in early Soviet literature and theatre, see Levitina, Evreiskii vopros i sovetskii teatr, 34–37, 48–54. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 191–94. 56.  See Zholkovskii, Babel', 40. Shcheglov, “Some Themes and Archetypes,” 657n.14. 57.  See Babel’s diary in which Soviet internationalism is treated as an ideological cliché whose function is to cover up the Judeophobia of Red Army soldiers (“Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:362, 394, 422, 424, 431). On Babel’s deference to Soviet censorship, see his letter to D. A. Furmanov (4.II.1926) accompanying the final draft of the Red Cavalry cycle from which “all dangerous places have been thown out, even to excess” (I:244). 58.  Incidentally, Liutov is not the only Red Army soldier whose “jewishness” is marked by glasses: “The infantry dug in three miles from the village. A stooped young man in glasses was pacing in front of the trenches[. . . . ] This peasant leader, elected and loved by them, was a Jew, a myopic Jewish youth with the sickly and contemplative face of a Talmud scholar” (“Afon'ka Bida” [1924], II:80). 59.  See, for example, “Berestechko”: “Right in front of my windows several Cossacks were going to shoot for espionage an old Jew with a silver beard. The old man was shrieking and tearing away. Then Kudria, from the submachine gun squad, took the man’s head under his armpit. The Jew became quiet and spread his legs. Kudria pulled out a dagger with his right hand and carefully slaughtered [zarezal] the old man without sprinkling himself with blood” (II:69). See another example in “Perekhod cherez Zbruch”: “A dead old man lies there flat on his back. His gullet is torn out, his face hacked in two[. . . . ] ‘Sir,’ says the Jewess and shakes up the mattress, ‘the Poles were slaughtering [rezali] him and he was begging them: kill me in the backyard so my daughter won’t see me die’” (II:6–7). 60.  Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 342. Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature, 94. Shcheglov, “Some Themes and Archetypes,” 656–57. 61.  Il'f, Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 98, 291–95, 308. 62.  I am grateful to Efraim Sicher for this information (letter to the author, June 18, 2009) and for his kind permission to reprint the caricature. 63.  For Babel’s awareness of the dove’s Christian symbolism, see its designation as a familiar of St. Francis “whom women love” (“Pan Apolek,” II:24–25);

Notes to Chapter 16 and the contrast between Madame Gorobchik (“sparrow”), the Krik brothers’ treacherous mother, and Levka Krik’s beloved Tabl, “whose name in Russian means turtle dove” (“Zakat” [story], II:260) and whose mother, Liubka, is nicknamed “the Cossack” in reference to her autoemancipation from “jewishness” (“Zakat” [play], II:278). This symbolic contrast may be additionally informed by the low status of doves and pigeons in the rabbinic tradition, which regards their keeping as an unfitting pastime. Hence its attribution to the ba’alguf as a radically new type in Sholem Ash’s “Kola Street” (see Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 142). 64.  We find another such instance of the “jewish” intruder’s symbolic rejection by the majority culture, when the pogrom mob stuffs fish (a Christian symbol) in the mouth and pants of the hero’s murdered grand-uncle (“IMG,” II:150). 65.  It is possible to pinpoint specific texts that may inform Babel’s pogrom imagery. The combination of dove imagery and flying bird down is prominent in Gor'kii’s story “Pogrom” (1901) (Iz literaturnogo naslediia, 80–83), whose probability as Babel’s subtext is highlighted by the dedication of “Istoriia moei golubiatni” to Gor'kii. And as for the killing of a hero’s pet animal by the mob, it may hail from Kuprin’s “Gambrinus” (1907) (IV:179), whose scene is also laid in Odessa during the October 1905 pogrom. 66.  Cf. the identical reaction of a “jewish” woman to violence in Babel’s “Doroga” (II:202). See Roden’s comment, “Stuffed goose neck is one of the dishes that Ashkenazi Jews regard with special affection[. . . . ] It is part of folklore” (Book of Jewish Food, 130). 67.  “Perekhod cherez Zbruch,” II:6–7. In the already mentioned scene from Panas Myrnyi’s Khiba revut' voly, iak iasla povni? (1875), two Ukrainian boys twist the necks of sparrows and smash the birds with stones to punish them for their part in the Crucifixion. The avengers then proceed to harass “jewish” boys (Tvory, I:365–67). The kinship of this graphic episode to the smashing of the boy’s turtle dove in “Istoriia moei golubiatni,” as well as its focus on the “jewish” bird’s neck, suggest that Babel' may be using Myrnyi’s novel to his own ends. 68.  Cf. the verbal and situational parallelism of Liutov’s confrontation with the goose’s owner (II:34); of his exchange with the daughter of a murdered “jewish” man (“Perekhod cherez Zbruch,” II:7); and of the words addressed by Cossack pogromists to their victim’s family (“Berestechko,” II:69). 69.  Andrew, “Structure and Style in the Short Story,” 377. Cf. the same application of the term “clean” [chistyi] to a woman soon to be “defiled” [portit'] by a syphilis-infected Cossack in Babel’s “Sashka Khristos” (1924) (II:53). 70.  Cf. an even more eroticized description of a Red Cavalry officer who plays “Romeo” with his “infatuated” horse (“Nachal'nik konzapasa” [1923], II:16). 71.  Shcheglov, “Some Themes and Archetypes,” 653–70. 72.  See Shcheglov, “Some Themes and Archetypes,” 656. In the war diary, Babel' sees his inability to abuse civilians as atypical of a Red Cavalry fighter (“Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:371, 397, 399). Cf. Liutov’s confrontation with the goose’s

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Notes to Chapter 16 owner and the implicit sexual violence in the requisition scene in Turgenev’s “Zhid,” where a marauding Russian soldier spars with a “jewish” female over her poultry (IV:115). 73.  Cf. Babel’s own fear of being revealed as a Jew in front of the Cossacks by their Jewish hosts (“Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:363, 366, 385, 407). 74.  See “Kladbishche v Kozine” (1923), II:60; “Berestechko,” II:69. See also Babel’s “Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:377–78, 403, 408. As already mentioned, Gogol’s status as the inventor of the birdlike “jews” is institutionalized in Dostoevskii’s novel Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (IV:55, 93). Babel' is under the spell of this imaginative tradition, for even in his diary we find lines evocative of Taras Bul'ba’s “jewish” host, who retires for the night, “shedding his caftan and looking in his boots and stockings rather like a chick” (1842:84/1835:139–40). Cf.: “The Jews who did not sleep all night stand there looking pitifully, like birds, blue, disheveled, in vests and without socks” (“Dnevnik 1920 g.,” I:384). 75.  On Babel’s unfinished early story, see Sicher, “Midrash and History,” 216. 76.  Avins, “Kinship and Concealment,” 706. 77.  This juxtaposition of the Jewish religious tradition and revolutionary propaganda is deliberate, as confirmed by their coexistence among the belongings of Liutov’s dying double, the Red army soldier and Hebrew poet Il'ia Bratslavskii (“Syn rabbi,” II:128–29). 78.  See Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei v russkoi armii, 403. Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 95–96. 79.  Babel' was not alone in treating the language of the Soviet leader as an artistic example. Soviet Futurists saw Lenin’s style as avant-gardist and devoted to it several essays in the first issue of their review, Lef (1924). See Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 42–45. 80.  See Budennyi’s “Babizm Babelia iz ‘Krasnoi novi’,” 196–97; and his open letter to Gor'kii (Babel', Lonely Years, 384–87). See Babel’s reaction to Budennyi’s criticism in his letter to A. G. Slonim (29.XI.1928), I:291. For an analysis of Soviet literary life in relation to the country’s political climate, see Fleishman, Boris Pasternak v tridtsatye gody, 2–3, 124. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 418–21. 81.  Characteristically, both gangster leaders of Babel’s Odessa tales, Benia Krik and Froim Grach, are executed by the Soviets as ideological enemies despite their prior services to the regime (“Benia Krik” [1926; screenplay]; “Froim Grach” [1933; unpublished in Babel’s lifetime], II:258, 444–45). One cannot but project this scenario onto Babel’s position in Soviet literature as a “fellow-­ traveler.” The state’s ideological pressure is echoed in his letters to D. A. Furmanov (4.IV.1926), I. L. Livshits (23.XI.1928), and A. G. Slonim (29.XI.1928), I:244, 290–91. On the growing taboo status of “jewish” subject matter in Soviet literature and journalism in the 1930s, see Blium, Evreiskii vopros, 70–86. On the concurrent downplaying of Jewish cultural identity in Soviet theatre, see Levitina, Evreiskii vopros, 78, 83.

Notes to Chapter 17

Chapter 17 1.  See Proust, Le Temps retrouvé [Time regained] (1927), 208, 214–15, 217. On Fel'zen’s novelistic project, see Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 121–34; “Iurii Fel'zen. Materialy k bibliografii,” 115–24. 2.  On these critical debates, as well as on Fel'zen’s place in them, see Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 38–44, 129–30. 3.  Living in Paris in 1932–33 and following émigré literary and cultural life, Babel' may have heeded Fel'zen’s polemical allusion, for the play “Mariia” he wrote the following year contained a Russian character, Katerina Fel'zen, who simultaneously conveys the majority culture’s fear of predatorial “jewish” intruders and its superiority vis-à-vis recent transplants from the Pale of Settlement (II:324, 327–28). 4.  Fel'zen, “Povtorenie proidennogo,” 77. “Kompozitsiia,” 104, 108. “Probuzh­ denie,” 146–47. 5.  Fel'zen, “Irène Némirovsky. ‘David Golder’,” 246–47. “Mal'ro,” 30. “Marc Chadourne,” 278. “O Pruste i Dzhoise,” 215–16. “Vozvrashchenie iz Rossii,” 120, 123–24. 6.  Cited in Zinaida Gippius, “O evreiakh i stat'e Fel'zena” (1939), in Pachmuss, Intellect and Ideas in Action, 116. For some examples of Fel'zen’s male heroes who closely approximate his appearance and public image, see: “Neravenstvo,” 98, 104; “Zhertva,” 282. 7.  See Adamovich’s view of Fel'zen’s persona as “not quite Russian [Smert' i vremia]” (174); Ianovskii’s tongue-in-cheek description of his “foreign” practical mind-set and business acumen (Polia Eliseiskie, 38); and Osorgin’s contrast between Russian émigrés’ cultural rigidity and the ease with which exiled Russian Jews “acclimatize” abroad (“Russkoe odinochestvo,” 4). 8.  Fel'zen, “Umiranie iskusstva,” 129; “My v Evrope,” 155, 157. On the contemporary critical discourse about modern cultural crisis and Fel'zen’s position on the subject, see Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 129–42. 9.  Fel'zen, “Parizhskaia ‘Zelenaia Lampa’,” 5; “My v Evrope,” 160. See the ­Karsavin-Shteinberg debate in Boikov, Taina Izrailia, 407–31, 460–67. See also Gippius, “O evreiakh i stat'e Fel'zena,” 115, 117. Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 14. A letter sent by émigré poet Iurii Mamchenko to his colleague Aleksei Remizov during Easter week, 1938 or 1939, illustrates Fel'zen’s implicit marginality as an artist of Jewish origin: “Maundy Thursday is always somehow difficult for me. I cannot follow the routine, listen and think ‘as usual,’ amid candles, before the crucifix[. . . . ] I thought a lot about the Jews. All this is very profound and terrible. And not at all as simple as they themselves present it: ‘You live and let us live here: we get along splendidly in one culture’ . . . (Fel'zen, for instance: his flair for ‘culture’ only helps him make money at the stock exchange; and afterwards he discourses on ethics and esthetics with authority and entitlement. What’s all this—can’t they see? Even today?). No buckets can drain this swamp unless the swamp itself gives birth to new life” (Alexei Remizov Papers, Box 8, letter 33 [undated], Amherst Center for Russian Culture).

