The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky 9780804769853

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The Ridiculous Jew

The Ridiculous Jew t h e e x p l o i tat i o n a n d t r a n s f o r m at i o n o f a stereotype in gogol, turgenev, and dostoevsky

Gary Rosenshield

s ta n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s s ta n f o r d , c a l i f o r n i a

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 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, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenshield, Gary. The ridiculous Jew : the exploitation and transformation of a stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky / Gary Rosenshield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5952-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Russian fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Jews in literature. 3. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. I. Title. PG3098.3.R67 2008 891.73'3093529924046—dc22 2008011824 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

For Victor Terras In Memoriam

Contents



Acknowledgments



Introduction

ix 1

part one: gogol

1.

Taras Bulba: Gogol’s Ridiculous Jew, Form and Function

27



2.

Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context: Walter Scott, Gogol, and Russian Fiction

61



3.

Taras Bulba Otherwise: Deconstructing Gogol’s Cossacks and Jews

75

part two: turgenev

4.

“The Jew”: Turgenev and the Poetics of Jewish Death

99

part three: dostoevsky

5.

Notes from the House of the Dead: Ridiculous Jew, Existential Christian, Hagiographic Muslim, and the Intentional Text

131



6.

Notes from the House of the Dead: Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Jew and the Critics

163



7.

Notes from the House of the Dead: The Other Isay Fomich: Subversion and the Revenge of the Stereotype

173



Conclusion : Confronting the Legacy of the Stereotype: Babel, Rybakov, and Jewish Death

195



Notes

205



Index

247

Acknowledgments

Research for The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky was supported by grants from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School. I owe a great deal to all those who read the manuscript, either the whole or parts, and offered suggestions for improvement. I also benefited greatly from those who helped with aspects of the research and over the years engaged me in conversation on the representation of Jews in nineteenth-century Russian literature. I would particularly like to thank the late Victor Terras, David Bethea, J.  Thomas Shaw, Gabrielle Safran, Brian Horowitz, John Klier, ­Judith Kornblatt, Harriet Murav, Madeline Levine, Leo Livak, and the editors and readers of the Slavic and East European Journal and PMLA. I would again like to thank my wife for her love, support, and editorial assistance, all of which were crucial to the maturation and publishing of this book.

Introduction They seized the Jews by their arms and began flinging them into the water. Pitiful cries rang out on all sides, but the hardhearted Cossacks only laughed at the sight of the Jews’ legs in slippers and stockings kicking in the air. —n i k o l a i g o g o l , Taras Bulba He was really ridiculous, in spite of the horror of his position. The intense anguish of parting with life, his daughter, his family, showed itself in the Jew in such strange and grotesque gesticulations, shrieks, and wiggles that we all could not help smiling. —i v a n t u r g e n e v , “The Jew” He liked to steam himself into a state of stupefaction, of unconsciousness; and, every time, when going over old memories, I happen to recall our prison baths (which deserve to be remembered), then before me in the foremost place of the picture appears the face of the blissfully contented and unforgettable Isay Fomich, my prison comrade and fellow casemate. God, what a hilariously funny man he was! —f y o d o r d o s t o e v s k y , Notes from the House of the Dead

In the fourth chapter (“First Impressions”) of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s semiautobiographical novel about his Siberian prison camp experiences, Notes from the House of the Dead (1862), the narrator introduces the reader to a Jew by the name of Isay Fomich Bumshtein, the only Jew in the camp. Isay

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Fomich, we are told, is liked by virtually all the prisoners, even the Poles, primarily because he is a continual source of amusement. Of all the other convicts in our barrack, they liked only one Jew (zhid ), perhaps only because he amused them. However, our little Jew (zhidok) was liked by the other convicts as well, though everyone without exception laughed at him. He was our only one, even now I can’t recall him without laughing. Every time I looked at him I would recall Gogol’s little Jew Y­ankel from Taras Bulba who, after he had undressed, so that he could repair for the night with his Jewess to some cupboard, looked terribly like a chicken. Isay ­Fomich, our little Jew, was the spitting image (na dve kapli vody pokhozh) of a plucked chicken.1 (italics mine)

Through his narrator, Dostoevsky alludes to the most salient aspect of Jewish representation during the first great blossoming of Russian literature: ridiculousness. Although Gogol’s comic Jew, Yankel, is a factor (a military supplier) in a mythical tale about Ukraine in the sixteenth century, Dostoevsky goes back to Gogol to create the image of his Jewish fellow inmate. Dostoevsky does here what many Russian writers will continue to do for the next hundred years: portray Jews after the image of the Jews of Gogol’s Taras Bulba. When Ivan Turgenev writes his early story “The Jew,” like Dostoevsky, he takes his Jew ready-made from the same Gogolian source. Even such disparate Jewish writers as Isaac Babel, the most eminent prose writer of the Soviet period, and Anatoly Rybakov, a Socialist Realist writing in the late 1970s, must confront the image of the Jew that Russian culture inherited from Gogol when they portray their fellow Jews. This study is devoted to exploring the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century, arguably three of the greatest prose writers of modern times. But the focus is not on exposing the Jewish stereotype, which is manifest, and in Dostoevsky’s case virtually acknowledged.2 Moreover, much work has already been done identifying and enumerating Jewish stereotypes in Russian literature of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather, I focus on the ways in which Gogol and the young Turgenev and Dostoevsky exploit the stereotype of the ridiculous Jew for different literary and cultural ends. In terms of function, the stereotypes in Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead are unusual, and not only in a Russian context. In most works that include Jewish characters, the Jew, ridiculous or dangerous, is almost always an add-on, a figure who could have been left out without damaging the integrity of the work. By contrast, in Taras

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Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead, the Jew is integral to the content, style, and artistic vision of each work and writer. What ­Anthony Julius found most disturbing about T. S. Eliot’s poetry was that its antisemitism was not a side issue, a peripheral matter, but rather was central to the vision of several of his most important early poems: it could not be removed without artistically compromising the works.3 Eliot “was able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.”4 The same dilemma regarding anti-Jewish portraiture has beset the reception, especially in the last century, of the most well-known and influential work of Western literature featuring a Jew, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. There would be no play at all without Shylock, whose Jewishness is central to almost all the work’s sharp ideological conflicts: between Jewish usurer and Christian merchant, between Jewish law and Christian grace, between Jewish justice and Christian mercy, among other things.5 Like Shakespeare, Gogol, ­Turgenev, and Dostoevsky not only exploit the Jewish stereotype, they integrate the stereotype into the thematic and symbolic structures of their works. But just as in Shakespeare, the Jewish stereotype in the Russian works, perhaps because it is so well integrated and extensively exploited, also becomes disruptive, problematizing—even undermining— the assumptions and values that it was supposed to promote. One might call this practice “the revenge of the stereotype.” In Gogol’s Taras Bulba there are times when Yankel, the ridiculous Jew, seriously compromises the stature of the epic hero, Taras Bulba, although the stereotype is clearly intended to bolster his image, not undermine it. In Dostoevsky, the ridiculous Jew, Isay Fomich Bumshtein, casts doubt on the fundamental presupposition of Christian religious autobiography, the potential for resurrection from the dead, in imitation of Christ, of its putative author. I hope to show that the greater the integration of the stereotype, at least in these Russian works, the greater the potential of the stereotype for subverting the rhetorical structures that it was created to support, and for opening up the work to different and more productive interpretations,6 in some cases against authorial intention. Gogol’s Taras Bulba is a controversial work. It was championed in pre­ revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union as a paean of the national spirit, a modern Russian epic. But it has also been viewed, especially in the West, as one of the most embarrassing of Gogol’s works, partly for its celebration of Russian nationalism, but even more so for its glorification of war and its

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extenuation of violence, even atrocities. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 2003, Robert Kaplan calls it a seminal novel for our time precisely because of the violence it so graphically portrays, even celebrates: “It is a work that the critic John Cournos called ‘the finest epic in Russian history’ and likened to the Odyssey. The novel has a Kiplingesque gusto, too, that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba, to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face today in the Middle East and Central Asia.”7 Whether or not Kaplan is correct, Taras Bulba remains Gogol’s most well-known fiction and, at least from a historical and cultural perspective, his most important work. By looking at Taras Bulba from the point of view of Jewish portrayal, I hope to challenge some of the most widely held assumptions about this seminal work and offer an interpretation based on the irresolvable tensions in the author himself. Because of its blatant use of the same Jewish stereotype, Turgenev’s “The Jew” has been almost completely ignored in the critical literature, perhaps regarded as much an embarrassment for Turgenev’s legacy as many think Taras Bulba is for Gogol’s. But, horrible dictu, “The Jew” is one of Turgenev’s most accomplished stories. Complex and ingenious in terms of narrative structure, it represents a daring experiment both in the use of stereotypes and in the representation of characters of the lower class, testing the possibilities of reader empathy at the same time it advances its brief against capital punishment. But here too, as in Gogol, examining the Jewish stereotype leads not only to a better understanding of the Jewish stereotype in Russian literature but to a larger appreciation of perhaps the most problematic of all of Turgenev’s works, a work that presents the same problems for contemporary readers as The Merchant of Venice. Although generally considered the pivotal work of Dostoevsky’s later ­period, the period of the major novels, Notes from the House of the Dead is also one of his least studied fictions, probably because of its unique form and ambiguous genre: an amalgam of memoir, novel, and autobiography. In its preoccupation with crime and salvation, it is a key to the later works, and thus deserving of much more study. But it is also special in its own way, arguably being the best prison novel ever written, an outstanding example of modern religious autobiography, and one of the few major novels in Western literature that includes portraits of representatives of all the Abrahamic faiths. The narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead acknowledges that

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his Jew is not original, and he is not. What is original is the use that Dostoevsky makes of him in his depiction of other prisoners, in his representation of other religions, and perhaps, unbeknownst to him, in his depiction of himself: especially his possibilities for spiritual regeneration. Looking at Notes from the House of the Dead from the point of view of Isay Fomich leads, I would suggest, to a different interpretation of the novel and one that does not depend on the controversial preface that Dostoevsky tacked on for the purposes of the censor. It shows that Dostoevsky’s autobiographical project was fraught with difficulties from the beginning of his mature period: that is, from Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–1862) on. When writing about Dostoevsky’s religion, we need, in addition to focusing on Dostoevsky’s relationship to the Russian people and their religion, to train our attention on the crisis of faith that began with a Jew who looked like a chicken but in the end resembled more than anything else the author himself. In Dostoevsky’s world, what are the chances that a nineteenth-century “Russian” Jew could experience resurrection from the dead—or that a Russian who resembles him could be resurrected? These works of Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky need to be treated together not only because they employ a similar Jewish stereotype but because they are engaged in a literary and cultural conversation about the stereotype and its significance for Russian life. Gogol’s Taras Bulba is dependent on earlier works, both foreign and Russian, employing different Jewish stereotypes. Turgenev and Dostoevsky not only borrow from the same works as Gogol, they initiate a dialogue with Gogol over the stereotype, and especially in Turgenev’s case, polemicize with the representation of both Russians and Jews based on the stereotype. As the quotation above from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead shows, the relationship between these texts is a self-conscious one, with Turgenev and Dostoevsky alluding indirectly or directly to Gogol, and asking the reader, as it were, to view their texts as a response to Gogol’s. To understand these important works, then, one must understand their Jewish intertextuality: how Turgenev and Dostoevsky attempt, anxiously, to create a space for themselves in Russian literature in the shadow of Gogol’s Jewish images. Writing about the textual image of the Jew in English literature, ­Michael Ragussis emphasizes the influence of Shylock on the representation of the Jew in all writers after Shakespeare. But more important, he notes how referential almost every later text is to all its eminent forebears, so that the relation between images is conducted in what might be called a “battle of

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books.” “[T]he central rhetorical strategy of the revisionist novel of Jewish identity is allusion. Each ‘new’ novel that comes on the scene is embedded with references to its predecessors, because each ‘new’ novel inspects the representations of Jewish identity that precede it. By allusion I include the revisionist practice of recalling and reinventing the entire shape of earlier texts.”8 Similarly, we must understand Turgenev and Dostoevsky in relation to Gogol—and to earlier texts—if we are to gain a full appreciation of how and for what purposes Turgenev and Dostoevsky are “recalling and reinventing” Gogol’s Jewish images. I have focused this study on the dominant image of the Jew of the first half of the nineteenth century for several reasons.9 A book that treated in detail the representation of the Jew in the second half of the nineteenth century, not to speak of the twentieth century, could contain few close readings and would have to be twice the size, or more, of the present volume. But there are other reasons, and they are worth bringing up because of the light they may throw on the present project. In the 1860s and 1870s—that is, approximately from the publication of Notes from the House of the Dead in 1862 to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881—a more ominous Jewish stereotype became dominant in Russian literature and culture. Heavily influenced by the discussion of the Jewish question in Western Europe, Russian writers increasingly came to represent the Jew as an economic and cultural threat. This is the Jew of Dostoevsky’s notorious article on the Jewish question that appeared in the March 1877 issue of his Diary of a Writer, the Jew who rules over the stock exchanges and banks of the world, who determines international politics, and whose materialistic ideal is leading to the destruction of Christian European civilization. This threatening figure has little to do with that “killingly funny man,” Isay Fomich Bumshtein, from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, who, according to the narrator, is as harmless as a chicken, a source of infinite amusement for all, and someone that no one can take seriously; nor does this Jew have much do with the Jews of Taras Bulba, who can be killed with impunity; or with Turgenev’s inept Jewish spy, Girshel. As long as the Jews remained different in dress, mannerisms, and speech, and were, for all intents and purposes, contained aliens, segregated from the native population in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, they posed little cultural or economic danger. Their eccentricity could even be exploited in literature for local color, comic digressions, and archetypal contrasts with Russians. On the other hand, the acculturated, “hidden Jews” (conversos or

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not) of the second half of the century were, in the minds of some writers, potentially subversive.10 From a literary perspective, this historically more ominous Jewish stereo­ type, perhaps surprisingly, is less interesting and problematic than the more innocuous stereotype of the first part of the century. The ominous Jew figures more conspicuously in journalism and ideological polemic than in fiction: in Dostoevsky’s article on the Jewish question, for example, and the responses to Dostoevsky by Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s most eminent philosopher. With the exception of Chekhov, few interesting Jewish characters appear in the works of major writers during this period. In one of his later works, The Possessed, Dostoevsky creates in the converted Jew ­Lyamshin a less than believable political conspirator; in “The Unfortunate One” (“­Neschastnaia”), Turgenev sentimentalizes the sad tale of an assimilated half-­Jewess. No Jewish characters of significance appear in Tolstoy. Nikolay Leskov pens mostly Jewish caricatures that resemble earlier types without any of their problematic attributes. The more sentimental positive portraits created by liberal writers after the pogroms of the early 1880s suffer from the same two-dimensional and unproblematic representation no less than the more negative stereotypes. I am not in any way denying the importance of studying the image of the Jew during this later period. But in terms of imaginative literature, Jews in the earlier period figure in more important works and are integrated in a more aesthetic—though disturbing— fashion; and they are also more central to questions of literary evolution and influence, particularly among three of Russia’s most eminent writers, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.11 The study of Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead, in contrast to many later works, involves troubling literary questions about the use of the stereotype in works of high artistic merit.12 But equally important, looking at these works from the point of view of the Jewish stereotype provides a way of seeing them anew, and altering our understanding not only of the works themselves but also of their authors and their literary and cultural agendas. In addition, the image of the comic, puny, eccentric, and alien Jew characteristic of the earlier nineteenth-century period has greater significance for the Soviet period than it does for the second half of the nineteenth century. I have already suggested the relevance of Gogol’s Yankel in Taras Bulba for both Isaac Babel and Anatoly Rybakov. In my conclusion I will treat in more detail Babel’s and Rybakov’s confrontations with the Jewish stereotype of the early nineteenth century. But Jewish characterization in the Soviet

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period, as one might imagine, differs radically from nineteenth-century stereo­types. In nineteenth-century Russian literature, as in other contemporary European literatures, Jewish characters are primarily the creations of non-Jewish authors; however, in the twentieth century, especially during the Soviet period, Jewish characters and subject matter appear primarily in works written by Jews—Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Babel, and Ehrenburg, to name only the most important—in which the author’s confrontation with his own Jewishness plays a prominent role.13 This self-reflexivity alone radically differentiates the image of the Jew of the Soviet period from that of the nineteenth century. One can hardly imagine, to give an Anglo-Saxon example, a larger difference than the one that exists between Dickens’s stereotypical, medieval Jew-devil Fagin in Oliver Twist and the complex, guiltridden, “existential” Jewish protagonists in the works of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth.14 Fagin and Zuckerman (the protagonist in many of Roth’s novels) represent different literary realities. They have figured in the same critical studies about the representation of the Jew, but as literary creations they come from different planets. In Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead, Jews fulfill what might be called an apophatic function: they are the negative other used to define the positive ideal. Russian heroes are less characterized by their positive traits than by the absence of negative ones; they are defined most of all by not being Jews or by not being associated with anything stereotypically Jewish.15 For a contemporary audience, I would suggest that the best way to define the Russian Jewish stereotype of the early nineteenth century is to present it in terms of what it is not. Though this stereotype shares characteristics of almost all Jewish stereotypes, it lacks, or has in an only attenuated degree, many of the characteristics that readers may reflexively associate with the Jewish stereotype of the nineteenth century. Placing this early Jewish stereotype in its cultural and historical context will lead to a better understanding of what Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky were attempting to achieve with their Jewish characters and what they actually accomplished.

the jew as devil and homo economicus In medieval popular ballads and mystery plays, but also in later Renaissance literature, Jews are often cast as villains, striving, like the devil himself, to harm Christians and undermine Christendom. They are presented

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as poisoning wells, spreading leprosy, torturing the host, and sacrificing Christian children in reenaction of the Crucifixion. In the Renaissance, many of the devil’s features, including some of his physical accouterments and traits left over from the medieval mystery plays, such as his long beard and hair, were transferred to the Jew, the devil’s accomplice.16 In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice Shylock seeks revenge against the merchant Antonio, attempting to “sacrifice” him in a manner reminiscent of the ritual murder libel. In the Renaissance the image of the Jew as an economic exploiter of Christians begins to vie with his role as an associate of the devil. In Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale,” in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and for most of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jew works his evil schemes against Christians through the power of money;17 later, still as usurer, he comes increasingly to represent the hated new economic order.18 In the later Dostoevsky, the Jew, through his control of the stock exchanges and banks of Europe, determines European politics: it is all a part of a Jewish conspiracy to gain world domination at the expense of Christian civilization. When Jewish assimilation, or at least acculturation, becomes real, the fear of cultural competition emerges alongside the fear of economic domination. The appropriation (misappropriation) of the dominant culture by the Jew represents a “threat” to which writers and intellectuals seem even more sensitive than the threat of the Jew as homo economicus.19 The Jews in the works we will be examining, however, are unassimilated and alien, and thus constitute no cultural threat. Gogol treats an epic Russian past where the Jew and the Cossack operate in different economic and social spheres. Turgenev’s Girshel is not even a Russian Jew, and Dostoevsky’s Isay Fomich comes from the Pale of Settlement and speaks an accented Russian that the narrator exploits for comic effect. Although these writers treat the Jew’s economic activities negatively, he is not the serious economic threat that he would become just a few decades later. Turgenev’s Girshel is a poor contractor, attempting to make some extra money, albeit in despicable ways. Isay Fomich is a moneylender but his moneylending is amusing and at worst innocuous. Gogol’s Yankel is supposedly the economic scourge of the district in which he lives. But this can hardly be taken seriously: the passage in which Yankel’s financial dealings are cited is no more than a screed lifted from another novel (Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin) and as we shall see belied by the actual text.

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the good jew The positive Jew is a much more recent manifestation of the allosemitic stereotype, one that arose primarily during the Enlightenment, when some held that many of the negative traits and practices of Jews could be attributed to their centuries-old mistreatment by Christian society. The literary reflection of this point of view is twofold. The first is the creation of positive Jewish characters. Lessing’s Nathan, patterned after Moses Mendelssohn, in Nathan the Wise is the most famous of these positive portraits, but there are important English examples, including Richard Cumberland’s Sheva in The Jew (1794),20 Maria Edgeworth’s Mr. Moneenero in Harrington (1817), Dickens’s Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865),21 and George Eliot’s Mordechai and Mirah—and perhaps Daniel Deronda himself—in Daniel Deronda.22 Some of these figures seem now, at least, to be “bloodless abstractions,”23 as stereotypical in their rectitude as their negative counterparts in their vices. It has been argued that most of these positive portrayals of Jews arose out of their authors’ desire to rectify a more traditionally negative stereotypical portrait of Jews in their earlier works. There also exists an attenuated version of the good Jew: that is, a notall-bad Jew, or a Jew whose negative traits can be somewhat extenuated. In Ivanhoe Walter Scott does not pass over the negative traits of his Jewish moneylender, Isaac of York, but he attributes these foibles to centuries of Christian persecution. Ivanhoe includes an almost saintly Jew in Rebecca, but here Scott is not so much creating a new character but reworking the old dichotomy of the elderly, ugly, usurious Jewish father and his virtuous daughter, the prototypes of which we can find in Abigail in The Jew of Malta and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. In contrast to Abigail and Jessica, however, Scott’s Rebecca does not convert to Christianity but remains loyal to her family and religion.24 In Russian literature we see little of the virtuous or persecuted Jew before 1881, the year the first Russian pogroms broke out in southern Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. But the attempt to portray the Jew positively, or less negatively, in Russian literature of the last half of the nineteenth century resulted in no less formulaic characterizations than in other European literatures. The idea of presenting the Jew as a positive type probably never entered the minds of Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky when writing Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead. They

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would not in any case be atoning for previous works in which they regrettably maligned Jews. Neither do they depict Jews, in the manner of Scott, acting badly because of Christian persecution.

the inscribable jew There are critics, especially those studying the image of the Jew in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature, who focus less on the Jewish stereotype per se than on the widely diverging meaning it can assume in non-Jewish writers. For these critics, the Jew functions primarily as an indefinite signifier, an Other that resists clarity and definition, and thus a self onto which writers project (inscribe) their idiosyncratic anxieties and desires.25 While recognizing that “one should not underestimate the extent to which ‘the Jew’ could also be the ultimate and unchanging Other,” Bryan Cheyette argues that the Jew is “above all a sign of confusion or indeterminacy . . . that is locally defined.” The racial identity of “the Jew” was not simply determined biologically but varied radically both between and within the literature under discussion. Even within the same “character,” the otherness of “the Jew” was such that s/he could be simultaneously “male” and “female” and “black” and “white” and ultimately both “philosemitic” and “antisemitic.” The protean instability of “the Jew” as a sign is, therefore, continually refigured by a wide range of differentiating discourses that complement the intertwining trinity of “race,” “class,” and gender.”26

Whether Cheyette is right or not about the ambiguity of the image of the Jew, especially the Jewish stereotype (some have argued that one of the most distressing aspects of the Jewish stereotype is its unambiguous uniformity over the ages),27 he has accurately pointed out a common critical practice of employing an ambiguous image of the Jew as a means of analyzing writers’ psyches. In his article on Henry James, Jonathan Freedman, for example, argues that the Jew “functions most fully for James not as a concrete figure or even a stereotyped one, but as a receptacle: a figure onto which can be loaded all the sources of his inchoate anxieties and unacknowledged terrors.”28 William Empson suggests that the “Jew” in Eliot’s writing is a standin for his Unitarian father29 and that “both [Eliot and Pound] reviled in the Jew what they feared and cherished in themselves: their exile from their

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homeland and their diaspora among the texts that bear their names. Pound projected onto the imaginary Jew the anal fantasies and phobias enciphered in his name—a prosecutor he could never overcome. His antisemitism, like Eliot’s, is founded on identification, and his writings represent a lifelong struggle to exorcize his unknown self.”30 This idea of projection is not new, being part of almost all theories attempting to explain the antisemitic stereotype. But the idea that the Jew is not a single, invariable, and unchanging entity, but a sort of empty receptacle to be variously filled by the needs of the individual writer, leads to a different notion about Jewish representation, one in which the critical focus shifts from uncovering stereotypes to determining their specific function in individual authors, a function that is shaped by the author’s identity themes and cultural environment. Once Jews become projections of authorial fears and desires, they may indeed serve different functions; on the other hand, the image of the Jew, especially as a projection, rarely strays far from the traditional negative stereotype: it is always a negative projection.31 It is not my goal to employ the image of the Jew as a means of revealing the inner life of Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. Gogol and Dostoevsky are phobic personalities for whom there is little that does not pose some danger or threat. Gogol, often regarded as the most eccentric of the great writers, saw the devil everywhere, even in overcoats; Dostoevsky thought that the whole world was conspiring to do Russia in, not only the Jews. Freud employed the not so distantly related idea of parricide to illuminate Dostoevsky’s relationship with his father and with the tsar. Although the idea of the differing function of the Jewish stereotype is central to my method of tracing the way the Jew is used in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, projection seems less relevant to the Russian writers of the first half of the nineteenth century than to English writers of the twentieth century. Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky perhaps do not take Jews seriously enough to see them as personal threats. In his novel Summer in Baden-Baden (Leto v Badene, 1978), about Dostoevsky’s first year of marriage, Leonid Tsypkin reimagines Dostoevsky’s life in part to compel Dostoevsky to realize that the Jew, Isay Fomich, from Notes from the House of the Dead is really his alter ego. But Tsypkin’s narrator at bottom knows that his Dostoevsky is not the real Dostoevsky but one he has created to make the genial writer repent for his misrepresentation of the Jew. The narrator wants and needs a repentant Dostoevsky, a Dostoevsky that would be more acceptable to a Jew of the late twentieth century, a Dostoevsky a Russian-Jewish reader and writer feels less guilty about venerating.

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t h e j ew a s s i m i l at e d a n d c o n v e rt e d It may seem strange that assimilation and conversion are not prominent questions in works about Jews of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially since, according to Ragussis, one of the central foci of criticism on the representation of the Jew in nineteenth-century English fiction has been the reaction to Jewish assimilation and its consequences—its danger—for English society. For many centuries assimilation implied conversion. When conversion did not work, Jews were often segregated from the Christian population or expelled, as they were in England in 1290. For proselytizing religions, conversion of the unfaithful often plays an important soteriological role. Jews remained necessary because, according to some, the ultimate victory of Christianity could be realized only with their conversion.32 For the religious consciousness of nineteenth-century England, the earliest of the Old Testament Hebrews were viewed not as Jews but as primitive Christians. It was only after Moses, with the supposed degeneration of the religion, that the people of the book became Jews. Conversion was seen as an attempt to bring the Jews back to their original religion.33 Edgar Fisch emphasizes the centrality to the conversion project of chapter 11 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul “requires the contemporary Jew, the Jew of post-biblical history as a witness to the final consummation of the Christian promise of salvation: or to put it a little more accurately, he requires the regeneration of Israel as the true source of the regeneration for all mankind. . . . The regeneration of Israel is accomplished through his conversion to Christianity, and by no other way. . . . He [the Jew] had to be kept outside the pale of society: but he also had to be preserved. . . . The Jews were a deicide nation but they were also a nation which is redeemed, and on whose redemption the fate of mankind hangs.”34 The conversion of Jews sometimes figures prominently in literary texts. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, the Jewish heroine, Abigail, converts to Christianity when she learns of her father’s perfidy. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the conflict between Shylock and Antonio, between Jews and Christians, is resolved with Shylock’s defeat and conversion. Scott motivates Rebecca’s decision not to convert by the harsh treatment of Jews by English Christians. Ragussis argues that one of the overarching missions of English cultural history of the nineteenth century was its preoccupation with the conversion of the Jews, an event that for many would validate English national identity and certify England’s status as the New Israel among the nations.35

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Ragussis does not gloss over the resistance to conversion. In fact, for all those urging conversion as necessary to the fulfillment of Britain’s Christian mission to the world, there were perhaps equal numbers who feared that the Jews would as conversos (secret Jews) exploit conversion to their economic and cultural advantage. He views Trollope, who feared the Judaizing of English society, as typical of the reaction against conversion as a solution to both the Christian and Jewish problems.36 But there were other objections to conversion. George Eliot was opposed to the conversion of the Jews for very different reasons than Trollope: she feared that the Jews would lose their national identity. The perfect English gentleman, Daniel Deronda, truly finds himself only when he discovers he is a Jew and then becomes fully committed to the mission implicit in his national and religious identity. Until the last few decades of the eighteenth century there were few Jews in Russia. This situation changed dramatically when, as a result of the three partitions of Poland, Russia became the ruler of one the world’s largest Jewish populations.37 The government generally went along with the recommendations of various administrators and commissions that Jews be denied the right of residence in Russia proper and be restricted to the areas in which they had lived in the Old Kingdom of Poland,38 eventually to be known as the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti). It was not long into the nineteenth century that the Russian government began to consider conversion as a way of solving its Jewish problem.39 It permitted the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews to pursue its activities in the Kingdom of Poland.40 Alexander I was influenced by the apocalyptic ideas of the English missionary Lewis Way, who “believed that the salvation of the world was to be anticipated by the mass conversion of world Jewry.”41 After Alexander I, Nicholas I pursued policies, such as the establishment of free schools for Jewish children, that were designed to bring about, if not widespread conversions, then a greater integration of the Jewish population. 42 Most Jews, however, believed that the educational reforms were nothing but schemes to undermine Judaism and promote conversion. Nicholas also expanded the notorious canton regiments for Jewish youth under age eighteen, which after 1827 often devolved into a makeshift system for converting Jewish boys to Russian Orthodoxy. In theory the religious rights of Jewish recruits were to be protected, but in practice thousands of Jews were subjected to coerced conversion. The horrors were magnified by the induction of children, in some cases, as young as eight or nine years

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old. Alexander Herzen recalls in his memoirs his encounter with a group of young Jewish recruits in Siberia, around Perm. They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten. . . . Not even a brush full of black paint could put such horror on canvas. Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats, with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes bore witness to fever and chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.43

In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, there is little reflection of any of the Russian conversion projects, or conversion in general, in Russian literature. No work on the subject of the canton system, for example, could ever have passed the censors. Herzen’s memoirs were published abroad. Moreover, Russian writers had little contact with Jews, who lived not in Russia proper but in the new western territories acquired as a result of the partitions of Poland. For most Russian writers, the idea of conversion could hardly be a topic of interest when Jews themselves could not be imagined in a contemporary social environment. As mentioned above, Gogol’s Taras Bulba takes place centuries earlier, Turgenev’s “The Jew” during the Napoleonic Wars outside of Russia, and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead in a prison camp about three thousand miles from Moscow. Moreover, the Jews in these works are hardly ripe for conversion; they are unassimilated, unassimilable Jews who hold fast to their religious practices and identity. The questions of Jewish assimilation and conversion began to interest writers, thinkers, and journalists after the major reforms of the 1860s, when not only was there more freedom to write about the Jewish question but also the question became more pressing as Jews, in limited numbers, began to move to the big cities and make their presence felt economically and then culturally.

the jewish body Whereas conversion and Jewish economic activity become important questions during the 1860s and 1870s, the Jewish body, especially the Jewish male

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body, is central to all earlier Jewish representation. In Gogol, Turgenev, and the early Dostoevsky, the essential differences between Russians and Jews are as much physical as moral, although in the stereotype the physical and moral go hand in hand. Scrawny, unprepossessing, sickly, and wrinkled, the Jews are also timid and cowardly, the antitheses of the manly and stalwart Russian protagonists. Gone are the devil’s physical accouterments: goat’s beard, horns, deformed or cloven feet, and tail.44 But all three writers often resort to invidious animal similes and metaphors in describing the Jewish body and its movements: so there are no Jewish lions, eagles, or falcons, only plucked chickens, parrots, and rabbits. We need to be careful not to equate this emphasis on the Jewish body with later developments, especially in German literature and culture and in recent critical theory on the body. There are similarities between the Russian and German oppositions of Jewish and “native” physicality, because each culture is attempting to define itself in terms of and against the Other, but the differences are of much greater importance than the similarities. Nothing in Russian literature and culture approaches what was occurring in German culture around the ideas of Aryan or Nordic racial superiority and Jewish inferiority; in German culture, the Jewish male, especially, became a convenient negative binary to the Aryan, a degenerate involved in prostitution and the white slave trade, a malignant carrier of diseased genes, an alien capable of diluting and polluting Aryan blood.45 Even later in the nineteenth century, Russian thought shows little tendency toward emphasizing the Jewish body’s integral relation with the moral, economic, and religious role of Jews in the modern world. Vladimir Solovyov, who continually stresses the importance of the material in the Jewish idea—the sanctification of the objects of everyday life—does not focus on the Jewish body. Of Russia’s major writers and thinkers, only Vasily Rozanov, at the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporates ideas about the Jewish—and Christian—body into his theories of sex, religion, nationality, and family life. But Rozanov often admired and celebrated Judaism for its sacralization of the flesh. The Jews’ power, not weakness, Rozanov argued time and again, lay in the body. The Viennese Otto Weininger, on the other hand, abhorred sexuality and preached an end to reproduction, not unlike Tolstoy, as the only means of achieving the ideal: immortality. Throughout the nineteenth century, but especially during the first half of the century, the Russian government, as we have seen, pursued an ag-

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gressive conversionist, thus assimilationist, policy toward the Jews. Jews could legally and theologically become Russians. And even later in the century, when anti-Jewish sentiment had increased considerably, the archreactionary Pobedonotsev still considered conversion, a physical incorporation of Jews into the Russian body politic,46 as an essential element in the Russian solution of the Jewish problem. Russian antisemites were much less concerned with miscegenation than with more traditional aspects of the “Jewish problem”: ritual murder (obviously a religious body issue carried over from the Middle Ages), the Talmud (which was seen as promoting Jewish separatism and preventing assimilation and which became a special obsession of the Russian antisemitic press), and the international Jewish conspiracy (a preoccupation of some prominent Slavophiles, like Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov). Though the ideas of race had become part of the cultural discourse in England, France, and Germany since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Russia remained preoccupied with the theological Jew; unlike Germany, its antisemitism had not passed from the theological to the ­racial. Russians could hardly be receptive to German racist ideology, which was bound to relegate them to the status of an inferior, even mongrel, race.47 Nor could Russian blood occupy the same place in Russian nationalist thinking as German blood would in German culture. The nineteenthcentury tsars themselves had almost no Russian blood. In his attempt at creating a national epic and celebrating the Russian spirit and soul, Gogol makes a point that his ideal “Russians” (who were ethnically a rather diverse group) constituted a brotherhood of spirit; they were bonded by soul, not by blood—blood kinship being one of the lowest forms of a human community. I want to tell you, friends, what is meant by our comradeship. . . . We were [once] left destitute, and, like a widow when the strong husband is dead, our country was destitute as we were! It was in those days that we, comrades, clasped our hands in brotherhood! It is on that our comradeship stands! Nothing is holier than the love of comrades. The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, the child loves its father and mother, but that is not the same, brothers; the wild beast too loves its offspring, but only men can be related in a kinship based on their souls, and not on their blood (No porodnit’sia rodstvom po dushe, a ne po krovi, mozhet odin tol’ko chelovek).48

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the unity of jewish body and spirit Yet there is little question that in Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead the Jew’s physical presence is a manifestation of an inner reality, be it mind, spirit, or soul. This consonance of body and soul, to be sure, obtains in almost all literary stereotypes—the more negative the stereotype the greater the degree of consonance—but it is not confined to stereotypes; it has been since the Greeks a major technique of characterization in the Western literary tradition, especially common in allegorical genres. This consonance is often embedded in language. The Greek word kallos means both beautiful and good as the word aischros means both ugly and bad. The Greeks knew intellectually that beauty of body often did not coincide with beauty of mind, spirit, or soul: beautiful goddesses can be cruel, handsome politicians can be corrupt. And Christianity has often associated beautiful flesh—and sometimes beautiful literature—with the temptations of the devil. But this does not prevent literature or even religious iconography from employing beautiful form to represent the highest spiritual realities.49 All his life Dostoevsky was vexed with the literary problem of representing goodness, both physically and spiritually. In Notes from the House of the Dead, he depicts the most spiritually perfect character in the work, the Muslim Aley, as a consonance of physical and spiritual beauty: Aley’s “whole soul was apparent in his handsome, one might even say beautiful, face” (92–94; 4:51–52). In The Brothers Karamazov, the most allegorical of Dostoevsky’s works, we find an even more exaggerated example of the consonance of the physical and spiritual, this time a consonance of the ugly and corrupt, in Dostoevsky’s depiction of the novel’s most negative character, Smerdyakov, whose name means “stinking.” Fond of hanging cats and despising all things Russian, Smerdyakov looks extraordinarily old for his age and has a wrinkled, yellow, sickly, and emasculate face. He is Dostoevsky’s closest counterpart of a Uriah Heep or Fagin. In Gogol’s Dead Souls, almost every physical detail points to a dead soul.50 Literature, to be sure, often challenges consonance, and Western literature has long exploited the disparity between appearance and reality, including the beautiful facade that hides something ugly. “O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” Gogol’s hero Piskarev in “Nevsky Prospect,” discovering that the celestially beautiful girl he saw on the street is a common prostitute, commits suicide in disillusionment precisely over this disparity. Literature less frequently challenges the reverse disparity, at least before the nineteenth

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century, that of the ugly exterior that hides a beautiful soul. Irony is almost always deflationary. In Gogol’s Taras Bulba beauty leads to the destruction of the Cossacks and the hero. The negative stereotype just reinforces negative consonance. One would hardly expect authors who use the body as a reflector of spiritual realities to see the negative stereotype as some sort of exception. Authors often choose a negative stereotype because its negative consonance is commonly accepted and unquestioned; because, unproblematic and static, it is the antithesis of irony. But there is an important complicating factor. Although Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky exploit the negative stereotype of the Jew, they also came to artistic maturity during a period of literary romanticism, which had a predilection for depicting the beautiful soul trapped in an ugly, deformed, or corrupted body: an inflationary dissonance, in contrast to the more deflationary dissonance of the beautiful concealing the ugly.51 As a comic writer, Gogol attempts to stay with the stereotype. For Gogol the problem arises when the epic hero, Taras Bulba, assuming the role of a Jew in order to get to Warsaw to witness the execution of his son, is compelled to take on some of the characteristics of Yankel, the stereotypical Jew. This problem is further complicated by the physical description of a Jewish woman that undergirds the author’s description of the terrible suffering of the people in the town besieged by the Cossacks. With Turgenev and Dostoevsky, the stereotype becomes problematic because it goes against their common practice. Turgenev writes stories in which illiterate, rough-hewn, poor peasant serfs are shown to be morally superior to their masters. The heroine of his “A Living Relic” combines saintliness with physical deterioration and decay. In “The Jew,” Turgenev discovers in the stereotype a way of making the strongest of existential statements about death and capital punishment. For Dostoevsky, the conflation of the good with the ugly, the sickly—and even the physically ridiculous—often lies at the center of his aesthetics. In his first work, Poor Folk, he turns the ragged, alcoholic, ridiculous clerk, Makar Devushkin, into a man with a soul as tender and pure as any heroine of a sentimental novel. “Makar” means “blessed” in Greek; and the word “devushka” in Russian means “girl, young girl, or virgin.” So the name “Makar Devushkin” implies that he is a blessed virgin. The heroine of Crime and Punishment, Sonya Marmeladova, is a prostitute pure in spirit.52 In Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot, the truth may be linked to both physical and mental disabilities: impotence and idiocy. The putrefying body of the saintly Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov precipitates a religious crisis in Alyosha Karamazov,

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who rebels against the disjunction of the good (the saintly Zosima) and the beautiful (a sweet-smelling dead body) in the phenomenal world. Leave it to Dostoevsky to convert a literary topos into an ultimate question. But how does a Russian writer who has dealt seriously with the disparity of the physical and the spiritual even in lower-class characters deal with a stereotype, in which the physical and spiritual are one. How can Dostoevsky, for example, treat the ridiculous Devushkin existentially and the ridiculous Isay Fomich as though he were not even a human being: that is, like Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich? As Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden makes clear, critics are still asking this question. But as I hope to show, at least in Notes from the House of the Dead, the static Jewish stereotype is always at the point of becoming unstable, losing its intended function, even undermining the rhetorical structures it was designed to support.

stereotypes and reality The Jewish stereotype, to the dismay of many, has remained remarkably stable throughout the centuries. But this does not mean that it has been exactly the same in all places and times. Modder argues that “the dominant” aspects of the stereotype—its foregrounded aspects—reflect societal changes, and he even sees as positive the shift of the dominant from Jews as deicides to Jews as economic threats. He can imagine a time when conditions will make the stereotype obsolete.53 Whether this is wishful thinking or not, different times undeniably promote different distortions. As we have seen, during the 1860s and 1870s, the most salient aspect of the Jewish stereotype in Russian culture changed as Russian writers began to react to the actual presence of Jews in the economic and cultural life of the country. When Dostoevsky writes about the harmful influence of Jews in the Russian borderlands, he is responding to an ongoing debate on the Jewish question in Russian society. In his famous short story “Gambrinus”(1907), Alexander Kuprin specifically addresses the antisemitism (and the antisemitic stereotypes) fostered by the disturbances resulting from the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. Rozanov’s writing continually responds to the famous Beilis case of 1913 (one of the most famous blood libel trials of the twentieth century). Before 1855, since there were few Jews in the interior of Russia, the Jewish question was hardly a burning issue. The Jews in the works of Gogol,

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Turgenev, and the early Dostoevsky are more abstract, more socially unanchored. They are based more on literary models, having little to do with actual Jews or social concerns relating to Jews. Gogol’s Jewish tavern owners of the fifteenth century are anachronous,54 Girshel is not even a Russian Jew, and Dostoevsky’s Isay Fomich is the only Jew in a Russian forced labor camp thousands of miles from the Russian heartland. Perhaps not having to reflect or imitate reality, writers focus more on the function of the stereotype and its relation to previous literary models. Shakespeare, too, was not dealing with real Jewish merchants working in England, but imagined Jewish usurers in Venice—or real English usurers in London. He exploited the Jewish stereotype in the usual way, but he also had more freedom to experiment, focusing more on literary models, like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, rather than perceived social realities. Gogol works off Scott and Bulgarin, Turgenev off Gogol and Bulgarin, and Dostoevsky off Gogol. The image of the Jew in Russian literature cannot be taken out of the larger Russian cultural, historical, political, and social context. The Jews of Taras Bulba, “The Jew,” and Notes from the House of the Dead are literary Jews. This is why I will be focusing much more on the literary in these texts than on their status as reflections or imitations (distortions or otherwise) of reality.

the jewish stereotype: t r a n s f o r m at i o n s a n d s u r p r i s e s Influenced by romantic ideas regarding national spirit, few Western European nations escaped the compulsion to define the unique nature and mission of their people. Since the publication of Petr Chaadaev’s philosophical letter, which argued that Russia had no distinctive national character and therefore no real role in history, Russian thinkers and writers have been preoccupied with defining Russian national character. In Part 1 (Chapters 1–3) I show how Gogol incorporates the Jew as “other” into his project of defining a Russian national ideal, which he searches for in a mythic past.55 Although Gogol also uses other groups—women, Poles, priests, Tatars—to define the Slavic masculine ideal, the Jew, I contend, emerges as the Russian’s most significant other. Taras Bulba also shows the influence of Walter Scott and the historical novel, in particular Ivanhoe, but Gogol casts the Jew Yankel in a very different role than Scott casts Isaac of York, neither needing persecuted Jews (Isaac) nor an ideal Jewess (Rebecca). Though he does

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not follow Scott here, Gogol nevertheless undercuts his project of creating a Russian epic ideal by incorporating the Jewish comic stereotype into his presentation of the heroic. The Jew becomes subversive. In addition, I hope to show that both the comic stereotype and the epic ideal may be compromised by the narrator’s depiction of a dead Jewess with a hungry baby at her breast, whom the narrator chooses to represent the suffering of the Polish city besieged by the Cossacks, an image startlingly similar to the starving mother and babe in Dmitry Karamazov’s dream in The Brothers Karamazov, in which Dmitry suddenly comes to understand the universal responsibility for all human suffering. I attempt to explain how such a passage can exist in a novel almost side by side with a scene in which, during a pogrom, the Cossacks laugh as they watch Jews drown in the river. The Jews not only open the text, they also illuminate the spiritual and aesthetic division in the author himself. Part 2 (Chapter 4) examines Ivan Turgenev’s early short story, “The Jew” (1847), which challenges the notion in Taras Bulba that Jewish death is not only not serious but even ridiculous. I show that, like Gogol, Turgenev exploits the physical and spiritual contrast of Russian and Jew but in different ways and for different ends: Gogol needs the negative stereotype of the Jew to highlight the positive attributes of a Russian ideal, but Turgenev needs the Russian ideal to outline, by contrast, the negative aspects of the Jewish stereotype. Since Turgenev needs to present death existentially, he needs not only a different Jew but also different Russian soldiers who witness the Jew’s death. The extent to which Turgenev exploits the stereotype becomes evident when “The Jew” is compared to a later work that Turgenev wrote against capital punishment, “The Execution of Troppmann” (1870). I also hope to show how, especially in comparison with Gogol, Turgenev transforms the relationship between narrator and Jew. Whereas in Gogol almost everything about the Jew and the Russian separates them from each other, in Turgenev, the death of a Jew becomes the central event in the life of the narrator, turning his story of the Jew, Girshel, into a confession that he must tell the young soldiers under his command. Whereas Gogol is distant from the Jews he describes and except in one instance emphasizes the Cossack’s absence of compassion—and not only for Jews—Turgenev I hope to show paradoxically uses the stereotype to elicit compassion from his reader, thus challenging the validity of the stereotype at the same time he exploits its most negative aspects. Whereas both Gogol and Dostoevsky focus on the Jewish male, Turgenev also experiments with the Jewish female, a distin-

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guishing characteristic of the most famous English works in which Jews play a prominent role.56 I show how Turgenev reverses the Jewish “heroine’s” traditional role—we shall see that she is no Abigail or Jessica—but also how he uses Jewish women (both mother and daughter) to raise the emotional stakes for his characters and the reader regarding Jewish death. Despite exploiting the stereotype, both Shakespeare and Turgenev humanize the Jew, but Turgenev humanizes the Jew differently than Shakespeare, not giving him cause for the way he is, but emphasizing the irreducible humanity that he shares with all human beings. For Gogol, death separates the Jew from the Russian, for Turgenev it unites them. The more closely we see Turgenev’s work in relation to Gogol’s the more intertextual—even polemical—Turgenev’s work appears and the more it opens itself up to interpretation. Part 3 (Chapters 5–7), dealing with Dostoevsky’s Jewish prisoner from Notes from the House of the Dead, Isay Fomich, focuses on a prominent example of what might be called “the return to Gogol”: the reinstatement and redeployment of the Gogolian stereotype from Taras Bulba. I show how Dostoevsky is content to exploit Gogol’s ridiculous Jew, a Jew who poses no threat to Russian Christians, both for comic relief and for illuminating, by contrast, an unexpected aspect of the Russian people, their spiritual and religious potential. But he is also used to define, again by contrast, ideal spirituality in the person of the perfectly beautiful Muslim Aley. I show how Dostoevsky may have returned to his portrait of Aley from Notes from the House of the Dead when creating positive Russian spiritual types in his later novels, such as Myshkin in The Idiot and Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. Chapter 6 is devoted to examining critics’ ingenious but abortive attempts to find something subversive in the Jewish stereotype in Notes from the House of the Dead, something in the character of Isay Fomich that belies what the narrator shows and tells. Here I examine in detail Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden, which attempts to reimagine Dostoevsky confronting a real Isay Fomich (Isay Fomich’s prototype) in himself. Lastly (Chapter 7), I attempt to show that though one cannot transform Isay Fomich into something that he is not, there is something in him that goes beyond the stereotype, something that makes him in some ways similar to his Russian comrades and removes him from the most hated of all Dostoevskian categories, the lukewarm. Much of this, I argue, happens against authorial intention. But I would suggest that the most interesting thing about Isay Fomich is the way, as a stereotype, he backfires, the way he subtly undermines the main idea of the novel itself, the narrator’s potential—and

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the potential of all educated Russians—for spiritual resurrection from the dead. I examine in detail the similarities in situation between Isay Fomich and the narrator that should make any reader question the religious Christian optimism of the text. I show that the Jewish stereotype comes back to haunt Notes from the House of the Dead no less than it does Taras Bulba. In every case, in Taras Bulba, in “The Jew,” and in Notes from the House of the Dead, the simple stereotype of the ridiculous Jew undergoes transformations, intentional and unintentional, that should change the way we look at these seminal works, but equally important, transformations that should make us once again face the disturbing questions posed by The Merchant of Venice: how we respond to classic texts in which the stereotype is an integral part of a great work of art.

part

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1

Taras Bulba Gogol’s Ridiculous Jew, Form and Function

One of the most notable ironies concerning the image of Jews in European literature is that the most influential portraits of Jews were anomalies for their creators. Marlowe and Shakespeare each wrote only one play where Jews figure prominently, and aside from The Merchant of Venice, which includes the most famous Jewish character in Western literature, Jewish references in Shakespeare are rare.1 This is no less true of Dickens. Oliver Twist would probably have been Dickens’s sole work in which a Jew figured prominently had he not thought to compensate for the medieval Fagan by creating the positive Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). In conformity with the general European pattern, Nikolay Gogol, who penned in Taras Bulba the most influential portrait of Jews in nineteenth-century Russian literature, also wrote relatively little about Jews. Since Jews had, by the 1830s, lived in Western Ukraine for centuries, it is not surprising that writers there, such as the early ethnographer, lexicographer, and author of comic sketches, Vladimir Dal, included them in their works. Gogol’s early stories derived from Ukrainian life and folklore appeared in 1831–1832 in the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, which included the stories “The Fair at Sorochintsy,” “St. John’s Eve,” “A May Night, or The Drowned Maiden,” “The Lost Letter,” “Christmas Eve,” “A ­Terrible Vengeance,” “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” and “A ­Bewitched Place.” In these stories, there are few Jewish characters, and none

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of especial interest. The occasional references to Jews are equally unremarkable. As traders, innkeepers, and drivers, Jews figure as part of the Ukrainian landscape. A Jewish tavernkeeper in “Christmas Eve” does not want to serve drinks on credit to a rich Cossack. Jewesses appear at booths in “The Fair at Sorochintsy.” The hero of “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” driven home from his regiment in Mogilev by a Jew, is delayed because the Jewish driver will not drive on the Sabbath. There are also occasional but not unexpected disparaging remarks. “Petro had only one gray jacket with more holes in it than gold pieces in a Jew’s pocket” (1:37; 1:49).2 The few Jews who do appear are invariably treated comically and never evoke sympathy or serious consideration from narrator or author. “The majority of the officers drank hard and were really good at dragging Jews around by their earlocks as any Hussars” (“Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” 1:176; 1:210). The Jew mentioned above who drives Ivan Fedorovich home is bitten by a dog when he descends from the carriage on arrival. This is presented as a comic incident in a larger humorous scene.3 Nor is there any sympathy in the narrator’s description of the outrageous behavior of the Polish nobility toward the Jews, as in the following passage in which the emphasis falls not on the Jews but on the Poles: “Their masters were at the height of their revelry, playing all sorts of tricks, pulling the Jewish tavern keeper by the beard, painting a cross on his impious brow, shooting blanks at the women, and dancing the Cracovienne with their impious priest (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:156; 1:185). In Gogol’s early stories, the Jews are implicated along with Poles and Russians in the spiritual decline of the age, and they are at times linked with the devil. “Our gentry initiate Polish fashions and have copied their sly ways. . . . they have sold their souls, accepting the Uniate faith. The Jews are oppressing the poor (Zhidovstvo ugnetaet bednyi narod)” (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:158; 1:187). But the Jews appear no worse than the Russians, who are presented as Judases, betrayers of their own Orthodox faith, often exchanging Catholicism for Orthodoxy. Gogol’s Ukrainian devil is no ­Miltonian Lucifer; rather he is a middling figure, who can on occasion be outwitted, defeated, and even humiliated. He often appears less formidable or objectionable than Great Russians (Moscovites) or foreigners.4 Nevertheless, in his many forms and disguises, the devil is still the main power disrupting the life of the village of Dikanka in the stories in Gogol’s Dikanka collection. Almost every human activity and natural phenomenon is associated with the devil, from pipe-smoking and revelry to pigs and the moon.