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Notes to Chapter 17 10.  Fel'zen, “Dve sud'by,” 7. “Povtorenie proidennogo,” 79. Schast'e, 16, 38–39. 11.  See, for example, Fel'zen’s own contribution to this debate in his essay, “Frantsuzskaia emigratsiia i literatura,” 27–30. 12.  Zhabotinskii, “Toska o patriotizme” (1903), in Ivanova, Chukovskii i ­Zhabotinskii, 55. I. A. Kleinman, “Evrei v noveishei russkoi literature,” 156. 13.  On the legend about Lermontov’s Jewish origin, see Dudakov, Paradoksy i prichudy, 292. 14.  Fel'zen, “Lermontov v russkoi literature,” 3–4. 15.  See, for example, Crémieux, Du Côté de Marcel Proust, 118–25. Spire, “Marcel Proust et les Juifs,” 1. See also David, “Marcel Proust et ses amis antisémites,” 909–10. Ebert, “‘Le Premier Dreyfusard’,” 208. 16.  Crémieux, Du Côté de Marcel Proust, 99–100, 112, 116. Spire, “Marcel Proust et les Juifs,” 1. See also Ebert, “‘Le Premier Dreyfusard’,” 203–4. 17.  Edward Hughes, “Textual and Tribal Assimilation: Representing Jewishness in À la Recherche du temps perdu,” in Cheyette, Image of the Jew, 171. 18.  Proust’s use of the language of “jewish” difference to the ends of artistic self-modeling has been extensively analyzed in recent critical literature. See, for example, David, “Marcel Proust et ses amis antisémites,” 917–18. Piperno, Proust antijuif, 81–82. Albert Sonnenfeld, “Marcel Proust: Antisemite?” in Caws, Reading Proust Now, 223–28, 238–40, 245–46. Recanati, Profils juifs, 16–20, 103, 139. See also Asai, “Note sur “la race maudite’,” 68. 19.  Sonnenfeld, “Marcel Proust: Antisemite?” 240–42. 20.  Pis'ma, 59–60, 89. Schast'e, 41–42, 45–457, 56–57. Fel'zen’s rejection of Zionist ideology is traceable to his assimilationist views (Gippius, “O evreiakh i stat'e Fel'zena,” 117). 21.  For a detailed treatment of Fel'zen’s stylistic program and its critical reception, see Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 123–25. 22.  “O evreiakh i stat'e Fel'zena,” 118. 23.  See, for example, the characters of Arman Grigor'evich Davydov (“­Povtorenie proidennogo,” 86–88) and the Vil'chevskii family (Obman, 71–72, 110–11). On Fel'zen’s living arrangement, see Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 10, 35. 24.  “‘And what do you think about love?’ asked Kirill somewhat ironically. ‘Does love exist, in your opinion? And what about happiness [schast'e]? Does socalled happy love exist?’ ‘I am always in love,’ replied Karnats. ‘That is, I always think about someone, I must always think about someone’ [. . .] ‘Lucky you [Vashe schast'e],’ said Kirill mockingly” (121). 25.  In addition to his already cited correspondence, see Shteiger’s letter to Shakhovskaia (9.XII.1935) describing the milieu of younger émigré writers in Paris as “half-Jewish” (Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia, 98). 26.  For Fel'zen’s life in occupied France, see Livak, “Materialy k biografii,” 61–70. 27.  “Guy de Maupassant” came out in June 1932, coinciding with the publication of an excerpt from Schast'e in the sixth issue of the review Chisla. Schast'e appeared as a book in November. Fel'zen may have read Babel’s story while finalizing

Notes to Chapter 17 his novel. The fact that Mark’s sisters are never mentioned before the funeral scene at the text’s close suggests that they may have been introduced at a later date, in response to Babel'. 28.  See Fel'zen, “Lichnost' i obshchestvo,” 132–33; “Na literaturnykh ­sobraniiakh,” 14; “Ravnodushie k svobode,” 14–15. Gul', “Ia unes Rossiiu,” 10–11. Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 35, 52. Morkovin, “Vospominaniia,” 227. On the anti­ semitic atmosphere in France in the 1930s, see Winock, Nationalisme, antisémi­ tisme et fascisme en France, 378. See also Dovid Knut’s letter to E. Ia. Kirshner (29. III.1938), in “Desiat' pisem Dovida Knuta,” 201. 29.  For Gippius’s reaction to Fel'zen’s concern with the political situation of European Jews, see her diary ([24.VII.1939], Dnevniki I:441) and the 1939 draft of her unpublished response to Fel'zen’s lost essay on the subject (“O evreiakh i stat'e Fel'zena,” 113–20). On Osip Mandel'shtam’s nickname, see Freidin, “­Evreiskie prazdniki,” 283–84. Cf. Gippius’s comment about Dovid Knut’s transformation into “a militant Israelite” ([16.II.1939], Dnevniki I:403) and Vasilii Rozanov’s perplexity at Zhabotinskii’s similar evolution (“Pestrye temy” [1908], in Ivanova, Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii, 177–78). 30.  On Swann’s regression into “jewishness,” see Sonnenfeld, “Marcel Proust: Antisemite?” 226–27, 245–46. Piperno, Proust antijuif, 159–70. 31.  Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 52. 32.  “Zhid griaznyi. Poshlyi zhid. Verno esli koketnichaesh' s zhidom i nesi posledstviia. Ni odna poriadochnaia zhenshchina ne stanet ne tol'ko koketnichat' s zhidom, no i prinimat' i znakomit'sia s zhidami.” 33.  Markish, “Il'ia Erenburg,” Babel' i drugie, 119. 34.  Consider an instance of such deflection that could not but remind Fel'zen of the tenuousness of his cultural position: “In the 1930s, émigré writers frequenting the restaurant ‘Dominique’ were known as ‘the Dominicans’[. . . . ] All core contributors to the review Chisla—Boris Poplavskii, Iurii Fel'zen [. . .] were among them. Once, I remember, a drunken sponsor [of émigré artistic life] addressed the writers: ‘Allow me to greet you,’ and, without further ado, ordered ‘a round of champagne for everyone but these (pointing to two writers) Yids.’ By ‘these Yids’ he meant [poet] Georgii Ivanov and sculptor Golovin who did not look Jewish at all. This incident delighted both of them and was for a long time a source of laughter on the [Russian] Montparnasse” (Terapiano, Literaturnaia zhizn', 135–36). 35.  See Nils Roemer, “Towards a Comparative Jewish Literary History: National Literary Canons in Nineteenth-Century Germany and England,” in Cheyette, Image of the Jew, 28, 31. 36.  Chernikhovskii, “Russko-evreiskaia khudozhestvennaia literatura,” in Dubnov, Evreiskaia entsiklopediia XIII:639–43. Zhabotinskii, “O evreiakh i russkoi literature” (1908), in his Izbrannoe, 65–66. See also Bacher’s “A zsidó irodalóm fogalmarol” (1911), translated in Markish’s “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 219. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 86. 37.  See, for example, Vasilii L'vov-Rogachevskii’s 1922 monograph, Russko-evreis-

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Notes to Chapter 17 kaia literatura (translated as A History of Russian Jewish Literature) and I. A. Kleiman’s essay, “Evrei v noveishei russkoi literature,” in Ginzburg, Evreiskii vestnik, 155–66. 38.  Dubnov, “Russko-evreiskaia intelligentsia v istoricheskom aspekte,” 11–16. Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 222. 39.  L'vov-Rogachevskii, History, 71. See also Kobrinskii, “K voprosu o kriteriiakh,” 111. Hetényi provides helpful bibliographical data on the Russian-Jewish periodicals published before 1917 (In a Maelstrom, 41). However, her attempt to give the census data a positive spin, relativizing their importance for “Russian-Jewish literature,” is unconvincing (6–7). 40.  Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura i Isaak Babel',” in Babel', Detstvo i drugie rasskazy, 322. 41.  Aikhenval'd, “Sushchestvuiut li pisateli-evrei?” 2. Gornfel'd, “Russkoe slovo i evreiskoe tvorchestvo,” in Kaufman, Evreiskii al'manakh, 185–87, 191–95. Slonim, “Pisateli-evrei v sovetskoi literature,” 163–64. 42.  See the description of the anthology’s selection principles: Maxim Shrayer, “Editor’s General Introduction: Toward a Canon of Jewish-Russian Literature,” in his Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature I:xlv. For a critique of these criteria, see Livak, “Shrayer, Maxim, ed. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature,” 122–24. 43.  Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 219–22. 44.  Kobrinskii, “K voprosu o kriteriiakh,” 101. Nakhimovsky’s formula is cited and endorsed in Shrayer’s “Editor’s General Introduction,” xxx. 45.  Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia liteatura i Isaak Babel',” 322–23. Shrayer, “Editor’s General Introduction,” xxxi. 46.  Dubnov, “Russko-evreiskaia intelligentsiia,” 11. Slonim, “Pisateli-evrei v sovetskoi literature,” 150, 153, 156. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 104. 47.  Aikhenval'd, “Sushchestvuiut li pisateli-evrei?” 2. 48.  Falen, “Odessa Tales,” 145. Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 86. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 103–4. See tale 97 in Silverman, Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales, 96–98. 49.  See, for example, J10, “Jews Expecting the Messiah Are Deceived by a Clerk,” in Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 218–19. 50.  Leonid Katsis observes a very similar reluctance in Mandel'shtam’s autobiographical prose (Osip Mandel'shtam: muskus iudeistva, 389–96). 51.  Babel', “Rech' na Pervom vsesoiuznom s'ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” II:381. 52.  Kobrinskii, “K voprosu o kriteriiakh,” 112–13. 53.  Guillén, Literature as System, 378, 495–96. Roman Jakobson, Iurii Tynianov, “Problems in the Study of Language and Literature,” in Jakobson, Language in Literature, 47–49. Wellek, Warren, Theory of Literature, 255. 54.  See, for example, Hetényi’s claim that Babel’s indebtedness to his RussianJewish literary precursors is manifest in his adoption of a child’s narrative perspective (In a Maelstrom, 230–40)—one of the oldest and universally practised narrative techniques in literary fiction. In addition, Leonid Katsis has suggested Semen

Notes to Chapter 17 Frug’s influence on Osip Mandel'shtam’s art but failed to make a convincing case (Osip Mandel'shtam: muskus iudeistva, 86–110). 55.  Deleuze, Guattari, Kafka, 16–27. Markish, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 222. 56.  Hetényi, In a Maelstrom, 229. 57.  See Fel'zen’s letter to Aleksandr Bakhrakh (26.III.1942), in Livak, “Materialy k biografii,” 63. See the same source (47–49, 62–70) for a discussion of the last years of Fel'zen’s life in Russian émigré milieu in the context of Nazi ideology and victories. 58.  Cf. Knut’s Parisian letters to Rakhil' Chekver: “I am not writing new poems for many reasons [. . .] I rarely see Russians—many of them rooted for . . . the Germans and I am ashamed to look into their eyes when I accidentally come across their obsequious faces” (28.X.1945); “As concerns poetry [. . .] I have already confessed to you my pathological embarrassment vis-à-vis these luxury items. It seems to me that here and now one should not, or rather, one cannot, being a Jew, not turn a deaf ear to music” (16.I.1946); “I almost never see the writing crowd: too many in it ‘distinguished themselves’ in Hitler’s glory days. I do not feel like conducting an investigation about each individual, but nor am I ready for Christianstyle universal forgiveness” (8.VII.1946). Collection Rakhil' Samoilovna Chekver, Box 1, Folders “Knut, D. M. Paris & Toulouse 1945” and “Knut D. M. Paris & Boulogne 1946–49,” Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University (the originals are published with errors in Rischin, “Toward the Biography of a Period and a Poet,” 371–80). See also Markish, “Vasilii Grossman,” Babel' i drugie, 99–117. 59.  Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 34. 60.  See, for example, his jibe at Babel’s art as “farshirovannye zakaty”—a simultaneous allusion to an Ashkenazi dish, gefilte fish [“farshirovannaia ryba”]; to ­Babel’s play “Zakat” [Sunset], based on his Odessa stories; and to the expressionist style of the Red Cavalry cycle (Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 249). Ianovskii’s memoirs, and specifically his treatment of Fel'zen, were taken to task in Liudmila Veidle’s letters to the author ([1.XII.1983; 21.XII.1983], in Livak, “Materialy k biografii,” 67–69). 61.  Mandel'shtam, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 198. Kats, Muzykal'nye kliuchi, 245–47.

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Index

Illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italic type. Tables are indicated by t following the page number. Acculturation: and anti-Judaism, 170; Babel' and, 306; Christianity and, 223; education as means to, 171; of German Jews, 281; good vs. bad, 197, 206, 213, 343; harmful effects of, 347; “the jews” in disguise and, 94, 96–97, 193, 245; and liberal attitudes toward Jews, 174, 222, 249; Russian identity crisis related to, 165. See also Assimilation Actants, 10–11 Acts of Peter, 75 Acts of Pilate, 17 Adamovich, Georgii, 292, 346, 423n45 Adversus Iudaeos tradition, 14, 16, 19 Africans, “the jews” associated with, 90, 97, 99 Ahasuerus, 35, 87, 92. See also Wandering Jew Aikhenval'd, Iulii, 354–57 Aksakov, Ivan, 34, 41, 169; Den' (Day), 168 Alcohol, 60, 153–54 Aleichem, Sholem, 356; “Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy” (Errant stars), 315 Alenu, 97 Alexander I, 142 Alexander II, 168, 170, 217 Alexander III, 43, 46, 134 Allium genus, 94–97, 240 Allosemitism, 8. See also Other Al'tshuller, Mark, 397n8

Andreev, Leonid, 218–19, 231 Animal symbolism, 40, 74–80; birds, 77– 80; canines, 74–75; devil’s beasts, 76–77; gender and, 324 Antichrist, 45, 47, 65–66 Anti-Judaism: Christian, 2–3, 6, 8, 16–21, 29; concept of, 9; Dominican Order and, 19; elite dissemination of, 12, 17–19; in hagiography, 17; in historiography, 17; in literature, 16–17; mistaken theories of, 5; Russian treatment of Jews based on, 15–17. See also Antisemitism; Jewish image; “the jews” Antisemitism, 3, 9, 170, 235, 254, 291, 343. See also Anti-Judaism Antokol'skii, Mark, 57, 209, 266 Apocrypha, 17–18, 61 Aquinas, Thomas, 45, 49 Archetypes, 10–11, 55–73; devil, 57–67; dualism of, 55; Mary and Eve, 67–71; in “Taras Bul'ba,” 114–21 Arendt, Hannah, 5 Arkhivskii (Iudeiskii) khronograf, 17 Arnold, Matthew, 56; “Hebraism and Hellenism,” 42 Art: cultural modeling in, 13; “the jews” in, 37. See also Culture, “the jews” and Asemitizm (asemitism), 230–31, 276, 294, 348, 351, 421n34 Ash, Sholem, “Kola Street,” 324 Ashkenazi Jews, 78–79, 125, 197, 282 Assimilation: anxiety about, 201; Chekhov and, 240, 241, 251; Christianity and, 223; and cultural role of “the jews,” 208, 211,

483

484

Index 246; deficiencies in, 249–51; Dracula as narrative of, 245; émigré culture and, 295–96; Europe’s need for new Other after, 96; faulty, 312; and flight from “jewishness,” 56; ideal of, 170–71, 213; “the jews” in disguise and, 192–93; and language, 288; and lexicon of “jewish” difference, 70, 98–99, 171–73, 194, 282, 283, 284, 286, 367; literary traditions and, 353–55; in “Neschastnaia,” 198, 206; and political activism, 290; into revolutionary upheaval, 325. See also Acculturation Atheism, 296, 339, 426n17 Auerbach, Erich, 36 Augustine, 43, 50, 51, 68 Authors, personal lives of, 1, 7–8, 356. See also Russian-Jewish authorship; RussianJewish literature; Russian literature Avins, Carol, 333 Avvakum (archpriest), 17, 20 Babel', Isaak, 22, 23, 56, 70, 101, 282, 328; “Argamak,” 323, 335; autobiographical narrative of, 290, 300, 302–3, 305, 307–8, 314–15, 319–20, 323–36, 360; “Avtobiografiia,” 303–4, 307, 314; “Berestechko,” 304; on Christianity, 304–5; “Dnevnik 1920 g.” (The diary of 1920), 301, 326, 333; “Doroga” (The road), 304, 306; “Evreika” (The Jewess), 320; Fel'zen and, 289–90, 298, 338; “Froim Grach,” 303; Gogol' and, 332; “Guy de Maupassant,” 307–21, 323, 331, 335, 345, 359, 364; “Ikh bylo deviat'” (They were nine), 324; “Istoriia moei golubiatni” (The story of my dovecot), 302, 306, 329; and Judaism, 298–99, 302–3, 320–21, 323, 334–35, 425n6; and Judeophobia, 326; “Kak eto delalos' v Odesse” (How it was done in Odessa), 303, 307, 315; “KarlIankel',” 325, 333; “Korol'” (King), 302; and literary style, 296–97, 313; “Mariia,” 310, 433n3; “Moi pervyi gonorar” (My first honorarium), 303, 335; “Moi pervyi gus'” (My first goose), 321, 324–36, 346, 361; “Nachalo,” 304; “Odessa,” 305,

307–10, 314; Odessa cycle, 313, 321; as outsider, 289, 296–97, 306–7, 334, 359–60; “Pan Apolek,” 305; “Pervaia liubov'” (First love), 306, 324, 329–30; private and public lives of, 298–99; “Probuzhdenie” (Awakening), 301, 302–3, 306, 309, 312–13, 318–19, 324, 359; professional life of, 297–98, 303, 307, 314, 317; Red Cavalry cycle, 313, 320, 321, 323–36; and RussianJewish literature, 353–61, 364–65; “ShabosNakhamu,” 301–2, 358–59; “Syn rabbi” (A rabbi’s son), 301; target audience of, 300– 301, 306, 358–59; “Vecher” (Evening), 334, 335; “Vecher u imperatritsy” (An evening at the empress’s), 304; “V podvale” (In the basement), 302, 306; war diary of (see “Dnevnik 1920 g.” (The diary of 1920)); and world culture, 289; Zakat (Sunset), 300–301, 367; “Zakat” (Sunset), 319–20 Bacchus, 88 Bacher, Wilhelm, 353 Backès, Jean-Louis, 206 Baldwin, James, 220, 226 Baptism: anti-, 93; consequences of avoiding, 70, 96; cure by, 88, 155, 171, 172; drowning as, 126, 134, 156, 227–28; in émigré culture, 296; millenarianism and, 36, 50 Barrès, Maurice, 343 Bashkirtseva, Maria, 76 Beardsley, Aubrey, 243 Bedford Book of Hours, 78 Belinskii, Vissarion, 167, 396n3 Belorussia, 15–16, 18, 19, 65 Belova, Ol'ga, 14, 18 Belyi, Andrei, 276 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 9, 39, 296 Bergson, Henri, 284 Bernard of Clairvaux, 49 Bernhardt, Sarah, 214–17, 248, 252, 254, 269, 310 Bezbozhnik (The godless) [journal], 426n17 Bialik, Haim Nachman, “Arye Ba'alguf,” 324 Bible, 17, 38–42. See also Hebrew Bible Bible des Limbourg, 37