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But the Jews are no more associated with the devil than the Russians. In a curious passage in “The Terrible Revenge,” the hero, Danilo, suspects his father-in-law of being in league with the devil not because of any association with Jews, but because his father-in-law will not drink the “Jews’ vodka,” the vodka that Danilo stole from the Jews at Brest (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:145; 1:172). In the only scene in which the devil and a Jew appear together (“The Fair at Sorochintsy”), they are antagonists. The devil pawns his red jacket to a Jew and says he will return for it in a year. But it seems to the Jew too long a time to wait, so he sells it. When the devil comes back to reclaim his coat, the devil gives the Jew the scare of his life. The Jew faints but is revived by the pig-allies of the devil and is compelled to confess what he did (1:22–23; 1:32–33). The Jew in the early work of Gogol is an alien but he does not loom more ominously than Germans (that is, European foreigners), Turks, or Gypsies. He is associated with money but more often than not he is the object of abuse by the “native” populations. He is also amusing to Gogol’s narrators whether praying, being pulled by the beard, or being bitten by a dog. And he is no less a victim of the devil than the other inhabitants of Dikanka. As Kunitz argues, the Jew is treated contemptuously for comic effect, but without malice or hatred.5 Nothing about Gogol’s attitude toward Jews changed significantly in the years separating the early Dikanka stories (1831) and the two versions of Taras Bulba (1835 and 1842).6 But in Taras Bulba, in which Gogol transforms the Cossacks7 into romantic epic heroes representative of a lost Russian past,8 the Jews are cast in a radically different role. They still serve as comic relief, but now they are exploited as devices for highlighting, apophatically, the greatness of the Russian soul as embodied by mythic Cossacks.9 In Taras Bulba, Gogol conceives most of his characters in complementary sets of binary oppositions. Sometimes he extols his heroes not only by dramatically portraying the Cossacks’ martial virtues and inexhaustible exuberance but also by contrasting them with various sets of negative others (women, Poles, priests, aliens, and Jews). The Cossack is thus defined equally by what he is and by what he is not. A Cossack is not a Pole, not a woman, and, most of all, not a Jew. But this process is reciprocal, whether intended or not, for the Jew becomes inevitably defined in terms of the Cossack: that is, apophatically, as a non-Cossack. As O. V. Belova, who has studied popular ethnic stereotypes among the Slavs, argues, one creates a portrait of the other (­chuzhoi ) in order to discover one’s own true identity (osoznat’ sebia samogo).10

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In this chapter, I shall examine Gogol’s use of the secondary or literary epic to portray the Russian national ideal embodied in the semi-historical mythic Cossack,11 the basis for understanding the role of the Jew in the novel. The focus here falls on the portrayal of the Cossack martial ethos, ­sacralized brotherhood, and Russian spiritual vitality. I shall then examine how Gogol utilizes the Jewish stereotype to reinforce this ideal by negation, first by showing how “the way of negation” works with another antithetical other, women, with whom the Jew has much in common, and then by contrasting Cossack and Jewish attitudes toward money, trading, and brotherhood. These are the most obvious categories in which Gogol’s binary oppositions hold sway. Equally important, however, are the different ways that Jews and Cossacks relate to their environment (space) and inhabit their bodies. The description of the Jewish body is especially important, for it is the foundation of Gogol’s comic portraiture. The Jew’s scrawny physique, alien dress, and wild gesticulations are prime reasons, as we shall see, why the Jew cannot be taken seriously, why he cannot be presented problematically and existentially, even in death. There is nothing that defines both Cossack and Jew more than death, and it is precisely in death that the Jew appears the most ridiculous. In Chapter 2, I discuss the literary context of Gogol’s representation of Jews. Since Gogol creatively assimilated the literary culture of his time, we can better understand the Jews in Taras Bulba when seen against the most popular novel of the times, Scott’s Ivanhoe, which included the most famous literary portraits of Jews since Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. To highlight what Gogol could have done and chose not to with the material at hand, given the fact that he quotes from Scott in reference to his own Jew, Yankel, I compare Gogol’s comic treatment of Yankel in Taras Bulba with the more problematic and existential treatment of Isaac of York and Rebecca in Ivanhoe. But it is also important to compare Gogol’s treatment of the Jews in Taras Bulba with the portrayal of Jews in the most popular contemporary Russian novels, such as Faddey Bulgarin’s Mazepa and Ivan Vyzhigin, both of which preceded Gogol’s work and included more serious portrayals of both positive and negative Jewish types. The last chapter of Part 1 (Chapter 3) deals with what I shall call the deconstructive—that is, unintended—consequences of Gogol’s comic treatment of the Jew, for in places, probably unintentionally, the binary opposition between Cossack and Jew occasionally weakens, in one instance to such an extent that Cossack and Jew come to occupy the same space, concretely represented when Taras lies down on the same mattress to sleep as Yankel,

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and when in a reversal of roles he hides in Yankel’s cart. The effect of this conflation and reversal is that the Jew plays an important role in undermining the main project of the novel: the creation of a Russian national hero and a heroic epos for modern Russia. But equally unexpected is the appearance of an existentially serious Jew, a Jewess to be more exact, whom Gogol uses as a symbol of human suffering. Just as the comic Jew undermines the heroic text, the existential Jewess casts doubt on the exploitation of the comic Jew as a means of apophatically creating an epic hero. If Jewish death can be treated as seriously as Cossack death, what is one to make of those episodes in which Jewish death is treated not only unproblematically and unexistentially but comically, even ridiculously? Is the stereotype unintentionally challenged, or is there method to this artistic aporia? An analysis of another work by Gogol, “The Overcoat”(Shinel’), gives us a way of better understanding the ambiguous nature of the comic representation of the Jew in Taras Bulba and the unusual role of the narrator or author himself in the text.

ta r a s bu l b a a s m y t h i c e pi c Generically Taras Bulba is a nineteenth-century literary or secondary epic employing typical epic devices, including catalogues of warriors, extended epic similes, and long formal speeches.12 But it also incorporates elements of the historical novel as practiced by Scott and his imitators, abounding in local color and detailed descriptions of clothes and interiors. The episodic plot involves the attempts of the hero, Taras Bulba, to defend the Russian lands and the Orthodox faith from their traditional enemies, the Catholic Poles in the west and the Tatars and Turks in the east and south. The epic becomes the vehicle by which Taras’s deeds are immortalized and come to serve as inspiration for future generations. As is common in Christian secondary epics, there is little of the supernatural machinery of primary or folk epics in which the gods intercede to advance the missions of their human wards. The only semblance of the supernatural in Taras Bulba is Christ’s receiving the slain Russian martyrs and placing them by his side. Gogol also does not adhere to the traditional high style of epics. A prose epic, Taras Bulba shows its romantic provenance by mixing high, middle, and low styles, frequently introducing low comic elements—similar to those in Gogol’s early comic stories—into some of the most serious episodes of the text, including the deaths of both of Taras’s sons.

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As has been pointed out, Taras Bulba himself is conceived more as a mythic or romantic hero than an epic one. And the novel itself is less a paean to a way of life that has been lost than a glorification of the Russian soul and spirit as embodied in the primitive Cossack defenders of the Russian land and religion (Russian Orthodoxy). Gogol does not describe the Cossacks from the historical record; he imaginatively refashions them for their ideological and religious roles.13 In contrast to the oft-stated Soviet view, the Cossacks were hardly stalwart defenders of Russian lands. Originally formed from peasants escaping Russian serfdom, over time they became a formidable military force. But they often shifted allegiances, alternatively allying themselves, when convenient, with Russians, Poles, or Turks. Nor were they ever purely Russian; they comprised disparate elements, including Poles, Tatars, and even Jews. Although there were many “warriors” among them, many Cossacks farmed and even lived by trade. Despite all the narrator’s rhetoric in Taras Bulba praising the Cossacks’ loyalty to and defense of Russian Orthodoxy, the Cossacks cared as little about religious allegiance as national allegiance; they were a martial brotherhood living primarily for booty, reveling, and fighting. Setchkarev describes them as “idealized beasts.”14 The apotheosis of the Cossack life, even in Taras Bulba, is death in battle; an old man arouses only suspicion. “There were no very old men in the camp, for no Dnieper Cossack died a natural death” (2:48; 2:66).15 Gogol is not implying that contemporary Russians should emulate the Cossacks by becoming warriors. Shaped by their experiences and their times, the Cossacks could be brutal, killing women and children without compunction. But Gogol presents their cruelty as justified by historic necessity, for during those times only ruthless warriors could successfully defend the Russian lands and the Russian Orthodox Church. Furthermore, their ruthlessness was not intrinsic to their nature, it was the era that made them what they were: “The inherently peaceful Slav spirit (drevle mirnyi slavianskii dukh) was tempered in the flames of warfare and the Cossack organization arose” (2:27; 2:39). Most important, beneath their rough exterior there was a broadness and depth of soul to be found nowhere else on earth. This depth had been lost by the Cossacks’ more civilized nineteenth-century Russian descendants, who lived in a world obsessed with materialism, refinement, and sex.16 Reacting to the contemporary charges by Petr Chaadaev17 and other intellectuals that Russia had contributed nothing to civilization and that Russians were fated to be an ahistorical people, Gogol creates an epic celebrating

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the superiority of Russian national character epitomized in the broad Russian soul, evident in the hero’s attempt to rouse his fellow warriors to action. “Meanwhile in silence he prepared himself to rouse them all at one moment by uttering the Cossack battle cry, so that courage might come back anew to the heart of each with greater force than before, a revitalization of which only the Slav race (slavianskaia poroda) is capable, that richly endowed, vigorous race which, compared with all others, is as the ocean to shallow rivers; in time of tempest it is all uproar and commotion, tossing and flinging up billows as no impotent river can; in calm, still weather it stretches far and wide its limitless glassy surface, fairer than any river, an endless joy to the eye” (2:95–96; 2:120).

the cossack ideal The Cossack ideal in Taras Bulba is martial and masculine. The Cossacks are brave, resilient, and stalwart warriors. When injured in battle, a Cossack just throws some dirt on the wound, spits on it, and returns to the fray (2:56; 2:74). Gogol exploits the epic form to provide the battle scenes necessary for showing the Cossacks’ martial prowess. The goal of every Cossack should be, as it is for every epic hero, glorious death, Greek kleos.18 “But Bovdiug had fallen from the wagon. The bullet had caught him just under the heart; yet the old man rallied all his strength and said: ‘I am not sorry to part with life. God grant every man such a death! May Russia be glorious to the end of time!’” (2:105; 2:131). Nailed to a tree by the Poles, having sacrificed himself for his country and religion, Taras calls out to his brothers to carry on the fight against the Polish infidels. The warrior ethos and Christian ideal are fused into a martial crucifixion. But the preeminent virtue of the Cossacks is not martial prowess, nor sacrifice in defense of Russia and Orthodoxy—nationality and religion mean little to them—but loyalty, specifically loyalty to the Cossack brotherhood: comradeship (tovarishchestvo). As the Cossack Bovdiug expresses it: “The first duty of a Cossack is to respect the laws of comradeship.” In a passage quoted earlier, Taras argues that next to the relationship between comrades, even the relationship between family members, even between mother and child, are like relationships between animals (2:99; 2:124–25). It is not surprising then that the plot focuses on the betrayal of the Cossack brotherhood by Taras’s younger son and Taras’s revenge for his son’s betrayal. The

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idea of brotherhood is emphasized throughout, but it is especially prominent when an appeal is made to the group. When Taras fears, for example, that the Cossacks are going to abandon the siege of the Polish town in order to attack the Tatars, he tries to dissuade the Cossacks by appealing to their sacred fraternal obligations. “No, your counsel is not right,” he said. “You are wrong; you seem to have forgotten that our comrades seized by the Poles are left in captivity. You would seemingly have us disregard the first sacred law of comradeship ( pervyi, sviatoi zakon tovarishchestva), would have us leave our mates to be flayed alive, or to be quartered and their Cossack limbs sent about from town to village, as the Poles did with the Hetman and the foremost Russian noblemen in the Ukraine. . . . I ask you all. What is the Cossack worth who leaves a comrade in misfortune, leaves him like a dog to perish among aliens?” (2:91; 2:115–16)

And toward the end of the novel, when Taras attempts to persuade his fellow Cossacks not to accept peace offered by the Poles but to pursue the war against them, he relies once more on the idea of brotherhood, even defying the wishes of the Russian Orthodox clergy. He can do so because in the world of the novel it is the relationship between comrades that is most holy, something that Christ himself paradoxically recognizes, welcoming into heaven the recently arrived warrior-martyr, Kukubenko: “You did not betray the brotherhood (ty ne izmenil tovarishchestvu)” (2:106; 2:132) If the Orthodox Church acts against the interest of the brotherhood, then it, too, must be defied.19 Since, alas, the Cossacks are not always at war or marauding, ways must be found to exalt their virtues at rest. Gogol discovers a somewhat attenuated exuberance and spirit in the sech’, the place where Cossacks live and revel in preparation for war,20 and where women, priests, and Jews are strictly forbidden. Here the irrepressible vitality of the Cossacks is channeled into reckless abandon. This propensity for revelry does not always serve their interests—later in the novel, the Cossacks, helplessly drunk, are set upon and killed by the Poles during a siege of a Polish town—but revelry is a natural outlet for the great Slavic soul; it is a vice that reveals a higher virtue, Slavic vitality.21 The camp presented an extraordinary spectacle; it was in uninterrupted festivity (pirshestvo), a ball that began noisily and never ended. Some of its inmates practiced crafts, others kept shops and traded; but the majority

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c­ aroused from morning till evening, if the jingle in their pockets made it possible, and the booty they had won had not yet passed into the hands of dealers and tavern keepers. There was a fascinating charm in this carousing. It was not a gathering of people drinking to drown sorrow, but simply the frenzied recklessness of gaiety (beshenoe razgul’e veselosti). Everyone who came here forgot and forsook everything that had occupied him before. He spat, one may say, upon the past, and carelessly abandoned himself to freedom (volia) and the companionship (tovarishchestvo) of other reckless revelers like himself, who had no kindred, no home nor family, nothing but the open sky (vol’noe nebo) and the eternal festivity (vechnyi pir dushi svoei). This produced a wild gaiety (beshenaia veselost’) that could spring from no other source. The talk and storytelling among the crowd lazily resting on the ground was often so amusing (tak byli smeshny), so full of life and vigor (dyshali takoiu siloiu zhivogo rasskaza). (2:42; 2:58–59)

The narrator reveals that the life force manifesting itself in revelry and gaiety is the same that energizes the Cossacks’ epic martial exploits. These are not introspective, brooding loners. When they are not fighting they reveal their Slavic soul in the company of their brothers. At leisure, the Slavic soul most expresses its vitality and freedom in dance, an orgiastic, national, collective dance that almost no Cossack, even the 720-pound Taras, can ­resist joining. Four old Cossacks near the young one were working their legs rather mincingly, flinging themselves like a whirlwind almost on the musicians’ heads, and suddenly dropping into a squatting position, they flew around, stamping with their silver heels vigorously and resoundingly on the hard beaten ground. The earth resounded with a hollow echo far around and the air was ringing with the dance tunes struck out by the clinking heels of their boots. . . . The crowd grew larger; others joined the dancers, and no one could have watched without being held spellbound by that most free, most furious (beshenyi) dance the world has ever seen. (2:40–41; 2:56–57)

t h e way o f n e g at i o n : w o m e n Although Gogol clearly does not pass over the Cossacks’ martial prowess, bravery, drinking, dancing, and fraternal loyalty, he works out their characterization in greater detail in the portrayal of their significant others. He exploits “the way of negation” because implicit in the idealization of the Cossacks is an invidious comparison with the decadent present. Thus

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the definition of the Cossack must be framed in relation to the shortcomings of the contemporary world.22 What is good about the Cossack is not only that he is he a warrior, a comrade, a free spirit, and a reveler but also that he is not a “civilized” denizen of the author’s own world, not a trader, farmer, fop, intellectual, politician, bureaucrat, official, priest, Tatar, Turk, Gypsy, German, Moscovite, Catholic, Uniate, and certainly not a Jew, the ultimate un-Cossack and perhaps the Cossack’s most significant other. Since the apophatic technique that Gogol uses with the Jew in defining the Cossack is similar to the one he uses with other outside groups, I would like to show briefly how this device is used with women. The attempt to establish a link between femininity and Jewishness belongs more properly to other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cultural traditions,23 but Taras Bulba occasionally likens Jews to women. On the other hand, since women represent a radically different “other” than the Jew, especially in terms of the sensibilities of the narrator, they sometimes underscore the nature of Jewish difference and alterity as much as the Cossack male.24 Some men are attracted to women and their world (Taras’s younger son Andrii is representative of this sad phenomenon), and women can understand the Cossacks’ ideal of loyalty to their brotherhood. But no true Cossack could be attracted to the life of a Jew, the life of commerce, nor could any Jew understand anything about Cossack life, especially about the most important thing of all: brotherhood.25 Knut Andreas Grimstad has characterized Cossack community (tovarishchestvo) in Taras Bulba as not only homosocial (though not homoerotic) but also antifeminine.26 But it is more than that: Cossacks are constantly reminded that they are not women. When Taras’s two sons, Ostap and Andrii, come home from the Kiev seminary, Taras is displeased that they are dressed in frocks that make them look like women or monks (a feminized brotherhood).27 When Taras’s wife wants to show her love for her boys, whom she has not seen for a year, Taras immediately intervenes: he is not going to have his boys, who have been bred for war, coddled and feminized. “Don’t heed your mother, son: she is a woman (baba), she knows nothing. What do you want with spoiling (nezhba). What you want is the open plain and a good horse: that’s the best treat for you. And you see this saber (eta sablia) here? That’s the mother for you” (2:24; 2:36). By stating that the saber, a masculine sexual symbol, is the true mother of the Cossack, Taras emphasizes the complete displacement, even erasure, of the feminine that must take place in the maturation of the Cossack warrior.28 Taras himself sees his “old woman” as

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little as possible. In the above scene, Taras wants to make sure his sons leave for the sech’, the staging grounds from which they will prove themselves in battle. When Taras’s wife objects to his stern admonition to his sons, Taras rebukes her: “Stop whining, stop whining, old woman! A Cossack’s not for the hanging about with women. You’d hide them under your petticoat ( pod iubki ) and sit on them as though they were hen’s eggs” (2:24; 2:36). The sentence is prophetic. Andrii hangs around women, is contaminated by them, and betrays the brotherhood. When, at the beginning of the novel, Taras tells his comrades that they are becoming like women, the Cossacks respond as if his words “were like sparks falling on dry wood”: “You plowmen sowing buckwheat, minding your flocks, and running after the wenches! Enough of following the plow, muddying your yellow boots on the land, running after women, and destroying your knightly power!” (2:29; 2:41).29 If a Cossack is like a woman, how can he be a true Cossack, how can he bond with his brothers, how can he live in the sech’? How can he defend the Russian land and the Russian Church, ruthlessly slaughtering women and children? The Cossack is a lover of other men, not women. The Cossack’s embrace of his brother is manly; his embrace of a woman is necessary for the propagation of the next generation of warriors, but shameful. By novel’s end, the comic antipathy toward the feminine that we have seen turns misogynistic. Taras is not only waging a war against the traditional Cossack enemy, the Poles, he is also, perhaps even primarily, waging a war against women, brutally slaughtering them and their children as they pray at church altars. Destroying women has become Taras’s last desperate attempt to maintain his identity and solidify the bonds of comradeship among the remnant of faithful Cossacks. As I have noted, the text says that the Cossacks hate Catholic priests (“perverted brothers”) worse than they hate Jews; Taras comes to hate women even more than he hates Catholic priests.

the other other: the jew Jews are different anti-Cossacks. For Cossacks, Jews, unlike women, are neither tempters nor repressed others. They are more than other, they are alien. Cossacks are not particularly fond of the clergy, but the Orthodox clergy at least are their own. The Cossacks profess Orthodoxy as part of their identity. To enter the sech’ and participate in its activities, all Cossack newcomers must certify their Orthodoxy.

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Even Poles, who look like “sissies” in their military finery, are valiant fighters, no less courageous and daring than the Cossacks themselves. By contrast, there is hardly any way that the Jew is not different from the Cossack—and here again we are dealing with the intentional text—for the Jew highlights apophatically every defining characteristic of the Cossack, and therefore what is quintessentially Russian. But who and what is the Jew, the un-Cossack?

the jew and money If the ur-Cossack in the novel is Taras Bulba, the quintessential Jew is ­Yankel, the Jewish contractor who works just outside the sech’, supplying the Cossacks with the things they need for fighting—-and for carousing during downtime. Gogol exploits the traditional stereotype of the Jew as homo economicus. Yankel is defined by his passion for money, just as unambiguously as the Cossack is defined by his passion for fighting. Even while praying, money is not far from Yankel’s mind. When he catches sight of Taras he immediately sees the reward on Taras’s head, despite the fact that Taras has recently saved his life. Yankel tries to stifle this shameful thought, but it is impossible to do so because it is not only part of his nature, it is part of the nature of the entire Jewish race. Taras went into the inner room. The Jew was saying his prayers, covered with his rather dirty blanket, and in accordance with the rites of his religion turned to spit for the last time, when his eyes suddenly fell on Bulba standing behind him. First of all, the two thousand gold pieces promised as a reward for Bulba’s head seemed to leap up before the Jew’s eyes; but he was ashamed of his greed (koryst’) and strove to conquer the everlasting thought of gold which twines like a worm about the soul of a Jew. . . . “I know, I know all about it; they offered two thousand gold pieces for my head. They give it a value, the fools! I’ll give you five thousand. Here are two thousand on the spot”—Bulba shook two thousand gold pieces out of his leather purse—“and the rest when I come back.” The Jew instantly seized a towel and covered the gold pieces with it. “Aie, the wonderful (slavnaia) money! Aie, the dear (dobraia) coin!” he said turning a gold piece over in his hands and trying it with his own teeth. “I expect that the man from whom your honor seized such good gold pieces did not live another hour, he went at once to the river and drowned himself there, after losing such splendid gold pieces.” (2:113–14; 2:140–42)

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Yankel may at first be successful at suppressing “the everlasting thought of gold which twines like a worm about the soul of a Jew,” but he is relieved when Taras gives him two thousand on the spot and promises him three thousand in addition for his services. Gloating over his potential gain, he is yet able to empathize with the man from whom Taras stole the money. Had he been the victim he would simply have gone straight to the river and drowned himself. Yankel’s obsession with gold is more, however, than a private obsession; we are told, it has detrimental consequences for the entire province. “By now he [Yankel] rented a bit of land and kept a little tavern; he had by degrees got all the gentry and nobility of the neighborhood into his hands, had gradually extracted almost all their money, and the presence of the Jew was having a profound influence in the district. For three miles in every direction there was not a single hut left in decent condition; they were all tumbling down and falling into ruins; everything was being squandered on drink, and nothing was left but poverty and rags; the whole countryside was laid bare as though by fire or pestilence. And if Yankel had stayed there another ten years, he would certainly have laid bare the whole province” (2:113; 2:140). But it is not only the landowners who have been impoverished by the Jews, so have the Orthodox priests and churches, a situation that enrages the Cossacks and leads to threats of hanging: “Don’t let them make the priests’ vestments into petticoats for the Jewesses! Don’t let them put stamps on the Holy Easter Cakes! Drown them all, the heathens, in the Dnieper!” (2:53; 2:72). The Jew’s obsession with money is also revealed in his risk-taking behavior. Taras is amazed at the dangerous situations Jews place themselves in just to collect the pettiest of fees. Recognizing a Polish officer entering the besieged Polish city, Yankel accosts him to collect an outstanding debt. Taras is actually less surprised that Yankel was not killed on the spot than he is by Yankel’s stupidity. To Taras and the narrator, Cossack and Jewish risk-taking are diametrically opposite entities. “I followed him with the notion of getting him to pay me, and went into the town together with them.” “How could you go into the town and expect them to pay you, too?” said Bulba. “And didn’t he order you to be hanged on the spot like a dog?” “Oh, dear, yes, he meant to hang me,” answered the Jew. “His servants caught me and put the rope around my neck; but I besought the gentleman; I said that I would wait for the money if only he would help me get from the other knights what they owe me; for Goliandovich—I am telling you

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everything, noble sir—has not a single gold piece in his pocket, though he has farms and estates and four castles and steppe land right up to Shklov; like a Cossack he has nothing, not a kopek, and now, if the Jews of Breslau had not equipped him, he would have had nothing to go to the war in.” (2:80; 2:103)

The Cossacks risk death for glory, the Jew for a few gold coins. ­Yankel here barely escapes death from his foolish request for repayment as he barely escaped drowning from the Cossack’s wrath in an earlier episode, when Taras was fortunately present to save him. The reasons for Yankel’s escape from the noose are even more revealing than the escape itself. Yankel’s speech implies—realistic motivation is often inapplicable to both plot and characterization in Taras Bulba—that it was not the noose that most discouraged him from insisting on payment but his realization, just by looking at the Polish lord, that he had no more money to his name than any Cossack. It would be thus better to delay the request for a later time. Yankel’s behavior may seem strange, but it is consistent. Taras perhaps should not be surprised at Yankel’s behavior. Right after he saves him from being drowned with the other Jews, Yankel hides for a while under Taras’s cart, but as soon as the coast is clear he not only erects a stand indicating that he is once again ready for business, he secretly places one of his carts among the convoy so he can sell his wares to the Cossacks. Taras shrugs his shoulders, amazed at the enterprising nature of the Jew, who serves throughout the novel as the Cossack’s other with regard to gain (koryst’). Money means (or should mean) nothing to the Cossack; it means everything to the Jew. The Jew accumulates money from selling alcohol, the Cossack spends every copeck he has on drink. The Cossack does not count his money when he pays for something, he just reaches into his pocket and gives what he has for what he wants: “For the Zaporozhtzi never cared for bargaining, and paid whatever money their hand chanced to grasp in their pocket.” His scorn for money defines him in terms of the Jewish lust for gold. As Taras makes clear, any turn away from the martial ideal to the material one is a betrayal of the Cossack brotherhood and by implication a kind of Judaization. The extent to which a Cossack reaches the Russian ideal is determined not only by his adherence to the martial ethic but also by his rejection of the Jewish ethic: profit, love of material gain (koryst’ ). Jews are described as impelled by a strong desire for gain (pobuzhdaemye sil’noiu koryst’iu) (2:60) and as traders obsessed with gain (korytoliubivye ­torgashi) (2:61). The story of Borodaty, the Uman commander, is illustrative

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of the destructiveness of greed for the Cossack hero. An elegantly attired Polish officer is killed by the Cossack hero, Kukubenko, who abandons him to fly into the fray to slay other Polish officers. But Borodaty is struck by the riches of the slain Pole, and he rides away from his regiment to collect the spoils, where he himself is slain in an attempt to enrich himself. “Oh, what precious trappings he has left unstripped!” said Borodaty, the chief of the Umansky unit, riding away from his followers up to the spot where lay the Pole slain by Kukubenko. “Seven Poles I have killed with my own hand, but such trappings I have not seen yet on any.” And Borodaty coveted them (i pol’stilsia koryst’iu): he bent down to take the costly armor from the dead Pole; already he had pulled out a Turkish knife, set with gems all of one hue, and untied a pouch of gold pieces (chervontsami) from the belt, and lifted from the breast a knapsack containing fine linen, sumptuous silver, and a maiden’s curl, carefully treasured in remembrance. And Borodaty did not hear the red-nosed standard bearer, whom he had once thrown down from the saddle and at whom he had a good slash, fly up behind him. The standard bearer swung his sword and smote him on the neck as he bowed down. Greed [that is, love of material gain] brought the Cossack to no good (Ne k dobru povela koryst’ kozaka); the mighty head flew off and the dead man fell headless, wetting the earth with blood far and wide.” (2:87; 2:110; italics for English mine)

The Cossack who crosses over the line from martial duty, especially in time of battle, to material self-aggrandizement, undergoes a form of Judaization and is punished by a death unbecoming of a Cossack warrior. Meeting his death while gloating over gold pieces (chervontsy), Borodaty recalls Yankel’s gloating over the two thousand gold pieces given to him by Taras Bulba. Perhaps it is not accidental that Borodaty comes from the same town as Yankel—Uman.

the jew as trader The Jew as homo economicus is also the personification of another bête noire of the text: the trader. Though not strictly a usurer, the most despised of professions, the Jew plies an occupation that is nevertheless the antithesis of the Cossack martial ideal. The Cossack attains not goods but booty; he confiscates and pillages, he does not trade. Trading is against Cossack, and, by extension, Russian nature. Cossacks, the narrator tells us, never liked trading (zaporozhtsy nikogda ne liubili torgovat’sia) (2:44; 2:60–61).

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The novel’s animus against trade is reflective of the scorn in Russian and Polish culture for the middleman. The Jews, who were invited into Poland to invigorate a primitive economy, occupied for centuries the role of middleman not only in Poland but also in most Eastern European areas. As the indispensable intermediary between the landowner and the peasant, the Jew was often despised by both. From the point of view of high culture— that is, of the landowners—the peasants were at least natives and producers, whereas the Jew was alien and a trader-usurer. The peasants often despised the agent more than his employer. Furthermore, the Jewish trader in Russian literature, even in Gogol, has none of the stature of the classic Jewish trader-usurers in the English tradition. In Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, the Jewish protagonist ­Barabas attains, through his mercantile exploits, enormous power, which the play seems to both abhor and celebrate. Malta, Marlowe’s mercantile state, tolerates Jews because it is dependent on them for its economic welfare. In the new world, trade has become an important political matter; it is capable of bringing down states (Malta), even empires (Turkey). The Jew, as the ur-merchant, has an opportunity for the first time of holding equal sway with the princes of Europe. It is only when Barabas oversteps his economic role and attempts to rule as governor that he meets his end. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare goes even further than Marlowe, first by attempting to establish a distinction between usury and trade, and then by elevating trade to an activity worthy of being considered with the exploits of medieval knights and princes. The Jewish villain Shylock is a usurer; the model Christian Antonio is a merchant. When Portia, disguised as a judge, enters the “court,” she asks who is the Jew (that is, the usurer) and who is the merchant. When Antonio achieves his victory over Shylock at the end of the play, forcing him to convert to Christianity, he also makes him, willy-nilly, into a merchant, someone who can no longer achieve material gain through usury. Shakespeare recognizes the emerging victory of capital in the new world and attempts to create a place in that world that a Christian knight can honorably and virtuously occupy. What Shakespeare is proposing for Venice is also a crucial issue for English identity. Can one be a good En­ glishman and a merchant at the same time? The rhetoric of The Merchant of Venice answers in the affirmative, but as often is the case in Shakespeare, one can make a good—although a deconstructive—argument for the other side. In contrast to Marlowe and Shakespeare, who imagine a new world in which mercantile activity is fated to play a decisive role, Gogol travels back-

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ward to recreate a medieval world in which trading is still usury and thus incompatible with Christian and knightly ideals. No trader—not only Jews and women—can enter the sech’, the holiest place in Cossackdom. No trader can be a true Russian. Even though some Cossacks are engaged in trade—a sign of incipient decline—trading is not in their blood. Called to arms, the Cossack will always abandon his peacetime occupations to prove himself in battle, showing his true Russian nature, showing implicitly that he is no Jew. If he is actually engaged in trade, he will destroy his wares, sending them to the devil (chert), to whom trade belongs. Trade, furthermore, is practiced in constricted quarters, in private spaces. The Russian must get on his horse, head out into the steppes, pillage, plunder, and defend the Russian lands and the Orthodox Church. The farmer broke his plough. The brewers and distillers threw down their casks and broke their barrels, the craftsmen (remeslennik) and the tradesmen (torgash) sent craft and shop to the devil, broke the pots in his hut—and every­one mounted his horse. In fact, here the Russian character found the full outlet for its expression. (2:28; 2:41–42)

t h e j e w a n d c o m r a d e s h i p ( t o va r i s h c h e s t vo ) As the quintessential un-Cossack, the Jew must also be inscribed negatively into the symbology of brotherhood-comradeship (tovarishchestvo).30 Women are associated with betrayal in terms of a fatal attraction. Seduced by the Polish beauty, Andrii, Taras’s son, exchanges not only his clothes but all his allegiances. “Who says that my country is the Ukraine? Who gave it to me for my country? Our country is what our soul seeks, what is most precious of all things to it. My country is you! Here is my country! And I shall bear it in my heart, I shall bear it in my heart to the day of my death, and we shall see, let any Cossack tear it from me! And I will give up everything in the world, renounce all, and perish for this country!” (2:76; 2:99). But women, in contrast to Jews, are capable of understanding betrayal no less than men. It is because the Polish beauty is sensitive to Andrii’s dilemma about his allegiance that she sounds like, or can simulate, the voice of conscience. “’Do not deceive yourself and me,’ she said, softly shaking her lovely head. ‘I know, and to my great sorrow know too well, that you must not love me; and I know what is your sacred duty: your father, your comrades, your

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country are calling you, while we are your foes’” (2:76; 2:98–99). However one may interpret the Polish beauty’s intentions in speaking to Andrii about his duty, she understands—and perhaps even shrewdly plays on—the ties and language of brotherhood. The Jew, however, is an other for whom the concept of brotherhood is entirely alien. Gogol plays on the Jew’s inability to understand the “first, sacred law of brotherhood” in two of the most important scenes in the novel. In the first, the Cossacks have just demanded that the Jews be hanged for such blasphemous crimes as making dresses for their wives out of the cassocks of Orthodox priests and for painting signs on the Easter cakes or ­wafers.31 But before they can carry out their intentions, a Jewish orator (who turns out to be our Yankel) attempts to stay their rage. Because of its importance for Jewish representation in Russian literature in general as well as in Taras Bulba, I will cite the entire passage. The poor sons of Israel, losing what little courage they had, hid in empty vodka barrels, in ovens, and even crept under the skirts of their wives; but the Cossacks found them everywhere.32 “Illustrious masters!” cried one tall Jew as long as a stick, thrusting his pitiful face, distorted by terror, from among a group of his companions: “­Illustrious masters! A word, only let us say one word! We’ll tell you something you have never heard before—so important that there is no saying how important!” “Well, let them speak,” said Bulba, who always liked to hear the accused. “Noble lords!” the Jew articulated. “Such lords have never before been known, upon my soul, never! Such kind, good, valiant gentlemen have never been in the world before!” His voice failed and shook with terror. “How could we think any harm to the Dnieper Cossacks! Those who are leaseholders in the Ukraine are not our people at all! By God, they are not! They are not Jews at all! The devil knows what they are; such that one can but spit upon them and turn them out! Here they will say the same. Isn’t it true, Shloma, or you, Shmuel?” “By God, it’s true!” answered Shloma and Shmuel from among the crowd, in tattered caps, both white as clay. “We have never had any dealing with the enemy,” the tall Jew went on, “and we don’t want to know anything of the Catholics: may they dream of the devil! We have been brothers with you. . . . “ “What? The Dnieper Cossacks are your brothers?” one of the crowd shouted. “You’ll never see that, you damned Jews! Into the Dnieper with them, comrades, drown all the heathens!” These words were the signal. They seized the Jews by their arms and began flinging them into the water. Pitiful cries rang out on all sides, but the

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hardhearted Cossacks only laughed (tol’ko smeialis’) at the sight of the Jews’ legs in slippers and stockings kicking in the air. The poor orator who had called down trouble on his own head, slipped out of the long coat by which he was being held, and in nothing but a narrow spotted jacket clutched at Bulba’s feet and in a piteous voice besought him. (2:54; 2:72–73)

The Jewish orator first tries to dissociate his fellow Jews, the local Jews,33 from the Jews who are allegedly fleecing the Cossacks of Ukraine. “They are not our people at all” (Te sovsem ne nashi) (72). To save himself and his fellow Jews Yankel denies, as it were, the brotherhood of all Jews. He even claims that the exploiters the Cossacks are talking about cannot be Jews at all (To sovsem ne zhidy). Yankel is saying all this to save his life and those of his fellow Jews, but in the Cossack world of Taras Bulba to deny one’s kinship, whatever the circumstances, is disgraceful. Taras will later risk his life acknowledging the call of his older son, Ostap, who is about to be executed. As soon as Andrii denies his kinship to his brothers he becomes a traitor. Yankel seems to be making some headway in his argument about the Jews not being the enemies of the Cossacks, when he makes a disastrous blunder regarding the question of Jews and brotherhood, stating that it is absurd to accuse the Jews of consorting with the enemy, the accursed Poles, for the Jews and Cossacks are like blood brothers (My s zaporozhtami, kak brat’ia rodnye). Can Yankel really be suggesting that, despite appearances, rather than being polar opposites, the Jews are the Cossacks’ brothers under the skin. For the reader this comparison might seem nothing more than a desperate ploy dictated by circumstances (imminent death), but to the Cossacks, for whom brotherhood is the holy of holies, such an association is blasphemy.34 The Cossack reaction reveals how far the Jews have stepped beyond the permissible. “What? The Dnieper Cossacks are your brothers?” The Cossacks seize the Jews and throw them into the Dnieper. Since for the Cossacks the river is the source of life, for Jews it can only mean death.35 Drowning, the Jews take along with them the dangerous idea that the Jews and Cossacks, binary opposites, might be brothers.36 The pivotal scene in which Taras first learns about the betrayal of the brotherhood by his own son also repudiates, if only implicitly, the ostensibly ridiculous claim of the close relation between Cossacks and Jews, but it again illustrates to what extent the concept of brotherhood is alien to Jews. In contrast to what Yankel had said earlier under duress about loving Cossacks and hating Poles, the Jews turn out to be equal opportunity lenders,

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distinguishing Poles and Cossacks only as different species of borrowers— and risks. If the war between Poles and Cossacks is to be exploited for gain (koryst’ ), it pays for the Jews not to take sides. Yet in the world of Taras Bulba no one expects allegiance from Jews. The Jews seem to know that neither the Poles nor the Cossacks will hold their lack of allegiance against them, or it just never enters their minds. During the siege of the Polish city, the Jews are the only ones who have free access to both the Polish and Cossack camps.37 The Jews’ lack of allegiance and ignorance of “true” brotherhood adds an element of unintended comic deflation to Taras’s realization that his son has brought dishonor to his family, nation, church, and brotherhood. At the beginning of the scene Taras is distraught; he believes Andrii may have been taken prisoner and may now be held within the besieged Polish city. Learning that Yankel has just been in the town, Taras asks him: “Have you seen any of our people (Videl nashikh)” (2:103). Taras almost wants to hear Yankel say that he saw Andrii a captive in chains, tortured, suffering martyrdom for the Cossack brotherhood, Russia, and the Orthodox Church. Not about to make the same mistake again of identifying Jews and Cossacks, of incorporating Jews and Cossacks in a collective “we,” Yankel responds: “Well of course, I did. There are a lot of our people there: for example, Itska, Rakhum, Samuilo, Khaivalokh, the Jewish-tax farmer (evrei-arendatur).”38 It does not even occur to Taras that when he uses the word “our” (referring to the Cossack brotherhood) that Yankel might interpret it to mean “your,” or that it might include Jews as well. Taras flares up: “ ‘Confound them, the bastards!’ cried Taras, flying into a rage. ‘Why do you foist your scurvy Jewish kindred on me? I am asking you about our Cossacks’” (2:80; 2:103). The verbal duel continues. Although Yankel tries to be more careful with his words, he blunders again, suggesting this time not a dangerous comparison but a dangerous distinction. “Our Cossacks (nashi zaporozhtsy) I did not see; I saw only the lord Andrii” (2:80; 2:103). Here “our” is used to distinguish among Cossacks: that is, those Cossacks fighting with Taras Bulba (our zaporozhtsy) and those Cossacks fighting for the Poles (Andrii)! Yankel does not seem to understand the contradiction in such a distinction: how could anyone fighting for the Poles against “our” Cossacks be a true Cossack? Andrii himself acknowledges this contradiction to his Polish mistress. Foolishly, Yankel presses the question of Andrii’s “going over” and its consequences, telling the horrified Taras how impressive Andrii looks dressed up all in gold. In accordance with his Jewish nature, Yankel cannot

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help admiring the gold-bedecked Andrii, mentioning the word “gold” three times. Taras cannot believe that Andrii has betrayed the brotherhood, but Yankel, because he lives in a world ruled by money and exchange and not by the laws of feudal fealty, cannot see Andrii’s action in terms of betrayal. “Gone over to the other side; he is one of them now.” “You are lying, you swine.” “How can I be lying? Am I a fool to tell you a lie? Would I tell a lie to my own ruin? Don’t I know that a Jew will be hanged like a dog if he tells a gentleman a lie?” “So according to you, then, he has sold his fatherland and his faith (prodal otchiznu i veru)?” “I don’t say he has sold anything; I only said that he has gone over to them! (Ia zhe ne govoriu etogo, chtoby on prodaval chto; skazal tol’ko, chto on pereshel im)” (2:81; 2:104)

Since Andrii is dressed up like the wealthiest Pole—that is, in attire exactly the opposite of a Cossack, who abhors finery and measures clothes by their usefulness in fighting—he makes a favorable impression on Yankel. After all, he might be a new source of income, like any other rich Pole. He does not think that Andrii has betrayed anything or anyone: it was just more advantageous for Andrii to go to the other side. For the author, Yankel does not make a substantive distinction between Poles and Cossacks. The only difference Yankel sees between Poles and Cossacks is that it is far easier to extract money from the style-conscious Poles than from the ostentationhating Cossacks. Both Cossacks and Poles, however, are equally dangerous trading partners for a Jew, who is always in danger of being hanged by the Poles or drowned by the Cossacks. So little does Yankel understand the concept of brotherhood that he does not think it dangerous to use the expression “gone over to the other side (pereshel im)” with respect to Andrii. While these words also can mean that someone is a turncoat (pereiti na storonu protivnika) or converts to another faith (pereiti v druguiu religiiu), Yankel does not mean it in these ways. If Yankel understood the sacred law of brotherhood, he would hardly relate to Taras the details of Andrii’s betrayal: his words would be no less dangerous than the ones he uttered earlier about the Jews and Cossacks being brothers. Again he risks being killed on the spot. Yankel persists in thinking, even during this conversation, that Andrii made a good choice, although as a human being—Gogol concedes a little of that to Yankel here—Yankel can

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understand how love might also have affected his decision. But psychological consistency is not what Gogol is after here. “And you did not kill him on the spot, the son of a bitch (chertov syn),” cried Bulba. “What for? He has gone over of his own free will (On pereshel po dobroi vole). How is the man to blame? He is happier there, so he has gone over there.” “And you saw him face to face?” “Oh, dear, yes! Such a glorious warrior! The most splendid of them all. God give him good health, he knew me at once; and when I went up to him, he said at once. . . . “ “What did he say?” “He said—first he beckoned with his finger, and then he said: ‘Yankel!’ ‘Lord Andrii?’ said I. ‘Yankel! Tell my father, tell my brother, tell all the Cossacks (skazhi kozakam, skazhi zaporozhtsam), tell everyone that my father is no father to me now, my brother is no brother, my comrade no comrade (tovarishch—ne tovarishch) and that I will fight against all of them, all of them I will fight!’” (2:82; 2:105)

Taras makes the same error again, probably because he is so distraught. He assumes for a moment that Yankel is “one of us,” thus not understanding why Yankel did not strike the Judas down when he heard Andrii’s words of betrayal. Yes, this projection might arise out of shock, but how could the puny Yankel have stricken Andrii down; or why, as a Jew, would he even have wanted to do so, even if he could? But Yankel is not done. He then foolishly praises Andrii to Taras’s face, unable to resist the temptation of expressing his admiration for Andrii’s splendor. He spells out what to any of Gogol’s readers would constitute the definition of betrayal: that Andrii has disowned his father, his brother, and the Cossack brotherhood and that he is about to take up arms against them. One might say that Yankel must be unbelievably stupid to have uttered such provocative words. But not according to the text. Yankel understands the risk of angering a Cossack, he simply does not understand the import of what he is reporting. The Jew and the Cossack live in two different worlds, and the Jew, precisely through his comic misunderstanding of the Cossack ethic, focuses our attention on the defining differences between Cossack and Jew in terms of allegiance, the sine qua non of Russian identity. Twice Taras makes the mistake of assuming that the Jew can understand Cossack values. The Jew cannot, and that is why the Jewish stereotype is such a convenient device for defining Cossack values. The Jew as homo economicus obsessed with money; the Jew as trader,

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the exchanger but not the plunderer of goods; and the Jew who is ignorant of loyalty, the highest feudal duty, are all embodiments of the Cossack’s alien other.

jewish space, cossack space Space is no less important in defining the difference between Cossack and Jew than occupation, attitude toward money, and fealty.39 The Jew occupies a different space than the Cossack. The open, expansive, boundless Russian steppe is the natural environment of the Cossacks and a metaphor for the greatness of the Russian soul and spirit.40 The steppe is also their mother, their only worthy feminine companion.41 Expansive space defines the difference between the Cossack way of life and that of the Jews, who live and thrive in cramped, confined quarters in villages and urban “ghettoes.” When Taras sets out with his sons for the sech’, he passes from the somewhat cramped quarters and prison of his own homestead into the free, open steppe, the natural marauding grounds of the Cossack warrior. Meanwhile the steppe had long since wrapped them in its [her] green embraces, the high grass hid them from sight, and only glimpses of their black Cossack caps showed from time to time among its flowering spikes. . . . The further they went, the lovelier the steppe became. In those days the vast expanse which makes up the southern part of Russia, right down to the Black Sea, was green virgin wilderness. Never had plough cut through the immense waves of its wild flowers; they were trampled only by the horses who were hidden in them as in a forest. Nothing in nature could be fairer; the whole surface of the earth was an ocean of green and gold, glittering with millions of different flowers. . . . How devilishly lovely are the steppes! . . . The travelers rode on without incident. They nowhere came upon trees; every­where the same boundless, free, lovely steppe. (2:38; 2:52–54)

The rivers, especially the Dnieper, are just as integral a part of the native realm of the Cossacks as the steppes.42 They are the highways for the Cossacks’ marauding expeditions through the steppes into enemy territory. The rivers also define and delineate the virtually inaccessible area of land beyond the cataracts that protect the Cossacks from enemy incursions, including those of their former masters. Because water in Taras Bulba is a Cossack “element” it is lethal to Jews, who, as we have seen, appear to perish in it immediately on contact.43

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The dichotomy between Cossack and Jew in terms of space is foregrounded in chapter 11, in which Taras realizes that he must find out what happened to his older son, Ostap, who has been taken into captivity by the Poles in the same skirmish in which Taras himself was wounded but rescued by his men. Taras decides to travel to Warsaw where his son is probably being held, if he is still alive. But it is dangerous for him to make the journey, the Poles having offered two thousand gold pieces for his capture. He comes to Yankel to help smuggle him into Warsaw. “I saved your life—the Cossacks would have torn you to pieces like a dog. Now it is your turn: do me a service!” (2:114; 2:142). Besides, Warsaw is a large city, an alien place, a place in which Jews live in even more cramped quarters than they do in the little villages of Ukraine. Taras would be completely out of his element were he to venture there on his own whereas Yankel lives in and is comfortable in such places. To whom but Yankel could he turn? As Taras will later say to Yankel: “I am not good at strategy, while you Jews have been created for it. You can cheat the very devil; you know every dodge; so that’s why I have come to you. And you know I would get nothing done in Warsaw by myself ” (2:114; 2:142–43). So Taras crosses the pristine, open steppes, redolent of grasses and flowers, not to the sech’, as earlier, but to Yankel’s village, Uman, and to Yankel’s confined, close, ill-smelling, smoke-filled little house with its yard full of trash, a foreshadowing of the journey to Warsaw upon which Taras is about to embark. But how is Yankel going to smuggle Taras Bulba into Warsaw? Taras suggests being hidden in an empty barrel: that is, being confined to the smallest possible space. Such is the humiliation that the freedom-loving Cossack is willing to undergo to see his son. But Yankel sensibly argues against this stratagem, suggesting instead that Taras hide on the bottom of his wagon, where he could place a layer of bricks on him, immuring him, as it were, for his own protection (the narrator calls it a “cramped cage [tesnaia kletka])” (2:144). Taras’s wagon journey from Uman to Warsaw, about 450 miles, must have been long and arduous, if not mythic, given the heavy load of bricks under which he lay—again let us not expect too much realism. Taras enters the lair of the enemy, the accursed Poles, but to get there he must pass through the center of Jewish space, Warsaw, the antithesis of the sech’. Warsaw is not Uman. Instead of a description of one house in Uman, Gogol regales us with a long description of Dirty Jew Street, where supposedly all the Jews of Warsaw live. The Jewish quarter is the quintessentially

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e­ nclosed, confined, fetid, unnatural space, the opposite in every instance of the steppe. Yankel, jogging up and down on his short-shanked dusty nag, turned, after taking several roundabout ways, into a dark narrow thoroughfare, known by the name of Dirty Street and also Jew Street, because almost all the Jews of Warsaw were to be found there. This street was very much like a backyard turned inside out. It seemed as though the sun never entered it at all. The completely blackened wooden houses, with numbers of poles stretched from the windows, made the street even darker. At rare intervals a brick wall showed red between them, and even that had turned black in many places. Only here and there the stucco top of a wall, catching the sunlight, made a glaring patch of white that hurt the eyes. Here there was a striking selection of articles: pipes, rags, shells, broken pots. Everyone flung into the street whatever was no use to him, so affording the passerby the agreeable possibility of thrilling his aesthetic sensibility. A man on horseback could almost reach with his hand the poles which were stretched across the street from one house to another with long Jewish stockings (zhidovskie chulki ), short trousers, and a smoked goose hanging on them. (2:116; 2:144–45).44

This is Yankel’s house writ large. By going to Warsaw, Gogol expands his Jewish portraiture beyond Yankel to Jews in general. Again cramp, dirt, garbage, stench, darkness, and disorder reign supreme. It is an environment that, at least for a while, completely saps the strength of the most stalwart of Cossack heroes, who like any other Cossack maintains his strength, ­Antaeus-like, by contact with the earth—here in particular with the boundless, open steppe. The narrator creates the impression that it was far more tolerable for Taras—less constricting—to travel for 450 miles in a bumpy cart under a load of bricks than to pass through Jew Street in Warsaw. The situation worsens when Taras enters a Jewish house. Mordechai went away with the companions who were so filled with wonder at his wisdom. Bulba was left alone. He was in a strange and novel situation; for the first time in his life he was conscious of anxiety. His soul was in a feverish state. He was not the same man as of old, inflexible (nepreklonnyi ), unwavering (nekolebimyi ), steadfast as an oak; he was timid, he was weak now. He shuddered at every rustle, at every new figure of a Jew appearing at the end of the street. In this condition he spent the whole day; he neither ate nor drank, and never took his eyes off the little window looking on the street. (2:118; 2:149)

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Taras is clearly out of his element. His confinement leads to being “uncossacked.” He has come to resemble the Jews among whom he is quartered. It is the first time in his life that he has become unsure of himself, experienced anxiety, pusillanimity, and weakness. The epic hero shudders at the figure of every Jew that passes by. Placed on Jewish ground, a sojourner in Jewish space, the fearless, indomitable Cossack becomes cowardly and timid; even more important, he comes to resemble the stereotypical Jew of Taras Bulba and much of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Some Cossacks (Russians) have been tempted by trade and money, but not Taras. It is alien to his nature. But even a Russian hero can become a nonentity, at least for a while, in cramped Jewish space.

the jew as alien The alien is the extreme form of the other. There are others who are alter egos, as it were, sides of ourselves. The creation of an alien character or group represents a refusal to see anything in common with another, as well as an attempt, often unconscious, to radically dissociate oneself from another in order to protect or assert one’s identity-ideal. In Taras Bulba, the Jew is presented as alien because he is the antithesis of the Cossack, but also because he is both directly and indirectly associated with what is considered alien by the dominant culture. Jews’ traditional association with the devil underscores the perception of them as alien. Thus, not unexpectedly, we find in Taras Bulba almost reflexive associations of the Jew with the devil and Judas. In addition to calling Yankel a “dog,” a stereotypical epithet for the Jew in Western culture, Taras calls him a “lying damned Judas,” “an accursed man of God,” and a Christ-killer. One might say that Taras is just expressing his anger, but the ease with which these phrases trip off his tongue indicates that he is dipping into a common storehouse of disparaging epithets. Probably not too much should be made of the word “devil,” since the Cossacks use it with each other and it can just mean foolish, even when applied to a Jew, as it clearly does when Taras calls Yankel “a devil of a Jew (kakov chertov zhid )” for engaging in trade in a dangerous place. “’What a devil of a Jew!” Taras thought to himself, and riding up to him on his horse said: ‘Fool, why are you sitting here? Do you want to be shot like a sparrow?’” (2:56; 2:61). More significant is the Jew’s and the devil’s association with dirt: in Russian culture the devil is commonly referred to as the “unclean spirit” (nechistyi

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dukh). The center of the Jewish kingdom in Warsaw is located on Dirty Street (Griaznaia ulitsa), and everything in the area, from the trash, the cramped conditions, and the smell, to the spitting—just like Yankel’s house in Uman—is redolent of an unclean spirit.45 Other implicit associations tie the Jew to the devil or the spirits of the underworld. A Tatar woman, the servant of the military general’s daughter, with hair black as coal, in a dark veil, with a deathly dark complexion and a half-bared swarthy breast, emerges from the night to lead Andrii into the Polish city for a rendezvous with the Polish girl. When Andrii first sees her he thinks she is a devil (an unclean spirit, nechistyj dukh). She leads him down into a hollow, across a river, through a marsh, then into a hole in the earth where they find themselves in complete darkness. It is an underground passage that takes them through catacombs and finally into a Catholic church in the besieged Polish city. Taras’s journey with Yankel is less ominously painted, but the similarities are nevertheless striking. Taras employs the services of a dark and dirty alien, associated with the devil, Yankel, to enter the center of enemy territory: Warsaw. He does not travel underground, but he is, in effect, buried for 450 miles under a heavy load of bricks at the bottom of the Jew’s wagon. He emerges not in a Catholic church but in the central street of Jewish Warsaw. The church that Andrii emerges into, because it is meant as temptation, is beautiful and magnificent. Because the Jews and Jewish life constitute no threat of temptation for Taras, Taras’s journey is as dark and dirty at its end (Dirty Street) as it was at its beginning, at Yankel’s house in Uman. Other allusions to Jewish alienness have to do with the difference between Jews and the devil but not necessarily in favor of the Jews. Taras asserts that the Jews speak a language so strange that even the devil cannot make head or tail of it.46 Since for the Romantics language is one of the defining aspects of nationality, the Jews’ alienness is underlined by the incomprehensibility and strangeness of their speech.47 Taras also claims, as we have seen, that Jews are so crafty that they can easily outwit the devil48 (2:114; 2:142–43). And, as all who are viewed as aliens, the Jews are associated with occult powers related to medicine and the healing arts. When in chapter 10 Taras is gravely wounded, his faithful companion Tovkach treats him with herbs and anointments and finds “a wise Jewess (znaiushchaia zhidovka) who for a month gave him potions to drink, and at last Taras was better. Whether it was the treatment or his iron strength that gained the day, within six weeks he was on his legs again” (2:111; 2:138-–39).