Index Bilibin, V. V., 254 Billy goats, 76 Bird down, 80, 227, 249 Birds, 77–80, 249–50 Blindness, 39–40 Blok, Aleksandr, 332; “Dvenadtsat'” (The twelve), 297 Blood libel legend, 12–13, 64, 244. See also Ritual murder Bloom, Harold, 36 Bloy, Léon, 50 Blumenbach, Johann, De generis humani varietate nativa (On the natural varieties of mankind), 93 Body: eyes, 92–93; foot and gait, 99–100; hair, 89–90; “jewish,” 88–101, 154, 173, 194–95, 195, 199; mouth and speech, 97–99; nose and odor, 93–97; of Satan, 88–89; skin, 91–92 Bogrov, Grigorii, 174, 284, 354, 364; Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew), 250 Bohemia, 19 Börne, Ludwig, 342 Bosch, Hieronymus, The Ship of Fools, 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 35 Brafman, Iakov, Kniga kagala (The book of the kahal), 170, 284 Buber, Martin, 5, 284 Budennyi, Semen, 334–35 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 292–93, 297; The Master and Margarita, 18 Bulgakov, Sergei, 8, 29, 39, 218, 296 Bulgarin, Faddei, 141, 166, 288; Ivan Vyzhigin, 106; Mazepa, 124 Bunin, Ivan, 35 Burenin, Viktor, 247, 266, 274, 287, 292, 297 Burton, Richard, 244 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 99 Business/economics. See Money Byzantium, 16. See also Russian Orthodox Church Cain, 43, 58, 82, 87, 91, 99 Cambrensis, Gerald, 78

Canines, 74–75 Cannibalism, 62, 64, 244 Capitalism, 169–70, 290 Caricature from Kikeriki, 257 Carnality, 39–40 Cathar heresy, 63 Catholicism: anti-Judaism of, 16–18; and desecration narratives, 63; Gogol' and, 141–43; in “Taras Bul'ba,” 122–24, 126–27; Ukrainian Orthodox submission to, 131–32 Censorship, 166–68, 170, 171, 174, 178–79, 181–83, 187–89, 218, 256, 326. See also Selfcensorship Chajes, rabbi, 283 Chamberlain, H. S., 56 Chaplin, Charlie, 342 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 71 Chaucer, Geoffrey: “Prologue” to Canterbury Tales, 96; “The Prioress’s Tale,” 12, 61 Chekhov, Aleksandr, 255 Chekhov, Anton, 23, 97, 101, 216, 231, 341; apolitical stance of, 234–35, 254–55, 258; attitude of, toward Jews, 175, 234; Babel' and, 313–18; Bezottsovshchina (The fatherless), 251; failed romance of, 235, 252; and Gogol', 164–65; Ivanov, 253, 256–58; “the jews” as conceptual tool for, 232–34, 247, 254, 276–77; and the liberals, 254–60, 276; and Novoe vremia, 235, 241, 247, 251, 254–58; “Perekati-pole” (Tumbleweed), 241, 249, 250, 261, 273, 274, 311; private and public lives of, 175, 257; professional life of, 232, 234–35, 251–52, 255–56, 258, 275–78; and religion, 165; “Skripka Rotshil'da” (Rothschild’s fiddle), 22, 233, 258–76, 365; “Step'” (The steppe), 237, 240, 250, 259; “Tina” (Mire), 22, 233, 235–43, 245–56, 311; Turgenev studied in relation to, 164; “Uchitel' slovesnosti” (A teacher of literature), 313, 323 Chekhov, Egor, 275 Cherikover, Il'ia, 294 Chernikhovskii, Saul, 353 Chirikov, Evgenii, 229; Evrei (The Jews), 100, 274

485

486

Index Christianity: accusations of “jewish” practices within, 19–20; anti-Judaism of, 2–3, 6, 8, 16–21, 29; archetypes of, 55; Babel' on, 304–5; dispossession of “the jews” by, 30–31, 33–38, 47–48; doubt within, 29–31, 44, 49, 61, 67; in émigré culture, 296, 339; Fel'zen on, 339–40; “the jews” represented similarly by denominations of, 16–18; “the jews” in theology and myth of, 27–54; Judaism as vital to selfdefinition of, 2, 14, 29–30, 171–72; narratives of, 10–11; revisionist interpretation in, 36–38; structure of narrative of, 29; truth of, demonstrated by “the jews,” 49–52, 87, 151; and usury, 59 Chrysostom, John, 16, 30, 40, 45, 51, 76; Homilies Against the Jews, 4 Chukovskii, Kornei, 229, 419n13 Church doctrine, “the jews” in, 32–33 Church Fathers, 9 Circumcision, 64 Civic equality, 168–69, 173 Civil service, admission of Jews to, 49 Clement Smoliatich, 17 Clowns, 66 Clyman, Toby, 236 Colombier, Marie, Les Mémoires de Sarah Barnum, 248 Comedy. See Humor and laughter Communion, 63–64, 132, 238, 242, 315 Congress of Berlin, 170 Conservatives: generative model used by, 223; on “jewish” difference, 222; Judeophobia of, 222 Conspiracy theories, 170, 171, 290 Conversion, 50, 56, 69–70, 171–72 Cossacks, 129, 133–35, 142–43, 146 Cranach, Lucas, 67 Crime, 303 Crypto-Judaism, 172 Cultural modeling: in art, 13; empirical knowledge in relation to, 6–7; and Jewish image, 1–2 Culture, “the jews” and: Babel' and, 314; Chekhov and, 246–48, 251–52, 273–78, 314; conservatives on, 266, 274, 287;

émigrés and, 295–96, 339; “jewish” deficiency, 34–35, 41; in “Neschastnaia,” 207–14; post-revolutionary, 292, 295; in “Skripka Rotshil'da,” 266–78; in “Tina,” 246–48; Turgenev and, 214–16; Wagner on, 209–13, 247, 266–72. See also Art; Music; Russian-Jewish authorship Cumberland, Richard, The Jew, 167, 192, 218 Cyril of Turov, 17 Dal, Vladimir, 96 Damascus affair, 244 Darkness, “the jews” associated with, 34 Daudet, Léon, 338, 343 Daughter of “the jews” masterplot, 69–70, 110, 125, 153, 201, 204, 227, 238, 252–54, 318 Daxelmüller, Christoph, 282 Death, “the jews” associated with, 34–35, 43, 48, 57–59, 75, 78–79, 84, 86–87, 93, 94, 101, 242 Decadent movement, 226 Deicide, 27, 29–30, 42–46 Deleuze, Gilles, 364 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 5, 15–16, 38 The Descent of the Virgin into Hell, 46, 128 Desecration of Christian objects, 62–63, 132 Devil. See Satan Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist, 55, 59, 81, 90; Sketches by Boz, 90 Dirt, 91–92, 152–53 Disguise, “the jews” in, 172, 173, 186, 193– 94, 196, 197, 199–200, 205–6, 211, 214, 239–40, 245–46, 311, 313, 343 Disraeli, Benjamin, 170, 208; Coningsby, 55, 259, 265; Tancred, 83 Dimitrii, False, 43 Dobronravov, Leonid, 228 Dogs, 74–75 Dolgorukov, P. V., 205 Dominican Order, 19, 52 Dostoevskii, Fedor, 164, 341; attitude of, toward Jews, 168–70, 230; Bednye liudi (Poor folk), 167; Besy (The possessed), 196; Dnevnik pisatelia (The diary of a writer), 261; and Gogol', 164–65; and Jewish image, 8, 36; “Pokhorony

Index ‘Obshchecheloveka’” (The funeral of a universal man), 261–62; Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the house of the dead), 77, 106, 300–301; “Zhid Iankel',” 164, 167 Dreyfus affair, 85, 175, 277 Drowning, 134 Dubnov, Semen, 354, 356 Ducks, 156 Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 82, 91–92, 233, 271–73, 272, 278 Dynnik, Valentina, 310 Easter, 64, 263, 265, 329 East Slavic body of texts in folklore, 18 Economics, 77–80, 133, 169–70 Edgeworth, Maria, Harrington, 32, 70, 174, 186; Ivanhoe, 166 Education, 171, 305–6 Effeminacy, of “jewish” men, 40, 70, 80, 84, 100, 185, 189–90, 310, 315, 319, 324 Efimov, Boris, caricature of Isaac Babel', 327–28, 328 Efron, S., Kontrabandisty (Smugglers), 218 Efros, Evdokiia, 235, 252–54, 273 Egorii (Saint George), 65 Eisenmenger, Johann, Entdecktes Judenthum, 97 Eliot, George, 208, 220; Daniel Deronda, 56, 200–201, 229, 272–73 Elites, anti-Judaism disseminated by, 12, 17–19. See also Intelligentsia Elizaveta Petrovna, Empress, 38 El'kan (dandy), 172 Émigré culture: Christianity and, 296, 339– 40; “the jews” and, 295–96, 339–40 England, Jewish immigrants in, 244–45 Enlightenment, 166–68, 171, 219–21. See also Haskalah Ephrem the Syrian, 16 Erenburg, Il'ia, 134; Zhizn' i gibel' Nikolaia Kurbova (The life and death of Nikolai Kurbov), 351 Erfurt Cathedral, 66 Ester, book of, 37–38 Ethnonyms, 192–94, 199–200, 234, 285–86

Eve, 55, 57, 67–71 Evreiskaia tribuna (The Jewish tribune), 294, 423n40 Evstratii, 44, 47, 61, 65, 112, 133, 138, 275 Excrement, 92 Exile, 48 Eyes, 92–93. See also Blindness Faber du Faur, C. W., 154; “Polish Jews and French Soldiers,” 155 Family feud symbolism, 31–32, 35, 47 Father archetype: bad, 55, 57, 58, 62, 66, 69, 113, 115; God as, 55; good, 55–56, 115; “the jews” as, 56, 57 Feasts, 261, 274 Fedotov, Georgii, 63 Fel'zen, Iurii (pen name of Nikolai Freudenstein), 22, 23, 282, 368; audience of, 351; autobiographical narrative of, 290, 337–38, 360; Babel' and, 289–90, 298, 338; on Christianity, 339–40; cultural identity of, 338–41, 348–50, 365, 435n34; “Figuratsiia” (A crowd scene), 344; and Judaism, 299, 338, 344, 350; and literary style, 296–97; “Neravenstvo” (Inequality), 344; Obman (Deceit), 337, 344; as outsider, 289, 296–97, 351, 353, 433n9; Pis'ma o Lermontove (Letters About Lermontov), 337–38, 341, 350; private and public lives of, 298–99; “Probuzhdenie” (Awakening), 338; professional life of, 298; “Razroznennye mysli,” 365; and Russian-Jewish literature, 357–58; Schast'e (Happiness), 337, 344–49, 351, 352, 358, 365, 367; “Vozvrashchenie” (A return), 348; and world culture, 289 Fertility: Christianity associated with, 34; Christian proscription of, 96; garlic and, 94; goose as symbol of, 78; “the jews” associated with, 57, 61. See also Infertility Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 36 Flavius Josephus, 51 Foetor judaicus, 93–94, 96, 240, 243, 285, 301 Folklore: “the jews” as element of, 12–13, 18, 52–54; narrative analysis based on, 10

487

488

Index Fool-figure, 81–83 Foot, 99–100 Fortress of Faith allegories, 51, 129–30 Fourth Lateran Council, 70 France, 75, 178, 296, 313–14, 428n39. See also French literature Franciscan Order, 52 Francis of Assisi, 84 French literature, 289, 342–43 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 226 Freudenstein, Nikolai. See Fel'zen, Iurii Frug, Semen, 287, 364 Gait, 99–100 Galton, Francis, 92 Gangsters (bandits), 302–4, 310, 315, 319, 324–25 Garin-Mikhailovskii, N. G., “Revekka,” 227 Garlic, 94–97, 235, 240, 245–47, 256 Geese, 78–80, 155–56, 227, 263–64, 309, 329 Gender, 70–71, 80, 124, 324. See also Men; Women Generative model of “the jews”: animal symbolism in, 74–80; archetypes as source of, 55–73; in art, 13; body in, 88; Christianity as source of, 27–54; concept of, 1–2; Gogol’s use of, 152; human types in, 80–87; individual artist’s use of, 22, 106; liberals and conservatives utilizing same, 169, 223; Russian-Jewish authors and, 281–82; shared with European cultures, 21, 163, 233–34. See also Lexicon of “jewish” difference Gennadii (archbishop), 19 Gerard, Emily, “Transylvanian Superstitions,” 245 German Jews, 281 Germany, 19, 75 Gertsen, Aleksandr, 167 Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 62, 143 Gippius, Zinaida, 291–94, 296, 299, 345, 350, 407n15 Girard, René, 30 Goats, 76 God: Christian anxiety about, 31, 35; Cos-

sacks and, 131, 134–35; and Jesus’s death, 29, 31, 62, 114; “the jews’” cruel, 118; “the jews’” defiance of, 45, 58, 81; punishment of “the jews” by, 36, 39, 46–49; as Wise Old Man archetype, 55 Goedsche, Hermann, Biarritz, 170 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 32, 283, 289, 308, 313, 335, 339, 341, 366–67; Dichtung und Warheit (Poetry and truth), 153; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 48 Gog and Magog, 65 Gogol', Afanasii, 140 Gogol', Nikolai, 23, 400n4; ancestry of, 140–41; authoritative image of “the jew” by, 105–6, 221; Babel' and, 332; Dead Souls, 144; “Get'man,” 114, 132, 153–54; and Jewish assimilation, 173; Mertvye dushi (Dead souls), 106; Mirgorod, 106, 112; “Noch' pered rozhdestvom” (The night before Christmas), 117, 129, 148; Obozrenie vseobshchei istorii (A survey of universal history), 151; Polish heritage of, 107; “Portret” (The portrait), 194, 196; “Propavshaia gramota,” 148; “Shinel',” 158–59; spiritual evolution of, 141–43; “Strashnaia mest'” (Terrible vengeance), 112, 129, 150; “Taras Bul'ba,” 12, 22, 56, 80, 90, 105–59, 178–80, 332–33, 345; “Vii,” 119, 120, 130, 146; “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (The notes of a madman), 309 Gogol', Ostap, 140–41 Goldstein, David, 396n1 Gorev, B., Russkaia literatura i evrei (Russian literature and the Jews), 6 Gor'kii, Maksim (also known as Aleksei Peshkov), 219, 229, 231, 287, 291, 297, 305, 310, 367; Moi universitety (My universities), 308; “Pogrom,” 227 Gornfel'd, Arkadii, 354 Granovskii, Timofei, 59–60, 134 Great Schism (1054), 16 Grebenka, Evgenii, 332 Greimas, Algirdas, 10–11, 21, 28–29 Grimm brothers, 52 Gromeka, S., 174, 192 Grossman, Vasilii, 355, 365, 368

Index Gruzenberg, Oskar, 229 Guattari, Félix, 364 Guilt, of “the jews,” 43 Günther, Hans, 341, 342 Gusikov, Mikhail, 270 Hagiography, 17 Hair, 89–90 Haskalah, 171, 284, 286, 289 Hebrew Bible, 36–37 Heine, Heinrich, 96, 240 Helper, “the jew” as, 11, 28–29, 56, 75, 151– 60, 225. See also Servants, “the jews” as Herbert, George, 39, 58 Heretics, 84–85, 122, 124. See also Judaizing Herod, 64–65 Herz, Henriette, 246 Hetényi, Zsuzsa, 364, 436n54 Hilarion, 17 Historical romance, 108–9 Historiography, 17, 106–8, 133–34 Hoffmann, E.-T.-A, “Little Zaches,” 270–71 Hogarth, William, A Harlot’s Progress, 76 Horses, 321, 323–24 Housing. See Settlements and living conditions Humor and laughter, 66–67, 76–77, 135, 158–59. See also Fool-figure Huysmans, J.-K., A rebours (Against nature), 238 Hyenas, 75 Ianovskii, Vasilii, 299, 365 Il'f, Il'ia, Zolotoi telenok (The golden calf), 321, 327, 334–35 Illiustratsiia (Illustration) [journal], 7, 168, 174, 175, 192 Imperial Geographic Society, 5 Infanticide, 62, 63 Infertility, 34–35, 41. See also Fertility Infidels, 84–85 Intelligentsia: liberal attitude toward Jews among, 166–69, 173–75; post-revolutionary, 291–95; Russian-Jewish, 171, 174, 284, 286–87, 289, 291, 293, 295, 336, 341, 348, 353–54, 356, 362. See also Elites

Internationalism, 293, 297, 306, 321, 326, 328 Ioann of Novgorod, 157 Isaac, Jules, 2 Islam. See Muslims Istoriia Rusov (A history of the Russians), 107–8, 131–32 Iushkevich, Semen, 286–87, 289, 364; Leon Drei, 287, 367 Ivan the Terrible, 43, 134 Jackson, R. L., 261, 262 Jacobowski, Ludwig, Loki, 82 Japan, 291 Jesus: child symbolism concerning, 64–65; Church as bride of, 68; de-Judaization of, 56; divinity of, 31; “the jews” in relation to, 27–28, 40; and Mary, 68–69; as Messiah, 30; in Paul’s doctrine, 27; race of, 56–57; responsibility for death of, 28, 30, 43; as Self archetype, 55; as spiritual transformation paradigm, 56; suffering and death of, 62, 64 “The Jew in the Brambles,” 52–54, 179 Jewish authors. See Russian-Jewish authorship Jewish Historical Archive, 294 Jewish identity, 288, 296 Jewish image: author’s personal attitudes and, 1, 7–8; contradictory features of, 98, 101; as cultural model, 1–2, 6; evolution of, 1–3, 163; generative model of, 1–4; Jewish authors and, 8, 282, 284–86; pseudoscientific perspective on, 3, 9; secularization of, 3; stability of, 1–3, 13, 23. See also Anti-Judaism; “the jews”; Judeophilia; Judeophobia; Lexicon of “jewish” difference Jewish question, 9, 41, 134, 164, 218, 293, 321, 323, 335, 348 Jews: civic equality for, 168–69, 173; expulsion from Spain of, 19; non-Jews’ empirical knowledge of, 4–7, 174, 290–91; as Other, 3, 8, 14, 20, 171; participation of, in European warfare, 123–24; racial perspective on, 3, 9, 173, 341, 342, 425n6

489

490

Index “the jews”: archetypes of, 10–11, 55–73; in art history, 13; assimilated Jews’ attitude toward, 283; blindness of, 39–40; carnality of, 39–40; Christian representation of, 10–13, 16–18, 27–54; in Church doctrine, 32–52; concept of, 4; cruelty of, 31–32; cultural deficiency of, 34–35, 41; as deicides, 27, 29–30, 42–46; dispossession of, 30–31, 33–38, 47–48; divine punishment of, 46–49; enemies designated as, 19–20, 85; as folkloric representation, 12– 13, 18, 52–54; generative model of, 72t; in Gospels, 28; guilt of, 43; as Helpers, 11, 28–29, 56, 75, 151–60, 225; intelligence of, 41–42; interpretive deficiency of, 38–42; Judas associated with, 21, 28, 31–32; laws in response to characteristics of, 46, 49, 88, 172; materialism of, 39; as negative archetypes, 55; obsolescence of, 100–101, 152–53, 263–64; as Opponents, 11, 27–29, 56, 75, 122–28; Orthodox perspective on, 16; overcoming their “jewishness,” 56; overview of study of, 9–10; positive depictions of, 166–68; as a representation not based in empirical knowledge, 4–7, 174, 290–91; in Russian culture, 14–21; and Satan, 57–67; as servants, 50–51, 151; as Subjects, 11; symbolic value of, 4–5; traditional Jews’ attitude toward, 283; truth of Christianity demonstrated by, 49–52, 87, 151; violence against, 51–52; Western influences on Russian conception of, 18–21; and women, 40; wretchedness of, 48–49. See also Anti-Judaism; Jewish image; Lexicon of “jewish” difference “The Jews of Worms,” 79, 95 John, gospel of, 28, 34, 39, 44 John the Evangelist, feast of, 261, 274 Joseph, husband of Mary, 67, 69, 201, 204 Josephus, The Jewish War, 17 Journalism, 98 Judaism: assimilated Jews’ rejection of, 284, 289; Babel' and, 298–99, 302–3, 320–21, 323, 334–35, 425n6; Christian selfdefinition dependent on, 2, 14, 29–30,