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the jewish body It is the physical representation of the Jew in Taras Bulba that has had the strongest influence on the portrayal of the Jew in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. Attitudes of authors and narrators toward Jewish characters varied significantly during this period, vacillating from scorn and hatred to sympathy and admiration, but in almost every case the physical image of the Jew remains much as it is presented in Taras Bulba and could in many cases be easily traced linguistically back to Gogol. One can argue about which Jewish/Cossack binary opposition in Taras Bulba is the most stark, but in Gogol moral questions are often superseded by physical realities. The Jew and the Cossack are primarily physical presences, and the narrator’s evaluations seem to depend more on their physical reality (their presence and movements) than on their moral being. The Jewish male is a thin, gaunt, weak, unprepossessing creature whose cowardly and womanish nature49 is perfectly in accord with his physical being. The Cossack by contrast is strong, stalwart (Taras weighs over 720 pounds; his horse recoils every time he mounts),50 and manly; and he is accordingly courageous, large-hearted, and magnanimous. But even more important, in Taras Bulba the Jew, and not only Yankel, by virtue of being comic makes a dramatic contrast with Taras, who, as the hero of an epic myth, and thus the defender of all things Russian, is meant to be the epitome of the existentially serious. But the Jew is more than comic, he is ridiculous; and because he is ridiculous, he cannot be taken seriously. Erich Auerbach has argued that one of the most outstanding achievements of the nineteenth-century novel was its existential treatment of members of the middle and, even more important, lower classes. Until the nineteenth century, especially characters of the lower classes, because of traditional literary and social constraints, could be treated only comically: that is, as Auerbach expresses it, they could not be “the subject matter for ­problematic-existential treatment.”51 One could argue that in terms of characterization Gogol was still writing in accord with much earlier practice, for it is not only Jews whom he does not treat existentially but almost all members of the lower classes. Gogol’s serfs are portrayed, from a literary point of view at least, no differently than his Jews. But there is a difference between the comic and the ridiculous in Gogol. Although Gogol may treat landowners of the nobility comically, the comedy is serious and sad, exposing not

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only vices but also man’s inability, even disinclination, to aspire to the ideal. The ridiculous, as we shall see, is another matter. Much of the disparity between the high and low in Taras Bulba is centered in the physical. Since Gogol’s forte is comic physical description, there are few idealized physical descriptions of the hero and his Cossack companions. But there are more than enough to provide the necessary contrast with the Jew, most of these occurring in the early chapters. In chapter 1, for example, Taras intends to send his sons off to the sech’ soon after they return home from the seminary, but once he sees them in person, he is so impressed by their physical development that he cannot resist the temptation of accompanying them to the sech’ himself. “He had meant at first to send them off alone; but at the sight of their youth (svezhest’ ), brawn (roslost’ ) and remarkable physical beauty and strength (moguchaia telesnaia krasota), his warlike spirit flared up and he resolved to go with them the next day himself ” (2:29; 2:21). The sight of manly beauty tells Taras that his sons are ready for the most serious of all matters: fighting for the brotherhood, the church, and the Russian land. When Taras first enters the sech’ he is likewise impressed by the physical presence of one of the first Cossacks he sees, who is sprawled out on the road, probably sleeping off a drunken binge. Taras cannot repress his admiration for this warrior-lion at rest, as it were, between prey. But the first man they came across was a Dnieper Cossack asleep in the middle of the road, his arms and legs stretched out. Taras Bulba could not help stopping and admiring him. “Ah, how grandly he is sprawling! I swear, he is an impressive figure!” he said, stopping his horse. It was indeed a bold picture; the Cossack lay full length like a lion in the road; his forelock, tossed proudly back, covered half a yard of ground; his trousers of expensive crimson cloth were smeared with tar, showing his complete disregard for them. After admiring him, Bulba made his way further along the narrow street. (2:39–40; 2:55)

A somewhat homoerotic passage, offered from the narrator’s point of view, occurs in the scene in which Andrii meets the military governor’s daughter inside the besieged city. Because the narrator says that the Polish girl seemed to be impressed by Andrii’s manly beauty, we can assume that the description also reflects the narrator’s perspective. “She, too, seemed impressed at the sight of the ruggedly handsome and manly Cossack (vo vsei krase i sile iunosheskogo muzhestva); even though his limbs were motionless his figure seemed to reveal the ease and freedom of his movements; his eyes

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flashed with clear firmness, the velvety eyebrows rose in a bold arch, the tanned cheeks glowed with all the brightness of youth, and the thin black mustache shone like silk” (2:72; 2:95). Beauty, power, fire, youth, ease of movement, boldness, and freedom characterize the physical presence of the Cossack, even one who is about to betray the brotherhood. The Jew makes a strikingly different impression, a comic and ridiculous one, on both the characters and the narrator, and thus on Gogol’s reader.52 The main source of Jewish physical portraiture is the chapter devoted to Taras’s stay in Warsaw, the center of the Jewish kingdom. In this dark and mysterious place, in which Taras temporarily loses strength and courage, one might expect to find a terrible fiend. But no, it is only a comic little Jew, who speaks an incomprehensible form of German (Yiddish)—to Taras it sounds like gibberish—who dresses differently and ridiculously, and who exhibits a set of strange and wild gestures and gesticulations. In every aspect of his physical appearance and presence, he differs radically from the Cossack. Mordechai, the man on whom the Jews rely to help Taras see his son, is a case in point. Since Taras believes that Jews can accomplish anything for money, he is at first somewhat in awe of this latter-day Solomon, the wisest among Warsaw Jewry, but the author quickly deflates all expectations about Mordechai’s powers. Mordechai! Mordechai! The Jews all cried with one voice. A scrawny Jew, somewhat shorter than Yankel and far more wrinkled, with an immense upper lip, drew near the impatient group. . . . Mordechai gesticulated, listened, interrupted, often spat to one side, and lifting up the skirts of his coat, thrust his hand into his pocket and drew out some jingling coins, displaying his very shabby trousers. . . . Taras looked at this Solomon, the like of whom had never been seen in the world, and some hope revived in him. His appearance was certainly calculated to inspire some confidence. His upper lip was something fearful to look at; its thickness was undoubtedly not all due to nature. This Solomon had only fifteen hairs in his beard—and those on the left side. His face bore so many traces of blows he had received for his temerity, that he had doubtless lost count of them long ago and grown used to regarding them as somehow natural. (2:117–18; 2:146–47)

Mordechai wears strange Jewish shoes (zhidovskie bashmaki) and a coat with skirts (fal’di ); his pants are in vile condition. He is scrawny (toshchii ) and wrinkled, even far more wrinkled than Yankel (gorazdo bolee pokrytyi morshchami). And to top it off, he sports the largest upper lip the world has ever known.53 Even more ridiculous, this upper lip supposedly inspires con-

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fidence in Taras. But, alas, the monstrous upper lip is no lasting confidencebuilder, it is a lip swollen out of all proportion from the numerous blows Mordechai has received in his business dealings, signifying many failed missions. His beard is even less inspiring—that is, more ridiculous—with only fifteen hairs and all of them on the left side. And his face seems permanently marked by various bruises and contusions, undoubtedly also received from dissatisfied customers. We know that Taras is not made more confident by Solomon’s presence; he becomes as timorous as a Jew. And Mordechai, as we might have expected, fails in his mission for Taras; he returns missing some of his sidelocks—he obviously could not have lost many more hairs in his beard, of which there were only fifteen, all on the left side.54 Gogol employs the same technique with the other Warsaw Jews. It is important to go over these details because some of them are used differently in the portrayal of a more serious Jewish figure, the subject of a section in chapter 3. We learn, for example, that “a red-haired Jew with freckles all over his face, which made him look like a sparrow’s egg, peeped out of a window” (2:116; 2:145). This is not only another comic representation of a Jewish physiognomy but one conveyed by an invidious animal comparison. The Cossack sprawled out on the road resembles a lion; the Jew a sparrow’s egg. But not only a sparrow’s egg. The red-haired, freckled Jew is described later as having become transformed “in his slippers and his stockings into something resembling a chick (sdelavshis’ v svoikh chulkakh i bashmakakh neskol’ko pokhozhim na tsyplenka)” (2:119; 2:148). The narrator uses the word tsyplenok (chick), a form generally used for the young of animals, which he will elaborate on a few sentences later. The red-haired Jew retreats for the night with his “Jewess (zhidovka) into something resembling a cupboard (shkaf )” (2:119; 2:148): Jews can fit into the smallest of spaces. Their children resemble them semantically and linguistically. “Two Jewish little ones, like two pet puppies, lay down to sleep beside the cupboard” (2:119; 2:148). What was once something that resembled a cupboard is now a cupboard. The word for Jewish child (zhidenok), like the word for chick (tsyplenok) in the previous sentence, takes on the connotation of a young animal. The Jews are all diminutive and animal-like, and all the more so their children.55 One need only contrast them with Taras Bulba’s children, for whom even Taras, in a fair fight, is no longer a match. Gogol’s portraiture of Jewish family members is significant in a larger literary context because it does not focus on a single Jew or a Jewish pair. In much of the literature in which Jews figure, the Jew is a solitary being,

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sometimes conspiring with others but most often acting alone against Christian interests. He usually has no wife—he is occasionally a widower— and if he has any children it is usually a daughter who in the end abandons him, converting to Christianity and/or marrying a Christian. There are variations. It has been argued that the Jew is depicted as alone in order to deprive him of any sympathy he might elicit if he had a normal family life, if he were, for example, a paterfamilias. Shylock remembers his wife fondly but Jessica turns against him and sells her mother’s wedding ring. Barabas murders his own daughter. Fagan is all alone. Scott again is the exception, altering the pattern: Rebecca, the Jewish heroine of Ivanhoe, refuses to convert, preferring to accompany her father into exile. Although Gogol focuses on Yankel, he also limns disparaging comic portraits of other Jews: Mordechai, the Jewish Solomon who is less wise than foolish and foolhardy; the family of the red-haired Jew, including his wife and his puppy children; and a few other Jews who are attempting to help Taras see his son. The reader does not have to generalize about Jews from a single character, since Gogol provides the reader with a sample “population.” Yankel is described in the very same terms as the Jews in Dirty Street. He lives in a “dirty, mud-stained little hut whose little windows are so begrimed that they could scarcely be seen . . . the roof was full of holes and covered with sparrows. A garbage heap lay before the very door” (2:113; 2:140). ­Yankel covers himself with a dirty blanket and spits when he prays. He is tall and thin as a stick with a “pitiful mug” (zhalkaia rozha). The same sparrow is used to describe the red-haired Jew’s face and Yankel’s roof. All the Jews are physically the same; they and their things are interchangeable. And in Gogol’s world those who are physically the same are also morally the same.

j ew i s h d e at h Most important of all, Jewish death in Taras Bulba is presented as inherently ridiculous.56 We have seen that even before they are killed, the cowardly Jews try to hide not only in barrels and ovens but also under the skirts of their wives (2:54; 2:73). Not only do Jews associate with women, they are more womanish than their wives. Further, Jewish death is implicitly and invidiously compared with the nobility of Cossack death, the defining event of Cossack identity and existence. The Cossack achieves manhood by fleeing from women (as Taras and his sons do at the beginning of the narrative);

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the Jews hide under the skirts (pod iubki) of their women for protection. One of the reasons Taras gives for taking his sons away from home and to the sech’ is that he is afraid that his wife is going to hide them under her petticoats (pod iubku) (2:36). Gogol uses the same expression in both instances. The binary opposition of Cossack and Jew must be nowhere more salient than in the representation of death. Jewish death, and the Jew in general, is not taken seriously because Jewish ridiculousness colors everything Jews do, from the way they live to the way they die. The Jews dress, gesture, speak, act, and live not only differently but ludicrously. When the Cossacks laugh at the Jews drowning in the river, they are not laughing because their enemies’ death is amusing to them—for the Cossacks, death is always serious—but because they cannot help laughing; the dangling legs of the Jews encased in outlandish shoes and stockings elicit laughter from the Cossacks just as would someone tripping on a banana peel. The Cossacks, then, are not laughing at death, they are laughing at the form of Jewish death. The Cossacks do not laugh at the death of Poles nor at the death of women, the Cossacks’ other significant others. In fact, the death of the Polish women described in the passage below bears a striking resemblance to the passage portraying the drowning of the Jews in the Dnieper, but the reactions of the narrator—and nature itself—to the death of these women could not be more different. The Cossacks did not spare the black-browed damsels, the white-­bosomed, fair-faced maidens: even at the altar they could find no safety; Taras burned them together with the altars. More than once snow-white arms were raised from the flames to the heavens accompanied with pitiful cries which would have moved the very earth and set the grass of the steppes shuddering with pity. But the cruel Cossacks heeded nothing; picking up the babes from the streets on their lances, they flung them into the flames. (2:129; 2:160)

Like the Jews the women are defenseless, and they are not military adversaries like the Poles. The Jews and the women each raise pitiful cries (zhalkie kriki ). The Jews try to hide; the women take refuge in their churches. In each case, the cruel (zhestokie or surovye) Cossacks find them. The Cossacks burn the women at the altars. They hurl the Jews into the waves. After they kill the women, the Cossacks pick up their children on lances and hurl them into the same fires. The narrator spares neither Taras nor the Cossacks; the Cossacks are on a rampage of revenge. The death of the women is presented

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with existential seriousness; it cannot evoke laughter. It elicits a sympathetic response from the narrator himself, expressed in folk imagery. The cries were so pitiful that one could imagine the damp earth itself shuddering and the steppe—the true nurturing mother of all Cossacks—bending down to the ground out of pity.57 There is no pity for the Jews. It is not because they are Christ-killers, as in the famous early folk tale about the descent into hell of the mother of God who experiences compassion for all sinners except the Jews, but that the Jews are ridiculous and cannot be taken seriously, even though what Gogol is describing is a pogrom, probably based on the tales that he heard or read relating to the 1768 Ukrainian peasant uprising against Polish landlords. The physical details of Jewish legs clad in shoes and stockings, the details that elicit laughter at the Jews, are hardly fortuitous. They are used again in the comic Warsaw scenes and thus become associated with all Jews, living and dying. When Taras enters Dirty Street (Griaznaia ulitsa) in Warsaw he is greeted by poles stretched over the street from which hang those same Jewish stockings (zhidovskie chulki). Mordechai’s long-awaited appearance is preceded by his foot clad in a Jewish slipper (noga v zhidovskom bashmachke). And the red-haired Jew is transformed into a chicken by his outlandish stockings and shoes (v svoikh chulkakh i bashmakakh neskol’ko pokhozhim na tsyplenka) (2:148). The words for shoes (bashmaki, bashmachki) and stockings (chulki) each appear only three times in the novel, but after their use in the drowning scene they serve as leitmotifs calling up all previous associations. Dress is an essential element of Gogol’s comic art: the last name of the hero of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” is Bashmachkin, derived from the word “shoe” (bashmak). But even in the mythic Taras Bulba, dress plays an essential role. The Poles, though good fighters, are more interested in looking good in battle, with clothes bought with money borrowed from the Jews. And in the crucial scene in which Taras learns about his younger son from Yankel, it is his son’s new clothes that bring home to Taras the reality of Andrii’s betrayal of the Cossack brotherhood. Taras kills Andrii in his magnificent Polish uniform. It is hardly surprising, then, that physical details dominate Jewish portraiture in Taras Bulba. In physical description, as in almost every way, the Jew is the Cossack’s alien other. But in no other way are Jews more ridiculous and less capable of being taken seriously than in their death.

ch ap te r

2

Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context Walter Scott, Gogol, and Russian Fiction

To better understand Gogol’s representation of the Jew in Taras Bulba, it is important to contextualize it culturally and historically. As Vinogradov has shown in his noteworthy study of the creative history of Gogol’s famous story “The Nose” (Nos), Gogol was acutely aware of the literary and cultural developments of his time and incorporated, albeit in his own original and parodic manner, many current themes, ideas, and styles.1 Gogol called Walter Scott, his favorite foreign writer, a great genius (velikii genii) (6:170), the most complete, universal genius of the nineteenth century (“polneishii, ­obshirneishii genii xix veka”) (6:182).2 He was unquestionably familiar with Scott’s hugely popular historical novel Ivanhoe,3 in which Jews play an important historic and ideological role.4 Gogol’s interest in Scott could hardly have diminished when he conceived of writing a historical fiction of his own. It has been argued that The Iliad and the French historical romances had a more pronounced influence on Taras Bulba than the historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott. Gogol uses few historical sources, in some cases completely ignoring the historical record. He shapes his narrative to conform to nineteenth-century Russian nationalist and Slavophile ideology and

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incorporates Russian and Ukrainian folklore to create a mythic tale with larger-than-life, almost epic, heroes; and he uses all the clichéd plot lines of popular Russian “historical” fiction.5 But this argument actually highlights Gogol’s eclectic method of composition, it does not disprove Scott’s influence. Gogol appropriated aspects of the historical novel in his own way, as did Alexander Pushkin in his own portrayal of Cossacks in The Captain’s Daughter (1836). Gogol, paying due respect to Ivanhoe, which also “legitimized” the portrayal of Jews in contemporary fiction, alludes to Ivanhoe in his portrayal of Yankel. One might say just as the Jew apophatically illuminates the Cossack in Taras Bulba—that is, by negation—so does Scott illuminate Gogol. If Scott’s conscious revision of Shakespeare is important, so is Gogol’s conscious reversion to the old stereotype in the presence of Scott. What Gogol did not do in the shadow of Scott is as important as what Scott did in the shadow of Shakespeare. Gogol follows the historical model of Scott in many ways, although he often makes Proppian substitutions, investing the same functions and structures with different values. Like Scott, Gogol employs long descriptions of ceremonies, battles, and attire peculiar to an older, exotic period. Gogol also incorporates romantic descriptions of nature, one of his fortes. Like Scott, Gogol often calls attention in his own person to the differences between past and present mores and moral standards,6 especially with regard to cruelty and torture. Scott, however, portrays the present as superior to the past, whereas Gogol, though acknowledging the cruelty and ruthlessness of the Cossacks, romanticizes the past to the detriment of the present. Gogol’s Cossacks bear some resemblance to Scott’s Saxons. Like Scott’s Norman French, Gogol’s Poles are presented as more sophisticated and refined than their Saxon and Cossack adversaries, whom they look down upon as crude churls. But for Scott refinement is one of the Norman’s few positive traits, whereas for Gogol refinement is the antithesis of Cossack spirit and identity. Betrayal plays as important a role in Ivanhoe as it does in Taras Bulba. Each novel also features an intense father and son rivalry: in Scott it is the son who kills the father, in Gogol it is the father who kills the son. Beauty plays no less an important role in Taras Bulba than it does in Ivanhoe. Much of the last part of Ivanhoe is devoted to the pursuit by the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, of the beautiful Jewess Rebecca, an action that goes against the will of his brotherhood. Andrii betrays his brotherhood for the beautiful daughter of the Polish military governor. Both the Norman French and the Cossacks commit atrocities against helpless women.

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Many of Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s actions are motivated by revenge against a woman by whom he was spurned; Taras’s rampage of revenge is motivated by the harm he believes a woman caused his son. For both the Templar and Taras, revenge becomes the mission of their lives, something from which they will never abjure themselves. In each novel, the hero’s ethic of glory and love of battle are virtually identical. The similarities of Ivanhoe and Taras Bulba extend to the portrayal of the Jew. But here again Gogol adapts the plot and characterization of Ivanhoe to further his own artistic and ideological goals, which are different from Scott’s. In Ivanhoe Scott portrayed the Jew partly against stereotype, presenting an extenuation, if not a justification, of Jewish behavior over the centuries, and introducing a virtuous Jewish heroine, who is revered by all the protagonists and idolized by the author himself. Explicitly citing the preeminent work in English literature in terms of Jewish representation, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Scott signals that his presentation of the Jewish father and daughter are intended as a dialogue with Shakespeare, if not a reworking of Shylock and Jessica. It has been said that in Ivanhoe Scott seems divided about the Jew. On one hand, he calls up the same repulsive, fawning, gold-obsessed stereotype of the European literary tradition; on the other, he lays the blame for the Jew’s behavior on mistreatment by Christians. When Isaac of York makes his entrance, he is greeted with loathing and scorn by Saxons, Normans, and their servants. He is bent over, servile, fearful, and fawning. The narrator stresses that he might have even been considered handsome had not his features “been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which, during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable” (42).7 The implication of these and other passages8 is that the Jews could not have been other than they were, given the circumstances in which they found themselves. Isaac is presented as obsessed with money; he cannot not think about money, even in situations where it is most inappropriate. Isaac’s actions tell a different story. Although thinking about money for Isaac is almost a hereditary disposition, money is not the most important thing in his life and he is willing to sacrifice it to help others, even at his own peril. Here Scott parts from Shakespeare. Out of goodwill, Isaac, whose inclinations are basically good, helps the Christian Ivanhoe with little hope

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of seeing his “investment” returned. He lends money to the nefarious King John because he has no alternative. Generally “his better feelings predominated over those which were most familiar to him” (64–65). Isaac is not just another variation on the traditional stereotype; he stands up to the fiercest warrior in Christendom and does disinterested service for Ivanhoe—and thereby for England. Most of Isaac’s story concerns his courageous mission to the castle of Templestowe, the home of the Templar Order—the Norman sech’, as it were—to win Rebecca’s freedom. When the welfare of his daughter is in jeopardy, the self-effacing, fawning Isaac acts with surprising courage. As a prisoner of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, the most ruthless and intimidating of the Norman French, Isaac offers his captor all his money and even his life for the safety of his daughter. When Front-de-Boeuf proves obstinate, Isaac becomes defiant, insulting him to his face, saying he prefers death rather than settling for anything less than Rebecca’s safety. His daughter is his life; it has no meaning without her. There are also substantive similarities in Ivanhoe and Taras Bulba in the plot lines involving Jewish characters, although it is impossible to say with certainty whether they represent the direct influence of Scott or Gogol’s appropriation of the topoi of the historical novel of his time. Isaac’s main role along with Rebecca is to give assistance to the Saxons in need and to seek assistance from the Saxons when they themselves are in distress. So in the beginning Isaac helps Ivanhoe acquire a horse and equipment to fight in the tournament against the Norman knights and supporters of King John. Isaac does not expect to be repaid but he is. He and Rebecca help Ivanhoe heal from his wounds that he received in the tournament, an almost novellong recovery. Rebecca uses remedies learned from an old Jewess. In return, Ivanhoe, arriving at Templestowe in the nick of time, saves both Isaac and Rebecca, who is about to be burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft: that is, the very healing arts that made Ivanhoe’s appearance possible. In Taras Bulba, only the order of helping and saving is reversed. Taras saves Yankel’s life right at the moment he is about to be thrown into the river. When Taras becomes ill, it is a Jewess skillful in the practice of potions who helps nurse Taras back to health. It is then Yankel who becomes the helper, taking Taras to Warsaw, into the heart of enemy territory (the Scottian Templestowe), where he hopes to see his son. (Isaac went to Temple­ stowe to see his daughter.) Like Isaac, Yankel is paid handsomely for his efforts.

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Several passages in Taras Bulba attest Gogol’s borrowing from Scott in “piecing together” some of the less consistent aspects of Yankel’s character. Chapter 5 of Ivanhoe begins with the famous lines of Shylock from Act 3, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?” (3.1:52–55). When Yankel is complaining that he will be punished severely if Taras is found in his wagon, seemingly out of the blue come the following words: “For everyone wicked pounces on the Jew; everyone takes the Jew for a dog, for they think he is not a man, if he’s a Jew!” (2:115; 2:143). The reference is probably to Scott, not Shakespeare. Yankel does not say anything remotely like this anywhere else in the text. Because these words seem out of character, and are never picked up in the text again, they sound as though they have come, unassimilated, from some other text, or as the Russian idiom has it, from another opera. According to the narrator, it is the Jews who are mistreating the non-Jews, and not the other way around. Another unveiled reference to Scott appears when Taras comes to Yankel for help in getting to Warsaw. Though Yankel is praying, as soon as he sees Taras he immediately thinks of the bounty on Taras’s head. Yet, as we have seen, Yankel “was ashamed of his greed and strove to conquer the everlasting thought of gold which twines like a worm around the soul of a Jew” (2:113; 2:141). Again nowhere else in the novel does the narrator indulge in this type of commentary regarding the eternal verities of the Jewish nature. In Ivanhoe it is difficult for Isaac not to accept Ivanhoe’s offer to pay for the horse and armor Isaac has offered him. Isaac attempts to stifle the desire to accept the offer. The Jew twisted himself in the saddle, like a man in a fit of the colic; but his better feelings predominated over those which were most familiar to him. “I care not,” he said, “I care not—let me go. If there is damage, it will cost you nothing—if there is usage money, Kirjath Jairam will forgive it for the sake of his kinsman Isaac. Fare thee well!—Yet hark thee, good youth,” said he, turning about, “thrust thyself not too forward into this vain hurlyburly—I speak not for endangering the steed, and coat of armour, but for the sake of thine own life and limbs.” (64–65)

These references to Scott represent verbal signs establishing Gogol’s knowledge of Ivanhoe rather than an attempt to deal seriously with Jewish subject matter in the manner of Scott. Scott’s Jews and the historical reality

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in which they are contextualized are distant from both Gogol’s story and Gogol’s romantic consciousness and style. Isaac and Yankel represent different social and human realties. It is because of their differences that each highlights the defining characteristics of the other as Jewish literary figures. Although Isaac of York is preoccupied with money it is not, as we have seen, the major determinant of his actions. Yankel’s thoughts are always about money, including contemplating the ransom on the head of the man who saved him from certain death; all his activities involve monetary transactions. Whereas Isaac’s actions in Ivanhoe challenge the stereotype of the Jews as concerned only about money, in Taras Bulba Yankel remains throughout homo economicus in thought and action, the epitome of the stereotype. We can see more clearly how Gogol goes his own way in the depiction of Yankel when that portrayal is seen in the light of Scott’s Isaac of York. But even as homo economicus, Isaac differs considerably from Yankel. Isaac is a wealthy Jew who plays a prominent role in the economic life of the kingdom, lending money to the English king. He attends tournaments given for the highest members of the royal court. He has servants. His situation is precarious, but since he is needed for his money he can secure for himself a certain amount of safety. Yankel, on the other hand, is a petty trader, a factor, someone who sells clothes to the Poles and provisions to the Cossacks. He is not distinguished in any way from other Jews. What the narrator says about Yankel’s wealth—that he has bankrupt the territory for miles around—is completely inconsistent with all the other descriptions of Yankel in the text. But not only is Isaac wealthy and prominent, he lives well and enjoys the finest and most expensive things. Yankel and the other Jews live in filth and stench, birds make nests in the roofs of their houses, their clothes are dirty and tattered. Even Yankel’s prayer shawl is unclean. If Yankel is as rich as the narrator says he is, he must be an incredible hoarder because nothing in his surroundings shows any of the supposed wealth he has accumulated. There is a tension and dichotomy in Scott’s Jew, who is subservient on the street but a king at home. Gogol’s Jew is all of a piece, and his life at home is a perfect reflection of his daily activities as a petty trader. Where at least Scott attempts to round out, if not give some depth to, his Jewish character, Gogol works within the stereotype, realizing the metaphor of the dirty Jew who lives on Dirty Jew Street. And, of course, the Jewish daughter in Scott is the female ideal of the novel, eclipsing in virtue the male protagonists, Ivanhoe and Richard the Lion-

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Hearted. A model of duty, fealty, and courage, she is loyal to her father, to her religion, to her nation. Even more so than Taras Bulba! In Taras Bulba there are no Jewish daughters to mitigate the image of their fathers, not to speak of Jewish heroines who are morally superior to the Christian heroes.9 There is also a significant difference between the texts regarding the Jew as a baneful economic power. For Scott the Jews engage in unscrupulous economic practices partly because of “the love of gain” and “the immense profits which they were enabled to realize in a country naturally so wealthy as England” (61), but the intensity of their activity is ascribed primarily to the hatred, persecution, and humiliation to which the Jews are subjected by all elements of the “Christian population.” Isaac, as we have seen, has good intentions, and Rebecca, under different circumstances, would have been a Christian ideal, a sort of Rowenna with spunk. At all times, Scott treats Jewish/Christian relations with existential seriousness. The rescue of a Jewess, which takes up most of the last chapters of the novel, is presented by the author as the truest test of Christian and chivalric virtue. Gogol portrays Jewish economic behavior as baleful to the Christian population. Yet his presentation of Jewish oppression, as well as the way in which the Cossacks deal with it, lacks credibility and seriousness. In the first scene that addresses Jewish exploitation, Cossacks arrive in the sech’ demanding that Jewish domination in their lands be ended immediately; the Jews are even accused of having gained complete control of the Orthodox churches and clergy. “Such times have come that now even the holy churches are not ours.” “How do you mean not ours?” “Nowadays they are leased out to the Jews. If you don’t pay the Jew beforehand, you cannot serve mass.” “What are you talking about?” “And if a Jewish dog does not put a stamp with his unbaptized hand on the Holy Easter Cake, one cannot consecrate the cake.” “He is lying, comrades; it cannot be that an unbaptized Jew puts a stamp on the Holy Easter Cake. . . .” “Listen! There’s more to tell: they say the Jewesses are making themselves petticoats out of the priests’ vestments. These are the things that are going on in the Ukraine, comrades!” (2:53; 2:55)

These charges made by Cossacks, not by the narrator, seem so far-fetched that even some Cossacks have a difficult time believing them.10 But the narrator nevertheless approvingly describes the Cossacks’ growing indignation at

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the Jews on the basis of these fabrications. “The Dnieper Cossacks were in an uproar and felt their strength. This was not the excitement of a frivolous people; it was the excitement of slow strong characters who do not soon get hot, but, when they are hot, long and obstinately retain their fire” (2:53; 2:57). The second passage, which we have seen before in a different context, exposes the Jewish economic exploitation of the native population (2:113; 2:140).11 Belonging entirely to the narrator this time, it serves as a reintroduction to Yankel, who has disappeared for two chapters (chapters 8 and 9). It recounts the deleterious effects of Yankel’s financial enterprises on the surrounding area, effects that seriously undercut Yankel’s words uttered in chapter 4, when he tries to defuse Cossack fury over Jewish religious and economic abuses by arguing that the Jews were the Cossacks’ brothers. The narrator’s contention that Yankel was responsible for the economic devastation of the entire area—which is likened to the effects of a contagion or plague, a common medieval accusation—seems at best bizarre. How a petty tavern owner—who on the side sells provisions to the Cossacks on the periphery of the sech’ and who is continually engaging in life-threatening, foolish behavior—has been able to devastate the entire district is a mystery. It is also hard to take the exploitation passage seriously because it smacks so much of Gogolian hyperbole, similar to the description of Mordechai’s enormous lip. Yankel does not control the province. He quakes in terror when the Cossacks come after the Jews and he is unsuccessful in persuading the Cossacks to leave the Jews alone. And how is it possible that not one of the ruined Cossacks—including Taras—recognizes Yankel, their prime tormentor? The house of the fabulously wealthy Yankel is a poor hovel. Moreover, whenever the Cossacks are unhappy with the Jews, they can, with complete impunity, always round them up and drown them in the river, as they in fact do in chapter 4. The implication is that the drowning was not a unique occurrence. Taras is amazed that when Yankel entered the besieged Polish fortress to collect a debt he was not killed on the spot by his Polish debtor. The narrator also tells us that as soon as the Cossacks found themselves without money they would smash the shops of Jews, Armenians, and Tatars and take what they wanted for nothing (2:60–61). The important difference between Ivanhoe and Taras Bulba regarding the representation of the Jew is not that Scott presents extenuating reasons for Jewish economic success and enmity toward Christians whereas Gogol sees only Jewish responsibility and culpability, but that Scott presents the whole

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issue of Jewish/Christian relations with existential seriousness. Except for a few stereotypical passages Gogol treats these relations comically. The scene in Ivanhoe in which Isaac loses his footing and rolls down the steps, providing “an excellent jest to the spectators, who set up a loud laughter, in which Prince John and his attendants heartily joined” (78), reflects badly on those who laugh at the Jew’s expense, given how negatively King John and his attendants are presented throughout the novel. In Taras Bulba the murder of the Jews is a comic episode. The detail that causes the laughter among the Cossacks (the stockings and shoes) is the same one that the narrator fixes on in his comic portrayal of the Jews of Warsaw. Comparing Taras Bulba with Ivanhoe, the most popular historical novel of its time, we can see more clearly to what extent Gogol has clung to the traditional comic stereotype of the Jew as homo economicus, trader, coward, exploiter, and comic butt—and ignored the Jewish question.

t h e l i t e r a ry c o n t e x t: r u s s i a n l i t e r at u r e , bulgarin, gogol, and the jew Although Gogol invites comparison with Scott regarding the portrayal of the Jew, specifically because of the explicit allusions to Ivanhoe in Taras Bulba, it is equally important to compare Gogol’s representation of the Jew with that of the most popular fiction of his own time. Gogol may have worked within the parameters of the most popular Russian stereotype, the comic Jew, but it was not the only model available to him even in his own literary milieu. He was aware of Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin and Mazepa, two of the most popular historical novels of the period, and, as he did with Scott, he makes direct allusions to them in his portrayal of Jews in Taras Bulba. Mazepa deals directly with the Cossacks, specifically the rebellion of their leader Mazepa against Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century; it also includes a crucial scene in which, as in Taras Bulba, the Cossacks laugh at Jewish death.12 Both Mazepa and Ivan Vyzhigin include Jewish subject matter and characters that are absent from Taras Bulba, some for obvious historical reasons, but others because Bulgarin opens up the text to greater Jewish participation. Mazepa features a well-developed Jewish “heroine,” Maria Ivanovna Lomtikovskaya, a former mistress of the hero. The beautiful and impulsive daughter of a rich Lemberg banker, who educated her with the best tutors

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and wished her to follow in his footsteps—and also to marry someone of her own faith—Maria desires fame, power, and greatness. Disobeying her father, she converts to Christianity (as most Jewish heroines do) and enters into a relationship with Mazepa, who deceives her just as he has deceived everyone else close to him. Later in the novel, she falls in love with the positive hero of the novel, Onevik, and remains true to him against the nefarious Mazepa, who ultimately has her killed. A strong, sympathetic, and well-rounded character with somewhat unorthodox views—she believes Catholic Europe is in the power of Jews, priests, and women—Maria is probably the most successful character in the novel. There are no characters like Maria in Gogol’s work. His Polish beauty seems undeveloped and wooden by comparison. But more important for Taras Bulba, Mazepa includes a scene in which the Cossacks execute a Jew by drowning. Gogol seems to have incorporated this episode directly into Taras Bulba. Mazepa, which has a strong Russian nationalist perspective, presents Poland as Russia’s most dangerous enemy during the time of Peter the Great. The Jews, none of whom at this time lived in Russia, are primarily Polish Jews (or Jews living in Poland), who occasionally spy for the Poles against the Russians for money. A Jew, sent by one of Mazepa’s minions to spy on Paley (a Cossack leader who is presented as the true defender of Ukrainian and Cossack interests), is apprehended and brought before Paley himself. He orders the Jew drowned. The Cossacks with obvious pleasure (s primetnym udovol’stviem) and loud laughter (s khokhotom) drag the Jew to the Dnieper. The Jew begs for his life, supplying important information in an attempt to stay the execution. It is of no avail. Paley repeats his order. One of Paley’s favorites, Moskalenko, attempts to intercede, pleading for the Jew’s life. “Pity this unfortunate man, have mercy on the father of a family, for the sake of the information he has supplied you” (432). But Paley will have none of it; he repeats the order for the Jew to be thrown into the river. “One, two, three!” yelled one of the Cossacks. A splash resounded in the water, and the Jew (zhid), tossed violently into the water, sank to the bottom like a rock. “Good riddance!” the Cossacks yelled again. Their laughter was echoed by the din. Meanwhile Paley sat lost in thought, not paying any attention to what was happening around him, smoking his pipe and twirling his mustache (432–33).13

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The laughter of Bulgarin’s Cossacks, which is joyful and malicious, differs from the laughter of Gogol’s Cossacks. The counterpart of Taras Bulba in Mazepa, Paley, does not save a Jew but orders the Jew’s drowning. He does not forgive or take mercy on traitors and spies. After he orders the killing, he pays absolutely no attention to the execution. On balance Mazepa presents Jews more negatively than does Taras Bulba. Yet Paley is just as eager to hang Poles and Catholic priests as Jews and is upset when prevented from doing so; they are all enemies of the Cossacks. What most separates these drowning scenes in Taras Bulba and Mazepa is the mode of representation. Bulgarin presents the drowning of the Jew as a completely serious affair. The laughter of the Cossacks is one of scorn and delight at the death of a Jew, because he is a spy, a fact to which the Jew himself confesses. They would have laughed, it is implied, in much the same way had they caught any other spy. There is nothing ridiculous about the manner of his death. But despite this universal satisfaction at the death of a Jewish spy, one of the most positive characters in the novel, Moskalenko, is moved by the Jew’s situation and pleads with Paley to take pity on the Jew for the sake of his wife and children. In other words, there is a Cossack among them who recognizes that although the Jew may be a spy he is still a human being and deserves compassion, at least for the sake of his family. Moskalenko’s compassion is not shared, but precisely because it occurs against the din of hearty laughter, it constitutes an existential moment. The spy that they are dispatching for the good of all is actually a man, in some manner like themselves, whose death cannot be seen only from the point of view of military strategy. In Gogol’s work, however, the reason for the Cossacks’ anger at the Jews is so exaggerated that even some of the Cossacks do not believe it. They need to be egged on to act. The narrator approves of their overzealousness because he admires the unity brought about by the Cossacks’ anger and passion. No one intervenes for the Jews. No one shows them any pity—and here there is no question of spies. Nor is it a single human being whose fate is being decided, but a large group of tradesmen. Gogol’s Cossacks do not laugh from satisfaction or pleasure; they laugh only because the Jews appear ridiculous in death—they cannot help laughing. Bulgarin uses Moskalenko’s speech to show that Jewish death in Mazepa is a serious matter, as would be the death of any other human being, Jew or not; but Gogol implies that Jewish death is not only ridiculous—and lacking seriousness—to the Cossacks, but that it would have seemed ridiculous to anyone else who had witnessed the Jews drowning. Having appropriated

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elements from Mazepa, Gogol must have understood that not just Scott but his Russian contemporaries could present the Jew seriously. He chose to retain the ridiculous Jew. Another aspect of Gogol’s representation of Jews that becomes striking when viewed in the light of Bulgarin’s work is its homogeneity. In Mazepa, there is a Jewish spy, but there is also a Jewish heroine, who is loyal to the Cossack hero and who is willing to sacrifice herself for the one she loves. In Ivan Vyzhigin, in which the Jews play an even greater role than in Mazepa, this varied Jewish portraiture is more pronounced. A picaresque novel, Ivan Vyzhigin includes, as might be expected, a large cast of rogues, and so there are Jewish as well as Russian scoundrels. The Jew, Iosel, the right-hand man of a prominent Polish landowner, is an oppressor of the local peasantry. But there are also Jews who treat the narrator well. In chapters 8 and 9, the most interesting chapters with regard to Jewish portraiture, the narrator (Ivan) tells of how he was left by his benefactors at the house of Jews. On one hand, the head of the household, Moshva, unscrupulously extracts money from unwary peasants; on the other, he and his wife Rifka take good care of the hero, feed him well, and even want to convert him to Judaism, circumcision and all. But most interesting, Ivan forms the strongest friendship of his life with their son Girshik, who believes he is the Messiah but does not want to reveal himself to his parents for fear that they will want him to perform miracles for them. Ivan, who has a rich imagination as well, shares his dreams with Girshik, his soul mate. Once to protect his own interests, Ivan threatens Girshik, warning him not to reveal to a recently arrived guest (Iosel) that he is living in their house, otherwise he will tell Girshik’s parents Girshik’s secret about his messianic powers. Girshik is so terrified that he goes into shock and appears close to death. Since Ivan believes that Girshik is about to die and that he will be blamed for his death, he escapes at his first opportunity. The only guilt and sorrow that the narrator feels in the novel is for his Jewish friend, because he believes himself responsible for his death. His greatest relief at the end of the novel is finding out that Girshik did not die but is alive and well: indeed he has become an eminent Rabbi. One of the most reputable characters in the novel, who tells Girshik’s story to Ivan many years later, calls him the Honorable Rebbe Girshel (Pochtennyi rabbi Girsh).14 Girshik sends Ivan his best wishes. “Girshik, my dear friend is alive! My soul revived, what a sin in that moment had been taken from me” (294). Bulgarin’s treatment of the Jewish child again stands out against Gogol’s. Girshik is not only the closest friend of the narrator but also an

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interesting human being, whose sickness and near death are presented with existential seriousness. In Gogol the children are not really human beings, but more like puppies, having even less individuality than their parents, who at least sport impressive upper lips and beards. They are simply “little Yids” (zhidenki). Gogol did not exploit the only images of Jews available to him. In fact, he borrowed scenes and words from works that treated Jews differently. Gogol needed the comic stereotypical Jew for his historical novel. The type was immediately available to Gogol, a commonplace of the Ukrainian folk theater with which he grew up as well as a feature of the comic stories of other Ukrainian writers, but he chose these models: he was not, as we have seen, ignorant of other possibilities for Jewish portrayal.15

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Taras Bulba Otherwise Deconstructing Gogol’s Cossacks and Jews

the cossacks diminished Taras Bulba not only contains many contradictions regarding the representation of Cossack values and mores, it often portrays something very different from what it intends. The Cossacks are susceptible to literary deconstruction. The narrator repeatedly advances the idea, echoed by Taras Bulba and other Cossacks, that the Cossacks are fighting primarily for the Orthodox Church and the Russian land. When the Cossacks die in battle, they invariably leave the living with a few inspiring words about Holy Mother Russia. When Schilo knows he is about to die, he says to his comrades: “Farewell, comrades! May Holy Russia (pravoslavnia Russkaia zemlia) live forever, and may her glory be eternal” (2:103; 2:129). Guska utters: “Down with all our foes, and may Russia (Russkaia zemlia) rejoice forever and ever!” (2:104; 2:131). And Bovdiug, with accompanying narrator, comments: “ ‘I am not sorry to part with life. God grant every man such a death! May Russia (Russkaia zemlia) be glorious to the end of time!’ And Bovdiug’s soul fled to the heavenly heights to tell the old men who had departed long

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before how men can fight in Russia (Russkaia zemlia) and, better still, how they can die for their holy faith (za sviatuiu veru)” (2:105; 2:131). Kukubenka thanks God for dying in the presence of his comrades: “I thank God that it is my lot to die before your eyes, comrades! May men better than we live after us, and may Russia (Russkaia zemlia), beloved of Christ, flourish forever . . . !”(2:106; 2:132). And before his martyr-like death at the hands of the Poles, Taras himself prophesies a time of Slavic religious and national glory. “Wait a while, the time is coming, the time is at hand when you will learn the meaning of the Russian Orthodox faith! Already the nations far and near have an inkling that their ruler will rise up from Russia, and there will be no power on earth that will not submit to him . . . !” (2:131; 2:164). In the years about which Gogol is writing, however, the majority of Cossacks were rough-and-ready pirates and marauders who changed allegiances for the sake of convenience and cared very little about religion and the church. Florinsky is harsh but probably not far off the mark about the Cossacks’ religious and national allegiances. Chivalry was incompatible with the crude, primitive instincts of the starving outlaws that formed the body of the brotherhood. The Cossacks, at their best, were mercenaries and soldiers of fortune; at their worst they were brigands to whom nothing was sacred and were capable of the greatest of atrocities. The very nature of the Cossack army singularly disqualified it for the role of the champion of Greek Orthodoxy and of national unification under Moscow, a role forced upon it by the course of events. Although nominally members of the Orthodox Church, the majority of the Cossacks displayed a marked indifference in religious matters. No church existed in the Sich in the seventeenth century, and ministers of religion were excluded from the capital of Zaporozhie. In their plundering expeditions the Cossacks made no distinction in the treatment they meted out to the churches and the clergy, whether Catholic or Orthodox.1

Although Taras Bulba is more historical romance than historical novel, with regard to the depiction of the Cossacks it sometimes reflects the historical record more than its own rhetoric.2 Despite the words that Gogol puts into the mouths of the Cossacks, the text rarely shows the Cossacks as martyrs for the nation and the faith. More often it shows the opposite, for example, the Cossacks’ dislike not only of the Catholic clergy but for their own clergy as well. Taras sends his boys to the seminary, but he is happy to get them out of there so that they can be real Cossacks.3 He is upset by the way they dress, effeminately and priestly. (If Andrii had not been sent

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to the seminary, he would never have met the Polish girl4 and betrayed his religion, country, and comrades.) There is no church in the sech’, and the Cossacks never engage in anything that resembles pious behavior. Their loyalty is not to the Russian land but to their fellow Cossacks. Betrayal has nothing to do with religion; it is betrayal of one’s family, one’s brotherhood, and the land of the clan. When Andrii speaks of his betrayal to his Polish enchantress, he mentions his father, his comrades (tovarishchi), and his fatherland (otchizna), which he identifies as Ukraine (Ukraina). He says nothing about religion. On numerous occasions Gogol shows that the Cossacks are warriors primarily interested in fighting for the sake of fighting. To be sure, they carouse, drink, sing, and dance but only when they do not have the opportunity to fight. Karlinsky sees Cossack passion or vitality in starker terms, arguing that the Cossacks more or less resemble a Mafia gang whose “principle aim in life is to seek out and provoke violence.”5 When Taras brings his sons to the sech’, he wants to start a war for no other reason than to give his sons the opportunity to distinguish themselves as warriors.6 The hetman (koshevoi) tells Taras that it is impossible to engage in a martial exploit because of a promise that the Cossacks have made to the sultan. To this, Taras responds that their duty to fight the infidel trumps any promise they might make to anyone. The hetman cites the Christian oath the Cossacks have taken: “We have not the right. If we had not sworn by our faith, then perhaps we might have” (2:45; 2:62). The Cossacks’ oath to honor the agreement means nothing to Taras, who has boys that need to go to war. War is for the sake of war, not for Russia, nor for the Church, nor for the Orthodox faith. The episode that most dramatizes the lack of patriotic or religious feeling among the Cossacks involves the hero’s last campaign, which is primarily motivated by personal revenge. Taras is obsessed with avenging the death of his older son Ostap at the hands of the Poles and the seduction of his younger son, Andrii, by the beautiful daughter of the Polish governor. Nothing about Taras’s motives or the campaign that follows has anything to do with nation or faith—not even brotherhood. An agreement had been reached between the Polish and Cossack leaders, which received its blessing from the Orthodox Church. We are told that the Cossacks would never oppose the Orthodox Church. When all the priests in their shining gold chasubles, bearing crosses and icons, and the bishop at the head of them in his pastoral miter, cross in hand, came out to meet the Cossacks, they all bowed and took off their

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caps. They would have disregarded anyone at that time, even the King himself; but they dared not oppose their Orthodox Church and they revered their clergy. The Cossack leader and his colonel agreed together to release Pototsky, taking from him a solemn oath to leave all Orthodox churches in freedom, to renounce his old enmity, and to do nothing to harm Cossack power. Only one colonel would not agree to such a peace. That one was Taras. He tore a handful of hair from his head and cried: “Aie, leaders, colonels! Do no such womanish deed! Trust not the Poles; they will betray you, the dogs.” (2:127–28; 2:158–59; italics mine)

Whereas the narrator reveals, at least here, that political allegiance means little to the Cossacks, he emphasizes that they have great reverence for the Orthodox Church and could never oppose it. Yet Taras will have none of it. The romantic, mytho-epic Cossack hero refuses to honor a treaty forged primarily by the Orthodox Church in the interest of the Church and Cossack autonomy. Again, Taras incites a large number of Cossacks to break the treaty and fight the Poles—this time against the Church and Cossack independence—just so he may have the opportunity to fight and achieve glory through death in battle. “Who among you wants to die their own death, not on a stove or on a woman’s bed, or drunk under a tavern fence like any carcass, but an honest Cossack’s death, all in one bed like bride and bridegroom?” (2:128; 2:159). War is the ultimate marriage among brothers. But in the end Taras does not even have war to justify his violent actions. What now motivates Taras is not even the desire to fight for the sake of fighting. His campaign, marred by the most terrible atrocities, is almost entirely fed by a personal vendetta.7 This is not the same kind of epic battle that characterizes the siege of the Polish Troy (Dubno), hand-to-hand fighting between illustrious, equally gifted warriors; this time the main goal of Taras’s campaign seems to be the slaughter of innocent women and children.8 “But the cruel Cossacks heeded nothing; picking up the babies from the streets on their lances, they flung them too into the flames. ‘That’s for you, accursed Poles, in memory of Ostap!’ Taras would say. And such sacrifices he made to Ostap’s memory in every village, until the Polish government saw that Taras’s exploit was something more than common brigandage” (2:129; 2:160–61). Although the narrator proclaims Taras a staunch defender of Orthodoxy and the Russian land, he often shows that Taras is neither. In the end, I would suggest Taras exploits—betrays—the ideal of brotherhood to satisfy his personal lust for revenge. If there is a tragedy in this epic tale, it focuses on the radical transformation of the hero into someone who has

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subordinated the welfare of nation, church, and clan to his own personal interests. Is that not, in another form, what his son Andrii did, for which Taras killed him?9 Gogol undoubtedly intended to portray Taras not as an immoral monster but as an epic and mythic hero, who contained the spirit, breadth, and potential of the Russian people. Several commentators have attempted to interpret Taras’s violence—as well as Cossack violence in general—in accord with what might be construed to be the ostensible intentions of the author. Kornblatt, for example, makes a strong argument that Taras Bulba presents violence as a creative passion, a marker of Cossack vitality; the novel therefore values the creativity and vitality associated with violence far more than it decries its consequences—including, among other things, atrocities against the civilian population. Gukovsky ingeniously attempts to shift the focus of the text from the hero, Taras, to the Cossacks as a collective entity, a common Soviet approach.10 In his view, the Cossacks most of all desired to escape the bonds of enserfment and create a free society of equals, a democratic utopia. The Cossacks were not violent because they loved violence but because their noble goals could be achieved in no other way. Gukovsky’s views, shaped by the times and constraints in which he was writing, may seem wrongheaded, but by carefully selecting his evidence, he makes as credible a case for Cossack violence as the text allows—in fact a better case than the narrator himself. Though Kornblatt and Gukovsky advance ingenious explications of Cossack violence in accord with Gogol’s intentions,11 I would suggest that ultimately the text lends greater support to an interpretation radically different from the author’s intention, one that even calls into question essential aspects of the moral dichotomies that the author sets up between the Cossacks and their various others, especially Jews. Is a man who is shown in the text to be fighting almost solely for revenge, and deriving pleasure in slaughtering women and children, morally superior to a Jew, Yankel, who is supposedly fleecing the local population, but for which there is no textual evidence?12 When a text is at odds with the intention of its author, it brings the author to the foreground, highlighting the tension between intention and performance, sometimes even making this tension for the contemporary reader the most intriguing aspect of the work. And that I suggest is exactly what happens in Taras Bulba.13 But if one part of the binary opposition—I am not disputing the text’s presentation of the bravery of the Cossacks or their physical difference from Jews—is subject to deconstruction, does that necessarily mean that the other

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members of the opposition are similarly suspect: that is, susceptible to be interpreted otherwise, especially those members related to moral questions? For a literary deconstruction to work, one does not need to have a complete reversal of roles—that is, the transformation of Jews into Cossacks and Cossacks into Jews—but one would have to find a substantially different Jew, at least morally. Georgy Ben has made precisely this kind of attempt by interpreting Yankel otherwise.

yankel as good jew? Citing Heine’s discussion of The Merchant of Venice, Georgy Ben argues that Gogol’s performance with Yankel is similar to Shakespeare’s with Shylock. Gogol “wanted to show how bad the ‘Jews’ (zhidy) were when seen from the perspective of the brigand Dnieper Cossacks, but his sense of artistic truth compelled him to portray the actions of his Jewish (evreiskie) characters in such a way that thinking readers could not but come to the exact opposite conclusion” (italics mine).14 Ben’s arguments, however, are far from persuasive. Some of the incidents he cites in favor of praiseworthy Jewish behavior seem, at best, questionable. He singles out the Jewess whose potions may have nursed Taras back to health, without citing the narrator’s doubts about the effectiveness of her remedies. Ben comments that it was fortunate for Taras that she had not been killed in the most recent pogrom. He cites Taras’s appeal to Yankel for assistance in taking him to Warsaw to see his son and that Taras was not afraid that Yankel would betray him: that is, give in to his inborn lust for gain. Actually, Taras knew that there was a reward of two thousand gold pieces for his capture and that is why he offered Yankel two thousand gold pieces as an initial payment. He cites Yankel’s overcoming his thought of handing in Taras for the reward as a fine act done not because of money but out of a sense of duty: Taras had saved his life. Actually, Taras would have killed him on the spot had Yankel refused and Yankel knows it. In their previous conversation Taras wondered why Yankel did not kill his son, Andrii, when Andrii said something that should have angered him. Ben argues that Yankel was taking a significant risk in hiding Taras in his cart. He would have taken a larger, and more immediate, risk had he refused Taras’s request. Ben argues that Yankel could have informed the authorities of what he had hidden and collected both Taras’s two thousand gold pieces and an additional two thousand in reward. Revealing

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that he had Taras hidden in his cart is not less risky than concealing it. One needs strong evidence to demonstrate a counterintuitive thesis, especially about a character who conforms almost entirely to a negative stereotype, but in each case cited by Ben it seems that Yankel was acting out of fear (actually terror) and desire for gain. One need only go back to the passage in which Yankel gloats over the two thousand gold coins that Taras gives him as an initial payment (2:114; 2:142); it does not seem that this is the man in whom virtue has overcome desire for gain.15 In contrast to Taras Bulba, by the fourth act of The Merchant of V­enice, Jew and Christian, Shylock and Antonio, begin to resemble each other: primarily because each is treated with existential seriousness. Because the authorities in Venice take Shylock’s legal arguments and claims so seriously, they are at a loss how to save Antonio without sacrificing the welfare of the state, which is dependent on its alien population. Shylock remains the villain, even a comic villain in the technical sense, but also a human being and in no way a ridiculous one. The comic stereotype like Yankel, on the other hand, will not turn into something radically different from what the author intended. Jews are not going to become drunkards and spendthrifts; they are not going to abandon their families to live on a Jewish settlement on the Dnieper and become ruthless killers. Unlike Shylock, Yankel does not turn into anything that challenges the stereotype, at least not anything that the author can take seriously. Even when Gogol gives Yankel a universal trait, or at least a trait shared by other characters, he does not eschew the same type of comic, physical stereotyping that he exploits elsewhere. In one of Yankel’s explanations for Andrii’s “going over to the other side,” Yankel cites the expected material reasons that fit the Jewish stereotype, but he also adduces the beauty of the Polish temptress. Can the Jew understand powerful motives of behavior other than money or the desire for gain? Yes, but the way the Jew expresses this appreciation for the Polish girl’s beauty is rendered so grotesque and ludicrous that it undercuts any common humanity implied by this appreciation. “’The general has a beautiful daughter. Holy God, what a beauty!’ Here the Jew did his utmost to portray her beauty in his own face, flinging wide his arms, screwing up his eyes, and twisting his mouth as though tasting something” (2:81; 2:105). The narrator spends several pages rapturously describing the beauty of the general’s daughter, but not in terms of the impression it makes on a Jewish face and in a Jewish mouth. Moreover, Gogol turns Yankel’s appreciation of the Polish beauty into a burlesque of

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the famous passage in The Iliad in which the Trojan leaders, catching sight of the wondrous, goddess-like beauty of Helen, understand why the Greeks and the Trojans have fought so long and suffered so much pain.16 “And so when they saw Helen walking about on the ramparts, they softly spoke winged words to each other. How can we condemn (ou nemesis) the Trojans and the well-armed Achaians who have fought for so long and suffered so much for such a woman. She is no less beautiful than the immortal goddesses themselves” (The Iliad, 3:154–58). The Cossacks may be diminished by the disconnect between their behavior and authorial rhetoric, but the Jew remains the same—and this is to be expected when the image does not veer from the stereotype.

c o m i c c o n ta m i n at i o n : the epic hero diminished Because the Cossacks are treated seriously they would seem much more apt to escape the intentions of the text—the rhetoric of the author. But Taras in particular may also fail to conform to the author’s intentions for another reason, because he is paired, through a binary opposition, with Yankel, a stereotypically comic Jew: that is, his image as an epic hero may actually suffer more because of his pairing with Yankel than because of his violent actions against the interests of Russia, the Church, and the Cossack brotherhood. In the end, Yankel drags Taras down more through identification than he raises him through contrast. Just as Jews will not turn into Cossacks, so Cossacks will not turn into Jews: they will not be shown to be thin and weak; their clothing will not be portrayed as ridiculous; their language will not be presented as alien; their death will not be represented as unworthy of serious existential treatment. The worst fear that Taras has about the Cossacks is not that they will become petty traders obsessed with money but that they will want to stay at home with their women and children, engage in agriculture, and grow fat and contented: that is, they will want to settle down and abandon the free life of unattached predators and warriors. The narrator tells us about the Cossack nobility being seduced by Polish refinements and luxurious living (2:28; 2:42), but there is little going on that can be characterized as a Judaization of Cossack life. Gogol shows that some Cossacks can be tempted by gain—I have already cited the example of Borodaty—losing sight, even in battle, of

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the main goal of war, and Georgy Ben maintains that the main goal of the Cossacks’ marauding expeditions is the accumulation of treasure, not the demonstration of prowess in battle.17 It is true that the taking of Dubno promises substantial material benefits; war and marauding usually have material objectives. The Cossacks pillage, they hide their treasure, and they become enraged when it is stolen. But the question is not what is historically true but what Taras Bulba shows. In Taras Bulba, as in martial epics in general, the casus belli is often presented as an excuse (pretense) for fighting, not as the reason for fighting: war is an opportunity for a warrior to prove himself. Even the Cossacks justify combat in terms of some other goal, such as the defense of Orthodoxy or the Russian land. But neither Taras Bulba nor his sons have any interest in money or booty. Taras takes his sons to the sech’ only so that they can be tested in battle. Only Yankel, who is projecting, thinks that one of Andrii’s main reasons for “going over to the other side” was money, but this observation shows more about Yankel than Andrii. Although there may be no Judaizing of the Cossacks in Taras Bulba, the hero is significantly diminished because of his close textual association with Jews, as the scene in which Yankel conducts Taras to Warsaw makes clear.18 In order to smuggle Taras into Warsaw, Yankel, as we have seen, hides Taras in his wagon under a heavy load of bricks. Hiding in a small space, Taras himself becomes smaller, Jew-like. Furthermore, Cossacks do not hide, it is something only women and Jews do. In an earlier scene, the Jews try to hide from the Cossacks who are threatening to hang or drown them. They hide in empty vodka barrels, in ovens, and they even try to crawl under the skirts of their Jewess wives. When Taras asks Yankel to take him to Warsaw, Yankel responds by saying that he will have to be hidden. “Well then, hide me, hide me as best you can, in an empty barrel or something” (2:114; 2:143). The barrel is a vodka barrel, the very same barrel that the Jews themselves attempted to hide in when the Cossacks came to get them.19 The cart in which Taras is trying to hide from his Polish pursuers is probably the same one that Yankel used to hawk his wares several times earlier in the novel. When they get to Warsaw Taras has to be confined and hidden again. Just by existing in Jewish space and on Jewish ground, he seems transformed into a Jew himself. Outside of his element Taras becomes the antithesis of himself; he becomes just like the figure who is used to define him apophatically. But this reversal of roles is only temporary, confined to the day of Taras’s arrival in Warsaw. By nighttime, after Mordechai has returned with bad

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news, Taras asserts himself. A plan has been devised to which Taras agrees. “ ‘Very good, take me to him!’ Taras pronounced resolutely, and all his firmness came back to him.” From this point on, Taras is himself again. He orders Yankel around. “ ‘Get up, Jew,’ he said, ‘and give me the disguise’ (Vstavai, zhid, i davai tvoiu grafskuiu odezhdu)” (2:119; 2:148). He becomes not only imperious but also impulsive. He is unable to control himself when he hears the Poles making disparaging remarks about the Cossacks and about Orthodoxy. He watches with pride and approval the torture of his son Ostap, whose bones are being broken before a large crowd of onlookers. When Ostap finally cries out for his father, Taras at great risk acknowledges his son’s call. He disappears, only to return later with an armed band, bent on avenging the cruel torture of his son. The Warsaw chapter presents a temporary diminution of Taras, a not uncommon episode in the life of mythic or epic heroes. Taras indeed emerges from the diminution powerful and determined, terrorizing the Polish and Jewish population even more ruthlessly than before. Diminutions and descents are often the necessary preliminaries of corresponding amplifications and elevations. But the diminution that takes place in the Warsaw chapter, however temporary, is an extreme one, for Taras is transformed into an alien whose life and death are not even taken seriously. If a mythic hero like Taras Bulba can be emasculated, incapacitated, Judaized—even if it is only temporarily—by living in a cramped, dirty, alien space, any Cossacks who are attracted to the city, whether for its refinement (Polish) or its trade and profit (Jewish), are in danger of losing their strength, spirit, and soul. The Jew is again exploited, even in this capacity, as the negative ideal. But Taras encounters a far more significant literary or aesthetic danger by association with the Jew than his temporary incapacity or diminution when sojourning in Warsaw: the danger of being reduced to the level of the Jew by becoming an actor in a comic scene done in Gogol’s most farcical manner.20 In his best works, Gogol is able brilliantly to mix and manipulate different stylistic levels, one of the defining characteristics of romantic poetics. In Taras Bulba, however, this mixing of stylistic levels has the unintended consequence of seriously deflating the image of the epic hero. When Taras’s most memorable scenes in the novel are not the ones in which he routs the enemy but those in which he plays straight man to a comic Jew, how can the image of the hero not suffer?21 In chapter 7, in a crucial scene examined earlier, Taras learns the terrible truth that his younger son, Andrii, has not

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been captured by the Poles but has gone over to the other side of his own free will, betraying his father, his brother-warriors, his clan, his country, and his religion. Taras could never have imagined that he would have to endure such humiliation.22 But this scene is largely—perhaps unintentionally— comic in effect. Yankel initiates the action when he beckons Taras, informing him that he has news about Andrii, but instead of getting to the point about ­Andrii, he proceeds to tell Taras in detail about a Polish nobleman who owed him money in the besieged Polish city. We will recall that when Taras asks him whether he has seen any of “our men” in the city, Yankel answers: “Of course, there are lots our men there: Yizchak, Rachu, Shmuiel, the Jewish contractor” (2:80; 2:103). This is a typical comic misunderstanding. Yankel interprets “our” (nashi) to mean “Jews” and he proceeds to give a list of Jewish given names, which are obviously intended to have a comic effect. Throughout the conversation, Gogol continues to include comic routines that American audiences may recognize from Abbott and Costello, with Yankel speaking the humorous lines and Taras Bulba playing the straight man. Realizing that Yankel may be really telling the truth about Andrii, Taras tries to deny that Andrii could have done such a thing. Yankel responds with a wonderful comic riff on spitting, which also harks back to his previous—perhaps mock-epic—listing of names. “You are lying, you devil of a Jew! Such a thing has never been in a Christian land! You are mistaken you dog!” “May the grass grow on the threshold of my house if I am. May everyone spit on the tomb of my father and my mother, of my father-in-law, and the father of my father and father of my mother if I am mistaken.” (2:81; 2:104)

Yankel then offers, as we have seen, beauty as a possible explanation of ­Andrii’s betrayal, which Gogol again presents comically. Taras, as straight man, asks for the reason: “Why?” Yankel responds: “’The general has a beautiful daughter. Holy God, what a beauty!’ Here the Jew did his utmost to portray her beauty in his own face, flinging wide his arms, screwing up his eyes, and twisting his mouth as though tasting something” (2:81; 2:104–5). This passage was just examined in relation to Yankel’s humanity, but it also needs to be examined in the context of the crucial role that beauty plays in the novel. Yankel is right when he cites beauty as one of the causes of Andrii’s betrayal. Next to the idea of brotherhood/betrayal, the seductive and destructive nature of beauty emerges as the most important theme in

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the novel.23 The narrator has just spent several pages describing the beauty of the Polish girl, likening her to a peerless Renaissance painting, employing every device of his narrative art to show why Andrii could not have resisted her. Having Yankel, as it were in competition with the author, ludicrously attempt the same description, with his wild gesticulations and facial expressions, undermines not only the idea of his humanity but also the seriousness of the theme of beauty. The scene ends as it begins: in farce. When Yankel reports Andrii’s words renouncing his kinship ties, Taras becomes infuriated, and Yankel takes to his ludicrous heels. “You are lying, damned Judas!” Taras shouted, beside himself. “You are lying, you son of a bitch! You crucified Christ, you man accursed of God! I will kill you—you bastard! Be off—or you will meet your death!” Taras snatched up his sword as he said it. The terrified Jew took to his heels and fled as fast as his thin spare legs (tonkie, sukhie ikry) would carry him. (2:82; 2:106)

Thus, the most important scene in the novel, the one containing the revelation that the hero’s son has betrayed the brotherhood, ends just like the drowning scene, with a Jew’s ludicrous thin, spare legs in motion; the Jew is not drowning but he is nevertheless attempting to escape death—this time from Taras’s sword. Yankel is no less ridiculous than his fellow Jews. He runs for a long time, without looking back, and as far as the eye can see. He ran “through the entire Cossack camp and far away over the open plain.” The narrator says that Taras did not pursue him not because he did not want to vent his anger on the first comer—which makes little sense. He does not pursue him because the fleeing Jew looks ridiculous. Can we imagine the most eminent Cossack hero chasing a Jew through the entire camp? This after all is not Achilles chasing Hector around Troy. Perhaps the 700-pound Taras could not even catch him! The use of the expression “far away over the open plain” (po vsemu chistomu poliu) makes the description even more comic, for this is the expression the narrator uses to describe the passage of the Cossack horsemen to the sech’ or from the sech’ on their marauding expeditions. By comic association, the Jew brings Taras down to his level, and by extension, all other Cossacks. No epic hero can maintain his stature in the presence of such clowning.24 There is much more of the same comic reduction in the Warsaw chapter and it is done in an even more extravagant comic vein. Although this chapter treats another tragic event in the hero’s life, the execution of his son, it

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is replete with blatant slapstick and narrative clowning. As we have seen, Gogol even gives a few comic lines to Taras himself. “Listen Jews! . . . You can do anything in the world, you can dig a thing up from the bottom of the sea, and there is an old saying that a Jew will steal himself if he can steal nothing else” (2:117; 2:145). The chapter includes the famous description of Mordechai’s tremendous upper lip and his beard with only fifteen hairs, all on the left side. Once Gogol is in this comic mode, when he is “riffing,” he has difficulty controlling himself. Soon with Taras in disguise and Yankel attempting to help Taras to see his son, the Polish guards become comic actors, taking over, as it were, from Mordechai. The comic Jews are infectious. Until this chapter the Poles were treated seriously. The narrator’s descriptions of the Polish soldier’s mustaches sound like a variation on Mordechai’s beard. “At the door of the dungeon, which ran up to a point at the top, stood a soldier with mustaches in three stories. The upper story of the mustaches turned backward, the second straight forward, the third downward, which made him look very much like a tomcat” (2:121; 2:150). Or later: “The soldier twisted the upper stage of his mustaches and let out through his teeth a sound not unlike the neigh of a horse” (2:121; 2:150). The stylistic discordance of epic narrative and low comedy not only diminishes the hero, it also undercuts the seriousness of the whole epic endeavor. Here the portrayal of the Jew as ridiculous, incapable of being taken seriously, has considerable consequences for what might be called the “other,” or serious text. The more Taras associates with the Jewish comic characters, the more their comicality rubs off on him, and the less he is able to play the role for which Gogol has destined him. Taras, the narrator says, was only temporarily incapacitated by living in Jewish space and recovered in short order. Our image of Taras, however, does not.25 For those who regard the Warsaw scenes the finest in the novel, the image of Taras will always be considerably diminished. The most irreparable damage that the Jews inflict on the Cossacks in the novel is not the marking of the Easter cakes or the despoliation of Ukraine, it is the diminution of the mythic hero, who in order to see his dying son must seek the advice of a man with the largest upper lip in the world and with a beard with only fifteen hairs in it, all on the left side. The power of the comic Jew in Taras Bulba over the hero and the novel is aesthetic, and it is this power that contributes as much to the deconstruction of the novel’s rhetoric, the author’s intentions, as the disparity between the Cossacks’ words and their deeds.

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the existential jew(ess) I would like to conclude this chapter on Taras Bulba with perhaps the novel’s most significant anomaly, one that bears directly on Jewish representation. It is possible to deconstruct Taras Bulba because there are so many examples revealing a dichotomy between the Cossacks’ behavior and the narrator’s encomia of their virtues, especially their trumpeted allegiance to Russia and the Orthodox Church. Other passages underline the jarring effects of mixing epic and comic characters and styles. Here I would like to put forward just one example, but one so problematic that it may call into question all of Jewish representation in the novel, much as the text’s disparities, aporias, and disruptions call into question the stature of the Cossacks and their epic leader. In this passage the narrator—and perhaps even the author—more than anywhere else in the novel acknowledges that he has concealed the truth not only from his readers but also from himself. It concerns the most important image of all with regard to Jewish representation: Jewish death. The passage describes the suffering that Taras’s younger son, Andrii, observes when he enters the besieged Polish city of Dubno, whose residents have been slowly dying of starvation. On his way to meet the governor’s daughter, led by her Tatar servant, Andrii witnesses the gruesome suffering and death of several of the city’s inhabitants: his first encounter with this horror is a Jewish mother and her infant child. The passage was added to the 1842 version of the novel. The marketplace looked dead, but he thought he heard a faint moan. Looking more closely, he noticed on the other side a group of two or three men lying on the ground completely motionless. He looked steadily to find out whether they were asleep or dead, and at that moment stumbled over something lying at his feet. It was the dead body of a woman, apparently a Jewess. She seemed to be young, though there was no trace of youth in her distorted and emaciated features. There was a red silk kerchief on her head, two rows of pearls or beads adorned the lappets over her ears; two or three long curls fell below them on her wasted neck on which the veins stood out. Beside her lay a baby convulsively clutching her thin breast and pinching it with his fingers in unconscious anger at finding no milk. He no longer screamed or cried, and only from the slow heaving of his body it could be seen he was not dead or was perhaps just now expiring. (2:69–70; 2:91)

Gogol presents the suffering and loss of life in the city in his most serious manner. The death of the inhabitants is not heroic (it is not Cossack death);

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but because it is less formulaically elegiac, it is more moving.26 In this passage, it is more the narrator who is overwhelmed by what he sees than ­Andrii. Jewish death here is not only not comic, it is of the most existential seriousness; it is employed to represent the death of the other inhabitants of the town. More important, the Jewess and her child are singled out here, not to diminish Jewish death nor to show how Jewish death differs from the death of others; rather Jewish death here is universal—and no less serious than that of any Cossack. The neutrality of the Jewess’s physical description here contrasts sharply with the comic nature of all previous descriptions of Jews in the novel. Her distorted and emaciated features, which makes her look older than she really is, results not from Jewish ethnic idiosyncrasies but from starvation. In almost all previous descriptions of Jews, physiognomy has been a device of comic differentiation, a stratagem for defining Cossack and Russian physical identity apophatically. In the above passage the Jewess’s physical characteristics are unvitiated by the narrator’s comic distortion and commentary: it is just a red silk kerchief on her head, not a dirty one. Two rows of pearls (zhemchugi) or beads (busy) adorn (ukrashaiut)—a positive word used unironically—her headdress. When Taras pulls up to Yankel’s door to solicit his help in finding Ostap, Yankel’s wife, wearing a cap and “discolored pearls” (potemnevshie zhemchugi), looks out of the window (2:113; 2:140). When Taras enters Warsaw, the narrator takes the opportunity to describe Dirty or Jew Street, noting that: “Sometimes the rather attractive face of a Jewess, decked out in tarnished beads (potemnevshie busy), peeped out of a decrepit window” (2:116; 2:145). Further, Jewish curls no longer represent comic physical difference but a human being’s terrible suffering: they call attention to the Jewish woman’s wasted neck and protuberant veins. Gogol treats the child in the same way. Later on, as we have seen, when the redhaired Jew retires for the night with his wife, their two children are likened humorously to two little puppies, and they are not children (deti) but little Yids (zhidenki). The Jewish child here, however, could be any child. The image of the child convulsively clutching at its dead mother’s breast, devoid of milk, no longer strong enough even to cry, calls into question the comic Jew of the surrounding text, and by so doing, it also calls into question the binary opposition of which that image is a basic structural element. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, while Dmitry Karamazov is being investigated by the assistant district attorney, he has a salvific dream in which he accepts responsibility not only for his father’s death but for all human suffering. Central to this epiphanic vision is a child crying because

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his emaciated mother’s breasts have no milk. The mother looks forty but she is probably only twenty. He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses, through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a fair, long beard. He was not an old man, somewhere about fifty, and he had on a gray peasant’s smock. And there, not far off was a village, he could see the very black huts, and half the huts were burned down, and there were only the charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.27

Both passages from Gogol and Dostoevsky portray a young woman who looks forty but is really in her twenties. The women are emaciated from starvation, their babies cannot nurse because their breasts are dried up. Like Dmitry, Ivan Karamazov is also tormented by suffering children and their mothers. Both Dmitry’s and Ivan’s ideas of universal responsibility and “all is permitted” derive directly from their visions of suffering children and their mothers. I am not arguing for a direct influence of Gogol on Dostoevsky, but it is important to note that the existential foundation of The Brothers Karamazov is based on images similar to the one that Gogol limns of a dead Jewess in Taras Bulba. How does one account for this disjunctive “Jewish” interpolation in the text? First of all, the passage is not disjunctive outside of its Jewish connection. The narrator gives other examples of terrible suffering in Dubno, even in the same scene as the one above. As we have seen, he is not reticent about depicting the atrocities the Cossacks commit against the civilian population, especially against women and children. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this passage is to see it in the context of a similar passage in Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat” (Shinel’), which was written in the same year as the second edition of Taras Bulba. “The Overcoat” recounts in mock-sentimental fashion the last days of a copying clerk, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who falls in love with his newly purchased overcoat and dies of a broken heart when the coat is stolen. The narrator and the characters make fun of the clerk for most

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of the story, but in one striking passage toward the beginning, Akaky Akakie­ vich, to everyone’s surprise, including the reader’s, turns on his tormentors and asks why everyone is harassing him. A jarring note of compassion enters the text that critics have had difficulty dealing with for over 160 years. Akaky Akakievich never answered a word, however, but behaved as though there were no one there. It had no influence on his work; in the midst of all this teasing he never made a single mistake in his copying. It was only when the jokes became too unbearable, when they jolted his arm, and prevented him from doing his work, that he would say: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and there was something touching in his words and in the voice in which they were uttered. There was a note in it of something that aroused compassion, so that one young man, new to the office, who, following the example of the rest, had allowed himself to tease him, suddenly stopped as though cut to the heart, and from that time on, everything was, as it were, changed and appeared in a different light to him (vse peremenilos’ pered nim i pokazalos’ v drugom vide). Some unseen force seemed to repel him from the companions with whom he had become acquainted because he thought they were well-bred and decent men. And long afterward, during moments of the greatest gaiety, the figure of the humble little clerk with a bald patch on his head appeared before him with his heart-rending words: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” And within those moving words he heard others: “I am your brother.” And the poor young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterward in his life he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage brutality lies hidden under refined, cultured politeness, and, my God! even in a man whom the world accepts as a gentleman and a man of honor. (2:306–7; 3:137–38)

Akaky Akakievich is ridiculous and ridiculed. His physical features as well as his work habits, mental abilities, and speech patterns (he almost lacks speech) are all comically presented. His given name, which is repeated throughout the story, is meant to be ridiculous and the story of his naming is related in one of the most remarkably comic episodes in Russian literature. His last name, “Bashmachkin,” derives from the word “bashmak” (boot or shoe) or “bashmachok” (shoe or slipper). The physical objects most associated with the Jews, especially in death, are their shoes (bashmaki), the ridiculousness of which makes the Cossacks laugh as they watch the Jews drown. After this sympathetic passage in “The Overcoat,” Gogol reverts to his parodic style with Akaky, just as after the passage describing the dead Jewess in Taras Bulba he reverts to his former comic mode of depicting Jews. But in “The Overcoat,” almost from the beginning—the sentimental passage occurs on the

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third page—an unresolved tension between the mock-sentimental and the sentimental humanitarian styles remains. It is perhaps this unresolvable stylistic and thematic tension that may account for the effectiveness of the story, making it more open to interpretation than any of Gogol’s other stories.28 The interpolated anecdote about Akaky’s reaction to his mistreatment does not focus on Akaky; rather, it concerns itself with the reaction of the young man who is changed forever by Akaky’s remarks. He not only sees Akaky differently, with compassion rather than with derision, but also ­begins to take an entirely different view of his erstwhile friends and of the world in general, a vision into the cruelty underlying the forms of politeness and refinement. The young man who went along with everyone in making fun of those beneath them appears to be a projection of the narrator-author himself, who, perhaps only unconsciously, rebukes himself, as narrator, for ridiculing the poor clerk the same way as Akaky’s colleagues do in the story itself. It is as though the narrator-author is forced to question his own poetics, to ask himself why he has not been treating his subject, a human being and a brother (it was Yankel’s suggestion that the Jews were brothers to the Cossacks that aroused their lethal wrath), with existential seriousness. The narrator reverts to his old manner, but what he has said cannot be erased once a completely different point of view has been endorsed (drugoi vid). A note of seriousness accompanies sotto voce the narrator’s resumed parodic manner, a note that has shaped the interpretation of the story for many readers, even fictional ones—including Devushkin, the hero of Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk29—to the present day.30 I do not wish to diminish the differences between these passages from “The Overcoat” and Taras Bulba. Whereas Akaky Akakievich is the protagonist of “The Overcoat,” the dead Jewess and her child in Dubno occupy a small section of a chapter. The anomalous passage in “The Overcoat” has influenced interpretation of the story precisely because it bears on our perception of the hero, explicitly questioning the way we relate to all those like Akaky Akakievich. The comparable passage in Taras Bulba is not intended to challenge our perceptions about Jews, nor to force us to reassess our interpretations of the Cossacks. It has gone unnoticed. It jumps out because we are looking at the text from a different perspective, just as the Akaky Akakievich passage jumps out because it is told from a different perspective. The passage in “The Overcoat” is intentional and explicit; the passage in Taras Bulba is not meant to call attention to Jewish death. If it does so, it is by accident; however, it constitutes an important part of the unintentional text that we have been examining in this section.

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In the “brotherhood” or “humanitarian” passage from “The Overcoat,” the young man (and the narrator-author through him) sees a different Akaky Akakievich, no longer a ridiculous petty clerk but a human being like himself, and he becomes a different person through his altered perspective. In Taras Bulba, the narrator, through Andrii, registers a drastic change in point of view without seeming to be conscious of it. Andrii has entered the marketplace and notices three motionless men. As he moves closer to find out whether they are sleeping or dead, he accidentally stumbles over something lying at his feet. He is not looking for what he finds. It finds him, as it were, impeding his progress, forcing him to look more closely. Andrii does not have an epiphany about Jewishness, nor does the narrator through him; they do not suddenly realize that Jews are their brothers, as both Akaky Akakievich and Yankel claim, or that Jewish death is the same as all other death, even Cossack death. But this is exactly what the passage shows; the author-narrator stumbles over this reality while looking for something else; he observes, and reveals, but does not see: it is insight from blindness. But how does one reinterpret the representation of the Jew in light of what we have seen about the treatment of Akaky Akakievich? If this Jewish death can be serious, what happens to the apophatic binary system of Cossack and Jew, based in part on contrasting representations of Jewish and Cossack death? Does it imply a diminution of the Cossack even greater than the instances that we have already explored? The passage relating to the Jewish mother and child cannot be wished away, no more than the shorter comic passage representing the drowning of the Jews, a passage that has elicited the attention of every commentator who deals with the representation of the Jew in nineteenth-century Russian literature. One might argue that in describing the starvation taking place inside the besieged Polish city, Gogol chooses a Jew because Jews constitute a significant part of the population, although no mention of this fact is ever made. But if Jewish death in general were so insignificant it would hardly be used as a symbol for the terrible suffering of the town. Nor can the passage be interpreted as an artistic lapse, since the description of the dead Jewish woman uses physical details associated elsewhere with Jews. But there is a significant difference: none of the negative evaluative adjectives used elsewhere are used here. The red kerchief, the pearls, and the beads are neither dirty nor discolored and there are no ridiculous Jewish stockings and boots. The woman’s distorted face results from starvation not from Jewish alienness. The baby is neither a puppy nor a little Jewish animal (zhidenok). She has no husband hiding

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under her skirts, but a child grasping her breast desperately for milk. She is not wearing the cassock of a Russian priest. If by portraying Taras’s encounters with Jews, Gogol risks compromising his hero by comic contamination, he paradoxically also risks compromising his artistic intentions by the serious treatment of the Jewess who has starved to death. If Jewish death can be presented seriously then how does one explain Jewish death presented comically? Against the serious portrayal of Jewish death, Jewish ridiculousness seems a much more artificial and arbitrary means of defining apophatically Cossack virtue and manliness. The device is bared. When the Cossacks throw the Jews in the river, they are killing the same people whose death will be treated with existential seriousness a few chapters later. The dead Jewess and her dying baby are the same Jews that Taras will be ruthlessly slaughtering along with the Polish women and children when he goes on his last rampage of revenge. Moreover, this Jewess has no magical powers against death, has no association with the devil, has no control, like Yankel, over an entire province. She is not wearing ridiculous stockings and shoes. And why is she dying? Her death has nothing to do with the defense of Russia or Orthodoxy. In fact, the last stage of the Cossack campaign against the town is not even a battle. Against their common practice, the Cossacks are attempting not to defeat the Poles in battle but to starve the inhabitants into submission. If the Jewess calls into question the representation of Jewish death elsewhere in the novel, does she not also call into question the representation of Jewish life? If the underlying view of character in the novel implies the close association of the moral and the physical, then Jews, if they are physically ridiculous, cannot be taken seriously. Conversely, the dead Jewess cannot be presented ridiculously because the author has chosen her to become the “subject matter for problematic-existential treatment.”31 I do not want to suggest that we begin viewing the Jews in Taras Bulba as Ben does, as the opposite of how they are in fact presented by the author. But on the basis of the passage describing the dead Jewess, one is compelled to look at Jewish representation in the novel otherwise. Just as readers realize that the Cossacks they encounter in the novel are distorted images, they may assume that the same is true for the portrayal of Jews. Once the reader begins to see Jewish representation in this way, the whole binary structure, the apophatic strategy of the text, with regard to both Cossack and Jew, becomes shaky. Thus, not only the comic Jew but also the serious Jew become subversive narrative elements, threatening to undo the intentions of the author.

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And that is not a bad thing. For if Gogol had achieved his stylistic and ideological intentions in Taras Bulba, if our interpretation of the novel had rested perfectly—or even comfortably—within the text’s rhetorical structures, we would certainly be dealing with a much less interesting work, and yes, a lesser novel. One of the main reasons why critics have had a lower opinion of Taras Bulba than many of Gogol’s other fictions is that they have interpreted Taras Bulba as a work that completely realizes its intentions, a work in which the novel’s rhetorical structures and the represented world are one. But as I have shown, the rhetoric of the novel is often at odds with what it actually shows, both with respect to its hero and the representation of Jews. But it is precisely in this “failure” of Taras Bulba to realize its author’s intentions, this failure of the novel’s rhetorical strategies to rein in its fractious material, that we may find, paradoxically, the most interesting and artistically successful sides of the novel. If we see Taras Bulba, as some have seen “The Overcoat,” as a novel that is defined by the tensions between the ostensible rhetoric of the text and what actually happens in the text, then we are dealing with a much different Taras Bulba, a novel that is as much about its narrator as about its hero or heroes. It is these tensions—its stylistic inconsistencies, its aporias, its conflicting points of view, its ambivalences— that define the real power of Taras Bulba, not its neat binary oppositions and rationalization of violence. Thus, to gain a better appreciation of the novel, we need to focus more on the real center of action in Taras Bulba: the conflict in its author between coarse simplicity and refined beauty, between self-sacrifice and mean-spirited revenge, between brotherhood and self-aggrandizement, and between Jews whose death is ridiculous and Jews who can function as symbols of universal suffering. Yes, the narrator praises the coarse simplicity of the Cossacks and condemns refinement, but he gets carried away by refined beauty no less than his anti-hero Andrii, by the beauty of the Catholic Church, by the beauty of Polish military uniforms, and by the beauty of the Polish enchantress. He celebrates the Cossacks’ ruthless defense of Russia and Orthodoxy, but he shows his heroes to be primarily interested in fighting and killing for their own sake. He attempts to create a mythic, epic hero, but has him commit atrocities purely to wreak revenge, forgetting the best interests of Russia and the Orthodox Church. He elevates his hero by his exploits, then compromises him by making him participate in a vaudeville involving comic Jews. He creates a ridiculous, inconsequential Jew and then creates a Jewess who casts doubt on the entire Cossack enterprise. Can we imagine any work that so amply supplies the means by which it can

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be interpreted against itself—deconstructed? The Jew, to be sure, plays only a part in this deconstruction, but it is no small part, for there is no greater disparity in the text than that between the ridiculous Jews drowning in the river and the tragedy of the dead Jewess with her baby at her breast. There is nothing in the text that shows the tensions in the text more glaringly. Taras Bulba fails where it succeeds, it fails where it achieves its author’s intentions, but it rarely realizes these intentions. It succeeds where it fails, where it unintentionally reveals its fault lines and its pervasive, unreconcilable tensions, where it shows the opposite of what it says, where it undermines the project of creating a national epic based on violence, hatred, and an escape to the past. It succeeds where it exposes the conflicting allegiances of its author. The novel’s flagrant mixing of stylistic levels, so disturbing to some, with epic seriousness and low comedy playing off each other, is not a defect; it is the essence of Gogol’s romantic aesthetic. Taras Bulba succeeds therefore where it most resembles its author. And perhaps there is no other work by Gogol that more fully reflects the psyche of its author than Taras Bulba. It is not this other, this serious Jew, but Gogol’s physically unprepossessing and ridiculous little Jews who shaped the attitude toward the Jews in Russian literature in the first part of the nineteenth century. The exploitive, parasitic Jew—the Gogolian Jews who “own” the Orthodox Churches and control entire regions of Ukraine—are paper tigers in Taras Bulba; only in the second half of the nineteenth century will they become the dominant Jewish stereotype. The implications of the serious treatment of the Jew in Taras Bulba, in particular, the serious treatment of Jewish death—the latent legacy of Gogol’s Jewess and child of Dubno—will have to wait till the twentieth century for full realization in the works of Babel, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and Rybakov. But for Gogol’s legacy of the comic Jew, we need now to turn to Turgenev and Dostoevsky, two of the most prominent writers of the next generation. Turgenev takes Gogol one step further, fusing the serious and ridiculous in one and the same Jewish character. Perhaps Dostoevsky’s image of the starving Russian women in The Brothers Karamazov was inspired by Gogol’s portrait of the dead Jewess in Taras Bulba, but his portrait of the Jew in his Notes from the House of the Dead seems purposely to eschew the serious for the ridiculous. We shall see how successful—or unsuccessful—he is in creating a perfectly ridiculous Jew in the last chapters of this volume.

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“The Jew” Turgenev and the Poetics of Jewish Death

Gogol’s Yankel in Taras Bulba escapes not only the fate of his fellow Jews drowned in the river by the Cossacks but also other near-fatal encounters. Gogol undoubtedly kept him alive because he needed a Jew to conduct Taras Bulba to Warsaw; he also was not about to sacrifice Yankel’s comic potential. In “The Jew,” Turgenev, as it were, revived Yankel. He needed him, however, not for comic relief but as the antihero of an existential drama about death and dying. This time the Jewish protagonist is not spared at the last moment. He is hanged. Furthermore, Turgenev’s Yankel, renamed Girshel (Girshel’), is no longer an appendage of the epic hero, he is the Jew of the title. Written in 1846 and published in 1847, “The Jew” (“Zhid ”) appeared eleven years after the first edition of Taras Bulba and five years after the second. Although Gogol had not written anything significant since 1842—when he published two of his best-known masterpieces, “The Overcoat” and Dead Souls—in 1847 he was still the reigning giant of Russian literature. The oft-quoted saying, “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” implies that ­nineteenth-century Russian writers were all Gogol’s literary

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descendants. Gogol, indeed, influenced the lesser writers of his own time, among other things, making it acceptable, even fashionable, for literature to represent the life of the lower classes; however, in terms of style, characterization, and Weltanschauung, he was distant from the major writers of the following generation. The young Dostoevsky had an almost entirely polemical relationship with Gogol, as evidenced in his first work, Poor Folk, incorporating an extensive and multifaceted critique of “The Overcoat.”1 Given that Turgenev was even less akin in spirit to Gogol than was Dostoevsky, it comes as no surprise that in “The Jew” the relationship between Gogol and Turgenev with respect to the representation of the Jew is defined not by imitation, but confrontation. “The Jew” received little attention when it appeared in 1847.2 It was published without the author’s name (Turgenev appears to have requested the editor, Nikolay Nekrasov, to replace his name with three asterisks), though most literati knew the work’s provenance. Several prominent critics noted “The Jew” in their critical review of the year’s literature, the novelist and critic Alexander Druzhinin even thinking it worthy of eventually being placed in an edition of Turgenev’s works. And in fact the story appeared in almost all collected editions of Turgenev’s fiction during his lifetime.3 Although “The Jew” contains a simple plot, its narrative structure, taking advantage of two narrators, is quite sophisticated.4 The reader is introduced to the hero, a Russian colonel by the name of Nikolay Ilyich, by the first narrator (since he is unnamed I shall call him “narrator one” or “the frame narrator”), who is part of a group of younger soldiers to whom the colonel has been persuaded to tell a story. After giving a brief physical and moral description of the colonel, narrator one disappears, letting the colonel (Nikolay Ilyich ) tell the rest of the tale. The colonel recounts his experience as a young cornet5 of nineteen, the same age as most of his present listeners, during the Napoleonic Wars, when he was stationed in Danzig in 1813. If the story is being told in 1846, the colonel is now about fifty-two. During a lull in the fighting, Nikolay Ilyich won a great deal of money at cards. A Jew by the name of Girshel, having learned about Nikolay Ilyich’s success, offers his services, specifically the company of a beautiful young girl. It is, in fact, Girshel’s daughter, Sarah (Sara), but Nikolay Ilyich only learns her real identity much later in the story. Girshel has no intention of compromising his Sarah, so when he brings her to Nikolay Ilyich, he stays close by to make sure nothing untoward happens, which of course exasperates the Russian cornet. About five days after the last of these frustrating visits, Nikolay

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Ilyich comes upon Girshel drawing maps of Russian troop positions. After Girshel is brought to the general in command and the evidence of spying is presented against him, the general orders him hanged immediately. The narrator, who feels compassion for Girshel, does everything he can to intercede, but the general will not diverge from standard military procedures that call for the hanging of spies. When Sarah learns about the fate of her father, she turns to Nikolay Ilyich for help. It is here for the first time that Nikolay Ilyich realizes that Sarah is Girshel’s daughter. Nikolay Ilyich makes another unsuccessful attempt to persuade the general to stay the execution. When he returns with Sarah, who is beside herself with anguish, to the site of the hanging, he sees that the soldiers charged with carrying out the execution are laughing at Girshel. When the noose is put over Girshel’s head, the narrator shuts his eyes and rushes away. Afterward he is arrested and imprisoned for two weeks for disobeying orders. When Girshel’s widow comes for his things, the general gives her a hundred roubles. Nikolay Ilyich never sees Sarah again. Soon after his release from prison, he is wounded in battle. When he recovers, Danzig has already been taken and he rejoins his regiment on the shores of the Rhine. Working off the image of Jewish death in Taras Bulba, “The Jew” tests the notion that the death of anyone can be ridiculous, not existentially serious, even the death of a Jewish spy.6 Especially with regard to the representation of Jewish death, Turgenev goes further than Gogol does in Taras Bulba by creating a greater physical and moral distance between the Jew and the Russian and by placing his story in the recent not the distant past. The main contrast here involves a more contemporary Taras or Russian (Nikolay ­Ilyich) and a more contemporary Yankel or Jew (Girshel). The frame narrator introduces the reader in the very first paragraphs to the physical and moral virtues of his superior, Nikolay Ilyich. We greatly loved and respected Nikolay Ilyich for his kindness, his common sense, and his indulgence for us, his younger colleagues. He was a large, tall, broad-shouldered man. His dark face, “one of those wonderful Russian faces,” his honest, intelligent gaze, his gentle smile, his manly and resonant voice—everything about him was pleasing and attractive.7 (115)

Nikolay Ilyich is as an exemplar of Russian spiritual and physical beauty. Physically, he could be Taras Bulba or either of his sons. In character, he is straightforward, honest, and intelligent; but his gentle smile (krotkaia ulybka) indicates that he is no Taras Bulba. Common to all the physical

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descriptions in the works under discussion is a consonance of outer beauty and inner virtue. Thus Nikolay Ilyich’s gaze is honest and intelligent, his smile is gentle. Everything about him physically, intellectually, and spiritually is attractive and pleasing. He is presented by the frame narrator as though he were the modern Russian martial ideal. The physical descriptions of Girshel, which conform in almost every way to the stereotype of the Jew, contrast sharply with those of Nikolay Ilyich. Compared to Girshel, Gogol’s Yankel almost seems a fine specimen. Since the story proper is told by Nikolay Ilyich, no physical descriptions of the colonel can occur after the shift in narration in the story’s second paragraph, but the physical descriptions of Girshel accompany his every appearance and they all bear directly on his character and actions. “He was small, thinnish, pock-marked, and red-headed. He was continually blinking his tiny, reddish eyes. He had a long crooked nose, and he coughed incessantly” (116). His constant coughing suggests sickness and disease. (Nikolay ­Ilyich, by contrast, exudes health and vitality even in old age.) The story reproduces Girshel’s accented and ridiculous speech; however, it focuses even more on his movements, gestures, and gesticulations. He is always fidgeting, bowing obsequiously, wagging his head, waving his hands, spreading out his fingers, shaking his side-locks, closing his eyes, leering, and skipping. Both when spying against the Russian army, and when later caught in the act, he is likened to an animal. Girshel “suddenly ran off a little to one side, quickly and timidly looked around . . . uttered a cry, crouched down, cautiously craned his neck and began again to look around and listen closely” (97). He starts like a hare and sniffs at the air. When he is apprehended, “Girshel shriveled up. He shook like a leaf and let out a sickly rabbit-like cry” (97). The description of the Jew’s attempt to escape comes directly out of Gogol and would later be appropriated by Chekhov in his most famous story about a Jew, “Rothschild’s Fiddle”: “The Jew ran exceedingly well; his legs, clad in blue stockings, flashed by, really very rapidly (Zhid bezhal ­chrezvychaino bystro; ego nogi, obutye v sinie chulki, mel’kali deistvitel’no ves’ma bystro)” (124). Alternately an animal (a timid rabbit) and a puppet with jerky, unnatural movements, the Jew is always ridiculous, far more so than Yankel in Taras Bulba. Turgenev makes Girshel into the moral antithesis of Nikolay Ilyich as well. Just as all the physical characteristics of his Russian hero have corresponding moral virtues, so Girshel’s stereotypical physical deficiencies are tied to stereotypical Jewish moral defects, the worst being greed (obsession

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with money) and betrayal (spying). Girshel’s plan to use his daughter to extract gold coins from the young officer, however close by he intends to be, is a risky and sordid business. On hearing Nikolay Ilyich make a disparaging remark about money, Girshel counters: “Oh, your Excellency, don’t talk like that. Money is a wonderful thing, it’s always necessary, it is possible to obtain everything with money, everything! Everything! Just command the agent and he will get you everything, your excellency, everything, everything” (116). His desire for gain lures him into an even more risky—and eventually fatal—venture: spying on the Russians. Caught red-handed, he pleads in his defense that it is his first time. The reader has little reason to believe he is telling the truth since he has lied about everything else. His detailed map of the Russian camp with numerous notes is enough to convince the general to order Girshel’s immediate execution. As in Gogol, the Russian, Nikolay Ilyich, is defined by a Jewish other, Girshel. The more unfavorably Turgenev presents Girshel, the more positively his Russian antithesis emerges. But Turgenev is not attempting to create a perfect man. On one hand, it seems that Turgenev is offering up a Russian hero for the modern age, replacing the violent, callous warrior ideal of Gogol’s epic fantasy Taras Bulba, located in the mythical past, with a gentler and more sensitive contemporary alternative. On the other hand, he presents us a with a character who is conscious of his own flaws and who does not always present himself in the best light. Sent out on a foraging expedition in a neighboring village, he watches his men ransacking houses of the local population. The staff sergeant is holding his booty of chickens and ducks over his head, laughing at a tattered and ugly Jewess (zhidovka) trying to defend her property. At this point, Sarah, Girshel’s daughter, comes up to Nikolay Ilyich and requests that he order his men to cease marauding. (The tattered Jewess is probably Sarah’s mother.) To impress Sarah, who now seems to Nikolay Ilyich more beautiful than ever, he orders his men to leave the Jews alone and then asks Sarah if she is pleased with him. The narrator does not present himself as a knight in shining armor; he implies that he would not have stopped his men if Sarah were not there, and he did not have any compassion for the Jews whose goods were being “requisitioned.” The next day, before his promised rendezvous with Sarah (he still does not know that Girshel is Sarah’s father), he observes Girshel spying. But this example of the hero’s unexemplary behavior on one occasion, a concession to realistic characterization, in the end only sets off his most noteworthy virtue, the most highly prized Russian virtue: compassion.