171–72; crypto-, 172; Fel'zen and, 299, 338, 344, 350. See also Anti-Judaism; Jews; “the jews”; Rabbinic Judaism Judaizing, accusations of, 19–20, 37, 46, 84. See also Heretics Judas: Antichrist and, 45; body of, 89; in Christian myth, 27–28; as eternal wanderer, 87; hanging, 57; “the jews” associated with, 21, 28, 31–32; in Last Judgment depictions, 21; and money, 58; physical appearance of, 89; and strong-smelling plants, 96 Judeo-Christian tradition, 38 Judeophilia: absence of criticism of, 229; in art, 37; Chekhov’s spoofing of, 249–50, 253, 261, 272–73; concept of, 9; Enlightenment-inspired, 166–68, 171, 219–21; eroticism in, 226; and identification with victim, 231; and “jewish” difference, 222–23; Judeophobia coexisting with, 223–29; of liberals, 191–92, 218, 221, 229; literary, 219, 221–32, 260; millenarian, 136; “Skripka Rotshil'da” and, 258–60; tempering of, 218; Thackeray’s parodies of, 208; traditional views persisting in, 222; Turgenev’s “Zhid” and, 190, 191; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, 220, 224; and violence, 226; waning of, 193 Judeophobia: Babel' and, 326; concept of, 9; conservatives and, 217–18; Dostoevskii’s, 230; elite dissemination of, 12; foundations of Russian, 17; growth of, in late nineteenth century, 217; Judeophilia coexisting with, 223–29; in liberal interpretations of Shylock, 158; opposition to, by liberal intelligentsia, 175; Polish, 21; post-revolutionary, 291–92; Russian imperial, 32; Solzhenitsyn and, 23; of Wagner, 209–10 Judith, 38, 243, 250, 253, 310, 311, 318 Jung, Carl, 10–11, 21, 55 Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich, 401n12 Kafka, Franz, 364 Kant, Immanuel, 71 Kantemir, Antiokh, 37

Index Kapparot, 361 Karamzin, Nikolai, 174 Karlinsky, Simon, 116, 122, 143 Karsavin, Lev, 339 Kats, Boris, 366 Katsis, Leonid, 14, 436n54 Katz, Elena, 14, 373n24, 376n41, 399n14 Kermode, Frank, 27 Khludov Psalter, 36 Khmel'nitskii, Bogdan, 20, 135, 156 Kievan Paterikon, 17, 37, 39, 44, 133 Kievan Rus', 14, 16–17, 19–21 Kikeriki, 257 Kiseleva, M. V., 235, 251 Kishinev pogrom (1903), 225, 288 Kiukhel'beker, Vil'gel'm, 172; “Agasfer” (Ahasuerus), 42 Klezmer music, 212 Klier, John D., 376n41 Knigy vremen'nyia i obraznyia Georgiia Mnikha, 17 Knipper, Ol'ga, 254 Knox, Robert, The Races of Men, 3 Knut, Dovid, 296, 358, 365, 368, 422n37, 437n58 Kobrinskii, A., 355, 360–61, 364 Kostomarov, Nikolai, 168 Kramarev, Solomon, 234 Krasi_ski, Zygmunt, Nie-Boska komedia (Un-divine comedy), 130 Krasnaia nov' (Red virgin soil) [journal], 308 Krestovskii, Vsevolod, T'ma egipetskaia (The darkness of Egypt), 170, 223 Krylov, V., Kontrabandisty (Smugglers), 218 Kunitz, Joshua, 259, 261; Russian Literature and the Jew, 6 Kuprin, Aleksandr, 229, 231; “Gambrinus,” 77, 418n90; “Svad'ba” (Wedding), 230 Ladyzhnikov publishers, 295 Lameness, 99 Landa, M. J., The Jew in Drama, 6 Language: deficiency in, 98–99, 152, 204–5; of disguised “jews,” 173, 212–13, 249; Jewish identity and, 288; and literary traditions, 354; Russian-Jewish authors and,

287–89, 297. See also speech Language of “jewish” difference. See Lexicon of “jewish” difference Last Days, 129–37 Laughter. See Humor and laughter Lavrov, V. M., Russkaia mysl' (Russian thought), 255 Law, tables of the, 37 Laws, in response to characteristics of “the jews,” 46, 49, 88, 172 Lazhechnikov, Ivan, Doch' evreia (A Jew’s daughter)/Vsia beda ot styda (Woe from shame), 192, 219 Léandre, Charles, Rothschild, 244 Leg, 99–100 Leprosy, 83–84 Lermontov, Mikhail, 337–39, 341, 342, 350; Geroi nashego vremeni (The hero of our time), 338; Ispantsy (Spaniards), 166, 219; Maskarad (The masquerade), 172; Prestupnik (The criminal), 60; “Sashka,” 187–89, 203–4; “Tambovskaia kaznacheisha” (A Tambov treasurer’s wife), 187 Leskov, Nikolai, 32, 174; Evrei v Rossii (The Jew in Russia), 218; “Skazanie o Fedore-khristianine i o druge ego Abrame-­zhidovine” (The tale of Fedor the Christian and his friend Abram the Jew), 218, 224, 230 Lessing, G.-E., 222; The Jews, 49, 166; Nathan the Wise, 42, 69, 166, 186, 218 Letter of the Bible, vs. spirit, 38–39 Levanda, Lev, 354, 364; Goriachee vremia (Seething times), 288 Leviticus, book of, 88, 123 Levitina, Viktoria, 37 Levy, Sara, 246 Lewis, C. S., 3 Lewis, M. G., The Monk, 92 Lexicon of “jewish” difference: assimilated Jews and, 283, 367; authors’ uses of, 164– 65, 175, 193, 204, 206, 274, 277, 278, 286, 361, 366–67; Babel' and, 301–2, 325, 335; Church doctrine as basis for, 33; communism and, 290; elements in, 80, 96, 239, 243–45, 256, 273, 285, 361; émigrés

491

492

Index and, 351; excessive/subversive meanings of, 77, 228, 258, 278; Fel'zen and, 339, 358; German Jews and, 281; individual authors’ use of, 9; Judeophilic writing and, 11, 193, 222–24; late-nineteenth-century complications concerning, 231–32; liberals’ influence on uses of, 173–75, 217, 223, 229, 287 (see also Political correctness); liberals’ use of, 169; modern European imagination and, 163, 233, 278; modernity depicted through, 231; Nazism and, 290; persistence/acceptance of, 168, 193, 222, 224; Russian-Jewish authors and, 357; stability of, 1; Stoker’s Dracula and, 243–45; traditional Jews and, 283; Wagner’s use of, 210; and World Literature, 298. See also Generative models; Jewish image; “the jews” Liberals: and acculturation of Jews, 222; Chekhov and, 254–60, 276; condescension toward Jews of, 224; empathy for Jews from, 166–69, 217–18, 220, 225; generative models used by, 223; on “jewish” difference, 222; Jews serving wider political purposes of, 168, 218, 225; Judeophilia of, 191–92, 218, 221, 229; literary treatment of Jews influenced by, 173–75, 191–93, 228–32; and political correctness, 175, 219, 229, 258, 278; self-censorship of, 175, 193, 230, 291; traditional views of Jews held by, 169, 190, 218 Life, Christianity associated with, 34 Lifschitz-Golden, Manya, Les Juifs dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (Jews in medieval French literature), 6 Light, Christianity associated with, 34 Literature. See Russian-Jewish literature; Russian literature Lithuania, 178 Liutostanskii, Ippolit, Talmud i evrei (The Talmud and the Jews), 170 Living conditions. See Settlements and living conditions Lombroso, Cesare, 71, 284 Lost Tribes of Israel, 20. See also Ten Lost Tribes of Israel

Luftmensch (man of air), 197 Luke, gospel of, 28, 29 Luther, Martin, 9, 20, 38, 134; Book of Thieves, 59; On the Jews and Their Lies, 67, 82; That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, 222 Lyotard, Jean-François, Heidegger and “the jews,” 4 Maccoby, Hyam, 30 Machtet, Grigorii, “Zhid” (The Jew), 255, 346 Maguire, Robert, 327 Mamchenko, Iurii, 433n9 Mandel'shtam, Osip, 287–89, 297, 301, 312, 350, 364, 366, 368; Chetvertaia proza (Fourth prose), 284–86, 327; Egipetskaia marka (The Egyptian stamp), 289; Shum vremeni (The noise of time), 304; “Zhil Aleksandr Gertsovich” (There lived Aleksandr Gertsovich), 366 Marcion, 37 Maritain, Jacques, 9, 50 Mark, gospel of, 29 Markish, Shimon, 293, 351, 354–61, 364 Marlowe, Christopher, 66, 82 Marr, Wilhelm, 9 Marriage, 69–70 Marx, Karl, 284 Mary, mother of Jesus: as archetypal good mother, 55, 67–71; de-Judaization of, 56; “the jews” associated with, 225; and punishment of “the jews,” 46; as spiritual transformation paradigm, 56; virginity of, 61 Materialism, 39 Matthew, gospel of, 28, 29, 44, 148 Maupassant, Guy de, 289, 307; “L’Aveu” (Confession), 308, 315, 316 Meige, Henry, 92 Mellinkoff, Ruth, 283 Men: age of, 100; effeminacy of, 40, 70, 80, 84, 100, 185, 189–90, 310, 315, 319, 324 Mendelssohn, Moses, 283 Menzel, Wolfgang, 240 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 144, 297 Mérimée, Prosper, 203