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Whereas Nikolay Ilyich’s amatory interest in Sarah motivates the first part of the story, his compassion for Girshel dominates the second. In contrast to the Gogolian stalwart but ruthless Cossack, a man who does not even hesitate to slay his own son, Turgenev depicts a physically robust and courageous young man, who, moved by compassion for a Jew about to be executed, acts against his own interest even before he knows that Sarah is Girshel’s daughter. Moreover, Girshel is hardly a sympathetic character. He arouses disgust in the narrator by his mere physical presence, he cheats him out of money, and he gives detailed plans of the Russian camp to the enemy. In the end, the only thing that Nikolay Ilyich and Girshel have in common is—life. It proves more than sufficient. Nikolay Ilyich’s compassion grows in accord with the seriousness of ­Girshel’s situation. Girshel cuts so pathetic, timid, and ridiculous a figure while spying that the narrator at first cannot take his action seriously. He wants to let Girshel go with a scare, but once Girshel’s spying becomes generally known, Nikolay Ilyich realizes that he must report it to the general. He tries to present the whole episode as an insignificant matter (­nichtozhnoe) unworthy of attention, but he is unsuccessful in doing so. When after having questioned Girshel, the general orders him to be hanged, the narrator attempts to intercede. “’Take pity on him, your Excellency,’ I said to the general in German as best as I could. ‘Let him go’” (127). The general refuses. After seeing Girshel’s terror after the sentence has been announced, the narrator pleads again: “’Your Excellency,’ I began again, ‘release this unfortunate creature (etot neschastnyi)’” (128). It is to no avail. A Russian hero, however, who differs radically from his fellow Russian soldiers, especially with regard to compassion for the Jew, can undermine Turgenev’s existential experiment regarding capital punishment by making his response seem idiosyncratic, lacking in universality. But the other soldiers, however much they differ from Nikolay Ilyich, all share his compassion, a point Nikolay Ilyich stresses throughout the last part of the story. Not trying to single himself out as a moral exemplar, Nikolay shows that despite ethnic origin or social status everyone in the end reacted to Girshel’s death in the same way. And not only Russians, the German general, too. Working within the nineteenth-century Russian stereotype of the unfeeling, dutybound German, the Russian’s antithesis, Nikolay Ilyich presents the general, an ethnic German who speaks Russian poorly, as the epitome of discipline and order.8 When the general finds out that Girshel was indeed spying, he has no choice but to order his execution. “A strict enforcer of military rules

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and regulations . . . the general, unfortunately for Girshel, placed the fulfilling of his duties higher than compassion (vyshe sostradaniia)” (125–26). Girshel pleads with the general that he has a wife and a daughter, but it is to no avail. But as the general begins to see that Girshel, now under the threat of execution, is not just a Jew and a spy but a man facing death—and thus like any other man in the same situation—he begins to react differently. When Girshel brings up his wife and daughter again, the narrator mentions how the general “was taken up short and fell silent. But nothing could be done. . . . According to regulations the Jew must be hanged. . . . He drew out his words with the appearance of a man who against his heart is compelled to sacrifice his best feelings to duty” (128). The duty-bound general is a man who feels the same compassion as Nikolay Ilyich and the other Russian soldiers; he understands that what is occurring before him is something that transcends ethnicity. When Girshel hears the death sentence, a sudden change comes over him that makes everyone see himself, for a moment, in Girshel’s place. Suddenly a terrible change overcame Girshel. Instead of the agitation and fright, peculiar to the Jewish nature, a terrifying anxiety was expressed in Girshel’s face as happens right before death. He began to thrash about like a trapped wild animal, his mouth opened wide, he let out a dull, hoarse moan, began to hop up and down in place, convulsively swinging his elbows. He had on only one slipper; they had forgotten to put the other one on . . . his gown came wide open . . . his skull cap had fallen off. . . . We all shuddered; the general fell silent. “Your Excellency,” I began again, “Forgive (prostite) this unfortunate creature and let him go.” (128; italics mine)

The narrator starts out with the stereotypical characterization of Jewish timidity. Girshel’s agitation and fright are expressed in a way “peculiar to the Jewish nature,” a phrase that could have been taken directly from Gogol. But almost immediately, another reality imposes itself, “as happens before death” in general, eclipsing ethnic difference. Lionel Trilling has argued that great literature overcomes the different assumptions peculiar to specific places and times and reveals the universals of our moral existence. Generally our awareness of the differences between the moral assumptions of one culture and those of another is so developed and active that we find it hard to believe there is any such thing as essential human nature; but we all know moments when these differences, as literature attests to them,

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seem to make no difference, seem scarcely to exist. We read the Iliad or the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare and they come so close to our hearts and minds that they put to rout, or into abeyance, our instructed consciousness of the moral life as it is conditioned by a particular culture—they persuade us that human nature never varies, that the moral life is unitary and its terms perennial, and that only a busy intruding pedantry could ever have suggested otherwise.9

In the presence of Girshel’s sentence of death, “the moral life as it is conditioned by a peculiar culture”—at least for a moment—gives way to what is “unitary” and “perennial.” The narrator notes that “we all shuddered.” Even the general fell silent before the terror. Siliavka had laughed when he dispossessed a Jewess of her property, but conducting Girshel to his execution is a different matter. “On his [Siliavka’s] coarse but not ill-willed face there appeared a strange, despairing compassion (sostradanie)” (128). All the soldiers stand around Girshel morosely looking down at the ground. When the soldiers later laugh at Girshel it is not because they find the situation in any way amusing or trifling. The narrator gets angry at them, but when he looks at Girshel he understands why they are laughing: they are laughing despite themselves, despite what they feel, they are laughing involuntarily. The soldiers took Girshel under his arms. I understood then why they had been laughing at the Jew (smeialis’ oni nad zhidom) when Sarah and I came running from the camp. He was really ridiculous (smeshon) in spite of all the horror of his situation. The tormenting anguish of parting with life, his daughter, and his family, expressed itself in the unfortunate Jew in such strange and grotesque gesticulations, cries, and skips, that we all smiled involuntarily, though it was horrible—oh so horrible—to us too. The poor fellow was half dead with fear. (131; italicized emphasis mine)

In one short paragraph the narrator runs through all the words expressing horror and terror (strashno, zhutko, uzhas, strakh). But he also expresses his sympathy for Girshel again: he is no longer just a Jew obsessed with acquiring gold coins, but a poor fellow (bedniak). This is why, in addition to his experience of horror, Nikolay Ilyich cannot witness Girshel’s final moments, but covers his eyes and runs away.10 Turgenev uses a highly personalized narrator to dramatize the effects of men witnessing an execution. But he is not content to record only the immediate effects of the hanging, he wants to show what role witnessing that execution plays in the narrator’s life many years later. Nikolay Ilyich revisits the

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psychological trauma of the execution, almost relives it, by telling the story. When the young officers requested that Nikolay Ilyich tell them a story, they probably expected to be regaled with a tale about the old soldier’s military experiences during the Napoleonic wars. The frame narrator, who has unbounded admiration for Nikolay Ilyich, has probably heard many of Nikolay Ilyich’s war stories, but the story the frame narrator chooses to tell us, the one that he recounts word for word—the one that obviously made the most lasting impression on him—is the tale that Nikolay Ilyich tells about a Jew. But why does Nikolay Ilyich choose to tell this tale in the first place? And why tell this tale to this audience? Perhaps when he looked at his listeners, he saw himself, like them, a nineteen-year-old officer setting out on his career, and he realized that the story that he needed to tell them was not about war at all but about something that happened during the war; and it was also about something that could happen at any time and was still happening as he was speaking. As he tells the story, Nikolay Ilyich realizes that he is no less horrified now by what happened than he was thirty years ago. The story is a way of coming to terms with something that will always haunt him. It is his confession. But it also contains a mission. Because what happened to Girshel relates not only to him but to all men, it becomes his duty both to relive the events himself and to tell the story to others, to infect them with the same horror and compassion that he and others—indeed everyone—felt during the events.11 To complicate his task, Turgenev must draw forth these emotions for a character who elicited smiles and laughter at his own hanging. The emphasis on the hero’s feeling of horror and compassion in “The Jew” also shows how differently Turgenev and Gogol depict their Russian martial ideal, and ultimately how differently they depict the Jew. Turgenev uses the stereotypical Jew, much as Gogol does, to define his Russian hero, but he finds his ideal in the historical present, not in an ill-defined mythic or epic past, in particular in his hero’s compassion, a quality totally absent (Gogol would argue for good reasons) in the Cossacks of Taras Bulba. For Turgenev, Russia need not look back to the brutal, hardened Cossacks to find the essence of the national spirit, since it can be found in contemporary Russians in whom compassion coexists harmoniously with manliness, courage, and patriotic zeal. But with regard to Jewish representation, it seems unlikely that Turgenev is cultivating the worst aspects of the traditional Jewish stereotype solely to create a Russian ideal, that he has entered the lists with Gogol to see who can use the Jew more effectively in defining Russian national consciousness

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and character. Rather he needs the stereotypical Jew primarily for the literary experiment he is performing regarding execution as an inhumane practice, even in war. As Dostoevsky was later to do in Crime and Punishment, Turgenev creates an extreme situation in which “murder” (execution) seems justifiable, but in the end proves unjustifiable under any circumstance. Like Dostoevsky, he chooses a physically and morally repugnant victim to carry the burden of the experiment: if it is never justifiable to kill a pawnbroker, it is never justifiable to execute a Jew, even in wartime. For his experiment, Turgenev employs the most unsympathetic character for the culture in which he lives, a character who is alien in speech and dress, sickly and physically repulsive, dishonest, and willing to use his own daughter for profit. Girshel’s spying against the Russian army additionally calls up the Jew’s associations, however inappropriate they might be in this instance, with Judas and the idea of betrayal.12 To make the Jew even less sympathetic, Turgenev makes his Christian characters, in contrast to the ruthless heroes of Taras Bulba, compassionate and sensitive to the fate of the other, the Jew. The extent to which Turgenev goes in creating a negative portrait of the Jew becomes clearer when we look at the different ways in which Girshel and Yankel are portrayed with respect to ethnic allegiance and money. In Gogol, Yankel passes freely between the Polish and Cossack camps, and neither the Poles nor the Cossacks think anything of it. Just as the Poles ask Yankel about the Cossacks, as a completely neutral source of information, Taras asks him about the Poles. In Taras Bulba no one would think of harming him for his lack of allegiance, which for the participants seems only natural for an alien. Girshel, on the other hand, is actually spying. He knows that what he is doing is dangerous (that is why he is continually watching to see if anyone is nearby), and he hides his drawings of the Russian camp in his shoe. Girshel is presented as being even more obsessed with money than Gogol’s Yankel. Yankel helps ransom Taras’s brother and later takes Taras to visit his captured son in Warsaw. Though it is always risky to use psychological motivation in explaining the actions of Gogol’s characters, it could be said that in addition to the money that Taras gives and promises him, Yankel is, at least in part, paying back a moral debt to Taras who saved his life. Girshel, on the other hand, receives money for spying against the Russians in the Patriotic War of 1812. Furthermore, he behaves badly in his final hour. Before he is hanged, probably in desperation, he yells that he is now willing, for real, to sell his daughter to Nikolay Ilyich if he saves his life.

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Turgenev pushes the negative stereotype even further in Girshel’s execution, the event that ironically elicits compassion from all the participants, by making his death pusillanimous and ludicrous. Rather than accept his fate and die with dignity, Girshel sobs like a baby, trembles like a leaf, begs, shrieks, and writhes like an animal. He behaves worse than the Jews who hide from Gogol’s Cossacks before the Cossacks find them and throw them into the river. There is also something about his physical bearing, even in death, that strikes everyone as ridiculous. His behavior and gesticulations do not conform to the expectations of his executioners; they seem to take the rituals of execution into a discomfiting space in which the comic threatens to undermine the serious. Taras Bulba ends with the sublime death by crucifixion of the epic hero. Turgenev turns Girshel’s death into something that compels laughter from almost all who observe it, not the laughter of indifferent, ruthless Cossacks but the laughter of men who also experience horror and compassion. There is something aesthetic that gets in the way of seeing Girshel like others in his situation, something that interferes, aesthetically if not morally, with the behavior and decorum of those observing his death. Turgenev does not permit the Jew dignity even in his dying for he does not want his reader to identify with Girshel because of anything in his character or behavior. Just as Gogol did not treat the Jew more sympathetically because he was unaware of precedents to the contrary, Turgenev did not treat Girshel more sympathetically because he was unaware of precedents for presenting executions otherwise. Victor Hugo’s brief against public executions, The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Le Dernier jour d’un homme condamné, 1829), one of the most famous and influential works of the early nineteenth century and a work with which Turgenev was undoubtedly familiar, compels the reader to sympathize with the condemned man by having him tell his own story just before his execution and by presenting him as someone with whom the reader can easily identify. The condemned man is well educated with refined sensibilities, an elegant spokesman for the author. It is implied that he has been convicted for committing a crime of passion. To garner even more sympathy for his hero, Hugo has him portray the meeting he had with his little daughter right before his execution. He addresses her: “That is what will be done to your father by men, none of whom hate me, all of whom feel sorry for me and could save me. They are going to kill me. Can you understand that Marie? Kill me in cold blood, in solemn ceremony, for the edification of the public! Great God in heaven! Poor little

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girl! Your father who loved you so, your father who kissed the fair skin on your little neck, who never tired of running his hand through your silken curls, who could cup your pretty round face in his hands, who dandled you on his knee, and each evening joined your little hands in prayer!”13 Hugo’s condemned man, who has thought about the physical realities of his impending execution, responds with bitter humor to the idea that being guillotined is a “merciful release.” “How can they be sure that it’s painless? Who told them that? Since when did a decapitated head stand up on the rim of the basket and shout to the people, ‘I didn’t feel a thing?’ And did any of their victims ever come back to thank them, saying ‘It’s a fine invention. Couldn’t be bettered. It works to perfection?’” (77). Turgenev, with the knowledge of Hugo, chooses to present the execution from the point of view of one who watches it, not from the point of view of the man condemned to death, and he makes his “hero” far less sympathetic, articulate, and, of course, familiar (svoi). What is most striking in Turgenev’s presentation of Jewish death is his ability to elicit horror and compassion from the participants and the reader despite how negatively he presents Girshel. And this is especially evident with regard to Girshel’s ridiculousness. At first, at the time of the events, the narrator was dismayed because Girshel’s ridiculousness seemed to interfere with the emotions and behavior that he thought should attend the execution of a fellow human. But by now he has come to realize that laughter in the presence of death makes Girshel’s death more, not less, troubling. The ridiculousness that, at first, seemed to compromise both morally and aesthetically the horror of execution, in the end intensifies the narrator’s horror and pity, eventually compelling him to use Girshel’s story as his brief against capital punishment. Gogol’s Cossacks laugh as they indifferently watch the Jews dying because the Jews die ridiculously. Turgenev’s narrator and fellow soldiers laugh despite the horror they experience. Their laughter makes them uncomfortable because it singles out Girshel’s death from all the others, it foregrounds it, makes it strange (ostraniaet ee), it removes it from the death that is commonplace in war, from the death that the soldiers see every day. Girshel’s death occurs during a lull in the action, it is set apart, it is a different kind of death.14 If we examine the execution scene in its contemporary Russian literary context, we can see just how strongly Turgenev foregrounds the pity and horror evoked by Girshel’s death. Turgenev incorporates into “The Jew,” far more closely than Gogol does into Taras Bulba (discussed in Chapter 2), the

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execution scene in Faddey Bulgarin’s Mazepa, in which a Jew, just as ­Girshel does, pleads for his life, citing his wife and children. Paley, the head of the Cossacks, here a sort of counterpart to Turgenev’s German general, ­orders the Jew to be executed by drowning. Like Turgenev’s general, Paley further interrogates the Jew but does not rescind his order. A young follower of Paley, Moskalenko, attempts to intercede for the Jew: “Pardon this unfortunate man, have mercy on the father of a family (Prosti etogo ­neschastnogo, ­pomiluite ottsa semeistva).”15 In Turgenev’s story, Nikolay Ilyich, also a young officer under the general’s command, uses exactly the same words as Moskalenko: “Prosti etogo neschastnogo.” And right before he is hanged, Girshel repeats almost verbatim Moskalenko’s words: “Pomiluite neschastnogo ottsa semeistva” (131). (The literary citation is unmistakable.) In both works the intercessions are to no avail and both younger officers are reprimanded. But in Mazepa, Paley shows no sympathy at all for the Jew, and he hardly pays attention to the execution. Those who carry out the execution feel neither pity nor horror; they laugh at the Jew sinking to the river bottom not because he is ludicrous—he is not—but because they simply take pleasure in killing him. Turgenev’s soldiers laugh against their will. The general must steel himself against the compassion he feels for Girshel and he orders his widow compensated. Turgenev is probably responding not only to Gogol and Bulgarin but also to a large body of literature, largely forgotten, and perhaps deservedly so, in which the murder of a Jew is at best a laughing matter. In “The Jew” Turgenev turns the laughter into existential horror.

t h e c r e at i o n o f s y m pat h y: j ew i s h wo m e n The creation of sympathy for Girshel presents Turgenev with an aesthetic dilemma. He needs for his experiment an unsympathetic character, someone whom we pity primarily because of his situation: his impending execution. But if this pity is to be effective it cannot arise only from his situation—otherwise Girshel would turn into an abstraction, a literary device. ­Girshel’s fate must be somewhat personalized. Turgenev must have Girshel elicit from the participants, and readers, a degree of pity or sympathy as a person, but not because of his own actions or character. He personalizes Girshel by providing him with a real family, a wife and a daughter: a life outside the stereotype. In most European literature, by contrast, the Jewish male is presented as an isolated figure detached from

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familial and ethnic contexts. Girshel’s wife is the Jewess victimized by the marauding soldiers under Nikolay Ilyich’s command.16 Girshel’s daughter attempts to save her father’s life. When she learns about his imminent execution, she runs for help to Nikolay Ilyich. Beside herself with anxiety (na nei litsa ne bylo) (129) and wringing her hands, she rushes with him to the general to persuade him to stop the execution. Nikolay Ilyich then depicts Sarah’s despair on realizing that nothing more can be done to prevent her father’s hanging. The unfortunate girl (neschastnaia) was hardly conscious. Girshel was muttering something in her ear in Yiddish. . . . The soldiers with difficulty freed Sarah from her father’s embrace and gently led her about twenty steps away. But suddenly she ripped herself out of their arms and rushed to Girshel. Siliavka stopped her. Sarah pushed him away; her face was covered with a light blush, her eyes began to flash, she held out her arms. “May you be cursed,” she began screaming in German, “cursed, thrice cursed, you and your whole detestable kind, with the curse of Dathan and Abiram, with the curse of poverty, barrenness, and a violent, shameful death! May the earth open up under your feet, you godless, merciless, bloodsucking dogs.” (131)

Girshel is not alone, he has a daughter who is passionately devoted to him and would do anything to save his life. The soldiers can hardly restrain her. She desists only because she faints when she realizes her father is about to be hanged. The story does not present a formulaic wife and daughter, something the stereotypical Jew, as in Bulgarin’s Mazepa, invariably includes in his plea for mercy. This is not the collective and impersonal death of Gogol’s ridiculous Jews drowning in the river. Sarah is not a faceless Jewish daughter who enters the story at the end; she is Nikolay Ilyich’s love interest from the very beginning and thus one of the story’s main actors. Earlier the narrator came to the aid of a Jewish woman at Sarah’s request, and now at her request he tries to intercede for Girshel. It is her mental turmoil, as much as anything else, that brings home to those who are watching and performing the execution the human tragedy that is unfolding before them. The executioners not only have to kill Girshel, they must carry out the execution in front of his terrorized daughter, who holds them responsible for her father’s death. The soldiers must be somewhat relieved when she faints before the execution. In The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Hugo uses the wife and daughter in a similar way. However, in Hugo’s work the daughter

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is a three-year-old who hardly recognizes her father when she visits him in prison. Turgenev dramatizes the relationship between father and daughter by having Sarah actively participate in the story and experience a horror similar to her father’s. But Turgenev also steers away from any idealization of Sarah. A more virtuous Sarah would work against his plan just as a less reprehensible Girshel; she would elicit too much personal sympathy for Girshel when Turgenev wants to emphasize Girshel’s situation. Given this ambiguous Sarah, Turgenev must work against the most famous prototypes of the young Jewish female, Shakespeare’s beautiful Jessica, who abandons her father and converts to Christianity,17 and Scott’s virtuous Rebecca, who defends her father and remains true to her faith. Thus Turgenev cannot use a Jessica or an Abigail (from Marlowe) because they turn against their fathers, and he cannot use a Rebecca, who, though a defender of her father, is too perfect for the role of the Jewish daughter in this story. Turgenev forges a new amalgam. Like Rebecca, Sarah defends her father and her community (her request for intercession during the marauding), but she is not virtuous. Nikolay Ilyich presents Sarah as her father’s accomplice. When he gives Girshel some gold coins, Sarah asks for some for herself; when he drops several coins in her lap, she pounces on them as nimbly as a cat (kak koshka) (119). When later she escapes Nikolay Ilyich’s embrace, he likens her bending down and slithering away to the motions of a snake (kak zmeia) (120). Later, after he finds out that Sarah is Girshel’s daughter and after Girshel confesses that he was after the narrator’s money, Nikolay Ilyich grows silent, telling his audience that he was disgusted at that moment not only by Girshel but also by his accomplice (soobshchitsa) (130). Right before her father is to be hanged, Sarah becomes completely distraught; she loses all restraint, lashing out at and cursing the soldiers, calling them vile, merciless, pitiless, bloodthirsty dogs. Her spirited wildcat nature brings her into salient relief with her father’s funk and his “strange, grotesque gesticulations, cries, and skips.” But her passionate outburst, directed at the soldiers, who are also deeply affected by Girshel’s impending death, is not presented in the best light.18 Though her behavior here is completely understandable,19 it reveals at the same time the other Sarah, the Sarah who worked as her father’s accomplice, whom the narrator likened to a cat and a snake. We are not meant to feel sympathy for Girshel because of this daughter—Sarah is not a Rebecca—but because he is not an isolated Jew, because he has a family, because he has a real daughter who, however portrayed, loves and defends him passionately.

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turgenev, the little man, and the zhid (kike) It is surprising to find a character like Girshel in a writer with realist inclinations like Turgenev. But Girshel’s characterization is not only a gross example of the Jewish stereotype, it is in many ways extreme for its own time, especially when viewed against the depiction of “the little man” (people of the lower classes) in Russian literature. As we have seen, Gogol’s little man in “The Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich, like Turgenev’s Girshel, is also laughed at. But even more, he is subjected to the depreciating humor of the author himself, who focuses on Akaky’s comic physical features, mechanical work habits, limited mental abilities, and dysfunctional speech. “The Overcoat,” however, also contains an interpolated, “humanitarian” episode dealing with Akaky’s reaction to his mistreatment and how that reaction compels a young man not only to see Akaky differently, with compassion rather than with derision, but to reevaluate the people and world around him.20 I suggest that in “The Jew” Turgenev attempts to rework “The Overcoat,” taking the idea developed in the “humanitarian” episode to an extreme conclusion. Instead of a poor Russian clerk, an Orthodox Christian (several pages are devoted to Akaky’s Christian naming), Turgenev transfers the action from Russia to Danzig and uses a non-Russian Jew, who, in appearance alone, is far more alien and ridiculous than Akaky Akakievich could ever have been.21 Yes, Akaky dies of a broken heart over a material object, an overcoat, but he is not continually likened to an animal, he does not gesticulate wildly, he does not engage in shady business practices, he is not obsessed with money, he is not a spy. In “The Overcoat,” as I have suggested, the story of the spiritual awakening of a fellow office worker may be a veiled reference to the narrator’s own moral dilemma in his relationship to his hero, but this aspect of the text is neither foregrounded nor actively pursued. After the famous “humanitarian episode” Gogol returns to his former mock-ironic mode of portraying his hero. By contrast, in “The Jew,” Turgenev places a sharp focus on the narrator throughout, the man who attempted to save “the little man” from execution and later changed as a result of his actions. As he tells the story, as we have seen, the narrator seems no less distraught than he was thirty years ago. “The Jew” does not attempt to elicit sympathy for someone who is innocent but for someone who is physically and morally repulsive to the narrator, for someone who represents the narrator’s antithesis in almost every way. It tests the possibilities of compassion and identification under the most unpropi-

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tious circumstances, the capacity of all the participants and readers—both inside (those listening to Nikolay Ilyich) and outside the story—to recognize in the Jew, a zhid, their common humanity and to experience horror and pity at the execution of another human being, however alien (chuzhoi ). The pejorative, zhid, emphasizes the most extreme form of otherness. The purposeful use of the expression zhid (and all its connotations) is evident not only in the title but also in the way the word is employed throughout the story itself. As I indicated earlier, Russian writers of the 1820s and 1830s knew that the official word for Jew is evrei and that contemporary Russian-speaking Jews would never refer to themselves as zhidy. Nikolay Ilyich, Turgenev’s narrator, clearly knows that as well. The German general who speaks broken but official Russian therefore refers to Girshel only as evrei, as does Girshel when speaking about his religion or nationality. In pleading his case with the general, Girshel says: “Let me go, I am a poor Jew (Pustite menia, ia bednyi evrei )” (133). The soldiers refer to Girshel as zhid. Nikolay Ilyich knows that this is how the soldiers, many of them from the South of Russia, normally refer to Jews and he may be simply recording their speech. When speaking in his own person, however, Nikolay Ilyich never uses the word evrei when referring to Girshel, only calling him “Girshel” and zhid. This is all quite conscious on his part. After having introduced Girshel as a Jew (zhid ), Turgenev could easily have had his narrator thereafter refer to him as Girshel, especially when the story takes a more serious turn, but he continues to alternate Girshel and zhid. In his last three personal references to Girshel, however, only zhid is used, including the reference describing the execution: “They placed the noose over the Jew’s neck (Na zhida nadeli petliu)” (132). By contrast, he never uses the word “Jewess” for Sarah. For the narrator, Girshel is not just any man facing death but a Jew (zhid ). In the Russian literary context, Turgenev needed a degraded version of Akaky Akakievich, not another Yankel. Perhaps no Russian author before had asked his reader to feel pity for a character so low, suggesting, one has to assume, that if one can find compassion for and express horror over a zhid under the sentence of death for spying, there is no one for whom execution should be justifiable. But could Turgenev paradoxically be contesting or challenging the stereotype, as Shakespeare may have (intentionally or not) in The Merchant of Venice, while openly exploiting it for his literary and ideological experiment? Is Turgenev calling attention to this double purpose by employing the word zhid in the title?22 Yet if “The Jew” is an attempt by Turgenev in some

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way to challenge the Jewish stereotype, it differs significantly from the approaches that most European writers had taken before him. The least radical of these approaches is exemplified by Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, in which the Jewish stereotype remains intact but is applied to non-Jews as well as Jews: that is, it does not enhance the image of Jews but rather diminishes the image of Christians by comparing them to Jews. Like The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice challenges the stereotype not by portraying a good or even a morally unexceptional Jew but by personalizing him—and not demonizing him as Marlowe does Barabas—by showing the understandable motivation of Shylock’s vengeful feelings.23 If Antonio can humiliate Shylock in public, harm his business, and participate in the abduction of his daughter, should Shylock not seek revenge as would any Christian? In Ivanhoe, Scott challenges the image of the Jewish male (his female is still a variation of an older type), not by idealizing him but by extenuating Isaac of York’s obsession with money and presenting him as a basically good man and a self-sacrificing father. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were also attempts to rehabilitate the image of the Jew by showing that Jews could be as good as Christians, following the well-established formula that when Christians behave badly they resemble Jews, and when Jews behave well they resemble Christians. Turgenev takes a very different path. Like Shakespeare, he uses the Jew to set in relief the virtue of his Christian hero. But he does not use Girshel seriously to question the virtue of the hero at the same time, as Shakespeare does with Shylock in relation to Antonio, who has always hated Shylock more than Shylock hated him and who in the end achieves the greater revenge, forcing Shylock to convert, to finance the daughter who betrayed him, and to become like Antonio a merchant of Venice. Turgenev does not show Girshel as being similar, even in a negative sense, to other Christians. Furthermore, he provides no motivation for Girshel’s actions other than lust for gold.24 Thus, Girshel does not garner our sympathy because of any redeeming virtues nor our understanding because of unexemplary behavior similar to that of Christians. Turgenev’s accomplishment in the story is to show that Girshel, despite conforming to most of the negative aspects of the Jewish stereotype, is still a human being and if capital punishment is unjustifiable in his case it is unjustifiable in all others. Girshel cannot be made an exception just because of who he is. Death trumps everything in the story, even when the Jew involuntarily evokes smiles and laughter. The Jew’s ridiculousness before death, because of

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its terrible incommensurability with the event, foregrounds the horror of execution. It is what makes the narrator never forget what happened on that day. Despite who he is, and what impression he makes, however ridiculous he may appear, the Jew is presented problematically and existentially. His life, defined by death, is like everyone’s else’s life. Nikolay Ilyich, a hero of the Patriotic War of 1812, remembers the death of Girshel, that poor fellow (­bedniak), as perhaps the most significant event in his military service, one necessary to relate to the next generation. If, as Erich Auerbach has argued, the serious portrayal of members of the lowest classes is the revolutionary signature of nineteenthcentury realist fiction, then the problematic representation of the Jew as zhid might be seen as the most daring part of Turgenev’s literary experiment and the most serious challenge to the stereotype itself. The Jew is an everyman. Because he is an everyman, the title, “The Jew,” which distinguishes Yankel from all the actors in the story, must be a misnomer. Through the portrayal of Jewish death, the story subverts its own title, foregrounding the universal as it undercuts the importance of ethnic particularity. Gogol’s Cossacks can throw the Jews into the river and laugh, because they are zhidy. Turgenev’s narrator can never forget the death of the Jew because he was no less a human being than any other. He was not just a zhid. He was chuzhoi (alien) , but ultimately, in what was most important, he was svoi, one of us. For Russian literature, the true challenge to the image of the Jew in death that Turgenev exploits in “The Jew” would have to wait until the twentieth century, when Isaac Babel reworked Turgenev’s tale in the first story of his collection Red Cavalry, “Crossing the Zbrucz,” which features a daughter’s relationship to her murdered father. In Babel’s story, which takes place during the Russian-Polish War of 1920, the narrator, a political officer with a division of Red Cossacks, poses as a non-Jew, but his experience in the hut of a pregnant Jewish woman, in the presence of a Jewish father’s death, transforms his idea of the Jew (zhid) and challenges his assumptions about his own Jewishness, a matter that I will address in more detail in the concluding chapter.

j ew i s h d e at h a n d t h e execution of troppmann In 1870, twenty-four years after the appearance of “The Jew” (and forty-one years after the publication of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man), Turgenev published a moving brief against the death penalty, entitled

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“The Execution of Troppmann” (“Kazn’ Tropmana”), based on his experience as a witness to the execution of Jean Baptiste Troppmann, convicted of slitting the throats of an entire family, including a father, a pregnant mother, and six children, from the ages of two to seventeen. Troppmann confessed to being part of the murder plot but maintained to the end that the actual murders were committed by his accomplices, whom he refused to name. Turgenev was able to report on the crowd that had gathered to watch the execution but also, being a special guest, he observed the prisoner at close quarters, where the final preparations were made for the guillotine. The character of the criminals and the circumstances of their execution in “The Jew” and “The Execution of Troppmann” differ significantly, but the works contain striking similarities, especially with regard to their narrators (Nikolay Ilyich and Turgenev) that bear on the interpretation of “The Jew” and the story’s use of the Jewish stereotype. “The Execution” focuses less on Troppmann than on Turgenev himself, much as “The Jew” focuses on its narrator, Nikolay Ilyich. Using himself as a prime example, Turgenev presents the deleterious effects of capital punishment, especially public execution, on all those who witness it. The execution of even a moral monster like Troppmann tends to elicit sympathy for the criminal from eyewitnesses, who begin to see themselves as executioners and the criminal as a victim (zhertva),25 even an unfortunate (neschastnyi) (180). “Everyone in his mind tried to turn away from what happened and to rid themselves of the responsibility of murder” (185). Those witnessing Troppmann’s last rites seemed more agitated than the condemned man; they looked as though they were about to be executed and not Troppmann.26 Turgenev does not focus on himself to elicit sympathy from the reader; he wants to put the reader in his position, a participant in a grisly uncivilized spectacle, and thus, to some degree, responsible for murder. 27 But there is a problem. Troppmann is not the right criminal for Turgenev’s agenda. It is not that he thinks that Troppmann is innocent or not responsible by reason of insanity, although many thought the crime was so terrible that the murderer could only be insane; Turgenev concedes that Troppmann committed a horrific crime and calls him a moral monster (nravstevennoe chudovishche and izverg)(and a callous murderer (­bezzhalostnyi ubiitsa) (180). He slit the throats of six children while they were crying for their mother. But Troppmann does not look the part of a monster. Were it not for his bad teeth and his peculiar way of holding his head, like a crow, Troppmann, Turgenev writes, could easily be called handsome (krasivyi ). If

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you met him not in prison but in a different environment he would have made a favorable impression on you. He was slender, well-built, and had a healthy, rosy complexion. Sometimes he looked like a child (183). He in fact resembled many other young factory workers that one might meet on the street at any time. In appearance, he is the antithesis of the alien Jew, Girshel, who stands out physically in every way. But even more unsettling for Turgenev than Troppmann’s rather ordinary, undistinguishable appearance is his behavior before death. Troppmann faces death bravely, in fact, too bravely. Some of the prison authorities maintain that Troppmann will fall to pieces, as do most other prisoners in the last half-hour before execution (to lessen suffering, the prisoner is executed within a half-hour of waking in the morning), but Troppmann’s demeanor does not conform to expectation. He does not go numb, does not put on airs, and does not cry and beg for mercy as does Girshel (179). On the eve of his execution, he even sleeps well and needs to be woken up. He helps the attendants who remove his clothes and prepare him for his final hour. He is polite with everyone, from the priest to the prison officials. The head of the security police asks him whether he still maintains that he had accomplices. “’Yes, Sir, I continue (Oui, monsieur, je persiste),’ Troppmann answered in the same pleasant and firm baritone, bending forward slightly as though politely begging pardon, even regretting that he could not answer otherwise” (183). He is much less rattled by the proceedings than Turgenev and his party. “We were all unquestionably more pale and disturbed than he was (My vse byli, bez somneniia, i blednei i vstrevozhenei ego)” (179). When Troppmann walks out of the prison on his way to the guillotine, he momentarily falters but immediately rights himself and walks firmly forward. The only act that shows Troppmann’s emotional state, which Turgenev did not observe himself, was his biting the finger of the attendant who tried to place his head more securely in the execution collar. Perhaps it was only a reflex action. Again in the execution scene, Troppmann is clearly the complete antithesis of Girshel. The Troppmann article illuminates much about Turgenev’s artistic and moral ends in “The Jew.” In the Troppmann piece Turgenev had to deal with Troppmann as he was in real life; in “The Jew” he could create “the criminal” he needed for his story. Girshel is not someone who slits the throats of young children. His is not a public execution, but a hanging carried out according to military regulations. None of the men want to hang Girshel but they must. Troppmann is not the kind of criminal Turgenev needs for his

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article because, in contrast to Girshel, he cannot elicit, even among those present with him right before death, the requisite horror, compassion, and identification. Turgenev would have liked Troppmann to break down, as Girshel broke down, begging for mercy. But he did not. Turgenev could not feel any pity for this man, only amazement. But in the presence of this calm, of this simpleness and almost modesty, all my feelings—the feeling of revulsion toward a callous murderer, a monster, who had cut the throats of children while they were screaming: mama, mama; and the feeling of pity for a man whose life was about to be snuffed out—disappeared and were lost in one thing: the feeling of amazement. (179–80)

The public execution of Troppmann therefore is not only a crime in its own right, it cannot serve as a viable deterrent since it elicits only astonishment (izumlenie). “What, in the end, did I come away with? The feeling of involuntary (nevol’noe) astonishment before a murderer, a moral monster (urod ) capable of showing contempt for death” (185). The narrator is deprived of all the appropriate emotions. He would have liked to have experienced the involuntary horror and the compassion that the soldiers felt watching Girshel’s death, but he could not. Nikolay Ilyich and his fellow soldiers could feel pity because Girshel, though comic, repellent, and more alien than Troppmann, broke down and begged for mercy. Nikolay Ilyich does not watch Girshel’s hanging. Overcome by horror and pity, he closes his eyes and runs away. Turgenev does not so much watch Troppmann’s execution as listen to it, reporting its sounds. The story that he will have to tell, however, is different from the story he has Nikolay Ilyich tell in “The Jew.” Turgenev may have arrived at the prison thinking that the situation was similar to the one he created in “The Jew”: Troppmann was going to be another extreme case from which one could conclude that the execution of any man, however terrible his crime, was unjustifiable. But Troppmann disappoints aesthetically and morally, not because he is a moral monster but because he faces death so coolly, calmly, and courageously. Girshel, so different in every way from those who witness his execution, conforms to Turgenev’s goals precisely because his behavior is recognizably human and can elicit sympathy and identification. So at the end of the Troppmann piece, Turgenev wonders not only whether the execution was justified but also whether the article that he is writing about the execution can achieve its aim: to turn society against capital punishment.28 Compared

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to Troppmann, the stereotypical Girshel is an ordinary condemned man (­obyknovennyi ­osuzhdennyi) (182), because faced with execution, he acts the way many men act have acted before him and will act after him, and thus his death arouses sympathy and horror. Turgenev’s emphasis on Troppmann’s failure to elicit pity and fear (horror) suggests that we might do well to understand “The Jew” in terms of Aristotle’s tragic emotions, despite his view that a bad man cannot be the proper subject of tragic representation. The story of an extremely bad man falling from good fortune to misfortune, Aristotle says, “arouses human feeling in us but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by someone like ourselves.”29 The only figure suitable for tragedy is an intermediate sort who is not preeminently virtuous or just but passes from good fortune to misfortune not as a result of vice or depravity but from a mistake in judgment. In “The Jew” it would seem that Turgenev is going against Aristotle’s prescriptions for characters that will arouse the emotions of pity and fear. Turgenev does not depict in Girshel an archvillain, but he does choose a bad man: a man who is physically repulsive, obsessed with money, and caught spying against the Russian forces in the Great Patriotic War of 1812. It is even harder to take him seriously—tragically—because he is presented as being ridiculous. Turgenev also does not choose “someone who is like us,” in fact, he chooses someone who everyone regards as different, even alien (chuzhoi). Then how can this Jew (zhid), a bad but ordinary man, a man not really like us in so many ways, a type of character considered for over two thousand years unworthy of existential representation, someone lower even than Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, elicit pity and fear in those who witness his execution, in those to whom the story is told—and, perhaps most importantly—in us, Turgenev’s readers? For it is clear that Nikolay Ilyich’s reason for telling the story is to infect his listeners with the same emotions that he felt during the events (compassion and horror). It is also clear that the frame narrator intends to perform the same function for the reader. But few of those in the original audience of the story or Turgenev’s readers could have been expected to feel pity for or horror over a bad person passing from happiness to misery, especially a Jew. An exceptionally dramatic action was essential to overcome this barrier: a hanging. If one looks at the story as a literary experiment, rather than a brief against summary execution, the execution becomes the artistic device (priem) by which the author elicits fear and pity from his characters and readers. Any man can

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be tragic, can arouse pity and fear in his audience, if the situation is grave enough. Turgenev uses the plot-device of execution, which, in the cultural environment of the author’s time, could make even a bad man elicit the tragic emotions, pace Aristotle. This artistic device makes the bad person’s situation appear to be an undeserved misfortune and makes him seem more personable, someone like ourselves. Moreover, by eliciting pity and fear for the Jew, by turning the other into someone who in the end is like us, the story may undermine the assumptions of the stereotype at the same time as it exploits it. The subversion of the Jewish stereotype paradoxically arises from its exploitation; it is preserved only to be destroyed—perhaps even unintentionally.30 Girshel turned out to be far more capable of eliciting horror and compassion than Troppmann. Troppmann could not play the part because of a discordance between his crime and his appearance, between his imminent execution and his calm behavior. Turgenev needed consonance for working out his idea in “The Jew,” a consonance of the physical and moral, and that is what the stereotype provided him. In the context of the time in which he is writing, he can get by with stereotyping because he knows that his audience, just like Shakespeare’s, will not question the stereotype. This type of unambiguous portraiture, in which outer and inner coincide, is uncharacteristic of much of Turgenev’s writing after “The Jew,” but it works well in “The Jew” because of the intricately constructed narrative framework and the nuanced characterization of Nikolay Ilyich, through whose conscience and consciousness the stereotype is exploited and then subverted.31 Turgenev presents more sympathetically the few Jews in his work after 1847. Some attribute this change to the many years that Turgenev spent abroad after 1861 in Germany and France, where he came in contact with Jews who were assimilating into Western culture.32 In “The Unfortunate” (Neschastnaia), published in 1869, Turgenev again resorts to characterization through consonance, but this time to present a much more sympathetic portrait of a young Jewish girl. Combining physical and spiritual beauty, Susanna is, in some respects, a rehabilitated Sarah from “The Jew.” The illegitimate daughter of a Russian nobleman and his Jewish mistress, Susanna comes, on her mother’s side, from a completely acculturated family: her maternal grandfather was an artist. She is admired by all the noblemen who are acquainted with her, including the narrator, who, highly critical of the Russian nobleman who adored her but failed to protect her, presents her fate both sentimentally and tragically (problematically).33

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In 1872 Turgenev published a short story called “The End of Chertopkhanov” (“Konets Chertopkhanova”)—later included in editions of Notes of a Huntsman—which contains a Jewish character who in contrast to Turgenev’s other Jewish characters is constructed on the nonconsonance of the physical and moral. The protagonist, Chertopkhanov, saves the life of the Jew (zhid ), who is being beaten severely by a crowd of angry peasants: a common topos of early-nineteenth-century literature that includes Jews. Physically at least, the Jew resembles both Yankel and Girshel. In gratitude the Jew sells at a very low price a horse that becomes the love of Chertopkhanov’s life. When Chertopkhanov dies, aside from one of his servants, the Jew is the only one at the funeral to pay his “last respects to his benefactor (otdat’ poslednii dolg svoemu blagodeteliu)” (414).34 The grateful Jew is probably a literary topos (Lazhechnikov uses it in Bursma), but here the Jew is presented as the only one who cherished the memory of the hero and remained loyal to him.35 By the late 1860s, for whatever reason, Turgenev was able to depict Jews (on the few occasions he did so) by either ignoring the stereotype completely, as in “The Unfortunate,” or using it in a way that undercut its customary consonance of the physical and moral.

v i o l e n t j ew i s h d e at h : g o g o l , turgenev, and historiography Before turning to the portrayal of the ridiculous Jew in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, I would like to place in a wider cultural perspective Gogol’s and Turgenev’s representations of violent Jewish death and its association with literary ridiculousness. It is Gogol that must be considered as an anomaly here. Death that is portrayed as comic or ridiculous is unusual both in literature and popular culture. Most studies that examine death and dying in Western culture—including those devoted to the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the modern period—deal primarily with natural not violent death, which is invariably treated with existential seriousness.36 Grotesque portrayals of writhing sinners and tormenting devils occur often enough in medieval paintings and sculpture: however, they are meant as a warning to the faithful, “agents of terror” in Sourvinou-Inwood’s formulation, not as entertainment.37 In epic, to be sure, violent death in battle is celebrated; however, the innocent victims of war—women, the old, and children—are treated with compassion. Imitating the epic ethos, in

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Taras Bulba Gogol presents death in battle as glorious, and the victims of the Cossack siege of Kovno and Taras Bulba’s last military rampage are portrayed sympathetically. Even when demonized enemies (like the Poles and Tatars in Taras Bulba) are denied sympathy, they are not treated comically. Victors may mock their enemies but as a form of contempt, not comic entertainment. The comedy of violent death in our own culture is largely confined to spoofs of gangster or cowboy movies. For Gogol, since Jews are comic in everything they do, they must be ridiculous in death as well. This is Gogol’s idiosyncratic treatment of Jewish death; it is not in accord with the models of Jewish representation with which he himself was acquainted. In Scott, violence against Jews is presented as serious and problematic: the most important sections of Ivanhoe concern the violence planned against a Jewish girl (Rebecca) and Ivanhoe’s attempt to rescue her. There was no widespread violence in Russia against Jews at the time that Gogol was writing.38 The pogrom on which Gogol bases the drowning scene took place in the eighteenth century.39 The pogroms that broke out in the Pale of Settlement after 1881, many years after Gogol’s death, elicited various responses in the contemporary press and in imaginative literature, but I do not know of any portrayals of violent Jewish death as being ridiculous. In the hundreds of popular stories and anecdotes that Belova has collected of Slavic stereotypes having to do with Jews, few, if any, present violent Jewish death comically.40 In contrast to Gogol, Turgenev in “The Jew,” just as in his essay on the death of Troppmann, is in accord with a good deal of educated or middleand upper-class sentiment dating from the middle of the eighteenth century regarding execution. Corporal and capital punishment were common in Europe from the twelfth century onward. But beginning in the seventeenth century, a gradual repugnance first toward various forms of corporal punishment and then toward capital punishment, probably consonant with Enlightenment thinking, can be observed among the educated classes.41 At various times in different countries, laws were enacted first banning mutilation, then corporal punishment of any kind, then public punishment, and finally capital punishment.42 Public execution lasted until 1939 in France; capital punishment, at least legally, until 1965 in Britain; and it is still legal and practiced in several states in the United States. With regard to corporal and capital punishment, Russia is an anomaly. Whereas public executions were still common in nineteenth-century England and France,43 Russia had effectively abolished capital punishment under the Empress Elizabeth in the

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1740s before any other major European state.44 On the other hand, it maintained corporal punishment well into the nineteenth century when most of Western Europe had come to see it as barbaric. Russia’s continued use of corporal punishment was viewed by Europeans as a sign of her uncivilized nature.45 The lower classes, those most likely to undergo punishment both corporal and capital, seemed more accepting of, or at least less squeamish about, the practice of punishment, and many enjoyed attending public executions.46 Public executions (both corporal and capital), which were meant to impress on the public the power of the state, often occurred on justice days, holidays, as it were, when the public could attend and gain lessons from the punishments about miscreant behavior. Those among the middle and upper classes who had come to perceive corporal and capital punishment as barbaric were also disturbed by the attraction of executions among the lower classes. There are, for example, reported instances of spectators laughing at and making jokes at the expressions and screams of the victims. Spierenburg cites Restif-de-la-Brentonne’s observations at an execution (in Les Nuits de Paris, 1788), in which he expresses his outrage at the behavior of several spectators while they witnessed a prisoner being broken at the wheel. While the victims suffered, I studied the spectators. They chattered and laughed as if they were watching a farce. But what revolted me most was a very pretty young girl I saw with what appeared to be a lover. She uttered peals of laughter, she jested about the miserable man’s expressions and screams.47

Placing “The Jew” in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes toward capital punishment throws additional light on Turgenev’s polemical relationship with Gogol on the subject of Jewish death. On one hand, Turgenev appropriates the portrayal of ridiculous Jewish death in Gogol for his own polemical and aesthetic ends, effectively turning the Gogolian image on its head in an attempt to show that capital punishment is unjustifiable in all situations, irrespective of who the victim might be. On the other, he is also able through the Gogolian image to argue against public punishment as an effective means of promoting respect among the lower classes for the law (authority) as well as to counter the idea that the lower classes view public punishment as entertainment, even as something at which one may laugh. In “The Jew,” the execution of Girshel does not fill the common soldiers under Nikolay Ilyich’s command with respect for

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authority, nor does it appear to them amusing in any way. It may appear to a casual observer, as it first seemed to Nikolay Ilyich, that the common soldiers were laughing at Girshel. But when Nikolay Ilyich looked at Girshel he realized that the soldiers were laughing involuntarily and in fact were horrified by what was occurring no less than he. But there is still another level of horror that Turgenev injects into the story, an intertextual one. It is the horror that the author himself experiences as he confronts the image in Gogol’s work, the fear of the cultural damage that the image might do given Gogol’s importance in Russian culture. The image of ridiculous Jewish death must be directly resisted and discredited. Turgenev was prescient in this regard. Turgenev’s image of the ridiculous Jew was fated not to erase Gogol’s. In fact, whereas “The Jew” played an insignificant role in Turgenev’s literary biography, Gogol’s image of Jewish death in Taras Bulba embedded itself in the Russian cultural consciousness, not only among non-Jews but among some of the most prominent Jewish writers as well. We should nevertheless not lose sight of what Turgenev accomplished in “The Jew”—however difficult or inappropriate it may be to speak of “accomplishment” in the face of such a negative Jewish stereotype. Turgenev wrote a brilliant story, ingeniously exploiting different narrators and different temporal perspectives. Artistically, he made a more convincing case against capital punishment, under any circumstances, than Hugo did in his The Last Day of a Condemned Man, perhaps the most famous piece on this issue by a major writer in the nineteenth century. Additionally he made an important, though unacknowledged, contribution to Russian fiction, and perhaps to nineteenth-century fiction in general, by eliciting compassion for a character who his contemporaries probably saw as alien in almost every way: in religion, speech, dress, movement, physical appearance, and profession. Moreover, the Jew elicits compassion from all the characters of the story, whatever their origins: Nikolay Ilyich, the common soldiers, and the German general. The narrator tells the story to infect his audience with the same compassion that he and the other participants felt during the execution—and which Turgenev himself did not feel during the execution of Troppmann. Turgenev tells “The Jew” to infect his audience with that same compassion. He also makes violent Jewish death, a topos of historical Russian fiction, by contrast with Gogol’s drowning Jews, a serious existential event, not a comic episode. Yet Turgenev’s exploitation of the Jewish stereotype in the story is disturbing, for “The Jew” presents us with a problem similar to the one we face when reading The Merchant of Venice: How do we respond to a work that,

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in terms of art, successfully employs an anti-Jewish or antisemitic stereo­ type? If Shakespeare undercuts the stereotype in any way—especially for his time—it is to make the Jew a human being, like other human beings, albeit in his negative passions. By showing the Christian Antonio in the end to rival or even outdo Shylock in his desire for revenge, Shakespeare is not so much raising the Jew as diminishing the Christian. Although Antonio forces Shylock to convert to Christianity—and thus to become like him a merchant of Venice—Shylock remains a Jew in everything but the inability to charge interest. The Jewish villain is foiled and humiliated, but to the dismay of some of the characters he is spared execution. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock provides a measure for assessing what Turgenev does with the Jewish stereotype. Turgenev exploits a much more lowly Jewish type than Shakespeare. Girshel has none of the larger passions of Shylock, to whom in the end money means far less than revenge. Girshel’s money-dealing is sleazy. The risks he entertains in employing his daughter to extract money from Nikolay Ilyich are portrayed as reprehensible: something to which Shylock would never have stooped. Turgenev also takes advantage of the descriptive possibilities of narrative to underscore the physically unattractive and alien nature of his Jew. However, despite the lowliness of the Jew, Turgenev is able to bring out Girshel’s common humanity. His impending execution elicits compassion from all the participants. No one in The Merchant of Venice feels compassion for the “grander” Shylock, even when it seems that he, too, like Girshel, is about to be executed. And yet still one may with justification be uncomfortable with Turgenev’s method in “The Jew.” Even while attempting to bring out the Jew’s humanity—the universal—Turgenev continues to exploit the most negative aspects of the Jewish stereotype. The story then both perpetrates the stereotype and challenges the stereotype simultaneously. In all that is accidental to time, place, and circumstance, Girshel remains a stereotypical Jew, and Turgenev seems comfortable utilizing and not contesting the Russian version of the stereotype. The stereotype, however, does not contain or explain Girshel, for he is also a man with a family—and in contrast to Shylock, with a daughter who is passionately devoted to him. And existentially, his death is like that of any other man’s. It is for this man, this other Girshel, that the characters in the story feel compassion; it is also this other Girshel for whom the stereotype and thus the title of the story, “The Jew,” are most inapplicable and contestable. No more than Shakespeare, Turgenev probably

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did not set out either to perpetrate or challenge an ethnic stereotype, but the disturbing truth is that his story does both at the same time. But Dostoevsky did not follow the same path as Turgenev, as his views became increasingly conservative and anti-Jewish; early in his career, like Turgenev, he took his Jew out of Gogol’s Taras Bulba. According to the narrator, Isay Fomich Bumshtein—the sole Jew in the prison in Notes from the House of the Dead—was the spitting image of Gogol’s Yankel. We have seen Turgenev appropriate the stereotype of the ridiculous Jew and develop it in his own way. Dostoevsky does the same, transforming the stereotype into something that has elicited anger, dismay, and confusion for over a hundred years in many of the novelist’s most fervent admirers.

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5

Notes from the House of the Dead Ridiculous Jew, Existential Christian, Hagiographic Muslim, and the Intentional Text

In contrast to Gogol and Turgenev, Dostoevsky did not completely imagine his most detailed portrait of a Jew; it is based on a real-life prototype (Isay Bumshtel) from the prison camp in which he spent four years from 1850 through 1854.1 Nevertheless, the literary embodiment of this Jewish prisoner in his semiautobiographical novel, Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–1862), essentially conforms to the Jewish stereotype that we have seen employed by both Gogol and Turgenev. Like Gogol and Turgenev, Dostoevsky also exploits the stereotype in his own way, consonant with his artistic and ideological ends. What is most interesting about the Jewish stereotype is not, of course, its common features but the uses to which these features are put for different aesthetic ends. In each writer, the Jew stands as a negative other, a non-Russian and a non-Christian, whose difference places Russianness in a favorable light. In Gogol the Jewish stereotype is used to foreground the Russian spirit as embodied by the mythical Cossack; in Turgenev, it highlights an ideal of Russian compassion against which the morality of capital punishment can be challenged; and in Dostoevsky, as we shall see, it serves as a comic counterpoint to existential and hagiographical

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portraits of Christian and Muslim spirituality. But in Notes from the House of the Dead, the stereotype can also get out of hand, as we have seen in Gogol, undermining the very function for which it was originally employed. Dostoevsky began Notes from the House of the Dead shortly after his return from Siberian exile in 1859. Upon release from hard labor in 1854, he spent five more years in Siberia, most of the time as a noncommissioned officer. After his petition to move to Petersburg was granted, he gradually made his way back to the capital, arriving in the middle of December 1859, almost ten years to the day of his transport to the prison camp in Omsk. Dostoevsky did little reading in prison except for the Bible; only religious books (­dukhovnye knigi ) were permitted.2 But even after his release, despite requests to his brother for essential books (Hegel, Kant, the Koran, and the Church Fathers, among others),3 he did not write much, probably because of his involvement in a tempestuous love affair with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, soon to become his first wife. The works he published on his return to Petersburg (Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo) look backward, bearing the traces of Gogol in their characterization, tone, and style. In its preoccupation with crime and the search for salvation, Notes from the House of the Dead looks forward to the major works of the last two decades of Dostoevsky’s life, beginning with Crime and Punishment; however, in its representation of the Jew, it also looks backward to an older tradition, showing a good deal more in common with Gogol’s Yankel than with the literary Jew of the second half of the nineteenth century. In Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky needed a comic Jew, and he was there for the taking in the works of his literary predecessors. It has disconcerted some of Dostoevsky’s readers that the portrait of Isay Fomich is so firmly grounded in old stereotypes and that it does not incorporate the more problematic traits characteristic even in Dostoevsky’s early fiction—a view that has led some readers to problematize Isay Fomich, finding in him redeeming traits or even existential agendas that go beyond the ostensible intentions of the author. With Isay Fomich it is necessary, then, to examine not only the text itself but also the reception of the text, especially among Dostoevsky’s Jewish readers. Though any reading that argues for a more ambiguous Isay Fomich is facing an uphill battle, I shall attempt, as I have done for Gogol, to explore the openings in the novel that support a deconstructive interpretation: that is, an interpretation that, set against authorial intention (the rhetoric of the novel), might lead to a more problematic—and perhaps more interesting—

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understanding of not only Isay Fomich but the narrator-hero as well. Notes from the House of the Dead is a work of many contradictions, the narrator often taking opposite positions on the same issue, so it is not surprising that the novel lends itself to antagonistic interpretations. The most radical of all approaches to Isay Fomich occurs not in a work of criticism at all, but in Leonid Tsypkin’s novel, Summer in Baden-Baden (Leto v Badene, 1978), which imaginatively reexplores Dostoevsky’s gambling obsession at a spa in Germany during the first year of his marriage. Although Tsypkin sees Isay Fomich as a crude Jewish stereotype—and thus a terrible embarrassment to a Jewish admirer of Dostoevsky like himself—he ingeniously exploits his analysis of Dostoevsky’s behavior and character to argue for Isay Fomich as an alter ego of his creator. Tsypkin, in effect, makes the Isay Fomich episodes— for the purposes of his own work of course—the most important autobiographical revelations in Notes from the House of the Dead. As I hope to show, one does not need to create a fictional Dostoevsky to see the similarities of Isay Fomich’s and Dostoevsky’s situations. The evidence is in the text itself. But since this evidence threatens to undermine the whole project of religious autobiography, it is not in plain view. It needs to be recovered.

the ridiculous jew In Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky foregrounds the comic aspects of the Jewish stereotype while downplaying its negative sides. A Yankel without complications, Isay Fomich is ridiculous and only ridiculous (smeshnoi),4 a point that the narrator underlines in Isay Fomich’s first appearance and in every scene thereafter. But even the other convicts liked our little Jew (zhidok), although absolutely everyone without exception laughed at him. He was our only Jew, and even now I cannot recall him without laughing. Every time I looked at him I would think of Gogol’s little Jew Yankel, from Taras Bulba, who, when he had undressed to get into the cupboard where he slept at night with his little wife, bore a striking resemblance to a chicken.5 Isay Fomich, our little Jew, was the spitting image of a plucked chicken. He was a man no longer young, about fifty years old, short, weak, cunning and at the same time positively stupid.6

Neither the narrator nor the prisoners look upon Isay Fomich with hatred, revulsion, or fear. On the contrary, probably because he is killingly

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funny, the narrator repeatedly maintains that Isay Fomich is universally liked.7 Since he conforms to the literary stereotype of the ridiculous Jew, it comes as no surprise when the narrator reflexively conjures up Gogol’s Jews and the animal imagery used in their physical descriptions. Isay Fomich resembles a chicken: weak, thin, puny, and wrinkled. He is also harmless. The convicts treat him like one of their pets.8 The narrator tells us that “Luchka, who had known many Jews in his time, often teased him, and not at all out of malice, but just for amusement, just as one amuses oneself with a dog, a parrot, or any trained animal” (142; 4:94). Every incident reinforces Isay Fomich’s image as an unqualified source of amusement. His arrival in the prison is presented as “a most amusing story” (4:56) and, at another point, as positively hilarious (4:93). Isay Fomich’s first act is to make a loan, which one of the prisoners requests not because he needs money but simply to have fun with the new arrival. His first words in prison, about the terms of the loan, cause the prisoners to “roll with laughter” (4:94), and the conclusion of the loan is accompanied by the prisoners’ “continuing loud laughter (khokhot)” (4:94). The narrator always treats Isay Fomich with good humor, recalling him with fondness, even stating that they were “great friends” (4:55). He insists that the convicts who had their fun with Isay Fomich never really insulted or mocked him: “The prisoners in no way ridiculed him, they only joked with him for amusement” (4:93).

money Isay Fomich’s stereotypical ridiculousness differs from Yankel’s and Girshel’s because it does not combine with many of the morally reprehensible aspects of the stereotype. Yankel is obsessed with gold and supposedly sucking the lifeblood out of the region in which he resides; Girshel is not only physically repellent, he exploits his own daughter for gain and spies against the Russian troops. Even when the narrator in Notes from the House of the Dead alludes to the more negative aspects of the Jewish stereotype, he only makes Isay Fomich seem more ridiculous and harmless, so little does he fit the part of the ominous or gold-obsessed Jew. The narrator tells us that Isay Fomich is a jeweler by trade and “of course (razumeetsia) was a moneylender, supplying the entire prison with money at interest for pledges” (4:55). “Of course” (razumeetsia) means that the stereotype is to be taken for reality, and that it would indeed be surprising if Isay

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Fomich, a Jew, were not a moneylender. Moneylending is generally no less despicable a profession in Dostoevsky than it is in Shakespeare. Raskolnikov purposely chooses a pawnbroker, a bloodsucker, to justify his murder.9 But for the narrator, Isay Fomich’s moneylending (even though he charges over 40 percent interest a month, much more than Alyona Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment) is as ludicrous as any of his other personal activities. The following dialogue featuring Isay Fomich and Luchka, the common prisoner who often teases Isay Fomich, shows how even the Jew as homo economicus remains on the side of the ridiculous—and thus the unproblematic. “Eh, Jew, you’ll get the whip, you’ll be sent to Siberia.” “I’m in Siberia as it is.” “Well, then, they’ll send you farther.” “And is the Lord God there?” “Yes, I think he is.” “Well, it’s all right then. If the Lord God is there and there’s money, it will be fine for me anywhere.” (152; 4:94)

Here Isay Fomich’s saucy response regarding God, money, corporal punishment, and Siberia elicits only laughter and the approval of all the convicts. After Isay Fomich sets up his moneylending trade in prison, we are told that he now is in his element, even flourishing (zhil sovershenno ­pripevaiuchi) (4:93). Why would Isay Fomich ever want to leave the prison, wonders the narrator, since he has it so good. This is hardly an innocuous remark given the narrator’s existential treatment of the prisoners’ suffering and their dreams of freedom and escape. Everything having to do with the convicts’ relationship with money and the prison is serious, but everything having to do with Isay Fomich’s relation with the same is cause for amusement. The narrator presents the fact that the whole prison owes Isay Fomich money not as a serious matter but as a joke.10 Isay Fomich is a far cry from the Jews of Dostoevsky’s fiction and journalism of the 1870s: he does not control the stock exchanges and banks of Europe, he does not direct the foreign policy of the British Empire, he is not oppressing the peasants of the borderlands, nor is he spreading those noxious ideas of materialism and socialism that Dostoevsky saw as undermining the foundations of Western civilization and European Christianity. He also bears no resemblance to Avram Kovner, the Jewish criminal—and radical journalist—with whom Dostoevsky corresponded in the 1870s and to whom he directed his famous article on the Jewish question (“Evreiskii vopros”).11

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crime Dostoevsky treats Isay Fomich’s criminality, another defining aspect of the traditional Jewish stereotype, with the same lack of seriousness and humor as he treats the Jew and money. In Gogol, Jewesses are wearing the chasubles of Russian priests, the churches are in hock to the Jews, and the countryside is in ruins from Jewish exploitation. Yankel thinks, for a moment, of turning in the epic hero, Taras Bulba, for a reward. In Turgenev, Girshel is caught spying against the Russian army during the Patriotic War of 1812. One would think that Isay Fomich, who has been sentenced to penal servitude, including corporal punishment, for murdering his wife, would merit a modicum of serious treatment. And uxoricide in Notes from the House of the Dead is not just another crime: the narrator is also in prison for killing his wife.12 But the narrator never calls attention to the similarity of their crimes. For in what possible way, the narrator seems to be implying, could their crimes be alike? The narrator believes that through great suffering he may gain freedom and the possibility of resurrection from the dead; Isay Fomich, on the other hand, seems perfectly content in prison, and the narrator cannot even imagine that it might be better for him on the outside. Wife-­murder, however, plays an important role in Notes from the House of the Dead, providing the plot line for the interpolated tale “Akulka’s Husband,” one of Dostoevsky’s finest stories. Akulka, the peasant heroine, is slaughtered like an animal by her jealous husband, who tells the story of the murder to another convict in the prison hospital while the narrator eavesdrops. She is perhaps the most perfect example in Dostoevsky’s work of active Christian forgiveness, forgiving the man who slandered her and thus the man directly responsible for the terrible beatings she received from her jealous husband. This wife-murder, which constitutes the novel’s most detailed portrayal of a brutal crime, because in part it concerns Russian peasants, receives the most serious, existential treatment. Since Isay Fomich cannot be the subject of existential portrayal, everything that he does, even when associated with themes elsewhere treated with the most existential seriousness, must remain in the realm of the comic. After mentioning Isay Fomich’s twelve-year sentence for wife-murder, the narrator adds that Isay Fomich had a formula for a cream that would erase his brand marks after his release from prison, when he would be on the market for a new wife. He confides this to the narrator in his accented Russian, which is meant to impart to the statement a comic effect, especially given

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Isay Fomich’s recent murder of his first wife. “Otherwise I can’t get married . . . and I must absolutely get married (Ne to nel’zia budet zenit’sia . . . a ia nepremenno khotsu zenit’sia)” (97; 4:55). The literary context of the remarks underscores the narrator’s comic intentions. Just a few lines before the narrator had made a comic allusion to Gogol’s Yankel and his Jewish wife (zhidovka). Since for the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead, Yankel’s wife in Taras Bulba is part and parcel of Yankel’s ridiculousness, it seems appropriate to bring her up when he is searching for an image for Isay Fomich and his future wife. The wife is not a serious or a real wife, but a borrowed literary stereotype. Turgenev uses Girshel’s wife to underline the existential seriousness of the Jew’s fate; it is she who has been earlier humiliated by Russian troops and who comes for her husband’s things after he has been executed. She brings home to the narrator’s audience of young soldiers that the Jew is not only a father but also a husband. When the German general, touched by compassion, sees her, he gives her a hundred rubles. Yankel’s wife, that is, his real wife, and the other Jewess with whom Dostoevsky confuses her, are not the only Jewish women in Taras Bulba; there is another Jewish woman, as we have seen, whom Gogol uses as a symbol of universal suffering during war.

a s s o c i at i o n w i t h t h e d ev i l In a serious novel with a Christian “message,” explicit associations of the Jew with the devil would seem incompatible with the presentation of the Jew as a harmless and ridiculous creature. But not for the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead. In the scene in the bathhouse, which the narrator likens to hell, Isay Fomich seems to lord it over all the other prisoners, belting out his song of Jewish triumph over his gentile enemies. When we opened the door into the bathroom itself, I thought we were entering hell (ad) (4:98). Imagine a room twelve paces long and the same in breadth, in which perhaps as many as a hundred and certainly as many as eighty were packed at once, for the whole party was divided into two relays, and were close on two hundred; steam blinding one’s eyes; filth and grime; such a crowd that there was not room to put one’s foot down. . . . Men of the peasant class don’t wash much with soap and water; they only steam themselves terribly and then douche themselves with cold water—that is their whole idea of a bath. Fifty birches were rising and falling rhythmically on the shelves; they all thrashed themselves into a state of stupefaction.

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More steam was raised every moment. It was not heat; it was hell (peklo). All were shouting and vociferating to the accompaniment of a hundred chains clanking on the floor. . . . They pour more boiling water on the hot bricks and clouds of thick, hot steam fill the whole bath-house; they all laugh and shout. Through the cloud of steam one gets glimpses of scarred backs, shaven heads, bent arms and legs; and to complete the picture (v dovershenie) Isay Fomich is shouting with laughter on the very top shelf. He is steaming himself into a state of unconsciousness, but no degree of heat seems to satisfy him; for a kopeck he has hired a man to beat him, but the latter is exhausted at last, flings down his birch and runs off to douche himself with cold water. Isay Fomich is not discouraged and hires another and a third; he is resolved on such an occasion to disregard expense and hires even a fifth man to wield the birch. “He knows how to steam himself, bravo, Isay Fomich,” the convicts shout to him from below. Isay Fomich, for his part, feels that at that moment he is superior to everyone and has outdone them all; he is triumphant, and in a shrill voice of a madman screams out his tune “la-la-la-la-la,” which drowns all the other voices. It occurred to me that if one day we should all be in hell (v pekle) together it would be very much like this place. (157–59; 4:98–99)

In this passage the narrator reinforces the idea of the bathhouse as hell (ad ) by focusing throughout on the intense heat produced by the “hot steam,” “boiling water,” and “hot bricks” and on the terrible din of scarred and disfigured prisoners shouting, screeching, and laughing. The passage ends with the word peklo, which literally means intense heat but is also a synonym for hell. Above all this fire and din, steaming himself to stupefaction, shouting and laughing more loudly than anyone, sits Isay Fomich. No longer fearful or lowly, he occupies the highest place in the bathhouse. The convicts serving him, and “beating” him at his command, cannot take the heat even far below; they must run away to cool themselves down; however, the old, meek, puny, Jewish plucked chicken is in “heaven,” he cannot get enough of this heat/hell (peklo). The narrator has already explained to the reader the meaning of the song of Jewish triumph that Isay Fomich sings here, as he does on every Sabbath. He at once explained to me that weeping and sobbing were aroused at the thought of the loss of Jerusalem, and that the ritual prescribed sobbing as violently as possible and beating the breast at the thought. But at the moment of the loudest sobbing, he, Isay Fomich, was suddenly, as it were accidentally (the suddenness was also prescribed by the ritual), to remember that there was a prophecy of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. Then he must at once burst into joy, song, and laughter, and must repeat prayers in

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such a way that his voice itself should express as much happiness as possible and his face should express all the solemnity and dignity of which it was capable.(153–54; 4:95)

In the bathhouse, Isay Fomich’s song whips him into a mad frenzy even more impressive than the exaltation he achieves during his Sabbath “performances.” The song seems no longer that sudden joy prescribed by ritual, because Isay Fomich is not imagining his victorious return to Jerusalem, he is in Jerusalem. He has thrown off all restraint, solemnity, and the appearance of dignity; he is no longer trying to express as much happiness as possible, he is in fact exultant (v ekstaze), freely expressing himself, drowning out the tremendous din of all the other shouting voices beneath him. In his book on the association of the Jew in medieval culture with the devil, Joshua Trachtenberg13 calls attention to a series of sixteenth-century German prints showing “the devil assisting the Jews in the function of the bathhouse, drawing water with them, building up the fires, etc.” In Notes from the House of the Dead, one of the two bathhouses in the town is owned by a Jew, although not the one to which the prisoners are taken. Has Isay Fomich turned the tables on the prisoners, no longer an object of laughter and derision, but one of admiration, even laughing at those who just a few hours before had been laughing at him? Has the Jew-devil at last revealed his identity behind his comic mask? Well, the narrator does not think so, nor do the convicts. At the beginning of the chapter, the narrator tells the reader that he most associates the bathhouse scene with Isay Fomich and that he wishes to relate it to us because it presents Isay Fomich at his most comic. He liked to steam himself into a state of stupefaction, of unconsciousness; and, every time, when going over old memories, I happen to recall our prison baths (which deserve to be remembered), then before me in the foremost place (na pervyi plan) of the picture appears the face of the blissfully contented and unforgettable Isay Fomich, my prison comrade and fellow casemate. God, what a hilariously funny man he was! (149; 4:92)

Isay Fomich’s performance in the bathhouse is meant to be hilarious. How can anyone take this harmless chicken, liked by all the convicts, and the narrator’s own great friend (bol’shoi drug), to be the personification of the devil? When Isay Fomich begins to sing in the bathhouse, he gives the convicts his best performance. They love it. It might seem that the roles between prisoners—or between Christians and Jew or Russians and Jew—have

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been reversed. But at most this is a carnival reversal; the convicts are rarely taken to bathe. Knowing that, they not only let the harmless Isay Fomich enjoy his moment of triumph, they take pleasure in it as they do in all his “performances.” Nor does it seem that Dostoevsky has unintentionally done something contrary to his ostensible intentions with regard to Isay Fomich and the devil. As we shall soon see when we turn to the representation of Isay Fomich as a religious Jew, the contrast that Dostoevsky draws between Jews and Christians and Jews and Muslims is not between good and evil but between the existential and the comic, the problematic and the unserious. Turning Isay Fomich into a devil would in some respects make him more similar to, than different from, the majority of prisoners—and also undercut his usefulness as an important contrast to the narrator himself.

religion: the jew and the spiritual context Although religion has traditionally been at the center of the Jewish stereotype, it plays only a marginal role in the characterizations of Gogol’s Yankel and Turgenev’s Girshel; it plays a much more prominent role in the depiction of Dostoevsky’s Isay Fomich. Isay Fomich’s Jewishness, however, is never presented as a threat to Russian Christianity. In most Christian literature Judaism is viewed as a superseded religion and Jews as stiff-necked rejectionists who are losing, or have lost, their chance for salvation. In the medieval period they were demonized to dramatize the danger they posed for Christians and ridiculed to discount the validity of their views and practices. But in the Russian borderlands, from the sixteenth century onward, it was the Catholic and the Uniate churches that posed the chief threat to Russian Orthodoxy. The Jews were not even allowed to live legally in Russia until the Polish partitions at the end of the eighteenth century, and then only in the places in which they had resided in pre-partition Poland, the so-called Pale of Settlement.14 Gogol’s Yankel and his fellow Jews are portrayed primarily in terms of class and caste; they also constitute an “unfortunate” economic reality for the indigenous Russian people of the borderlands. Gogol grants us only a brief look at Yankel at prayer. When Taras Bulba visits Yankel to persuade Yankel to take him to Warsaw, he finds Yankel praying in a dirty shawl, spitting on the floor. Jewish religious practices are just another manifestation of the dirt, cramp, and disorder of Jewish life, presented in copious detail in the description of Jew (or Dirty) Street in Warsaw. The

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disparaging portrayal of Yankel at prayer differs significantly from the image of the more dangerous religious rites and rituals of the Catholic Church, the overwhelming beauty of which entices Taras Bulba’s son, Andrii, away from the Cossack brotherhood. In the world of Taras Bulba, as we have seen, it is inconceivable that the Jew could offer anything tempting to a Cossack. Just as in Gogol, in Turgenev’s “The Jew,” matters of Jewish religion are peripheral. Reacting to her father’s impending execution, Sarah screams at the soldiers, cursing them with Biblical oaths. Turgenev is not exposing Sarah’s religious views or prejudices, but using them to present a daughter’s anguish and despair more dramatically and realistically. Girshel is a spy, but not a betrayer or a Judas. He is neither a Russian nor a Russian subject. It is not surprising that religion plays a much more important role in Notes from the House of the Dead than it does in “The Jew” or Taras Bulba. Notes from the House of the Dead is a modern religious autobiography, recounting the spiritual journey of its narrator from the terrible errors of the past to a new life in Christ. The narrator celebrates his release from the house of the dead in the symbolism of Christian resurrection. The fetters fell off. I picked them up. I wanted to hold them in my hand, to look at them for the last time. It was as though I were surprised that they could have been on my legs a minute before. “Well, with God’s blessing, with God’s blessing!” said the convicts in coarse, abrupt voices, in which, however, there was a note of pleasure. Yes, with God’s blessing! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead. . . . What a glorious moment! (352; 4:232)

The narrator also devotes much attention to the religion and the religious practices of the Christian prisoners, with sections dealing specifically with the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. There are also important passages depicting pious young Muslims. In all the comic roles in which we have examined Isay Fomich, he is comic or ridiculous (smeshnoi) in and of himself. He does not need to be seen against others to be understood as a comic creation. By contrast, much of the ridiculousness of the Jews in Taras Bulba is foregrounded because Gogol employs the Jew as the Cossack’s other, and more generally, the Russian’s other: the Jews’ negative traits define apophatically the virtues of the Russians. Turgenev employs a similar technique with Girshel and Nikolay Ilyich. But in Notes from the House of the Dead one does not encounter the same kind of Russian physical, spiritual, and moral antitheses to Isay ­Fomich

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among the prisoners. There are certainly more prepossessing physical specimens among the prisoners than Isay Fomich; yet some of the strongest of the Russian convicts are the most terrible, and some of the most physically attractive are the most morally corrupt. Nor does Notes from the House of the Dead include any positive Russian antithesis to the negative Jewish stereotypical traits relating to money, not to speak of criminality. The Russian prisoners have a very different attitude toward money than Isay Fomich, who is a moneylender, but they often spend their money on drink and debauch. However the contrast of Jew and non-Jew in Notes from the House of the Dead based on religion is as stark as any contrast between Russian and Jew in Gogol and Turgenev. It is in the realm of religion where the portrait of Isay Fomich becomes something more than a device for comic relief, playing an important role in bringing out the ethnic and religious ideas of the text in relation to both the Orthodox Russians and the Caucasian and Daghestani Muslims. That is why the ridiculousness of Isay Fomich reaches its apogee in the representation of his religious practices—and not in the bathhouse—for Dostoevsky exploits it in his presentation of Christian and Muslim spirituality and practice. Only when we see Isay Fomich as a practicing Jew can he emerge as something other than a plucked chicken appropriated from Taras Bulba, only then can he serve as a foil for the other characters. But Dostoevsky’s task is made more complex by the existence of two groups of non-Jewish others—Orthodox Russians and Muslim ­Circassians—and the fact that the spiritual ideal in Russians exists primarily in potential whereas the embodiment of this ideal, at least in prison, can be found only in a few young Muslim convicts. In the following sections, I will examine Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the religion and religious practices of the Russian and Muslim prisoners, and then show how the descriptions of Isay Fomich’s religious practices function as a way of highlighting the portrayal of Russian and Muslim spirituality; but also conversely how the portrayal of Christian and Muslim spirituality shapes our perceptions of Isay Fomich as a religious Jew. Not seeing Isay Fomich next to his religious others would be like not seeing Gogol’s Yankel next to Taras Bulba or Turgenev’s Girshel next to Nikolay Ilyich. The image of the Jew is also shaped by the contrasting literary modes that Dostoevsky chooses for portraying figures of each of the Abrahamic faiths: whereas he remains mostly in the existential mode (in the Auerbachian sense) for the Russian prisoners and the hagiographical mode for the few Muslim prisoners whom he singles out for detailed representation, he employs the comic or grotesque mode for Isay Fomich, the Jew.

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religion: the russian orthodox Notes from the House of the Dead was written before Dostoevsky’s idealization of the religion of the Russian people reached its apogee in The Diary of a Writer; however, there are already important precursors of these ideas in the journalistic work that Dostoevsky did for Vremia, a journal published at approximately the same time as Notes from the House of the Dead. We do not expect the peasant convicts to express or embody Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, nor, given that many of them are hardened criminals, do we expect them to be exemplars of religious piety. On the other hand, Notes from the House of the Dead is a text in which the people are major actors and where, in contrast to other works that may feature a peasant or two, the peasants are treated both individually and collectively.15 Religion may not be the dominant topic of discussion in Notes from the House of the Dead, but Dostoevsky gives a more detailed and concrete portrayal of the religion of the peasants here than anywhere else in his fiction or journalism. Yes, the peasants here are all convicts, but so is the narrator. The point the narrator makes both implicitly and explicitly is that the convicts are representative of the people, even in matters of religion (more representative in a higher sense, to paraphrase Dostoevsky’s statement about his kind of realism), just as the narrator himself is representative of the potential of his own class for spiritual regeneration. The presentation of the religious experience of the Russian prisoners mirrors, albeit in a different way, the existential seriousness of the narrator’s own religious quest. In striking contrast to Isay Fomich, none of the Russians are ridiculous in anything they do, even those who make fools of themselves and are laughed at. And they are never literary stereotypes. As the only Jew in the prison, Isay Fomich becomes, ipso facto, not just a Jew but the Jew, a standin for all Jews, in accordance with common European literary practice. Each Russian, however, is an individual; one may make generalizations about him, but they are never defining. Dostoevsky cannot use the Russian prisoners as positive ideals in the same way that Turgenev uses Nikolay Ilyich or Gogol uses Taras Bulba; the convicts for the most part are common criminals, all of whom belong in prison. Nor would one expect to find among the prisoners exemplars of Orthodox piety. In fact, although piety varies among the Russian prisoners, it is uncommon. The narrator writes understatedly that “the younger ones did not pray much” (172; 4:108). Actually, the prisoners almost never pray. “The

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most they did even on a holiday was to cross themselves when they got up” (172; 4:108). A few of the older prisoners say a few prayers on holy days. But despite this lack of piety, the prisoners, the narrator emphasizes, appreciate and respect the major religious festivals. They recognize the solemnity of Christmas, and most of them behave differently and appropriately, preparing and buying special foods and reacting strongly to any infringement of the general dignity of the day (167; 4:105). The prisoners also understand the holiday’s personal significance for them: that at least in the eyes of God they are never outcasts. “Apart from their innate reverence for the great day, the convicts felt unconsciously that by the observance of Christmas they were, as it were, in touch with the whole of the world, that they were not altogether outcasts and lost men, not altogether cut off; that it was the same in prison as amongst other people. They felt that; it was evident and easy to understand” (168; 4:105). “On the whole, all behaved decorously, peaceably, and with an exceptional seemliness. . . . One saw signs of something like friendship (Proiavlialos’ chto-to vrode druzhestva)” (170; 4:107). The prisoners uncharacteristically greet each other, and some even greet the narrator for the first time. When the priest arrives, the prisoners, according to the narrator, show genuine piety and devotion. At last the priest came with the cross and the holy water. After repeating prayers and singing before the icon, he stood facing the convicts and all of them with genuine reverence (s istinnym blagogoveniem) came forward to kiss the cross. Then the priest walked through all the wards and sprinkled them with holy water. . . . They followed the cross out with the same reverence (s tem zhe blagogoveniem) with which they had welcomed it. (173; 4:109)

Christian ritual is a manifestation of the deepest reverence in the prisoners, who do everything possible to preserve the solemnity of the great day and react strongly—at least at first—to any infringement of its atmosphere and mood (nastroenie), which the narrator describes as “remarkable, even touching (zamechatel’no, dazhe trogatel’no)” (168; 4:105). But these are passing remarks about the prisoners collectively. The rest, and much larger part, of the chapter about Christmas is given over to a graphic and detailed description of the drunkenness and carousing that began barely five minutes after the major had left the prison. Although the narrator says that “the majority were still sober and there were plenty to look after those who were not” (174; 4:110), he also notes that “an unusually large number (neobyknovenno mnogo) of the people were drunk, yet only

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five minutes before they had all been almost sober” (164; 4:109). The Old Believer from Starodubov resorted to prayer, for “it was painful for him to see the ‘shamefulness,’ as he said, of the convicts’ carousing (vseobshchaia gulianka)” (174; 4:109). Nurra, a young Muslim, one of the narrator’s favorites among the prisoners, comes up to the narrator, shaking his head in pious indignation, remarking, “Bad, Bad. . . . Ough, it’s bad! Allah will be angry!” (174; 4:109). “By degrees it became unbearable and disgusting in the wards (Malo-pomalu v kazarmakh stanovilos’ nesnosno i omerzitel’no)” (183; 4:111). The narrator begins the concluding paragraph of the Christmas chapter with the words, “But why describe this drunken licentiousness (Na chto opisyvat’ etot chad?)” (175; 4:116). Easter Week is even worse. The coming of spring to the steppes only accentuates the chasm between the prisoners’ aspirations of freedom and the grim reality of their long prison sentences. The narrator devotes only one page to the most important of Christian holidays, emphasizing over and over the similarity between Christmas and Easter but also the more depressing nature of Easter. Loads of offerings for the prisoners were brought from the town again. Again there was a visit from the priest with a cross, again a visit of the authorities, again a cabbage soup with plenty of meat in it, again drinking and desultory idleness (p’ianstvo i shatan’e)—exactly as at Christmas, except that now one could walk in the prison yard and warm oneself in the sun. There was more light, more space than in winter, but yet it was more depressing. The long endless summer day seemed particularly unbearable during the holidays. On ordinary days, at least, it was shortened by work. (73; 4:177)

This extraordinary passage seems to undercut many of the positive things the narrator says about the religious observances and behavior of the Russian prisoners at Christmas. The structure and grammar of the sentences almost equate the visit of the priest and the cross with the more meaty cabbage soup, with the visit of the prison authorities, even with the drunkenness and revelry: Opiat’ (again) poseshchenie s krestom sviashchenika, opiat’ (again) poseshchenie nachal’stva, opiat’ (again) zhirnye shchi, opiat’ (again) p’iantsvo i shatan’e (4:170). And all this, he now says, is exactly (toch’-v-toch’) as it was at Christmas. The only difference is that there is more light at Easter. The increase in light, however, only adds to the prisoners’ despondency, mocking their hopes of freedom and salvation. Perhaps against the intention of the author himself, the dark description of Easter undercuts the more hopeful

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notes sounded at Christmas regarding the religious sensibilities and faith of the Russian people.16 While there are no models of piety among the young, examples of eccentric religious behavior do occur. The narrator mentions a meek prisoner— we do not know how old he is—who had been in prison for several years and was considered almost to be a holy fool (iurodivyi). He was literate and for the past year had been reading the Bible day and night, even when others were sleeping. One day he attacked the major. He was punished (beaten) and died three days later. On his deathbed he said that he bore no one ill will but had wanted only to suffer (khotel tol’ko postradat’ ) (60; 4:29). “He did not, however, belong to a dissenting sect (raskol’nichii sekt). In the prison he was remembered with respect” (37; 4:29), not so much because of his attack on the hated major but because of his religious act. The prisoners may not be religious but they respect piety. The narrator, however, notes the action of this meek prisoner almost in passing; he does not incorporate him into a religious ideology based on the redemptive nature of suffering characteristic of the Russian people. In Notes from the House of the Dead, anyone who attempts to kill another human being to take on suffering cannot be a model of Orthodox piety. In Crime and Punishment, the peasant Mikolka, who wants to take on suffering, confesses to a crime he did not commit. The narrator mentions more pious older Russian prisoners, who look upon the licentiousness and revelry of the younger prisoners with disgust. There are relatively few of these; and they are not treated as models of Christian piety. The only truly pious Russian Orthodox Christian from the nobility is Akim Akimovich, who was the narrator’s unofficial caretaker throughout his prison stay. The narrator dislikes almost everything about Akim Akimovich, though he accepts his services. He is critical of his religious practice as well, which is all ritual and little spirit. Among the older Russians not belonging to the nobility, only the Old Believers are pious. “Among the other prisoners in our room were four Old Believers (staroobradtsy), elderly men and dogmatic readers of religious texts (nachetchiki), one of whom was the old fellow from the Starodubov­ skaya settlement” (98; 4:56). And again: “There were other Old Believers in the prison, mostly Siberians. They were very well-educated (razvitoi narod ), shrewd peasants, great students of the Bible who quibbled over every letter (chrezvychainye nachetchiki i bukvoedy), and great dialecticians in their own way; they were a haughty, arrogant, crafty, extremely intolerant set. The old man was quite different” (67; 4:33–34).

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The Old Believers are a special category of Russian prisoners. One expects them to be pious; they may even be in prison for religious and ideological reasons, not for the commission of common crimes. For the narrator, however, they are far from exemplars of Christian piety. They are personally unattractive, proud, and intolerant. Their religion, combining fanaticism with pride, is based more on the letter (bukvoedy) than on the spirit. The narrator does not place them above the common prisoners of less piety for whom they show disgust and contempt, a contempt they share with the arrogant Poles.17 The most pious and attractive Russian Orthodox prisoner is one of the Old Believers mentioned above who differed from his fellows. “The old man was quite different” (67; 4:34). He is about sixty years old, tranquil, with bright eyes. The narrator says that rarely in his life had he met such a kind and wonderful being (blagodushnoe sushchestvo) (66; 4:33). Furthermore, in contrast to the other Old Believers, there is no hatred in his religious views. He is neither vain nor proud. Sociable, good-humored, possessed of an almost childlike simplicity, he is trusted and respected by everyone. Despite his outward equanimity and good humor, he is suffering bitterly in prison, for he sorely misses his wife and children. But the narrator is critical of his religious beliefs and actions. He is even more a nachetchik (dogmatic literalist) than the other Old Believers and he has committed an extremely serious crime (chrezvychainoe vazhnoe prestuplenie) (4:33), burning down an Orthodox church. “In his blindness (v osleplenii svoem)” (4:33), he still considers his crime to have been justified and a glorious deed (slavnoe delo) (4:33). He is certainly no Herostratus, who burned the sacred Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in order to achieve fame. His act is a selfless one. Nevertheless, he is not a model of Orthodox or even Christian piety, but a fanatic.18 It is precisely this disparity, this terrible duality in the old man, that fascinates and disturbs the narrator. One might argue that the narrator treats the religion of the Russian prisoners not only seriously but self-servingly, for he knows that he cannot be saved alone—salvation is not possible without his Russian Orthodox brothers. His resurrection ultimately depends on the same possibility of spiritual renewal for the people. But ideology does not get in the way of presenting the religious behavior and beliefs of the prisoners. Dostoevsky does not idealize them, and even the most pious do not escape his critical eye. He does not create an exemplar of Russian piety where there is none or where it would not be credible. Even much later, when fully in the grip of nationalist religious

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ideology, Dostoevsky often maintained the distinction between the reality and potential of the people.19 The Russian people have the potential of saving the world, for Christ remains pure in their hearts, but in their present condition, ignorant, hungry, and uneducated, they are not only incapable of saving the world or Russia, they are incapable of saving themselves. The people need educated Russians as much as the educated Russians need the people. Notes from the House of the Dead focuses more on the reality than the potential of the people’s religion, and this is hardly surprising given that many of the peasants in the prison are hardened criminals. There is no comedy here but also no idealization. The narrator presents the people as he sees them, with problematic and existential seriousness. With regard to the Russian prisoners, at least, Notes from the House of the Dead is a paradigm of Auerbachian realism.

religion: the muslims Since Dostoevsky often conflates religion and nationality, his treatment of Islam, Muslims, Turks, and Mohammed is not easily separable. Dostoevsky was always fascinated by Mohammed but more as a powerful lawgiver and epileptic visionary than as a prophet.20 He may have had a passing interest in Islam as early as the 1850s, perhaps sparked by his acquaintance with Muslim prisoners or his Muslim friend, Chokan Valikhanov,21 but religious Islam, not geopolitical Islam, does not come up as a serious subject in his work until the 1870s when Dostoevsky begins to pay more attention to Russian-Turkish relations. In an article entitled “Liubiteli turok” (“Lovers of Turks”) in The Diary of a Writer for May–June 1877 (chapter 4, section 1), Dostoevsky challenges the pro-Turkish sympathies among some educated Russians during the Russo-Turkish wars, lauds the people’s sympathies toward the subjugated Orthodox populations under Turkish rule, and defends the superiority of the people’s Russian Orthodox religious beliefs and intuitions over those of Islam. Islam was not a major interest of Dostoevsky’s even in the 1870s; in fact, he probably would not have even addressed the Muslim question if some Russian intellectuals had not, at the beginning of the war, revealed their pro-Turkish sympathies and made invidious comparisons between Orthodox Christianity and Islam in favor of Islam.22 In light of Dostoevsky’s later general xenophobia, some readers may be surprised at Dostoevsky’s earlier romantic idealization of several of the Muslim prisoners in Notes from the House of the Dead. Yet, with respect to the

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Muslims, he seems influenced more by what he observed in prison than by any preconceptions he may have acquired from his reading. By contrast, the Jew, Isay Fomich, is conceived according to a literary stereotype and the Russian Orthodox prisoners are presented, at least in part, in accord with Dostoevsky’s newly acquired views of the people.23 The portrait of some of the Muslims provides a striking contrast with the portrayals of the Russians and an even more striking contrast with the depiction of the Jew, Isay Fomich. Because there is more than one Muslim prisoner in the camp, the reader encounters figures of various temperaments and degrees of piety, as we do with the Russians. There are non-Slavs who are not devout Muslims. One Tatar by the name of Gazin “was a horrible creature. He made a terrible and painful impression on everyone. It always seems to me that there could not be a more ferocious monster than he was. . . . I sometimes felt as though I were looking at a huge gigantic spider, the size of a man” (76; 4:40). Gazin comes close to killing the narrator during one of his drunken sprees, the narrator’s closest brush with death in his ten years of prison. “In another moment he would have smashed our heads” (78; 4:42). There is also a Kalmuk Christian, Alexander, who converted solely in the hope that his punishment, four thousand strokes, would be alleviated if he were a Christian. He was shown no mercy and barely survived. Toward the end of the fourth chapter, however, the narrator introduces the reader to the other Muslims, among whom the narrator finds the most exemplary and pious souls in the entire prison. “Next to me on the left were a group of mountaineers from the Caucasus, who had been sent here to various terms of imprisonment, chiefly for robbery. There were two ­Lezgians, one Chechen and three Daghestan Tartars” (90; 4:50). The Chechen is described as a morose and gloomy creature full of hatred and contempt. One of the Lezgians was an old man who looked like the brigand he was.24 The other Lezgian, Nurra, made a deep and favorable impression on the narrator. He was young, strong, handsome, cheerful, friendly, honest, good-natured, hardworking, and liked by all. He showed compassion for the narrator immediately on the narrator’s arrival in the prison. Even more important he had high moral standards and was extremely pious. He often looked with anger at the filth and loathsomeness of prison life, and he was furiously indignant at all the thieving, cheating, and drunkenness, in fact, at everything that was dishonest; but he never picked a quarrel, he merely turned away in indignation. He had never during his prison life stolen anything himself, or been guilty of any bad action. He was extremely

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devout (bogomolen), he religiously repeated his prayers; during the fasts before the Mohammedan holy days he fasted fanatically, and spent whole nights over his prayers. (91; 4:50–51).