Index Messiah: Jesus as, 30, 33, 46, 126, 127; “the jews” and, 45, 65, 136–37, 147, 359 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 207, 209, 211–12, 215; The Prophet, 215; “Robert the Devil,” 207 Mickiewicz, Adam, 212, 400n4; Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage, 7, 136; Dziady (Forefathers’ eve), 136; Pan Tadeusz, 7, 60, 136 Minskii, Nikolai, 287 Miracles of the Virgin, 18, 55, 61, 68 Mishnah, 94 Modernity: Chekhov and, 233; “the jews” as symbolic of, 163, 175 Mondry, Henrietta, 14 Money, 58–60, 94, 156–57. See also Business/ economics Monkeys, 76–77 Morality, “the jews” lacking in, 40 Morkovin, Vadim, 299 “Moscow–the third Rome,” 17 Moses, 135; horned, 57, 67, 82 Mother archetype: bad, 55, 57, 67–71, 119–21, 310; good, 55–56, 67–71, 116; “the jews” as, 55, 56, 57; Mary as, 55 Mouth, 97 Murder. See Blood libel legend; Ritual murder Muscovy, 16–17, 19–21, 37 Music, 81–82, 207–10, 267–71 Muslims, 20, 83, 90 Mysticism, 37 Nabokov, Vladimir, 294–95; Dar (The gift), 295 Nadson, Semen, 254–55, 287 Nakhimovsky, Alice, 298, 327, 355, 364 Names, 172 Napoleon Bonaparte, 45, 85, 178 Narezhnyi, Vasilii: Bursak (The seminarist), 190; Rossiiskii Zhilblaz, 166, 190, 219 Nazism, 290, 350, 365 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 169 “Neschastnaia” (The hapless girl) [Turgenev]: anti-Wagnerian spoof in, 207–13; Chekhov’s “Tina” and, 248–49; disguised “jewishness” in, 193; negative reception

of, 197, 197–216; personal circumstances underlying, 202, 204, 206, 209–11, 214; public attitude toward Jews at time of, 191; “Zhid” in relation to, 202–3 Nevakhovich, Judah, 283 Nicholas I (ship), 184 Nicholas I, Emperor, 107 Nicodemus, gospel of, 17–18 Nicolas of Lyre, 19 Nicolas the Wonderworker, feast of, 261, 274 Niemoeller, Martin, 380n39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71 Nikon, 44 Nose, 93–94 Notkin, Nota, 283 Novgorod Cathedral doors, 19 Novoe vremia (newspaper), 235, 241, 247, 251, 254–58, 266, 274 Obsolescence, 100–101, 152–53, 263–64 Odor, 93–97, 240–41, 301 Oedipal symbolism: within Christianity, 68; of Christian-Jewish relations, 31–32, 47; in “Neschastnaia,” 201; in “Taras Bul'ba,” 117 Old Testament, 36–37 Opponent: in “Taras Bul'ba,” 122–28; “the jews” as, 11, 27–29, 56, 75, 122–28 Opyty (Experiments) [journal], 423n45 Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis (Let us also pray for the perfidious Jews), 50 Orientalism: Arabic/Muslim characteristics and, 83; and body of “the jews,” 90, 92– 93; and “the jews”-African association, 97, 99; and Jewish image, 3, 5, 173 Orlov, count, 57 Orthodox Church. See Russian Orthodox Church Orzeszkowa, Eliza: Meir Ezofowicz, 223, 250; “Silny Samson” (Mighty Samson), 219, 259 Osman-Bei, World Conquest by the Jews, 170 Osorgin, Mikhail, 297; “Russian solitude,” 295, 365 Ostropolier, Hershel, 301–2, 358–59

493

494

Index Other, Jews as, 3, 8, 14, 20, 171 Otto-Onegin, Aleksandr, 215 Paganini, Niccolò, 264 Paleia tolkovaia, 17 Pale of Settlement, 5, 60, 108, 171, 268 Pan, 88 Papias, 89 Parkes, James, 2 Parnakh, Valentin, 288–89, 293 Passion Plays: medieval, 158; Ukrainian, 118, 121, 126 Passover, 64 Pasternak, Boris, 283, 288, 289, 297, 362, 363, 368, 423n46; Doctor Zhivago, 363 Paul, 27–29, 39, 50–51 Peasantry, 169 Percherskii, Nikita, 37 Pereswetoff-Morath, Alexander, 14 Perets, Abram, 283 Peshkov, Aleksei. See Gor'kii, Maksim Peter of Cluny, 49 Petliura, Simon, 218 Petrov, Evgenii, Zolotoi telenok (The golden calf), 321, 327, 334–35 Physical appearance. See Body Pigs, 76, 125 Pilate, Epistle of, 17 Pilate, Pontius, 28 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 221 Platen, August von, 96 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 169 Pogodin, Mikhail, 108 Pogroms: associated with Easter, 329; Chekhov on, 234; domestic violence associated with, 190; erotic elements of, 80, 226–27; increase in, in late nineteenth century, 175, 217; in Judeophile art, 226; liberal condoning of, 169; Tolstoi and, 225; Volunteer Army–conducted, 294 Poland, 19, 21, 65, 85, 107, 135–36, 178, 305 Political correctness, 175, 219, 229, 258, 278. See also Lexicon of “jewish” difference: liberals’ influence on uses of Pollution, 30, 32, 44–46, 60, 62, 83–86, 91, 123–25

Poplavskii, Boris, 365 Post-Christianity: defined, 3–4; Jewish image in, 10, 27 Post-revolution Russia: anti-Judaism in, 291–92; emigration from, 294–96. See also Soviet Union Povolotskii, Iakov (actual surname: Benderskii), 426n27 Primary Chronicle, 148 Prodigal son, 111 Profanation of sacred objects, 62–63 Propp, Vladimir, 10–11 Prostitution, 61–62, 71, 84 Protestantism, 18 Protestant Reformation, 16 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 56–57, 170, 423n40 Proust, Marcel, 289, 339, 341–44; À la Recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time), 337, 342–43, 350; Contre SainteBeuve, 343 Psalm 136, of Russian Bible, 262, 275 Puppet shows, 19 Puritans, 9 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 35, 108, 132, 172; Brat'ia razboiniki (Brother robbers), 60; Captain’s Daughter, 401n16; Covetous Knight, 55; “Gavriliada” (The epic of Gabriel), 67, 68; “Grobovshchik” (The coffin maker), 258; “Klevetnikam Rossii” (To Russia’s slanderers), 142; Mednyi vsadnik (The bronze horseman), 306; Skupoi rytsar' (The covetous knight), 60 Pussy willow, 262–63 Rabbinic Judaism, 3, 85 Rabbi Samuel, Epistle of, 19 Rabinovich, Osip, 174, 284, 354; “Shtrafnoi,” 221 Race: antisemitism and, 9; of Jesus, 56–57; Jewish image and, 3, 93, 173, 341, 342, 425n6 Rachel (diva), 215 Radicalism, 290–91 Raemaker, Louis, 317 Rassvet (Dawn) [journal], 295

Index Reason, “the jews” lacking in, 41–42 Red hair, 89–90 Renan, Ernest, 56 Rerikh, Nikolai, 318 Revolutionaries, Jews among, 290–91 Richepin, Jean, La glu (The leech), 248 Rimbaud, Arthur, 303 Ritual murder, 62–63, 65. See also Blood libel legend Robbery, 59–60 Romanov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich, 31 Romanov, Konstantin, Tsar'iudeiskii (The King of the Jews), 18 Romanov, Mikhail, 43 Romanticism, 107 Rosenshield, Gary, 14, 261–62, 265, 372n18, 373n24, 400n14, 400n16 Rozanov, Vasilii, 8, 39, 71, 80, 231, 350, 407n15 Ruether, Rosemary, 29 Rus'. See Kievan Rus' Russian culture: anti-Judaism in, 15–17; “the jews” in, 14–21; Western influence on, 14 Russian-Jewish authorship, 281; audience of, 286; Babel' and, 289, 368; and elimination of “the jews” from their works, 294; Fel'zen and, 289, 341, 357–58, 368; identity issues of, 289; and Jewish image, 8, 282, 284–86; and language, 287–89; Russian-Jewish literature in relation to, 362–63; solitude of, 365–68 Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, 171, 174, 284, 286–87, 289, 291, 293, 295, 336, 341, 348, 353–54, 356, 362 Russian-Jewish literature, 353–68; assimilation and, 353–55; Babel' and, 353–61, 364–65; defining, 353–55; Fel'zen and, 357–58; Russian-Jewish authorship in relation to, 362–63; Russian-Jewish writing vs., 23, 353, 354, 361, 363; target audience of, 361, 363 Russian-Jewish writing, vs. Russian-Jewish literature, 23, 353, 354, 361, 363 Russian literature: “jewish” difference in, 173–75; “the jews” as distinctive type in,

105–6; Judeophilia in, 219, 221–32, 260; personal attitudes of authors of, 1, 7–8; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, 220–21, 224 Russian Orthodox Church: and desecration narratives, 63; Jewish image in, 16–18; and Jews as deicides, 43; Last Judgment paintings in, 21; and substitution theology, 33; theology underlying, 16 Russian studies, 14–21 Russocentrism, 321, 335 Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), 170 “Rus'–the new Israel,” 17 Ruszel, Pawel, Fawor niebieski, 398n7 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 253 Sadism, 120, 214 Sadomasochism, 190, 221, 226, 231, 253 Said, Edward, Orientalism, 5 Salome, 242–43, 248, 253, 310, 311, 317 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 169, 217; Dnevnik provintsiala v Peterburge (A provincial’s Petersburg diary), 174; “Iiul'skoe veianie” (The July breeze), 217; Otechestvennye zapiski (The annals of the fatherland), 219; Sovremennaia idilliia (The contemporary idyll), 223 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5 Satan: animal symbolism and, 76, 78; as archetypal figure, 55, 57–67; as exploiter, 58; “the jews” and, 27, 45, 48, 58; parodic actions of, 81; physical appearance of, 88–89, 93, 99 Saturn-Kronos, 62, 65 Scapegoat, “the jews” as, 30 Scholem, Gershom, 281 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 249 Schudt, Johann, 89, 96 Scott, Walter, 35, 66, 82, 85, 125; authoritative image of “the jew” by, 105; Ivanhoe, 4, 41, 55, 70, 75, 93, 108, 110–11, 139, 157–58, 166, 167, 199–201, 397n8; literary significance of, 108; Waverley novels of, 108–10 Secular culture: “the jews” in, 3, 5, 11–13; post-Christianity and, 3–4; Turgenev’s “Zhid” and, 181

495

496

Index Self: Jesus as archetype of, 55; spiritual transformation of, 56 Self-censorship, 175, 193, 230, 291 Semi(o)tic chaos, 173, 175, 197, 213 Senderovich, Savelii, 254, 275 Sentimentalism, 220, 221, 224, 226, 229 Serafimovich, Aleksandr, “Pogrom,” 228 Serfdom, 167–68 Serov, Aleksandr, Judith, 250, 311 Servants, “the jews” as, 51, 151. See also Helper, “the jew” as Servitus Judaeorum, 49, 151, 155 Settlements and living conditions, 35, 46, 91–92, 100–101, 152–53 Severnyi vestnik (The northern messenger) [journal], 247 Sexuality: animal symbolism and, 75–76, 78–80; and Crucifixion imagery, 315; in Dracula, 246; garlic and, 94, 240; goose slaughter and, 330; in “Guy de Maupassant,” 308, 310–11, 315–20, 323; Judeophilia and, 226; nose as sign of, 93; pogroms and, 226–27; pollution and, 60–61; in “Tina,” 235–43, 246; in “Zhid,” 177–78, 189–91. See also Prostitution; Sadomasochism Shabel'skaia, Elena, 96–97 Shadow: “the jews” as, 55, 56; Self ’s triumph over, 56 Shakespeare, William: authoritative image of “the jews” by, 105; The Merchant of Venice, 12, 22, 66, 75, 76, 82, 105, 125, 157–58, 174, 179, 180 Shakhovskoi, Aleksandr, 167 Shame, 283 Shchedrin, Mikhail Saltykov-. See SaltykovShchedrin, Mikhail Shcheglov, Iurii, 327, 330 Shchepkin, Mikhail, 167, 171, 180, 191 Shestov, Lev, 296, 297 Shklovskii, Viktor, 269, 315 Shoah, 14, 23, 355 Shrayer, Maxim, 355, 364 Shteiger, Anatolii, 295, 346–48; “Zhid” (The Jew), 346–48 Shteinberg, Aron, 339

Siberia, 19 Sicher, Efraim, 328 Sight, 39–40 Simon Magus, 75 Skin, 91–92 Skriabina, Ariadna, 296 “Skripka Rotshil'da” (Rothschild’s fiddle) [Chekhov], 258–76, 365; counter-Judeophilic elements in, 261–62, 266; Du Maurier’s Trilby and, 271–73; Easter symbolism in, 263, 265; and Judeophilia, 258–60; music in, 267–70; personal circumstances underlying, 274–75 Slonim, Mark, 355, 356 Slovesa sviatykh prorok, 17 Sokolovskii, Vladimir, 38 Sologub, Fedor, Melkii bes (The petty demon), 226, 309 Solov'ev, Vladimir: and conversion of “the jews,” 50; on Jewish antispirituality, 39; and Jewish image, 8; Judeophilia of, 9; and the Talmud, 4; and verus Israel, 36 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Dvesti let vmeste (Two hundred years together), 23 Somov, Orest: “Gaidamak,” 129; “Kievskie ved'my” (Kievan witches), 120 “Son Presviatoi Bogoroditsy” (The dream of the Holy Mother of God), 19 Soviet Union: atheism in, 296, 339; Judeophilia in, 293; Judeophobia in, 293; Russocentrism in, 321, 335. See also Postrevolution Russia Sovremennik (The contemporary) [magazine], 167, 174, 178–83, 185, 187 Sovremennye sapiski (Contemporary annals), 294 Spanish Inquisition, 19 Sparrows, 77–78, 152 Speech, “the jews” deficient in, 97–99, 152, 173, 204–5, 287–88, 297. See also Language Spinoza, Baruch, 247, 342 Spirit, “the jews” lacking in, 38–39 Spitting, 97–98 Sreznevskii, Izmail, 107 Staniukovich, Konstantin: “Isaika,” 218, 223, 227–28, 346; “Pokhozhdeniia

Index odnogo matrosa” (The adventures of a sailor), 223 Stereotypes, 1 Stilman, Leon, 141 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 233, 243–46, 271–72, 277–78 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 99; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 219–22, 224, 226, 231 Stravinskii, Igor', “The Soldier’s Tale,” 267 Sturdza, Aleksandr Skarlatovich, 195 Subjects, “the jews” as, 11 Substitution theology, 33–38 Suvorin, Aleksei, 218, 235, 242, 247, 250, 255, 256 Synagogues: as decrepit, 100; hyena as symbol of, 75; travelogues’ description of, 35, 48; witches’ gatherings associated with, 85 Syphilis, 316–17, 320 Tablets of the Law, 37 “The Tale of the Baptism of Rus',” 17, 36 Talmud, 3, 4, 85, 94 “Taras Bul'ba” (Gogol'), 22, 346; authoritative image of “the jews” in, 105; and body of “the jews,” 90; context of, 105– 13; eschatology of, 129–37; filial bonds in, 110–12; goose symbolism in, 80; the Helper in, 151–60; history in, 108; Iankel' in, 12, 105–6, 109, 111–13, 126–28, 133, 139– 41, 144–49, 151–54, 157–59, 178–80, 221, 332–33; misogyny in, 139, 143; the Opponent in, 122–28; realism of, 109; spiritual trajectory in, 56; temptation of Taras in, 138–50; theology of archetypes in, 114–21; Turgenev’s emulation of, 178–80 Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, 48, 65. See also Lost Tribes of Israel Thackeray, William, 208 Theodosian Code, 60–61 Theodosius, 44 “Tina” (Mire) [Chekhov], 235–43, 245–56, 311; Bernhardt as influence on, 248; decadence in, 238–39; fairy-tale elements of, 236–38; personal circumstances underlying, 235, 251–54; Turgenev’s “Neschastnaia” and, 248–49

Tolkovaia Psaltir', 17 Tolstaia, Elena, 235, 248, 255–56 Tolstoi, A. K., 58–59 Tolstoi, Lev, 225, 230, 308 Torah, 37 Tragedy, of “the jews,” 157–58, 166, 179–80, 221, 224–26 Translations, annotated, 17 Travel, “the jews” and, 48. See also Exile; Wandering Jew Travelogues, 35, 48, 172 Trickster figure, 82–83 True Israel. See Verus Israel Tsetlina, Mariia, 423n45 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 294, 421n34 Turgenev, Ivan, 23, 57; attitude of, toward Jews, 168, 175, 215–17; Chekhov studied in relation to, 164; “Chelovek v serykh ochkakh (Iz vospominanii 1848 goda)” (A man in gray spectacles [From the memoirs of 1848]), 208–9, 215; conduct of, during ship fire, 183–85, 189, 202, 205; and Gogol', 164–65, 185; “Istoriia leitenanta Ergunova,” 408n29; “Klara Milich,” 215, 286; “Konets Chertopkhanova” (Chertopkhanov’s demise), 181; mother of, 184, 202, 215; “Neschastnaia” (The hapless girl), 22, 191, 193, 197–216, 248–49; private and public lives of, 175, 183–91, 214; and religion, 165, 181; Rudin, 193–97; sketches of Jews by, 195; “Stepnoi korol' Lir” (King Lear of the steppe), 195; on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 221; Zapiski okhotnika (A huntsman’s sketches), 167, 220; “Zhid” (The Jew), 22, 164, 167, 177–91, 219 Turkey, 291 Ukraine, 15–16, 18, 19; desecration narratives in, 63, 132; historiography of, 106–8, 133–34; religious drama in, 118, 121, 126, 130, 131, 157 Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 131–32 Unia mystica, 68, 138–39 Union of Brest (Unia), 131–32 Uranus, 62, 65

497

498

Index Uspenskii, Gleb, 191, 259; “Den' nuzhdy i skuki” (A day of need and boredom)/“Zhidenok” (Jew-kid), 219; “V balagane” (In the fairbooth), 65, 219; “Zhidenok,” 346 Usury, 59 Vaiskopf, Mikhail, 14, 92, 123 Vampirism, 86, 242–46, 272 Varnhagen, Rahel, 246 Vatican II council, 33 Veinberg, Pavel, 301–2, 359; Scenes from Jewish Life (Stseny iz evreiskogo byta), 250 Vertovskii, Aleksei, 167 Verus Israel (true Israel), 31, 36 Viardot, Louis, 164, 185–86, 189 Viardot, Pauline, 181, 185–90, 195, 206, 209–12, 214–16 Victorian literature, 233 Viel'gorskii, Iosif, 143 Villon, François, 303 “Visitor from the World Beyond” (Yiddish folk tale), 358 Vitte, count, 134 Vladimir, Prince, 17 Vodka, 60, 153 Volkonskaia, princess Z. A., 141, 143 Volotskii, Iosif, 17; Prosvetitel', 16 Volunteer Army, 294 Volynskii, Akim, 247, 269, 292 Vremia (Time) [journal], 168 Wagner, Cosima, 211 Wagner, Richard, 89, 209–13, 215, 247, 267–70, 272, 287, 338; “Judaism in Music,” 210–13, 258, 269; The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, 210, 249 Wandering Jew, 35, 50, 87, 100, 194, 241, 273, 274, 321 Weil, Simone, 284

Weininger, Otto, 39, 71, 284 Western Church. See Catholicism Wilde, Oscar, 242, 248 Wise Old Man, 69, 114, 115; God as, 55; “the jews” as, 55; negative faces of, 66 Wisse, Ruth, 353, 356, 358, 362 Witches, 85–86 Witness-people, “the jews” as, 49–52, 87, 151, 222 Wolves, 75 Women: archetypal logic concerning, 67–71; dual view of, 67; faiths symbolized by, 68; “the jews” and Christian, 40; and prostitution, 61–62, 71, 84; in “Taras Bul'ba,” 122–28 World Literature, 283, 289, 307, 308, 335, 337, 366–67 Wretchedness of “the jews,” 48–49, 225 Zagoskin, Mikhail, Iurii Miloslavskii, 129 Zaleski, Bohdan, 136, 400n4 Zapiski okhotnika (A huntsman’s sketches), 181 Zhabotinskii, Vladimir, 229, 284, 288, 289, 295, 341, 350, 353–54, 358, 362–64; Piatero, 363; “The Savage Cavalry of the First Hassidic Brigade,” 321, 322 “Zhid” (The Jew) [Turgenev], 22, 164, 167, 177–91, 219; and censorship, 178–79; echoes of Lermontov in, 187–89; French translation of, 183, 203; Gogolian elements in, 178–80; “Neschastnaia” in relation to, 202–3; personal circumstances underlying, 183–91; subversive meanings of, 181–83; trial and execution in, 179–80 Zhid, as derogatory term, 191–93, 234 Zionism, 288, 296, 324 Zola, Emile, 277; Nana, 251 Zviguilsky, Alexandre, 186, 210