What is unusual about Nurra, particularly in comparison with almost all of the other prisoners, is first that he is both pious and young, and most important, his piety is in no way compromised by other aspects of his personality or actions. We have seen that all the pious Russian prisoners are older and most are unattractive dogmatists. Even the Old Believer, who is kind, honest, communicative, and gentle, has committed a terrible sacrilegious act in burning down an Orthodox church. Nurra’s strict observance of the holidays is presented positively. Just like the prisoners, the narrator has a great deal of respect for honesty, naivete, and deep piety.25 But Nurra is just a prelude to Aley, the most Dostoevskian Christlike fictional male character before Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Aley’s “whole soul was apparent in his handsome, one might even say beautiful, face (na ego krasivom, mozhno dazhe skazat’, prekrasnom litse). . . . He showed two rows of pearly teeth which the greatest beauty in the world might have envied” (92–94; 4:51–52). Dostoevsky writes elsewhere about Christ: “There is on earth only one positively beautiful person: Christ (Na svete est’ odno tol’ko polozhitel’no prekrasnoe litso—Khristos)” (28.2:251). Dostoevsky occasionally uses the word prekrasnyi—beautiful or fine—to emphasize the highest moral qualities. This conflation of the aesthetic with the moral or spiritual ideal is not uncommon in the Russian Orthodox tradition, in which icons, for example, are seen as windows of divine light and churches simulacrums of heaven. Dostoevsky will later choose the same word prekrasnyi to express his ideal of Christ, conflating the aesthetic and ethical ideal as Myshkin does when he is reported as having said that beauty will save the world. Aley also has what was always important for Dostoevsky: a wonderfully trustful and childlike smile. Though he was part of a mountaineer robber band that killed a rich Armenian merchant, the narrator assures us that Aley knew nothing about the intent of the raid and his light four-year sentence was probably given in recognition of diminished responsibility.26 Frankly, Dostoevsky does not want to explore Aley’s crime for it might force him to enter the existential mode and compromise the hagiographical, just as he does not want to explore Isay Fomich’s life and compromise the comic. Aley’s two brothers in prison with him, like most of the prisoners, are a sullen lot, but they lighten up whenever they see or speak to their younger brother. “It is hard to imagine (predstavit’ sebe) how this boy was able during

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his prison life to preserve such a gentle heart, to develop such strict honesty, such warm feelings and charming manners, and to escape growing coarse and depraved. But his was a strong and steadfast nature in spite of all its apparent softness (miagkost’ ). . . . He was pure as a chaste girl (tselomudren, kak chistaia devochka), and any ugly, cynical, dirty, unjust, or violent action in the prison brought a glow of indignation into his beautiful eyes (v ego prekrasnykh glazakh), making them still more beautiful (eshche prekrasnee)” (93; 4:52).27 The narrator cannot seem to come to an end to the catalogue of Aley’s virtues. He is modest, industrious, delicate, and intelligent, having picked up several trades while in prison and acquired, with the narrator’s help, an excellent knowledge of Russian in only three months time. But in turn he helped the narrator, principally in his first year in prison. Aley is the prisoner that the narrator was closest to and for whom he shows the deepest emotional response. I may as well say at once that I consider Aley far from being an ordinary person, and I look back upon my meeting with him as one of the happiest meetings in my life. There are natures so innately good (do togo prekrasnye ot prirody), so richly endowed by God, that the very idea of their ever deteriorating seems impossible. One is always at ease about them. I am at ease about Aley to this day. Just where is he now? (93; 4:52)28

But Dostoevsky pushes the connection of Aley with Christ much further, having Aley learn Russian by reading the Gospel. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov and Sonia, the criminal and prostitute, two great sinners, come together over Sonia’s recitation of the raising of Lazarus, which Raskolnikov requests that she read to him (Prochti mne) (6:249), and the epilogue implies that they will read the Gospel together in prison, again. In Notes from the House of the Dead, two criminals, already in prison, read together the Sermon on the Mount. Aley not only understands Christ’s holiness and recognizes that Jesus speaks the word of God, he immediately intuits and loves Jesus’s central idea: his message of forgiveness and the command to love one’s enemies. Moreover, Aley is not corrupted by his surroundings; he even has a transforming moral and aesthetic effect on those whom he touches, including his brothers and the narrator. Aley’s brothers, who are after all murderers, appear better than they really are since they are reflected in Aley’s wondrous light, and so does their religion. Hearing about Jesus from Aley, his brothers “with a dignified and gracious, that is, a purely ­Mussulman, smile (which I love so much for its dignity [vazhnost’ ]), turned

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to me and repeated that Jesus was a prophet of God and that He performed great miracles” (95–96; 4:54). The smile now becomes an essential part of their personal characterization and softens, if not erases, the darker side of their personalities. (They did after all slit the throat of an Armenian merchant.) Afterward, Aley’s brothers do what they can to help the narrator, a Christian, at work. If with regard to religion, Dostoevsky is working in the comic mode with Isay Fomich and the existential and “naturalist” mode with the prisoners of the Russian Orthodox faith, he is working in the utopic mode (as in the Father Zosima sections of The Brothers Karamazov) with the two Muslims, Nurra and Aley, singled out for their character and piety. They are not only attractive to the narrator, they are loved and respected by everyone in the prison. If Dostoevsky cannot find his Orthodox Christian ideal among the Russians, he discovers it or reimagines it among the two Muslims who, retrospectively, most embody it. Again we not dealing with the actual Aley, whom we can never know, or with any known literary models that Dostoevsky could have followed. As mentioned above in this chapter, the romanticization of the oriental had long gone out of fashion in Russian literature by 1860. We are speaking then of a reconstruction and reimagination of prototypes many years after the actual experience. When Dostoevsky later imagined Christlike figures for the contemporary world, I would suggest that he went back to his Muslim prototypes from Notes from the House of the Dead— or their hagiographic reconstruction—both for Myshkin in The Idiot and for Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. When writing The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s model for a young Christlike figure who embodies simplicity, naivete, intelligence, integrity, honesty, chasteness, and piety was already imagined, or could easily be recreated on the basis of the real or re-imagined acquaintance and friend in Notes from the House of the Dead. At the end of his description of Aley in Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky asks, “Where, just where is he now, my dear, dear good Aley (Gde-to, gde-to teper’ moi dobryi, milyi, milyi Alei . . . )?” (96; 4:54). 29

i s ay f o m i c h : t h e j ew i n r e l i g i o u s co n t e x t How with the beauty of the Muslim Aley shall the Jew hold a plea? The presentation of Isay Fomich is sandwiched between the presentation of the Muslim and Russian Orthodox prisoners, his introduction almost directly

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following the section devoted to the Muslims, and preceding the long religious section before the chapter entitled “Christmas.” It is clear from the narrator’s presentation of Isay Fomich’s religious rituals that he does not take Isay Fomich’s religious practices seriously. In fact, the narrator attempts to portray Isay Fomich as most ridiculous—and thus at his most unproblematic and existentially unserious—in the performance of his religious ­duties. This ridiculousness is underscored by the dramatic contrast between Isay Fomich’s religious practices and those of the Muslims just presented and Russian Christian prisoners to be presented in the novel’s following chapters. Even before the narrator shows Isay Fomich at prayer, he shows that he intends his religion to be the stuff of comedy. He cites an incident in which Isay Fomich is accused of selling Christ as an example of the convict’s friendly, playful attitude toward the Jew. Isay Fomich is well aware, according to the narrator, that Luchka is teasing him for amusement and thus takes no offense, deftly responding with a joke of his own. Isay Fomich is a master of repartee. “Hey, Jew, I’ll give you a thrashing!” “Hit me once, and I’ll give you back ten,” Isay Fomich would respond daringly. “You’re a damned scab!” “So, I’m a scab.” “You’re a scabby Jew.” “So I’m that too. I may itch, but I’m rich; I’ve got money.” “You sold Christ!” “So what if I did.” “That a boy, Isay Fomich, well done! Leave him alone, he’s our only Jew!” the convicts would shout with laughter. (152; 4:94])

Isay Fomich answers to the charge that he is Judas in the spirit of the accusation: “So what if I did [sell Christ].” For any Jew on entering the Omsk prison to have had the temerity to reply to the accusation of selling Christ in this way may seem inconceivable. But Isay Fomich’s bold repartee does not surprise the narrator at all. Since Isay Fomich is by nature timid he could only answer in this way because he knew perfectly well that Luchka was just having fun with him, that Luchka did not intend the Judas remark seriously, and that the more sassy his response the more Luchka, and all the other prisoners, would like it. And, of course, he is right. (We must remember we are talking about the text and not the original situation, which we

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can never construct.) Just as the prisoners will shout their approval to him in the bathhouse later on, they shout their approval and encouragement of him here. It is, after all, all so killingly funny. Who would not rock with laughter? The playful treatment of the betrayal accusation in relation to the Jew is underlined by the serious treatment of Christ in the narrator’s portrait of Aley. The narrator and Aley read the Gospels together, discussing the essential Christian message, and implicitly, the promise of salvation, which is of the utmost importance not only for the narrator personally but also, as shown in the chapter entitled “Christmas,” for every prisoner in the camp. That Christ in this novel can ever be part of a joke, especially concerning the relationship between Jews and Christians, shows how closely Isay Fomich is tied to the ridiculous. When presented in relation to Isay Fomich, even the most negative aspects of the Jewish stereotype cannot be taken seriously. On the other hand, this same ridiculousness can be exploited to bring into relief, by contrast, the seriousness of Russian and Muslim spirituality. The focus of Dostoevsky’s portrait of Isay Fomich is the description of his religious practices on the Sabbath. Everybody in the prison comes to watch Isay Fomich’s performance. Because of the importance of this passage in chapter 7 as well as in the present chapter in this volume, I shall quote a long section from it. Every Friday evening convicts came to our ward from other parts of the prison on purpose to see Isay Fomich celebrate his Sabbath. Isay Fomich was so naively vain and boastful that this general interest gave him pleasure, too. With pedantic and studied gravity he covered his little table in the corner, opened his book, lighted two candles and muttering some secret words began putting on his vestment (rizu)—westment (rizhu) as he pronounced it. It was a parti-colored shawl of woolen material which he kept carefully in his box. He tied phylacteries on both hands and tied some sort of wooden ark by means of a bandage on his head, right over his forehead, so that it looked like a ridiculous horn (smeshnoi rog) sprouting out of his forehead. Then the prayer would begin. He repeated it in a chant, uttered cries, spat on the floor, and turned around, making wild and ridiculous gesticulations (smeshnye zhesty). All this, of course, was part of the ceremony and there was nothing ridiculous (smeshoe) or strange about it, but what was ridiculous (smeshno) was that Isay Fomich seemed purposely to be playing a part before us, and made a show of his ritual (shchegolial svoimi obriadami ). Suddenly he would hide his head in his hands and recite with sobs. The sobs grew louder, and in a state of exhaustion and almost howling he would let his head crowned with the ark drop on the book; but suddenly, in the middle

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of the most violent sobbing he would begin to laugh (khokhotat’ ) and chant in a voice with feeling and solemnity, a voice weakened by a surfeit of joy. (153; 4:95)

According to the narrator, Isay Fomich knows that everyone is watching him, so, just as any natural performer would, he exaggerates to make the strongest impression. The narrator says there was nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the ritual itself, only Isay Fomich’s performance of it; but in this text, this is a distinction without a difference. The disparity between Isay Fomich’s ridiculous physical appearance and the performance of a serious religious ritual inevitably creates a comic effect.30 He wears a varicolored garment of woolen material and a forehead phylactery that is likened to a ridiculous horn (izo lba Isaia Fomicha vykhodit kakoi-to smeshnoi rog) (153; 4:95). If the ritual is not ridiculous in itself, why should the head phylactery be likened to a horn and why should it be described as ridiculous (­smeshnoi )?31 Isay Fomich sings his prayers in a funny, singsong falsetto. He shouts, he spits, “he turns himself around, making sweeping and comical gestures” (153: 4:95). He sobs, then howls, and then turns to laughter and joy in an instant. Once the terrifying major, before whom all the prisoners tremble,32 enters the barracks and walks up to Isay Fomich while he is praying. Isay Fomich pays him no attention, shouting, singing, sobbing, and gesticulating as if no one is there. This scene of the cowardly Isay Fomich, performing his ritual-routine in front of the tyrannical prison head, is related in Dostoevsky’s most comic manner. Isay Fomich later tells the narrator that he was so caught up in his prayers, in a trance as it were, that he had no idea that the major was there. The narrator insists that Isay Fomich is by nature a performer and provides evidence. Isay Fomich is the most frequent attendee at the theatricals at Christmastime. “As for the Circassians and still more for Isay Fomich, the performance was a real enjoyment. Isay Fomich paid three kopecks every time, and on the last performance put ten kopecks in the plate and there was a look of bliss on his face (blazhenstvo izobrazhalos’ na litse ego)” (189–90; 4:120). “From the moment the curtain rose, he seemed to be completely transformed into ears and eyes, naively and greedily expecting marvels and delights” (194–95; 4:123). In this respect, Isay Fomich is not different in personality from several other prisoners, especially the Muslims, who also love spectacle (vsegda okhotniki do vsiakikh zrelishch) (4:123), including the narrator’s beloved Aley. His desire to perform is not in itself demeaning (the narrator uses artistic performance in other places as a measure of the potential

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of the Russian people), it is what he is performing that is at issue. In the narrator’s eyes Isay Fomich is exploiting the religious ritual for the sake of performance, for theatrical ends. His point of view, he implies, is confirmed by the prisoners themselves, who take as much pleasure in the comic performance of Isay Fomich’s Sabbath prayers as they do in his comic repartee, his performance in the bathhouse, or the comic performances of the prison theatricals. For them, and for the narrator, Isay Fomich is all theater. All the physical devices that Gogol and Turgenev used with Yankel and Girshel are turned almost exclusively to comic effect in the portrait of Isay Fomich. The spitting while praying comes from Gogol’s description of Yankel at prayer. The sobbing, howling, turning, gesticulating, and “the sweeping and comical gestures” (153; 4:95) are all of one piece with the description of Girshel. Dostoevsky needs a stereotypically Jewish Isay Fomich for comic relief in Notes from the House of the Dead, and Isay Fomich is the only figure who can sound a comic note, the only figure who cannot, by virtue of who he is, become the subject of either existential or hagiographical representation. But the comic also serves as a device to highlight the existential portrayal of Christian spirituality. Though Dostoevsky does not find models of Christian piety in prison, he does find, or create, the evidence of potential manifested in the Russian prisoners’ innate sense and appreciation of the religious. The narrator’s description of the prisoners’ Christmas services is the antithesis, then, of the portrayal of Isay Fomich’s comic “performance.” Christian ritual is not performance and spectacle, but the manifestation of the deepest reverence. The prisoners do everything possible to preserve the solemnity of the great day. On the other hand, laughter (smekh), the word and notion most associated with Isay Fomich and his performance of Jewish ritual, seems forbidden (smekh kak-budto byl zapreshchen) (168; 4:105), the prisoners understanding intuitively that laughter is the antithesis of religious seriousness. In the narrator’s presentation, supposedly gleaned from Isay Fomich’s own words, Isay Fomich ritually acts out motions of despair and jubilation every Friday, but for the prisoners the kissing of the cross before Christmas is not just a ritual, it is their tie to the other world, their hope that they have not been abandoned and that before God they are all equal. Against the background of this “remarkable and moving” demonstration of Christian community and reverence, Isay Fomich’s comic celebration of the Sabbath gains even greater prominence. To be sure, soon after the major leaves, the holiday devolves for many of the prisoners into drunkenness and

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debauch, but that does not decrease its seriousness; rather it emphasizes the serious gulf that exists between the lives of the prisoners and their hopes. It is depressingly serious, not killingly funny. And even more so at Easter, when the disparity between hope and salvation is brought home to every prisoner with the coming of spring, the increase of warmth and light, and the rebirth of nature. The narrator is not using the religious experience of the Russian Orthodox to denigrate Isay Fomich or Judaism, but exploiting the Jewish comic stereotype in religious matters to highlight the existential seriousness of Russian spirituality. I have dealt with the Russian prisoners collectively because inevitably, as the sole Jew, Isay Fomich comes to represent all Jews and/or Judaism. But the same disparities would be equally evident were one to compare Isay Fomich with individual prisoners of the Orthodox faith. The narrator shows that few of the Russian prisoners are really pious, a serious problem not a source of comic relief, and even the ones who are indeed pious are presented critically. Even the most honest, compassionate, selfless of the pious, the Old Believer, committed a terrible crime, burning down an Orthodox church. On the other hand, he is presented as a complex human for whom the narrator expresses compassion. He suffers terribly, crying every night over his family and children. The contrast between Russian and Jew or Christian and Jew here is not so much between good and evil, or between morally reprehensible and commendable religious practices, but one of literary technique: Russian religious practice is individualized, psychologized, and in every case treated with problematic seriousness; everything to do with Isay Fomich remains on the surface, is in conformity with the stereotype and its comic function, a function that Isay Fomich could not serve if he were to become the object of existentially serious portrayal. The contrast between Isay Fomich and the attractive Muslims (Nurra and Aley) is even starker, especially in spiritual or religious matters. To be sure, there are Muslims who differ little from some of the Russians, but the main focus of the section on the Muslims is Nurra and Aley. Isay Fomich and Aley not only belong to different narrative modes, the comic versus the hagiographical, they come to represent entirely different physical and spiritual entities. Let us start with the physical and work to the religious. Dostoevsky’s contrasting physical portraits of the Muslims (Nurra and Aley) and Isay Fomich seem to reflect the contrasts between Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Yankel and Turgenev’s Nikolay Ilyich and Girshel. Nurra is young, strong, and handsome; Isay Fomich is old, weak, and has “a wrinkled white body

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like a chicken” (150). Traditionally when a stereotypical older Jewish male is being contrasted with a non-Jewish ideal, physical characteristics reflect moral and spiritual values. One expects striking contrasts in Gogol, whose art is based on the exaggerated physical detail; but, curiously, the contrast between the old, ugly, immoral Jew and the young, handsome, virtuous Russian/­Christian is even more prominently elaborated in “The Jew” by Turgenev. In Notes from the House of the Dead the foregrounding of this physical and spiritual contrast of Jew and non-Jew is equally strong. What is unusual is that the major contrast between Jew and non-Jew is between Jew and Muslim, not between Jew and Russian or Jew and Christian, a necessity because there are no Russians capable of embodying the positive religious ideal in Notes from the House of the Dead. Aley, in a sense, must stand in as an example of the realized potential of the Russian people, just as Dostoevsky would later take another outsider to perform this function in The Idiot. The most important detail in the physical description of Aley is his face (litso). Aley’s face is an icon, a window through which the divine light shines, a place where the physical, moral, and spiritual fuse, as they do in Christ. As we have seen, he has a “wonderful trustful and childlike smile” with “two rows of pearly teeth which the greatest beauty in the world might have envied” (92–94; 4:51–52); but his face (litso) is not only handsome (krasivoe) but beautiful (prekrasnoe). When later the narrator describes Aley’s eyes they are not described as krasivye (beautiful)—that is, physically beautiful—but prekrasnye, beautiful in a spiritual and moral sense. Dostoevsky is able to do this because, as we have seen above, the same word in Russian (litso) can mean face, person, figure, or character. Aley may represent in fact the closest consonance of the good and the beautiful in Dostoevsky. In his later work, physical beauty, in the fallen world, always has the potential of being one, or siding, with evil (the beauty of Sodom). In its highest manifestation it can save the world (Christ), but in its embodiment on earth, as in the case of Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, it more often leads to death and destruction. Isay Fomich’s face—no resemblance to an icon—is covered with wrinkles and on his forehead and each cheek he bears the brands received on entering prison. Other prisoners have similar terrible scars and brands. But their scars merit long descriptions and implicit briefs against corporal punishment. Isay Fomich’s facial scars are not taken seriously. They prompt the funny story about Isay Fomich obtaining a recipe for an ointment that will remove his scars on release from prison so he can marry again. When the

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narrator recalls the bathhouse scene, the first thing that comes to his mind is not its hellish atmosphere but the face (litso) of the hilarious Isay Fomich steaming himself to stupefaction, the face that “wore a continual expression of imperturbable self-complacency and even blissfulness” (150). Isay Fomich has told the narrator that at a particular time in his prayer ritual he is prescribed to show as much solemnity and nobility in his face (litsom). It is precisely at this moment that the major appears before him. The major does not take affront, he merely bursts out laughing. For no one in the prison is this a face that can express dignity and solemnity. The narrator makes sure that Isay Fomich does not look dignified at prayer, describing the phylactery on his forehead as something that resembles a ridiculous horn. Obviously, he has in mind the same wrinkled forehead with the brand on it. One can make whatever one wants out of the horn on Isay Fomich’s forehead; it is something animal-like, perhaps the mark of the Jew-devil, but the narrator will have none of that, for he refuses to take anything about Isay Fomich seriously. And how can one even take his Judaism seriously when it is attached to such a face, not only by itself but also when it is compared to the iconic face of the pious Aley, who understands Christ, looks like Christ, and whose religious ceremonies express the very opposite of Isay Fomich’s: not theater and ridiculousness, but piety and dignity (vazhnost’). All the prisoners liked Isay Fomich and Aley, but they liked Isay Fomich because he was amusing, they liked Aley for many things, but most of all because he was pious and beautiful (prekrasnyi).

the poetics of the seriocomic “little man” For most readers of Dostoevsky, Isay Fomich’s comic function in Notes from the House of the Dead is an insufficient justification for his inclusion in the novel, especially given that the literary task Dostoevsky set for himself—in his first novel Poor Folk (1846)—was to make the comic serious, to reveal the human being, the heart and soul, in the ridiculous clerk, a comic literary type of the literature of the 1830s and 1840s. Why did he not do the same for Isay Fomich, especially when we consider him in the light of Dostoevsky’s later words about the nature of the comic and ridiculous in world literature and their relation to the beautiful? In a letter to his niece about Christ and “the beautiful” (prekrasnoe), a line of which was quoted above, Dostoevsky states that it is so difficult to depict a positively beautiful character because

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there has been only one positively beautiful figure (litso) on earth: Christ. He then discusses the most successful beautiful figures in the Western tradition and their relationship to the comic. I will mention only that of all the beautiful figures (litsa) in Christian literature the most perfect is Don Quixote. But he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time comic (smeshon). Dickens’s Pickwick (an infinitely weaker idea than Don Quixote, but nevertheless immense) is also comic (smeshon), and that is precisely why he is successful. Compassion arises for the one who is ridiculed (osmeiannyi), for the one who is beautiful and does not know his own worth: consequently, again sympathy arises in the reader. This eliciting of compassion is the secret of humor. (28.2:251)

The problematic relationship between the comic and the beautiful, which Dostoevsky calls the ideal and associates with Christ, is central to the characterization of Myshkin in The Idiot. The literary goal, therefore, was to depict the beautiful without using the comic to arouse compassion for the good that is ridiculed. Aglaya, one of the heroines of The Idiot and the ­closest to Dostoevsky’s voice regarding the idea of the beautiful and the comic in the novel, insists on seeing Myshkin in terms of Don Quixote. But she also wishes that Myshkin, her ideal, not be reduced or tainted by the comic, not be the object of ridicule. Aglaya wants not only a serious Don Quixote but a non-comic one as well. Myshkin, she says, and wants to believe, “is a Don Quixote, only serious and not comic” (8:207). By comic she means ridiculous, subject to ridicule. In Poor Folk Dostoevsky dealt directly with the comic that was serious. Devushkin, the poor clerk who is the hero, appears ridiculous to others, but he is undeserving of ridicule. Although he thinks that he is worthy of being ridiculed (osmeiannyi), “he is beautiful, but does not know his own worth” and “consequently sympathy arises in the reader.” For Dostoevsky the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich, is ridiculed not only by his fellow workers but also by the narrator and author. He is a man who can hardly speak, not to mention love, think, and lead a spiritual life. In Poor Folk Dostoevsky restores the soul of the little man by giving his hero, Devushkin, not only speech, and thus a voice (the novel is epistolary and consequently the story is told in the first person), but sacrificial love for a woman, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity, humor, a recognition of his own limitations, and a desire to improve himself. Devushkin often makes a fool of himself, is laughed at by others no less than Akaky ­Akakievich, and he lowers himself in front of his boss (“His Excellency”);

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but not only does he not deserve to be ridiculed, he is the object of the author’s most serious existential treatment. Dostoevsky even has his hero come to a realization of his own worth through the power of his love for another. I know how much I owe you, my darling. Getting to know you, I came first to know myself better and to love you; and before I knew you, my angel, I was all alone and as it were asleep, and scarcely alive. They said, the spiteful creatures, that even my appearance was unseemly and they were disgusted with me, and so I began to be disgusted with myself; they said I was stupid and I really thought that I was stupid. When you came to me, you lighted up my dark life, so that my heart and my soul were filled with light and I gained peace at heart, and realized that I was no worse than others, that the only thing is that I am not brilliant in any way, that I have no polish or style about me, but I am still a man, in heart and mind a man.33

What is at issue here again is what was most central to Erich Auerbach’s praise of the nineteenth-century realist novel, whose most distinguishing characteristic in terms of the history of Western literature he saw as its ability to treat characters of the lowest class with that existential seriousness previously reserved to the members of the nobility: a clear breach in the classical ideal of decorum. This was what was involved in Dostoevsky’s groundbreaking transformation of Gogol, choosing the lowest of the low, a character that everyone laughed at, as the hero of a sentimental novel. Later in The Idiot Dostoevsky would try to create a positive character with different abilities and limitations, but one nevertheless, who, at times, is laughed at and ridiculed by all, but one who, like Devushkin, has a pure heart and the compassion characteristic of the highest Christianity. It may seem a shock at first to see Prince Myshkin as a direct descendant, even variation, of Makar Devushkin (the blessed virgin), but Dostoevsky’s own words bear it out. I have examined Devushkin’s role in Poor Folk partly as an introduction to the next chapter, which is devoted to the critical reception of Isay ­Fomich. Critics unhappy with Dostoevsky’s portrait of Isay Fomich will often cite Devushkin, or characters like him, as proof that Dostoevsky could have treated Isay Fomich differently but chose not to. I think it is also necessary to see Isay Fomich in a wider context: that is, to see him not only against other characters from Notes from the House of the Dead but also against his comic predecessors (Devushkin) and descendants (Myshkin). The intratextual contrast between Isay Fomich and Aley is certainly stark enough, but it is even more stark when we see Isay Fomich against the background of

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comic characters through whom Dostoevsky presents his most cherished and profound ideas. On the other hand, we should not be too hasty in dismissing the comic Isay Fomich’s integration into the deepest religious core of the novel, into the personal fate of the narrator and his class and their potential for spiritual regeneration, a subject on which I focus my attention in Chapter 7. But first we must see how the critics have dealt with “the intentional text” that we have just laid out in terms of Jewish portrayal.

ch ap te r

6

Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Jew and the Critics

Many commentators have argued that in Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky seemed content merely to replicate a commonplace Jewish stereo­type so that at best Isay Fomich is a comic caricature.1 Others, while conceding the derogatory aspects of Dostoevsky’s portrait, have seen the portrait of Isay Fomich as relatively good-humored or at least lacking in hostility.2 Robert Louis Jackson concedes that Isay Fomich at prayer is intended by the author to be a demeaning and comic portrait. “Dostoevskij . . . did not lift even a corner of the comic curtain that concealed the tragic life of the Jew Isaj Fomič Bumstein.”3 But he also views Isay Fomich as a lost literary opportunity given that in The Village of Stepanchikovo Dostoevsky treated Foma Opiskin, in many ways similar to Isay Fomich, seriously and problematically. Since The Village of Stepanchikovo was written approximately at the same time as Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky was, so to speak, not only not taking advantage of the work that he himself had done two decades earlier in Poor Folk and The Double but also not exploiting the potential of a character that he had just recently created. Fillipp Ingold, who has written the longest analysis of Isay Fomich, concedes in the end that Isay Fomich is a ridiculous character (eine lächerliche Figur), lacking stature and voice,4 but not before attempting to find at least some redeeming traits in Isay Fomich’s literary function, if not his portrait, suggesting similarities

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or associations of Isay Fomich with Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky—and even Christ! But when Ingold argues, with references to Sartre and Nietzsche, that Isay Fomich’s religious performance can also be seen as the existential self-affirmation of an anti-hero, he has not so much deconstructed Dostoevsky’s text as created his own.5 As we shall see, there is internal textual evidence that may be interpreted as undercutting some of the narrator’s rhetoric relating to Isay Fomich but little if any supporting Isay Fomich as an existential hero. Critics have implied that they have cause for castigating Dostoevsky’s portrait of Isay Fomich. They ask, as we asked in the previous chapter, why Dostoevsky, who showed so much compassion for the downtrodden in Poor Folk, could not see Isay Fomich with the same eyes. How could he have extended his “Auerbachian” experiment to hardened prisoners, many of them brutal murderers, and not to the camp’s only Jewish convict? Since the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century comprised serious portrayals of Jews, both negative and positive, it was not artistically inconceivable for Dostoevsky to have portrayed a more problematic Jewish character. Nor was Isay Fomich’s character determined by his real-life model; in Notes from the House of the Dead, prototypes of the prisoners often undergo change as they pass from life to art. But as we have seen, Dostoevsky was uninterested in exploring Isay Fomich; he wanted and needed him simple. Any other Isay Fomich would have been unable to carry out the aesthetic and ideological functions for which he was fashioned. Although Dostoevsky’s “choice” not to treat Isay Fomich with existential seriousness has not sat well with many, no one has confronted this empathetic and aesthetic omission as intriguingly as Leonid Tsypkin in his short novel Summer in Baden-Baden (Leto v Badene, 1978). Just as Turgenev’s “The Jew” throws light on Gogol’s portrayal of Jews in Taras Bulba, so Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden illuminates the portrait of the Jew in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. Tsypkin’s work recreates the summer of 1867 that Dostoevsky and his new wife, Anna Grigoryevna, spent in BadenBaden, a gambling resort in southeastern Germany. The narrator of the novel is a Jewish intellectual traveling by train in late December from Moscow to Petersburg, probably sometime during the late 1970s. He has taken along with him a refurbished copy of Anna Grigoryevna’s Diary, transcriptions of her shorthand notes about the couple’s time abroad, especially in Baden-Baden, where her husband’s gambling obsession manifested itself at its most intense.6 Dostoevsky’s constant losses placed a heavy burden on the

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marriage. The couple frequently pawned their most precious possessions and made requests from friends, relatives, and acquaintances for money, just to meet everyday expenses for food and lodging. As the narrator reads from Anna’s diary, and later when he arrives in Petersburg and revisits some of the places associated with Dostoevsky’s life, he not only reimagines the scenes that Anna relates but also recreates the inner life of his beloved author— the best way, he believes, to understand Dostoevsky’s personality—in which both past and future events converge.7 Like many other Jewish intellectuals, the narrator, while venerating Dostoevsky the artist, is dismayed by the reprehensible antisemitism that he sees in Dostoevsky’s writings. His views on this matter differ little from other Jewish admirers of Dostoevsky who similarly found his representation of Jews disturbing and embarrassing. The narrator writes: It struck me as being strange to the point of implausibility (do nepravdopodobiia strannym) that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, the jealous defender of the insulted and the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each leaf and every blade of grass—that this man should not have come up with a single word in defense or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years—could he have been so blind?—or was he blinded by hatred?—and he did not even refer to the Jews as a people, but as a tribe as though they were a group of natives from the Polynesian islands or somewhere.8

The author and narrator are clearly not the same. The narrator’s statement that Dostoevsky dismissed the Jews as though they were a tribe from the Polynesian islands is ridiculous. Dostoevsky’s main contention in his famous article on the Jewish question in The Diary of a Writer (1877) is that the Jews are indeed a people, a narod, and that is precisely the problem: as a people, he says, they have infiltrated all European states (as a fifth column) and are determining the foreign and economic policy of the entire globe.9 Moreover, not only are they the sole ancient people to have survived into the present, their history has not come to end: they have not said their final word. Since the narrator sees Isay Fomich as a typical nineteenth-century antisemitic caricature, he becomes “implausible” in a writer of Dostoevsky’s stature. “The arrogant and at the same time cowardly Isaiah Fomich . . . who did not scruple to lend money at enormous interest to his fellow-convicts” (114–15; 154), is the main case in point, but for the narrator Isay Fomich is no exception: all the Jews in Dostoevsky’s work are cut from the same

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antisemitic cloth. The narrator does not mention Dostoevsky’s narrative of Jewish and Christian reconciliation at the end of his article on the Jewish question in The Diary of a Writer, implying that it is beneath serious consideration; the real Dostoevsky manifested himself only in his diatribes against the Jews or in contemptible and ridiculous figures like Liamshin from The Possessed or Isay Fomich from Notes from the House of the Dead. For the narrator, Isay Fomich is central because he is the most fully defined portrait of a Jewish character in Dostoevsky’s fiction.10 But Tsypkin’s narrator not only wonders, like other critics, how Dostoevsky who expressed so much sympathy for downtrodden and ridiculous characters could not see the “real” Isay Fomich, he also asks, pushing further, how the historical Dostoevsky, whose most distressing experience in life was to be ridiculed and humiliated, could not see Isay Fomich as a pathetic figure. And how could he join in the laughter? Was there some intrinsic defect in Dostoevsky that prevented him from associating the humiliation that he personally experienced in his own life and career with the sufferings of Isay Fomich? In order to dramatize the implausibility of Dostoevsky’s blindness in his characterization of Jews, and particularly of Isay Fomich, Tsypkin attempts to show that Dostoevsky, the historical figure (or the historical figure of Tsypkin’s imagination), bears a strong resemblance to Isay Fomich, and that he displays many of the same characteristics. Toward the end of Summer in Baden-Baden,” Dostoevsky looks in the mirror and to his horror he sees not himself but Isay Fomich. At least for a moment, and or course only in the imagination of the narrator, Isay Fomich has become Dostoevsky’s double! But what could Dostoevsky and Isay Fomich possibly have in common? For the narrator, if not for Tsypkin himself, the answer lies in a deeper understanding of Dostoevsky’s unusual personality. The narrator presents Dostoevsky as suffering from a serious neurosis.11 The victim of two powerful forces over which he has no control—pride and fear of humiliation—he differs little from his most original creation, the hypersensitive underground man of heightened consciousness. On one hand, Dostoevsky believes himself to be better than everyone else (literarily speaking); on the other, he sees himself as socially inferior, often imagining himself to be the object of derisive laugher. When undergoing emotional stress (losing at gambling) or experiencing strong emotions (sexual relations with his wife), Dostoevsky replays in his imagination the most humiliating experiences (real or imag-

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ined) of his past, especially scenes from the prison camp in Omsk and from social gatherings in Petersburg in the late 1840s, a period when his literary star had already considerably declined.12 Dostoevsky’s visions of humiliation are variations on the same images. The first is that of the brutal commandant of the prison, a drunk, red-nosed swine, with yellow eyes, dilated and predatory pupils, a bull-like neck, and a Gargantuan chin. His face resembles the gorged abdomen of a blood-sated mosquito. It is he who Dostoevsky imagines beating and humiliating him before laughing onlookers. The other recurring vision is a Petersburg social gathering of high-society ladies and literati, including his literary rivals (most prominently, Ivan Turgenev) but sometimes anachronistically his own wife, Anna, and his former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova. And then everyone laughed at him, and some even wrote a quatrain about him—but she [Suslova] remained just as serious and attentive towards him, simply taking her hand away—but she, too, was beginning to laugh at him, and the others in the drawing room were now really roaring with laughter, those self-satisfied mediocrities [his literary rivals] . . . all of them, including her [Anya], laughed at him. . . . and she [Anya] no longer dared laugh but simply lowered her head further and further, as if trying to hide her face from him, and he would go down on his knees in front of her, kissing her feet and begging her to forgive him but, above all, not to laugh at him. (37–38; 68–69; italics mine)

In another passage, the narrator focuses on Dostoevsky’s fawning and humiliating behavior before others, likening Dostoevsky’s actions to a comic performance or dance (a cancan or a circus act), not unlike the one Dostoevsky described Isay Fomich performing for the spectators in Notes from the House of the Dead. Because Tsypkin’s style is to mix heterogeneous material into page-long sentences (that are sometimes even longer) without logical connectives, I would like to cite the relevant passage in full without ellipses. Here Dostoevsky and his wife have finally taken leave of Baden-Baden and are on their way to Basil, Switzerland. The lonely figure in narrow checked trousers, black top hat and black Berlin frock-coat with flapping skirts and pockets bulging with sandwiches, flew along the snow-covered platform of some station between Baden-Baden and Basel, bobbing up and down, curtseying and performing absurd dancing steps, as he shouted something about being short-changed by a franc, but the train had long since gone and night had descended, and the man continued to run and bob and curtsey, shining brightly in some flood-light

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which persistently followed him, as if all this were taking place on a stage, and circling slowly in the shaft of light and falling were flakes of snow, covering his face and beard in a white shroud—and the platform came to an end, and he now ran along a tight-rope stretched across the dome of a circus tent, and the white shroud covering his face was the mask of Harlequin from which tufts of his grey beard protruded—and removing his top-hat, he would throw it up into the air and catch it in mid-flight, curtseying and executing all kinds of dance steps as he did so. (117; 156–57)

In Summer in Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky is a sad figure, but like one of Dostoevsky’s own characters, he can also be comic, even grotesque. This inappropriately and ridiculously dressed man in the above passage, running along the snow-covered platform with his coat flapping in the wind and sandwiches stuffed in his pockets, is almost certainly a direct allusion to the most pathetic of all Dostoevsky characters, the elder Pokrovsky from Poor Folk, compared to whom Devushkin and Isay Fomich seem models of propriety and decorum. But Tsypkin pushes further by presenting Dostoevsky as a circus performer, not in a real circus, but in real life, performing all the necessary steps, curtseys, and bows of his ritual (just as Isay Fomich performed his), performing for the approval and applause of the spectators, who are not circus spectators at all but officials from whom Dostoevsky was begging favors. The horror of Dostoevsky’s dream concludes with a vision of Isay Fomich himself. And he walked up to the big-looking glass mirror hanging in the entrance hall to straighten his appearance, but instead of himself in the mirror he saw the puny figure of Isay Fomich, without any clothes on with the breast of a chicken—and he recoiled, and Isay Fomich recoiled, too—and then he started to bombard Isay Fomich with the sandwiches he had stuffed in his pockets at the station where he had shouted about the short-changed francs with the piercing scream of a moneylender who had been robbed, drowning out the whistle of the steam-engine, but the more he threw sandwiches at Isay Fomich, the clearer and more lifelike the feeble figure became. When I woke up [the narrator] it was already light. (119; 158)

So all this is in fact the narrator dreaming of Dostoevsky having a nightmare or hallucination about Isay Fomich. Where in the previous passage Dostoevsky became a clown, a conventional buffoon of the commedia dell’arte, dressed in a mask, checkered pants, and a top-hat, here Dostoevsky descends even lower, he has become Isay Fomich, not only looking and performing like Isay Fomich but crying out (one recalls the howling of

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Isay Fomich at prayer or in the bathhouse) with the piercing scream of a moneylender. The more Dostoevsky tries to rid himself of Isay Fomich— by throwing sandwiches at him—the more real and lifelike Isay Fomich becomes: that is, the more Dostoevsky becomes like his plucked-chicken creation. On one hand, this scene is all the dream of the narrator, on the other, it is an expansion on the narrator’s criticism of Dostoevsky’s literary flaw, his blindness about Jews. In his “literary criticism” the narrator says that he cannot understand how “a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others” could fail to understand the suffering Jew. In the novel itself that he writes about Dostoevsky, Tsypkin uses his narrator to take this criticism further by transforming Dostoevsky himself into one of the characters for whose sufferings Dostoevsky expressed so much sympathy in his fiction. How could he feel no sympathy if he himself was not so different from Isay Fomich? How could he not have recognized the comic mask of the real Isay Fomich when all his life he was acting and fawning before others, when he suffered the pain of humiliation, when he was continually tormented by the derisive laughter of others? How could he not have known, when he would continually plead with his own wife not to laugh at him? But there are still other reasons why Tsypkin may have his narrator imagine Dostoevsky imagining himself as Isay Fomich. At the end of his stay in Baden-Baden, when Dostoevsky had reached rock bottom, which, in his dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations, is again associated with derisive laughter, Isay Fomich becomes the fitting symbol of the nadir of his fortunes. Dostoevsky could hardly have imagined a humiliation any more painful than to have been reduced to an Isay Fomich, a performer, an actor, someone who is laughed at, not only by Turgenev, not only by society ladies, not only by Apollinaria and Anya, but by everybody without exception. Tsypkin presents Dostoevsky masochistically seeking out humiliation. There hardly could be a more perfect vehicle for this self-laceration than identification with “that killingly funny man,” Isay Fomich, who, to make matters worse, has now become emboldened, throwing back the sandwiches thrown at him by his creator. On the last page of the novel, the narrator asks himself whether his “­visions” in the apartment of an old family friend (Galya) in Leningrad, “in which, at the end, he [Dostoevsky] turned into Isay Fomich, was only the pathetic attempt of my subconscious mind to ‘legitimatize’ my passion” (145; 190). The narrator’s use of the expression to legitimize (uzakonit’ ) his

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passion implies that he can accept Dostoevsky better if he sees him as a suffering Jew, if he sees him as a hypersensitive man who has been continually humiliated, and who is struggling to deal with his feelings of humiliation just as the real-life prototype of Isay Fomich must have done. The narrator can feel compassion for Dostoevsky/Isay Fomich, the image in the mirror, even if the historical Dostoevsky could not feel compassion for Isay Fomich. Once the narrator identifies Dostoevsky with Isay Fomich, he can transfer his compassion from Isay Fomich to Dostoevsky, from the character to the character’s creator. The narrator, unsure about the reduction of Isay Fomich in his dream, phrases his idea about the legitimization of his passion for Dostoevsky as a question. But in effect, reducing Dostoevsky to Isay Fomich fulfills a double purpose. It turns Dostoevsky into a character resembling the characters in his fiction for whom one can feel sympathy, but it also gives the narrator a chance to settle scores with the great writer, perhaps even to exact a measure of revenge. By reducing Dostoevsky to the level of Isay Fomich, Tsypkin is, in effect, doing the same thing to Dostoevsky that Dostoevsky does to Isay Fomich. He reduces the man who has ridiculed his people to a buffoon, a clown, a harlequin; he subjects him to the most humiliating reduction that Dostoevsky could possibly imagine. But paradoxically, he shows his moral superiority over his literary idol by treating him with existential seriousness, the same existential seriousness that Dostoevsky did not apply to Isay Fomich because he did not think he was worthy of such treatment. The mirror scene shows that Tsypkin is dealing much more with the Isay Fomich of his own imagination than with the Isay Fomich of Dostoevsky’s novel. He, in effect, takes the portrait of Isay Fomich out of its immediate context, Notes from the House of the Dead, and places it into the context of contemporary readership, where the focus of interest in Isay Fomich has been for several decades. Summer in Baden-Baden becomes an enactment of reception theory; the author-critic participates in shaping the work that he is addressing and transforming the ethnic images he is contesting. After reading Summer in Baden-Baden, one is compelled to wonder whether the real Isay Fomich is only the one confined to Notes from the House of the Dead. Can he also be part of a tradition that includes his transformation in Summer in Baden-Baden? Is Shylock only the character that Shakespeare created for his audiences, or is he also the character who lives in the imagination of contemporary audiences, influenced by their place and time? Isay Fomich is far from dead; in fact, he remains more alive and problematic for

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Tsypkin at the end of the twentieth century than Dostoevsky ever thought him to be in the nineteenth century. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, Dostoevsky at some level knew that Isay Fomich was problematic, in fact, far more problematic than Tsypkin ever imagined, for he created a far more devastating picture of himself in Isay Fomich than Tsypkin saw in that terrible mirror.

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7

Notes from the House of the Dead The Other Isay Fomich: Subversion and the Revenge of the Stereotype

In this chapter I shall argue a somewhat counterintuitive thesis: that the text of Notes from the House of the Dead does not completely enclose Isay Fomich, inextricably tying him to the ridiculous role for which he was ostensibly conceived; but that there is a creditable deconstructive alternative for Dostoevsky’s Isay Fomich similar to the one I proposed for Gogol’s Jewish characters. I show that the novel includes details that can justify an interpretation of Isay Fomich that is not only different from the one I have presented so far (the intentional text) but one that undercuts the rhetorical strategies of the novel itself, casting into doubt the narrator’s possibility for resurrection from the dead. For this other Isay Fomich, not as Tsypkin had reimagined him, but as the narrator himself presents him, resembles no one in the novel as much as the narrator himself, an identification that the narrator repeatedly and anxiously resists. I do not have in mind a different Isay Fomich similar to the imaginatively recreated Isay Fomich explored in Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in BadenBaden. Nor do I have in mind how a “real” Isay Fomich might have played the buffoon as a means of defending himself in a hostile environment: that

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is, how he might have been like Foma Opiskin, the hero of The Village of Stepanchikovo, or a Fedor Karamazov. We can never know what the real Isay Fomich was really like.1 Nor does the text lend any support for Isay Fomich as a master manipulator of his own comic masks.2 In fact, whereas Foma Opiskin and Fedor Karamazov are portrayed psychologically with explanations given for their masochistic behavior, Isay Fomich remains, we are led to believe, an uncomplicated plucked chicken. Though some hold that the situation of Isay Bumstel (the prototype of Isay Fomich) must have been much more difficult than the way it is represented in Notes from the House of the Dead, they still maintain, as Jackson does, that Dostoevsky did not lift “even a corner of the comic curtain that concealed the tragic life of the Jew Isay Fomich.”3 If Isay Fomich’s real life was indeed tragic, Dostoevsky was either oblivious to it or did not care; or, as I will suggest later, he did not dare to explore it.4 The novel gives the impression that it never entered the narrator’s mind that Isay Fomich’s murder of his wife could have anything to do with the narrator’s murder of his own wife or with the uxoricide in “Akulka’s Husband.” If anything, it seems that these wife-murder parallels are introduced to make Isay Fomich seem not more problematic but more ridiculous, more incommensurate with the crime he committed. Critics who still wonder why Dostoevsky did not make Isay Fomich more sympathetic or at least treat him more seriously often ascribe this failure to his virulent antisemitism. Arguing backward from The Diary of a Writer and The Brothers Karamazov, they transpose Dostoevsky’s views of the 1870s onto the writer of the early 1860s. But as we have seen, there is a world of a difference between the portrayal of the harmless Isay Fomich in Notes from the House of the Dead and the more abstract world-threatening Jews of The Diary of a Writer. And whether we like it or not, Dostoevsky had aesthetic and ideological reasons for portraying Isay Fomich the way he did. He needed a ridiculous Isay Fomich to provide comic relief. He also needed him to serve as a dramatic foil for the depiction of the religion of the Russian prisoners and a few of the pious Muslims. But as I will argue in this chapter, the narrator most of all needed an Isay Fomich who in no way resembled himself, for the closer the narrator comes to resemble Isay Fomich in situation, the more he is implicitly undercutting the major idea of the novel: the potential of the narrator as well as other members of his class to overcome their separation from the Russian people and achieve resurrection from the dead. In Notes from the House of the Dead, there obviously can be no resurrection from the dead for the Jew, Isay Fomich.

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The task of the narrator, then, is to dissociate himself as much as possible from Isay Fomich, especially where their situations seem similar, and to contrast the existential gravity of his plight, and all its national implications, with the comic and often ridiculous situation of Isay Fomich, who he implies actually had a better life in prison than he could ever have had outside. As I hope to show, however, just as Gogol was not able to control the damage that Yankel did to the status of his epic hero, Taras Bulba, so Dostoevsky is often unable to control the far more serious damage that Isay Fomich does to his narrator, and by extension to the author of the semi-autobiographical novel who stands behind him. It is important, then, to look more closely at the elements in the portrayal of Isay Fomich that can be seen as escaping the author’s intentions and undercutting his role as only a ridiculous Jew, to interpret Isay Fomich otherwise: that is, to interpret him against the narrator’s and author’s intentions, against the rhetoric of the novel. We need then to take a closer look at Isay Fomich as a practicing Jew, upon whom, in part, the narrator’s existential representation of Russian spirituality and Muslim piety is based. We also need to examine Dostoevsky’s flippant treatment of Isay Fomich’s beating in the context of the novel’s otherwise eloquent and vehement attack against corporal punishment; and finally we need to analyze those scenes in which the narrator and Jew come closest together, some of which the narrator must present dismissively and comically in order to avoid contamination by association, to avoid being seen as “other”—or even alien—and thus incapable of salvation.

i s ay f o m i c h : r e l i g i o n a n d pa s s i o n The narrator exploits the religious rituals of Isay Fomich to exaggerate his comic characteristics, necessary for creating a sharp contrast between Jewish and Christian and Jewish and Muslim spirituality. If, however, we can speak here of an unconscious text, I would suggest that the narrator employs Isay Fomich’s ridiculousness most of all to increase the distance between himself and the Jew in the novel’s salvation plot. The narrator wants least of all to be identified with Isay Fomich in the sphere of religious practice, beliefs, and hopes. The function of the disassociative technique that Dostoevsky employs in his religious portrayal of Isay Fomich is to make him the Jew, the absolute other, completely ridiculous, and thus unworthy of serious consideration.

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He does not succeed, however, nearly as much as he would like: there is an element of the serious in Isay Fomich’s religion that the narrator reveals despite his intentions. Perhaps because he tries so hard to erase this element of seriousness, it stands out all the more prominently. Although Isay Fomich is portrayed as an antithesis of Aley, the character epitomizing the novel’s ideal of piety, he also appears to be the antithesis of a Russian character who represents the lowest form of religious practice and feeling in the novel, Akim Akimovich, a Russian Orthodox Christian from the nobility who helped the narrator with daily tasks during his prison stay but whom the narrator finds bound by ritual and thus completely lacking in religious spirit. He was not particularly religious (religiozen) either, for propriety (­blagonravie) seemed to have swallowed up in him all other human qualities and attributes, all passions and desires, bad and good alike. As a result, he was preparing for the solemn day [Christmas] without anxiety or excitement, untroubled by painful and quite useless memories, but with a quiet, methodical propriety (blagonravie) which was just sufficient for the fulfillment of his ­duties and of the ritual that had been prescribed once and for all. (168; 4:105)

The description of Akim Akimovich’s decorous, passionless, methodical performance of his religious duties is presented here as a manifestation of his devotion to decorum and restraint. He a Laodicean in religion, a man who lacks passion, but even more a man whose passion has been destroyed by his religious practice. The narrator simultaneously reveals and denies the religious passion in Isay Fomich that Akim Akimovich lacks. He observes it, for he shows it, but he refuses to believe what he sees. In fact, he attempts to show that the passion that Isay Fomich exhibited was prescribed by ritual and therefore his religious practice was not significantly different from Akim Akimovich’s. He is not guessing, he tells us, but merely reporting what Isay Fomich himself told him about his Sabbath ritual. “I once questioned Isay Fomich about the meaning of the sobbing and the sudden triumphant transitions to happiness and bliss. Isay Fomich simply loved such questions from me” (153; 4:95). Everything that Isay Fomich did was prescribed (predpisano). The law prescribes (zakon predpisyvaet) that at some points he must sob and beat his breast. Then, at other times, he must suddenly (dolzhen vdrug) remember the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. The narrator comments that “this suddenly is also prescribed by law (eto vdrug tozhe predpisano zakonom).” At this

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point Isay Fomich must (on dolzhen) immediately express joy and break out into song, laughter, and prayer. In other words, it is all scripted passion. But here the narrator—or Dostoevsky—is unable to contain his own creation. Isay Fomich’s performance of the ritual is not entirely prescribed; the text describes an idiosyncratic performance, an interpretation. There is more of Isay Fomich in the ritual than the ritual is in Isay Fomich. Again, the prisoners get it right. “Wow, he is really going at it (ish’ ego razbiraet)” (4:95). Yes, one should not be making a spectacle of one’s religious ritual; yes, Isay Fomich is a performer, but he is also passionate by nature and often incapable of restraining himself, incapable of acting like the decorous Akim Akimovich. The prisoners, to be sure, laugh at Isay Fomich, but they also admire him for his exuberance, his passion. One could perhaps be more dismissive of Isay Fomich’s Sabbath passion and exuberance, ascribing them completely to prescribed ritual, if they were not copiously attested elsewhere in the novel. Isay Fomich is passionate not only in prayer. Everything that he does he does exuberantly, whether it be lending money, performing religious rituals, or attending the performances at the Christmas theatricals. In the bathhouse scene, Isay Fomich simply cannot restrain himself, constantly hiring more and more prisoners to beat him to a state of stupefaction. Again, the prisoners shout: “The guy really knows how to steam himself, that a boy, Isay Fomich (Zdorov parit’sia, molodets Isay ­Fomich)” (4:99). Of course, the prisoners find all this funny (the narrator finds it both funny and frightening), but there is also a certain amount of admiration and approval for anyone who knows how to make the most of a Russian bath, who is passionate, who is capable of experiencing ecstasy (ekstaz). We see the same passionate Isay Fomich at the theatricals. To be sure, the text says that Isay Fomich is by nature a performer and it is understandable why he enjoys the Christmas theatricals. But it is more than that. Just as in the bathhouse scene, so at the prisoners’ performances, Isay Fomich is completely transformed and transported, experiencing something resembling ecstasy. In fact, he is even more excited by the theatricals than the narrator, for whom they are the best testament of the potential of the Russian people. When it comes to his passions, money is of no significance for Isay Fomich; he pays for the best seat in the house, as he always does (189–90; 4:120, 4:123). The most revelatory scene with respect to Isay Fomich’s religious feeling is the one in which the major enters the barracks while Isay Fomich is saying his prayers. It is here that the narrator insistently refuses to see and acknowledge what he himself shows—the religious fervor of Isay Fomich.

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On one hand, he is astonished that Isay Fomich seems to have been completely unaware of the presence of the major; on the other, he would have us believe that Isay Fomich is fully conscious of the major’s presence but continues his prayers because he knows that what he is doing is explicitly permitted by the law. Once while the prayer was in full swing the major came into the ward accompanied by the officer on duty and the sentries. All the convicts drew themselves up by the bed; Isay Fomich alone began shouting and carrying on more than ever. He knew that the prayer was not prohibited, it was impossible to interrupt it, and, of course, there was no risk in his shouting before the major. (154; 4:95–96)

The narrator’s comments are at best disingenuous. Yes, perhaps even the Isay Fomich of the novel knows that he is permitted to pray. But it hardly seems possible that of all people Isay Fomich would believe that the major—a man who was later dismissed for violating prison regulations in the treatment of prisoners—could do no harm to him because prison regulations forbade it. The House of the Dead is hardly a bastion of the law. None of the prisoners believe that the major is incapable of using his power arbitrarily. None of the prisoners continued to do what they were doing when the major entered the barrack room. All of them, many of them murderers, stood terrified at attention. It strains credulity that the meek, cowardly Jew of Notes from the House of the Dead would pay no attention to the major and continue his prayers just because he could do so according to regulations. Isay Fomich perhaps can banter with the prisoners and say “bold” things because he knows, as the narrator tells us, that the prisoners like him, and his celebration of the Sabbath is really a performance for them. If, as the narrator says, Isay Fomich performs his ritual for an audience—that is, for the prisoners who can appreciate his performance—why does he continue to perform for them when they are standing at terrified attention? Or is he really performing for the major, the man least likely to appreciate his performance, the one person who would like nothing better than to ban the performance of the Christmas theatricals? Despite the narrator’s insistence that Isay Fomich acted as he did because he was conscious of Russian law, he reveals that he is in fact no less surprised than the other prisoners at Isay Fomich’s celebration of the Sabbath in front of the major. An hour after the event, while Isay Fomich is eating, the narrator, acknowledging that regulations did not always protect the prisoners

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from the major’s arbitrary rule, asks Isay Fomich why he kept praying, when the major could easily have exploded. Isay Fomich is perplexed, obviously not understanding the question. The narrator gives Isay Fomich’s version of what occurred. “What major?” “What do you mean what major! You mean you really didn’t see him?” “No.” “Why, he stood not a yard away from you, directly facing you.” But Isay Fomich began most earnestly assuring me that he had absolutely not seen any major and that when he is praying he falls into a state resembling ecstasy (ekstaz) so that he sees and hears nothing of what is going on around him. (154; 4:96)

However dismissively the narrator presents Isay Fomich’s explanation of what happened, the reader senses that the prisoners understand Isay Fomich better than the narrator. They understand that in his religious rituals they see the same exuberant Isay Fomich who loses himself at the theatricals, steams himself into stupefaction in the bathhouse, and does indeed experience a type of ecstasy in prayer. One can understand the narrator’s explanations as his attempt to preserve his killingly funny Jew at any cost, but here the text tells a story different from the forced, self-serving interpretation he offers us. Isay Fomich turns out to be the antithesis of Akim Akimovich, the epitome of the lukewarm in religion. For Isay Fomich it can never get too hot, especially in his religious practice. Later, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky will present ecstasy as the defining element of Russian Orthodox experience.5 If, in fact, Isay Fomich experiences religious ecstasy, he becomes, at least, a less than ridiculous character and potentially a character who challenges the sharp contrasts the narrator draws among the Abrahamic religions, and perhaps most important, a character whose ridiculous religious practices cannot be used so easily to underscore the existential seriousness of the narrator’s Christian salvific agenda.

i s ay f o m i c h : t h e h o r ro r o f corporal punishment Just as Isay Fomich’s religious life cannot be so easily dismissed, neither can his experience in prison. One might argue that Dostoevsky handles the beating that Isay Fomich received on entering prison in the same flippant way

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that he dispenses with his religious practice or any other aspect of Isay Fomich’s existence in prison. But the narrator’s description of Isay Fomich as meek, puny, and chicken-like also does not jive with his capacity to survive such a severe beating. Although he concedes that he could never fathom how Isay Fomich could hold out against sixty lashes (Ia nikak ne mog poniat’ kak mog on vyderzhat’ shest’desiat pletei) (4:55), he does not think it necessary to explore this discrepancy. However, he deals quite differently with a similar discrepancy regarding a prisoner of the nobility, a certain Ilyinsky serving a sentence for killing his father (he is one of the prototypes of Dmitry Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov). The narrator states that he knows that Ilyinsky committed the crime but he cannot believe it psychologically. (Later when it turns out that he did not commit the crime after all, Dostoevsky includes a passage in the novel indicating that Ilyinsky was completely innocent of all charges.) But there is a striking difference in the way the narrator deals with the discrepancies in Isay Fomich’s and Ilyinsky’s stories. He attempts to understand Ilyinsky psychologically, discussing the relation between Ilyinsky and his crime and even using his case to make generalizations about character and criminality. He makes no such attempt with Isay Fomich. Again Dostoevsky does not pursue the threads that he pursues with many other prisoners, not so much because Isay Fomich must be only comic, being needed for comic relief, but because he must not be portrayed existentially. The narrator’s statement that Isay Fomich was badly beaten follows his detailed descriptions of the brutal beatings endured by many hardened convicts, men incomparably stronger than Isay Fomich, some of whom even died during or after corporal punishment. This is why the narrator himself cannot believe that Isay Fomich survived, implicitly conceding that there was no way that the narrator himself could have endured such a beating. The mention of Isay Fomich’s beating is related in a comic scene, but the comic manner cannot erase the seriousness of Isay Fomich’s suffering, especially given the novel’s vigorous condemnation of corporal punishment in the Russian penal system. Here we need to pay especial attention to the literary and cultural context in which the beating plays itself out. It is true that Isay Fomich is “only” beaten: that is, he is not tossed into the river to drown as in Taras Bulba or hanged like Girshel in “The Jew.” But since the narrator says that even strong young Russian peasants died during punishment, there was probably no one in the prison who thought that Isay Fomich would come out alive, who did not think that such a beating was tantamount to capital punishment. Isay

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Fomich was as lucky to escape from his punishment as Yankel was from the pogrom in which many of his fellow Jews perished in the river. We have seen that Turgenev in his narrative against capital punishment, and in reaction to Gogol, employed a reprehensible Jew in order to argue against execution in any situation, irrespective of who might be the victim. Dostoevsky, even more explicitly writing a brief against corporal punishment, describes in stark detail all of its horrors, concluding with an implicit plea for ending the practice not only because of what it does to the victim and the perpetrator (the executioner) but also because of the damage it does to the fabric of civil society. Society which looks indifferently on such a phenomenon [corporal punishment] is already contaminated to its very foundations. In short, the right of capital punishment given to one man over another is one of the sores of social life, one of the strongest forces destructive of every germ, every effort in society towards civic feeling, and a sufficient cause for its inevitable dissolution. (241; 4:154–55).

In “The Jew” Turgenev was arguing against a practice, capital punishment, that still had widespread support among all classes; however, Dostoevsky was condemning a form of punishment that educated sentiment had long turned against. At the time of writing Notes from the House of the Dead, most European countries had already abolished corporal punishment and Russia itself was just short of ending it. It was abolished in Russia in 1863, one year after the publication of Notes from the House of the Dead. In this context, precisely because the narrator incorporates the statement about Isay Fomich’s beating in a comic passage, the beating stands out; it cannot be erased by the comic mode in which it is presented. The same is true of Isay Fomich’s branding, from which he bears facial scars. To the narrator the branding only makes Isay Fomich look more ridiculous, and he incorporates it into a comic statement about Isay Fomich’s marriage plans on release from prison.6 Branding, however, was considered by the 1861 Russian committee looking into the abolishment of corporal punishment as the most degrading of all forms of corporal punishment. Dostoevsky could hardly have been ignorant of the seriousness of this issue.7 The fact that every other prisoner’s beating is treated seriously, and subsequently related to the catastrophic social consequences of such punishment on society in general, makes the comic treatment of Isay Fomich’s beating and branding even more disturbingly anomalous. It also calls into question the comic treatment itself. How could Dostoevsky not treat at least Isay Fomich’s corporal punishment with existential seriousness?

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Even in Taras Bulba, Gogol could suspend for a moment his comic representation of Jews, presenting a Jewish woman and her child as symbols of universal suffering. In Notes from the House of the Dead, the narrator implies that the Jew is ridiculous and therefore so must be his beating; however, the text seems to argue against its own creator, asking how the beating of the Jew can be comic if corporal punishment is always existentially serious.

i s ay f o m i c h : t h e t e r r i f y i n g entrance into the prison At the end of the section that introduces us to Isay Fomich in chapter 4, the narrator promises to tell us more about the Jew’s arrival in prison, which he says is a very funny story (presmeshnaia istoriia). This reference to humor comes as a surprise given that the narrator has spent the first four chapters describing the horrors of his earliest days in prison, replete with stories of drunkenness, revelry, debauchery,8 violence, and the undisguised animus of the common people to the prisoners of the nobility, including the narrator. He confesses that he lived in terror for the first months, ever fearful that he would fall victim to a violent attack; indeed, he was fortunate, as we have seen, not to have been killed in one of Gazin’s drunken sprees. The narrator even exploits the hilarious arrival (presmeshnoe pribytie) of Isay Fomich in prison to accentuate by contrast the existential seriousness of his own arrival. But once again the text—perhaps against the author’s best efforts to the contrary—shows that Isay Fomich’s arrival was not only not easy but also more harrowing than the narrator’s. Perhaps if the beating were Isay Fomich’s only suffering in the prison, the reader could pass over it. But the terror does not end with the corporal punishment, it begins with it. When Isay Fomich enters the prison after having been beaten he is petrified with fear. He is the only Jew. And how is he to know that the official beating that he has just received is not a prelude to even more terrible things to come?9 He is entering an environment even more alien for him than it is for the narrator, who is Russian and Orthodox. “On entering the prison [Isay Fomich] grew so timid (srobel ) that he did not even dare to raise his eyes to the crowd of mocking, disfigured and terrifying faces (strashnye litsa), which had solidly surrounded him; from timidity (ot robosti ) he had not yet managed to utter a word” (4:93). The narrator cannot not understand Isay Fomich’s fear, for he experienced much the same

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fear when he first entered the prison and faced the same disfigured, hostile, and alien inmates. Here, for example, is how, at the beginning of chapter 5, “The First Month,” the narrator describes his own entrance into the prison. Everything around me was inimical and frightening (strashno) and though all of it was not so in reality, to me of course it seemed so. There was that savage curiosity with which my new convict-comrades would stare at me, their intense severity towards a newcomer from the gentry, suddenly appearing in their community, a severity that sometimes approached hatred. All that so astonished me that I wanted to set out to work as soon as possible. (56–57; 4:99)

Thus, immediately after introducing Isay Fomich, the narrator reveals that he, too, experienced terror on first entering the prison. The terror he experienced, according to his own description, does not significantly differ from Isay Fomich’s. Yet the narrator cannot let it go at that. Writing this novel years after the events and after his views of the prisoners had changed, Dostoevsky now has to show through his narrator that his initial apprehensions about the prisoners were unfounded. The situation only seemed frightening. Since the narrator’s spiritual resurrection is accompanied by an epiphany about the people, about how he had misunderstood them—at least most of them—he must focus not on his fear but on his mistaken ideas about the prisoners. Though he now maintains that his fear was not the same as Isay Fomich’s, he cannot erase the similarities he himself has drawn between his situation and Isay Fomich’s. He tries to diminish the similarity by presenting Isay Fomich’s entry into the prison as ridiculous; however, by foregrounding the disparity when there are such significant contradicting details, he actually achieves the opposite of what he intends, reinforcing the similarities rather than the differences. The sixty lashes cannot be so easily erased from the text, nor can the branding, nor can the terror of Isay Fomich’s arrival in the prison.

the russian as jew The worst fear and humiliation that the Dostoevsky of Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden could imagine was identification with Isay Fomich. Although Tsypkin’s Dostoevsky is a figment of his narrator’s imagination, let us not dismiss this figment too quickly. I would like to argue

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here that Notes from the House of the Dead harbors the narrator’s—and perhaps the author’s—concealed or suppressed identification with the Jew. The narrator cannot risk identification with Isay Fomich since Isay Fomich is the eternal other. To be “other” implies the impossibility of ever being accepted by the people, and thus the impossibility of salvation. Salvation in Russian Orthodoxy is collective not individual; one cannot be saved apart from others. The problem for the narrator is compounded by the fact that the prisoners not only see the narrator and Isay Fomich as different from themselves but also that they see them, in some cases, as being different in the same way: that is, as having alien traits in common. As we have seen, the narrator attempts to dissociate himself from Isay Fomich by presenting him as a comic stereotype, but he also, perhaps unwittingly, associates himself with Isay Fomich in ways that cast doubt on his own salvation. I would like first to look at the most important associations between the narrator and Isay Fomich, discuss why the prisoners might look at them as being similar, and then explore the narrator’s fears about being “other” with respect to the common Russian prisoners—being, in what is most essential, an outcast, an alien, a Jew. The narrator tells us that he and Isay Fomich were great friends (bol’shie druz’ia), spending a good deal of time together, out of choice, not necessity. At the beginning of his prison term, the narrator was no more accepted by the convicts as a companion than Isay Fomich was. Like Isay Fomich he had more intercourse with the Polish prisoners than with the Russian prisoners of the people. The Poles also welcomed Isay Fomich, but, according to the narrator, who has an animus against the Poles, only because Isay Fomich amused them. The narrator states that he had frequent, long conversations with Isay Fomich, during which he spoke, among other things, about potions for removing his facial scars after being released from prison; about his marriage plans; and about the various intricacies of Jewish prayer. Isay Fomich was also one of the narrator’s main sources of news from the outside, which Isay Fomich would glean on his trips to the town to attend Saturday prayer services. The narrator seems not only to be amused by Isay Fomich but also to like him, and not only as a pet. It is unlikely that Isay Fomich conducts these conversations with any of the other prisoners or that any of the prisoners are interested in the meaning of his religious rituals. It is understandable that the narrator asks Isay Fomich about his religious observances, since he has already begun to think about his own salvation.

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There are intriguing similarities between the narrator and Isay Fomich that the narrator is not eager to pursue. Both the narrator and Isay Fomich are wife-murderers. At first it might seem strange that the narrator does not pursue this similarity in their biographies, but his passing over their common crime is understandable given the narrator’s disinclination to appear in his own eyes in any way similar to Isay Fomich. In addition, of all the prisoners in the camp it is the narrator and Isay Fomich who take the greatest interest in the prison theatricals. Just as the prisoners arrive from all over the prison to enjoy Isay Fomich’s performances (his celebration of the Sabbath), he goes to their performances as well, never missing a show and buying the best seat in the house. Isay Fomich is thus both a spectator of performances as well as a performer himself. But so is the narrator, who enthusiastically observes and writes about Isay Fomich’s performances, as well as those of the prisoners. It is because he is a writer that the prisoners are so concerned about his opinions of their performances.10 The associations, however, that the prisoners themselves make between the narrator and Isay Fomich are even more significant. The majority of the prisoners treat the narrator and Isay Fomich as pets, as individuals who cannot be taken seriously: Isay Fomich because he is ridiculous in so many ways and the narrator because he is a baby, unable to take care of himself. That is why the prisoners leave the narrator alone. Petrov, the most terrifying criminal in the prison, also views the narrator as no more than a helpless child. “It seemed to me that he looked upon me as a sort of child, almost an infant, who did not understand the simplest things in the world. . . . I fancied, too, that he had made up his mind once and for all, without bothering his head about it, that it was no use talking to me as one would to other people, that apart from talking about books I would never understand anything, that I was incapable of understanding anything, so there was no reason to bother me” (140–41; 4:86). Petrov, however, does not view the narrator only as a child, he also views him as an adult (someone who can talk about books) but an adult whose situation is so different from his own that it would be absurd to expect either to understand the other. On entering the prison both the narrator and Isay Fomich understand that they are entering a hostile environment in which they must at all times be vigilant. When he wrote Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky had already undergone a significant change in his views about the Russian people. But when he left the prison in 1854, he provided his brother with a far less reassuring view of the people in a letter of February 22, 1854, and he

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was not reticent about what he suffered from them from the beginning of his stay to the end. The last lines of the letter closely resemble the words of the proud, embittered hero of Notes from the Underground, a novel that appeared two years after Notes from the House of the Dead and eight years after Dostoevsky’s release from prison. They are a coarse, irritated, and embittered lot. Their hatred for the gentry passes all limits, and for this reason they displayed hostility at the sight of us, along with a malicious joy at seeing us in such a sad plight. They would have devoured us if given the chance. But you can imagine for yourself how protected we were when we had to live, sleep, eat, and drink side by side with these people for several years, and we didn’t even have the time to complain about their insults of every shape and description, so numerous were they. “You of the gentry, you’ve pecked at us enough with your iron beaks. You used to be a gentleman and kick people around, and now you are lower that the lowest of us”—this was the theme played to us over and over again for 4 years, 150 enemies never tired of persecuting us; they enjoyed it, it was an occupation for them, a distraction, and the only way for us to avoid the worst of it was by meeting it with indifference, with a display of moral superiority they couldn’t fail to understand and respect in us, and by refusing to submit to their will. They were always conscious of the fact that we were above them.11

But even more serious for the narrator than the prisoners’ hostility toward him is his realization that no member of his class may ever be able to overcome that antagonism, no member of his class may ever feel he will be accepted by them as being in any way like them (svoi ), nor will he ever feel that he truly belongs. By contrast, when the prisoners of the people arrive in the prison they immediately feel “at home” because they have joined another community of their own kind. What made the narrator’s life most difficult in prison, what was even more discouraging than the prisoners’ terrible hostility, was his feeling of being “other”—estranged and alienated—with respect to the Russian common people, of being ne svoi, not one of them. No; what is much more important than all this is that while two hours after his arrival an ordinary prisoner is on the same footing as all the rest, is at home (u sebia doma), has the same rights in the community as the rest, is understood by everyone, understands everyone, knows everyone, and is looked on by everyone as comrades (svoi), it is very different with the gentleman, the man of a different class. However straightforward, good-natured and clever he is, he will for years be hated and despised by all; he will not be understood, and what is more he will not be trusted. He is not a friend (drug)

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and not a companion (tovarishch), and though he may at last in the course of years attain such a position among them that they will no longer insult him, yet he will never be one of them (ne svoi), and will forever be painfully conscious of his alienation (otchuzhdenie) and isolation (odinoche­stvo). This ostracism sometimes comes to pass of itself unconsciously through no illnatured feeling on the part of the convicts. He is not one of them (ne svoi), and that’s all. Nothing is more terrible than living out of one’s natural surroundings (ne v svoei srede). (304; 4:198)

The narrator’s most notable success, he implies, his guarantee of resurrection from the dead at the end of the novel, is his ability to break down the barriers between himself and some of the prisoners of the people, to become someone who is no longer alien to them, and, most important, not to remain an outsider, in effect, a Jew. This is why he must tell us that he became friends with several of the common prisoners, who were sorry to see him leave and genuinely wished him well. But the narrator also shows that he has not broken down the barrier with the majority of the prisoners, who still view him as an outsider, an alien (ne tovarishch, ne svoi ), someone not to be taken seriously, someone who has no knowledge of real life, and even worse, a representative of a class that has oppressed the Russian people for hundreds of years, and thus in no way better than a Jew. The narrator does not fully understand the extent of this unbreachable gap until he is prevented from joining the prisoners in their complaint against prison conditions, especially the prison food, and then later when he asks Petrov if the prisoners of the people are angry that the prisoners of the nobility did not join their protest for “we ought to have done the same— out of comradeship (iz tovarishchestvo)” (316; 4:207). All this occurs not at the beginning of the text but toward the end, when we are led to believe that the narrator has made some headway in bridging the divide between himself and the people. Petrov, for one, is bewildered by the narrator’s suggestion. “’But how could you be a companion (tovarishch) of ours?’ he asked in perplexity” (317; 4:207). The narrator comments with sadness. I looked at him quickly; he did not understand me in the least, he did not know what I was driving at. But I understood him thoroughly at that instant. A thought that had been stirring vaguely within me and haunting me for a long time had at last become clear to me, and I suddenly understood what I had only imperfectly realized. I understood that they would never accept me as a comrade, however much I might be a convict, not if I were in for life, not if I were in the special division. But I remember most clearly Petrov’s face at that minute. His question, “how can you be a companion of

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ours?” was full of such genuine simplicity, such simple-hearted perplexity. I wondered if there were any irony, any malicious mockery in the question. There was nothing of the sort: simply we were not their comrades and that was all. You go your way (svoei dorogoi), and we’ll go ours (a my svoei ); you have your affairs (svoi dela), and we have ours (a u nas svoi). (317; 4:207)

We have seen the Cossacks’ reaction in Taras Bulba to Yankel’s suggestion that the Jews were the Cossacks’ brothers: they viewed the suggestion as absurd but they also viewed it as blasphemous and that is why they proceeded to throw the Jews into the river. Petrov’s response to the narrator’s suggestion that the common prisoners are their comrades eerily resembles the Cossacks’ response. (The narrator even uses the word “comradeship” [­tovarishchestvo], the word Gogol uses most often to define the Cossack ideal.) In contrast to the Cossacks who kill the Jews, Petrov and his comrades attack neither the narrator nor the other outsiders (the prisoners not of their class, chuzhie), but what they do, as far as the narrator is concerned, is not significantly different, for by denying that any members of the nobility can be their companions, the common prisoners are in effect dashing the narrator’s hopes for salvation. Whereas the Cossacks throw the Jews in the river because they see them as oppressors, the prisoners of the people in Notes from the House of the Dead reject the narrator’s claim of comradeship because they see the narrator and those of his class as oppressors even more dangerous than the Jew, Isay Fomich, from whom the narrator is trying to disassociate himself. It is clear now why the narrator does not want to take Isay Fomich seriously, especially why he does not want to dwell on anything they might have in common. Isay Fomich is the ultimate alien, who is different in every way from the convicts, who will never be treated seriously by them, whose business (dela) is not theirs, and who will never, no matter how many years he is in prison, be one of them, be their companion. Of course, Isay Fomich cannot be saved because of his religion. But the narrator might as well be a Jew, an Isay Fomich, if his salvation depends ultimately on being accepted as one of the people, or if not one of them, someone who can at least be considered a companion (tovarishch). The worst thing that the narrator could imagine is that he bears a resemblance to Isay Fomich, not in features, speech, or gesture, but in situation. The worst thing that he could imagine is that he is much closer to the hated Poles, other outsiders, and to the Jew, than to the real Russians. To bear any similarity to Isay Fomich, if that implies the impossibility of becoming one with the people and their religion, means to

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lose all hope of salvation and resurrection from the dead. The whole project of the narrator’s spiritual autobiography has been for naught. And how can it be otherwise, if the narrator can no more be saved than a ludicrous Jew, whom no one even takes seriously. The narrator’s arrival in prison does not turn into a comic episode like Isay Fomich’s, but he experiences the same fright before the same hostile faces; he does not like the Poles because they hate the Russian common people, but he is more at home with them, as is Isay Fomich, than he is with the Russian convicts. The narrator is not laughed at like Isay Fomich, but he is ridiculed and taunted to his face. He wants to be respected by the prisoners, not ridiculed or treated as a pet like Isay Fomich, but he is treated as a baby by the prisoners, someone who is helpless and has no knowledge of the real world. Isay Fomich has no intention of joining the common convicts in their complaint; he is bewildered and petrified by the whole affair.12 The narrator, although he wants to join the prisoners in their complaint, is roundly abused and ridiculed, then summarily dismissed—even told to go back and join the Poles. What is more, one of the prisoners, with the utmost contempt, calls him a “fly-smasher,” a name that arouses loud laughter (khokhot) (4:203) among all the prisoners.13 Khokhot is the same word that the narrator uses to describe the prisoners’ reactions to Isay Fomich’s hilarious arrival in the prison. Can the narrator be unaware that his description of his attempt to be one of the common people evokes the very same laughter (khokhot) that he often associates with Isay Fomich? Does not the word khokhot itself bring home to the narrator that he may have no more common cause with the prisoners of the people than Isay Fomich? The narrator in contrast to Isay Fomich tries to overcome the breach between himself and the convicts, but on almost every occasion the convicts remind him that he has no more chance of healing this breach than a Jew. The narrator attempts to dissociate himself from Isay Fomich, but the prisoners of the common people constantly remind him that his situation is not that different from that of Isay Fomich. By presenting Isay Fomich comically, by dismissing him as having no significance, the narrator, then, hopes to dissociate himself from an identification that damns him. Jackson may be right in saying that Dostoevsky does not reveal anything of the tragic life of Isay Fomich’s prototype. But it is Isay Fomich who reveals the tragic breach separating the narrator from his salvation. Tsypkin forces Dostoevsky to recognize Isay Fomich in himself by fabricating an aesthetically amenable psychobiography. In Notes from

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the House of the Dead, it is the narrator himself who supplies all the details that link him with Isay Fomich. So the larger the similarities in situation between Isay Fomich and the narrator, the more ridiculous Isay Fomich must be made, the more the narrator must make him appear unworthy of existential and problematic representation. But the links will not go away. Nor will the lashes, the branding, and Isay Fomich’s passion and religious ecstasy. On some level, the narrator understands or senses this all too well. If the narrator would look in the mirror and see not himself but Isay Fomich, it would not be because he thinks that he is in any way like Isay Fomich in personality, as Tsypkin’s narrator imagines him to be, but because he thinks that he resembles the Jew in situation, with no hope of resurrection from the dead. Even the Jew can convert, but he cannot be saved on Russian soil because he cannot become part of the Russian common people; the narrator can find faith in Christ after terrible mistakes in the past, but he may be no more capable of salvation than Isay Fomich if he does not become a companion (tovarishch) of the people, and if they continue to view him as an alien (ne svoi). I am not arguing here that this alternate interpretation, which goes against the ostensible intentions of the author, invalidates Notes from the House of the Dead as a powerful religious autobiography concluding with the narrator’s spiritual resurrection from the dead: the possibility of a new life. I myself have argued elsewhere for this religious interpretation.14 Notes from the House of the Dead, however, is one of Dostoevsky’s most inconsistent and ambiguous texts; we can often find the opposite points of view advocated in different places, without any attempt to reconcile them. On one hand, the narrator sees the crimes that most criminals commit as universal: that is, as crimes that have always been committed and will continue to be committed irrespective of place and time; on the other hand, he argues that the vast majority of crimes that are committed by the prisoners of the people stem from the evils of Russia’s social system, and this is why the prisoners do not feel guilt for committing them. Before the discovery of Ilyinsky’s innocence, the narrator says that it is an incontrovertible fact that Ilyinsky murdered his father, but the narrator still does not believe that he did it. It is not untenable that Notes from the House of the Dead supports two different interpretations of the narrator’s fate, one that is in accord with the novel’s rhetorical intentions, in which the narrator’s breaking of the barrier between himself and a few members of the people is the harbinger of not only his personal resurrection but the salvation of Russian society as a whole. On

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the other hand, the narrator includes details from time to time—and even quite late in the novel—that show that it is virtually impossible to break down the barriers that separate the overwhelming majority of the nobility and the common people. As Dostoevsky realized later, overcoming this immense divide would happen only when men grew wings: that is, during a new dispensation. Isay Fomich is certainly on one hand a source of comic relief, and he is used effectively as a way of bringing out the most important elements of Russian and Muslim spirituality. But he also reveals the cracks in the novel’s rhetorical armor, cracks that makes us wonder, and perhaps make the narrator wonder, whether he can be saved given the formidable gulf existing between the nobility and the peasantry. One can feel free to be skeptical about the five-page preface—which tells of the narrator’s death not long after his release from prison—being an integral part of the novel. In an effort to hide the autobiographical nature of the work, Dostoevsky may have resorted to a typical ruse of the time of having another narrator find the notes of one recently deceased. On the other hand, the preface reveals the other text that I have been attempting to uncover through Isay Fomich and his relation to the narrator’s fate. The portrait that the author (or imputed author) draws of the hero in the preface is quite different from the one the narrator paints of himself at the end of the novel proper, which speaks of his resurrection from the dead. In the preface, the frame narrator depicts a very different man: reclusive, hypersensitive, and melancholic. We learn that the narrator, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, named only in the preface, dies just three years after his release from prison, seemingly from despair, casting in doubt, if we are to believe the preface, the Christian optimism of the text, perhaps even verifying the subversive role that we have been arguing for Isay Fomich as the narrator’s situational alter ego. Isay Fomich seems to be a far more stereotypical comic Jew than the Jews of Gogol and Turgenev, what with the detailed derogatory physical descriptions and the frequent comic scenes in which he is at the center: his entry into prison, his bantering with the prisoners, his Sabbath “performances,” and his howling and steaming himself in the bathhouse. Gogol’s Yankel plays a more important role in the plot, helping the epic hero to enter Warsaw where he can witness the execution of his son. An anonymous Jewish woman in Taras Bulba, surprisingly, serves as a symbol of universal suffering. Turgenev, while exploiting all the negative aspects of the Jewish comic stereotype in Girshel, uses Girshel in his existential treatment of execution,

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emphasizing his humanity and supplying him with a real wife and daughter. But there is another Isay Fomich lurking in Notes from the House of the Dead, a more problematic one, and not because he is treated more seriously than the Jews in Gogol and Turgenev—he is not—or even because of the sixty lashes. He is more problematic because of his close relationship in situation with the narrator-author. Here for the first time, what seemed unimaginable occurs, the Jew and narrator come together, become one in situation, despite the intentions of the text, which does everything to keep them apart. Something happens, as Frank says in commenting on Tsypkin’s novel, that “would have filled Dostoevsky with horror.”15 And because it happens, it undercuts the generic expectations of the religious autobiography, the raison d’être of the novel: resurrection from the dead. The ridiculous Jew is employed by the narrator to define difference and to eliminate identification, but all we have to do is read a little otherwise to see that the attempt to erase the embarrassing, unwanted aspects of the Jew is self-defeating. The Jew has left indelible brands on the face of the narrator’s text. No potion can eliminate them. The aesthetic problems stemming from the identification of Jew and Russian also manifest themselves in Gogol’s Taras Bulba, where the stature of the epic hero and the generic integrity of the work are called into question by the relationship between Taras Bulba and Jews. Taras changes places with Jews for a short while in the Warsaw episode, and he is infected (loses stature) by comic interchanges with Yankel concerning the most serious of all subjects: the betrayal of the Cossack brotherhood by Andrii, Taras’s younger son. But in Taras Bulba the hero recovers and experiences the saving grace of a Christian epic death: crucified by the Poles, he urges his brothers to fight on. In Taras Bulba the author does not seem to realize the danger that his hero is undergoing by such close contact with the ridiculous Yankel. In Notes from the House of the Dead, the identification between Jew and hero, however disguised, is of far greater consequence because the hero is the narrator, and the narrator in this semi-autobiographical novel is so close to the actual author. The identification of Russian and Jew affects the entire world of Notes from the House of the Dead; it affects the action within the world of the novel in which the narrator is the hero, and it affects the prism through which the story is told: the narrating consciousness. Aesthetically speaking, Isay Fomich is the most dangerous character in Notes from the House of the Dead. Both narrator and author have more to fear from Isay Fomich than from the most hardened and terrifying convicts in all of the House of the Dead. In the unintentional text, Isay Fomich turns out

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to be more serious than either Gogol’s Yankel or Turgenev’s Girshel. Isay Fomich, the character intended for comic relief, turns on his author. Just as Gogol’s suffering Jewish woman calls into question the binary oppositions that Gogol sets up between Russian and Jew, so the other Isay Fomich calls into question the binary oppositions that Dostoevsky attempts to establish between Jew and existential Christian and Jew and hagiographical Muslim. The Jew also threatens both narrator and author by challenging the optimism of the religious autobiography and by doing so makes the text more problematic, ambiguous, and aesthetically interesting for the modern reader. The artistic success of Notes from the House of the Dead depends in no small measure on its conflicting portrayals of the most important characters and themes, implicitly calling each other into question but never canceling each other out. Antonio is a successful character in The Merchant of Venice because he is alternatively an ideal Christian and the rival to Shylock in the intensity of his hatred and desire for revenge. Shylock is his alter ego. Isay Fomich is no Shylock but he plays an even more important role in Notes from the House of the Dead than the one that Leonid Tsypkin tried to invent for him in Summer in Baden-Baden, the repressed alter ego of his real, not imagined, creator.

Conclusion Confronting the Legacy of the Stereotype: Babel, Rybakov, and Jewish Death

In my examination of Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden, I discussed in some detail perhaps the most provocative twentieth-century response to Dostoevsky’s portrait of a Jewish character, Isay Fomich from Notes from the House of the Dead. In my conclusion I would like to continue this approach, briefly discussing the most interesting responses to Gogol’s and Turgenev’s representation of the Jewish stereotype, particularly their portrayal of Jewish death, in Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Heavy Sand (Tiazhelyi pesok, 1978) and Isaac Babel’s story “Crossing the Zbrucz” (1924), the first story of his famous collection of tales about the Russian-Polish War, Red Cavalry.

rybakov Rybakov’s Heavy Sand, the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s dealing extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold and—problematic—attempt, working within accepted Soviet literary practice, to use the momentous events of the Bolshevik Revolution and

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the Holocaust to overcome the pervasive negative stereotypes of the Jew in Russian literature and culture.1 The novel recounts the story of a Jewish family and their relatives and neighbors in a small town in Ukraine, not far from Chernigov and Kiev, from the years before the Bolshevik Revolution through the Holocaust. It is told by a highly personalized first-person narrator, writing a testimonial to the courage and dignity of several generations of his family. (The narrator, obviously an alter ego of the historical author, was born in 1911 or 1912, Rybakov in 1911.) In addition to the formidable task of reintroducing the Jews into Russian literature, Rybakov challenges and corrects several kinds of disparaging portraits of Jews characteristic of the nineteenth-century literary tradition; but first and foremost, he discredits the reductive and derogatory treatment of Jews by Gogol in Taras Bulba. He undercuts the notion of Jewish ridiculousness by presenting his Jews not only seriously but also heroically.2 In order to challenge Gogol’s demeaning physical representation of Jews, Rybakov repeatedly uses his narrator to praise the beauty of his relatives. His mother, the novel’s heroine, is simply the most beautiful woman in the district. But since beautiful Jewesses are not uncommon literary phenomena, Rybakov focuses on the physical descriptions of his male relatives, especially his maternal grandfather, who is far better looking, he says, than his mother, and who made a far stronger impression than she did when he was well over seventy. “I have mentioned several times my parents, Yakov and Rachel, were very good-looking. Very. Yet their good looks simply didn’t compare with my grandfather’s.”3 Unlike the frail, sickly, weak Jew of the traditional stereotype, the grandfather demonstrates fabulous strength, which he retains into his eighties. He is both courageous and strong; anyone who deals dishonestly with him receives a good drubbing. Like a biblical Samson, he drives off a mob of wagon-drivers armed with crowbars (63–64; 51), just as he drives off, with the help of his sons, pogromists (probably Cossacks!) who come to the village during the disturbances sparked by the 1905 Russian Revolution. Thus not a single pogrom took place in the town. Given Gogol’s presentation of Yankel as incapable of understanding the Cossack ideal of loyalty, it is not surprising that the grandfather looks upon betrayal as the worst of all crimes, next to which theft is insignificant. He beats up a Gypsy who has stolen from him, not because of the theft, but because the Gypsy betrayed his trust. The grandfather is even likened to a Cossack. “If you could have seen him whipping up the horses when he was dashing to a fire, whooping and

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whistling like a Cossack, cursing in foul language and clambering into the fire, then I think you would understand that he was a man of complicated and contradictory character, and it was no simple matter for my father to get along with him” (57; 46). The transformation from Jew to Cossack, however, reaches its apotheosis in one of the grandfather’s sons, the narrator’s uncle. The narrator’s great-grandfather was an innkeeper, his grand­father an honest bootmaker and a leader of his community, but the narrator’s uncle was a true Soviet Cossack hero, an ur-Russian, achieving what the narrator of Babel’s Cossack stories could only dream of: the ability to ride a horse like a true Cossack, an ability that would guarantee that no one would mistake him for a Gogolian Jew.4 But for the Jews, the true initiation rites into Soviet personhood and heroism turn out to be neither the Revolution of 1917 nor the Civil War, but the Nazi occupation of the winter and spring of 1942. Only in the uprising of the ghetto do the members of the narrator’s whole family—the women and children as well as the men—turn into true Soviet epic heroes. Here Rybakov returns to Taras Bulba, inverting and even subverting Gogol to further his own agenda, especially with regard to the presentation of Jewish death. At the end of Taras Bulba, Taras is caught by the Poles who torture him in imitation of the crucifixion. Yet, while hanging on the tree, before he dies, he is able to call to and rally his Cossack brothers to fight on, to defend the Orthodox faith and Mother Russia. In Heavy Sand, when the members of the narrator’s family are caught by the Germans, they outdo, in courageous death, any of the heroes of Gogol’s epic. They are the antithesis of the ridiculous, the personification of the existentially serious. Many of the major characters of Heavy Sand undergo far more painful and prolonged tortures than Taras Bulba. Under excruciating torture, even the children act like heroes, never betraying one another. The narrator’s ­father confesses to an act of sabotage to save others from being arbitrarily shot. Brutally tortured for seven days, he is hanged in the public square in front of the ghetto; affixed on his chest is a label with the word “Partisan”— a topos of Soviet War literature. “Mother saw father’s corpse hanging. For three days he hung there—that was the Nazi norm, the Nazi standard” (363; 290; italics mine). Rybakov uses the most grisly scene in the novel, the torture and death of the narrator’s sister Dina, to counter the accusation of both Jewish betrayal (Judas) and status in statu. Dina kills her uncle, the chairman of the ­Judenrat, who threatened to give away the names of the partisans organizing

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the insurrection inside the ghetto. The Germans catch her in the act and proceed to make a spectacle of her. The inhabitants of the ghetto were all lined up on the square, where a cross had been erected. They brought Dina out, naked, beaten, covered in blood, her face a bluish color. They tied her to the cross. . . . At a sign from Stalbe, the executioner hammered the first nail into Dina’s hand. Dina fainted and Stalbe ordered water to be thrown over her. They poured water over her and she came to. . . . He struck her with his lash. “Maybe you’ll sing, all the same?” And Dina started to sing. No, it wasn’t singing. A wheeze came from her chest and blood came from her throat. They had damaged her lungs. She choked, wheezed something, then wheezed something again, all the time getting quieter and quieter. I couldn’t say what it was she was trying to sing, maybe a Jewish song, or a Ukrainian or a Russian song, or perhaps the “Internationale,” the hymn of our youth and our hopes.5 Dina hung dead on the cross for three days. (348–49)

Whatever the language (Russian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish) or content (the Internationale) of her song, Dina sings it defiantly. Like Taras Bulba, Dina in her last moments attempts to inspire her countrymen. Though Gogol conflates religious and heroic modes in the crucifixion at the end of Taras Bulba, he does not turn Taras into a martyr; Taras is a hero-warrior, ruthlessly slaughtering Poles in defense of his native land and faith. The conflation in Rybakov is even more striking, for he adds both Christian and Socialist Realist martyrology to Dina’s death scene. Likewise, when the grandfather, who has been running guns for the Jewish insurrectionists, dies his heroic death, it is presented much in the manner of Taras Bulba: the grandfather turns upon his guards, wounds one of them, and after being shot himself, cries out in order to warn his accomplice of the danger. The story of the narrator’s mother, the hero of the novel, passes beyond heroism and martyrology; it borders on mysticism. She bravely watches her husband hanged, her son sliced in two, and her daughter tortured and crucified before her eyes. She sustains the spirit of the starving Jews in the ghetto, later organizes them, inspires them to rebel, and stands at their head during the revolt itself. This is no small rebellion. Among other things, it involves an eight-mile run to the woods for a population that has been starved, beaten, overworked, and brutalized for many months. But most important, Rybakov will not have the narrator’s mother accept the kind of

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ridiculous death that Gogol had created for the Jews of Taras Bulba. She can accept death only with honor and dignity. “The alternative was meekly to resign yourself to your fate . . . without raising your hand against your murderers. This was the least acceptable of all options” (367; 293). She even argues that Jews who do not actively resist deserve to be exterminated: that is, if they act like rats (that is, like Jews) and not like real men. “You’re not men, you’re rats! The Germans are right, you ought to be exterminated!” (368–69; 294). But the narrator’s mother shows herself to be more than just brave and patriotic, that is, more than equal to the task: she dies a martyr’s and epic heroine’s death, to be later immortalized by her son, the Socialist Realist novelist. When at the end of the escape to the forest, Rachel turns back to help stragglers, the narrator transforms her from character into icon through his portrayal of her death. Tall and straight, she stood without moving or leaving her place, but for each person who went by her she receded into the forest; her image faded, and she seemed to dissolve into the air and gradually disappear. And when the people looked back, she was no longer there. Nobody heard the sound of her footsteps or the crunch of twigs under her feet, she dissolved into the forest amid the motionless pines, she melted into the air. . . . You think it’s fantasy, or mysticism? Maybe. But, even so, nobody ever saw my mother again, dead or alive. She vanished, melted, dissolved into thin air in the pine forest. (375–76; 300)

Socialist Realism shares some of the topoi of Russian Orthodox martyrology. The narrator does not believe that his mother vanished into thin air, nevertheless he needs to find a way of suggesting sainthood. (In hagiographical literature, the death of an Orthodox saint is often accompanied by miracles and supernatural signs, a topos that Dostoevsky plays with in The Brothers Karamazov.) Here the narrator transforms the body of his Jewish mother into the highest spiritual essence he can imagine; she becomes one with the forest, a symbol not only of her native village but of “Mother Russia” herself.6 The Holocaust provides Rybakov with the perfect vehicle for counteracting and transforming the Gogolian image of the ridiculous Jew that has haunted Russian literature and culture for over a hundred and fifty years. History itself has shown that Jewish death is not only not ridiculous, it is as existential and serious as any death in Taras Bulba, the Russian national epic.

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babel In the many stories of Red Cavalry that deal with Cossacks and Jews, Babel is responding directly to Taras Bulba, but in the first story of the collection, “Crossing the Zbrucz,” the target of artistic opportunity seems to be Turgenev’s “The Jew,” especially given the similarity of the scenes involving Jewish death. Although “The Jew” takes place around Danzig during the Patriotic War of 1812, Girshel’s family is probably of Polish origin. Girshel’s wife is mentioned, but as is traditional, it is the relationship between father and daughter that is foregrounded. The narrator is a young officer in charge of marauding troops that are ransacking Girshel’s home. Sarah, seeing what is happening, accosts the narrator, requesting that he intervene. She had earlier colluded with her father to relieve the narrator of his recent winnings at cards. When she learns that her father is about to be executed as a spy, she does all she can to prevent the execution, for which she holds the Russian soldiers responsible. In “Crossing the Zbrucz,” the narrator is a political reporter attached to a Red Cossack cavalry unit in Eastern Poland. He enters a hut belonging to a pregnant Jewess landlady and her father. It has been recently ransacked by Polish troops (and probably by Cossack troops before that). The narrator insensitively demands of the distressed landlady that he be billeted in her house. Babel’s narrator is strongly ambivalent about his Jewish origins. He associates Jewish ethnicity, religion, and mores with the old non-Communist world, associations that at times, it is implied, prevent him from becoming one with the vanguards of the revolution, the Red Cossacks, whose elemental, unconscious beauty he admires and whose community he wishes to enter. He often tries to hide his Jewish identity: among the Cossacks in order to gain acceptance, among the Jews in order to maintain his distance. In “Crossing the Zbrucz,” he tries to distance himself from the Jewish landlady by playing the role of the hardened soldier.7 He also tries to dissociate himself from the disorder and destruction that he sees all around him: “the ransacked wardrobes . . . scraps of women’s fur coats, human excrement and shards of the special dishes that Jews use once a year at Passover.”8 Not feeling, or attempting not to feel, compassion for Jewish victims, he rebukes the landlady over the mess, for which she is obviously not at fault, and orders her to clean it up. Playing the non-Jewish artist, he presents the Jews around him as they are portrayed in early-nineteenth-century Russian literature. Two red-haired Jews in the house conform perfectly to the Jewish stereo-

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type. The other Jews are strangely inhuman, even animal-like. The narrator associates them with the excrement surrounding them. Their necks and their gesticulations recall the Jewish stereotypes of Gogol and Turgenev. The two Jews rise from their chairs. They hop about on felt soles, clearing the debris from the floor, they hop about in silence, monkey-like, like Japanese in a circus; their necks swell and revolve. On the floor, they place a badly ripped feather mattress for me and I lie down facing the wall, next to a third Jew, who has fallen asleep. A timid destitution closes over my bed. All has been murdered by silence. (92; 14–15)

The story takes a sharp turn when the narrator decides to lie down next to the “third Jew” mentioned above, who, covered up and pressed into the corner, seems to be sleeping. Falling asleep himself, the narrator begins to dream. As he dreams of the division commander, Savitsky, shooting out the eyes of a brigade commander for a military error, he is awakened by the landlady, who tells him that he is thrashing and crying out in his sleep and pushing her father. Since the woman addresses the narrator as pan (Polish for “sir”), she obviously does not identify him as a Jew. As she uncovers the sleeping man, the narrator sees for the first time the true horror of the situation. The old man lying next to him—the landlady’s father—is not asleep, but dead. His throat has been torn out and his face cleft in two. Dark blue blood clings to his beard like pieces of lead. Avins justly notes that “all the stories of pogroms that Babel had heard are summed up in the story’s final lines.”9 “Sir (Panie),” the Jewish woman says, as she shakes out the feather mattress, “the Poles were murdering him, and he begged them: ‘Kill me out in the backyard so that my daughter doesn’t see me die.’ But they did what they wanted. He passed away in this room thinking about me. And now I want to know,” the woman said suddenly with terrible force, “I want to know where else in the entire world can you find a father like my father.” (102–3; 15)

The father is an ethical time bomb in the story, not unlike the dead Jewish woman in Taras Bulba that Andrii comes upon after he enters the Polish town.10 When the narrator finds out the truth about the father, the aesthetic, moral, and ethnic distance that he has attempted to put between himself and Jewish suffering dissolves. The narrator’s dream about the brigade commander being shot through the eyes corresponds to the landlady’s fumbling with her fingers on the narrator’s face. As Savitsky does with the brigade commander, she catches up to the narrator and rebukes him. She opens his eyes. As soon as the narrator hears what has happened to the

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landlady’s father and observes how she speaks about her dead father (whom she probably is too afraid even to bury), description stops. For the first time the narrator really sees and understands: the father could have been his own father. The story ends with her words not his. The narrator begins by distancing himself and the reader aesthetically, but Babel forces the narrator to lie down with Jewish death, with a slain father, who could have been his own, who has had his throat cut out right in front of his daughter’s eyes. Not one word of description follows the landlady’s remarks, only an ellipsis. We are left not with an image, but with a howl—and then silence: “All has been murdered by silence.” In Turgenev’s story the Russian hero is enhanced by the compassion he feels for a character constructed from all the worst aspects of the negative Jewish stereotype. His compassion is aroused only in extremis, and it appears not only in the narrator but in the common soldiers as well. The story, then, is less about the Jew than the feelings that the situation of the Jew calls forth. It takes death, however ridiculous, for others to realize that the Jew is a human being. In Gogol, Jewish death only increases the distance between Russian and Jew. In “Crossing the Zbrucz,” the narrator is a Jew from Odessa, and thus very different from the Hasidic Jews he encounters in Eastern Poland. He wants to see himself as an insider (svoi) and the Jew as alien (chuzhoi). He resists identification with the innocent Jewish victims of the recent pogroms so that he does not have to feel compassion for them, so that he can feel more a part of the pitiless revolution, not unlike Gogol’s pitiless Cossacks defending the Russian land. He does not want to emulate Turgenev’s hero who immediately feels compassion for an unsympathetic other. But once the narrator realizes that he is sleeping next to the landlady’s father whose throat has just been cut and then hears her story, he undergoes a dramatic transformation both in terms of identification and sympathy and so do the Gogolian and Turgenevian stereotypes that he has imposed on his fellow Jews. In Turgenev, Girshel and his daughter Sarah were motivated primarily by money. Sarah hated the Russians, and Girshel was a spy about to hand the enemy information about the disposition of Russian troops. In Babel, the Jews are innocent noncombatants, the victims of both Polish and Russian atrocities. The daughter is not a beautiful temptress, but a pregnant mother, a good woman, whose life has been ruined through no fault of her own. The father is not even described physically. Existentially serious and noble, he is the antithesis of the ridiculous. Like Girshel, he knows that he

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is going to be executed, but there are none of the ridiculous gesticulations that accompanied Girshel’s death. He does not offer to sell his daughter to save his life. He is much more concerned about his daughter than himself. Yes, he pleads, but not like Girshel. He does not plead for his life, rather he begs the Poles only to spare his daughter from witnessing his execution. In contrast to the soldiers in Turgenev’s story, Babel’s Poles have no compassion; they kill the father in front of his own child. The narrator realizes that the landlady’s father is more than someone for whom one must feel sympathy. He does not have to make a great leap of empathy for an alien, as the hero does in Turgenev; he has become one with the Jew as he lies in the same bed. Through the landlady’s father, he rediscovers part of his true identity. For the rest of the novel, he will seek out Jews, Hasidic Jews, rather than hide from them, in an effort to find out more about himself and about Jewish fathers. The father that the daughter defends is not a spy. He could easily have been a Gedali, a Jewish character from a later story (“Gedali,” 1924), “a founder of an unrealizable international,” a prince of peace, an old man who believes that one cannot make a good revolution with bad men, with merciless killers. “Bring a few good men,” Gedali tells the narrator, who is defending the bloodshed caused by the Revolution, “and we give them all our gramophones. We are not knownothings. The International—we know what is the International. I want the International of good men, I want each soul to be taken and registered and given first-rate rations” (118; 30). The Jewish father has not only become existentially serious, he has become the symbol of the terrible sacrifices of the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, a victim of both Russians and Poles. And though he says nothing, he is yet given a voice, not the voice of Girshel but the voice of Gedali, a voice that rises above the narrator’s voice and at least for a moment completely eclipses it. Jewish death is not ridiculous, as it is in most of Taras Bulba ; it is not existential despite its seeming ridiculousness, as it is in “The Jew”; it is the most serious of deaths, a moral measure of the Revolution. For the Revolution to have meaning, it must answer the question of all Jewish Gedalis and justify the spilling of Jewish blood. As a Russian-Jewish writer taking up the pen to write about Jews, Babel must retrace his cultural steps back to Gogol and Turgenev, must engage them on the representation of Jewish death, not only to revise the literary canon but to alter the legacy of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture regarding Jewish life. But altering that legacy can have unexpected consequences. Once Jewish death

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becomes serious, problematic, and existential, the Revolution itself becomes subject to challenge. In Babel, as in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, once the Jew sheds his stereotypical ridiculousness, becomes existential, he also becomes subversive, altering the works in which he seemed at first to play an uncomplicated, unidimensional part. Today, to be sure, we are confronting pernicious anti-Jewish ideas more characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century. But for both Rybakov and Babel, what had first and foremost to be asserted was the value of Jewish life through an existential portrayal of Jewish death. For that, the stereotype and the myth of the ­ridiculous Jew was the first monster that had to be slain.

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1.  F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. G. Bazanov et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990), 4:55. All translations from the Russian are mine unless otherwise indicated. The Library of Congress transliteration system will be used to record references in Russian and to transcribe individual Russian words; a modified version of this system (system I in J. Thomas Shaw’s pamphlet on transliterating Russian) will be used in all other instances. See J. Thomas Shaw, The Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979). 2.  There are only two major monographs devoted to the representation of the Jew in nineteenth-century Russian literature: Gabriella Safran’s excellent Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Joshua Kunitz’s Russian Literature and the Jew (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929). For several useful survey articles, see P. A. Berlin, “Russkaia literatura i evrei,” Novyj zhurnal, no. 71 (1963): 78–98; D. I. Zaslavskii, “Evrei v russkoi literature,” Evreiskaia letopis’ 1 (1923): 59–86; B. Gorev, “Russkaia literatura i evrei,” in V. L. L’vov-Rogachevskii, Russko-evreiskaia literatura (Moscow: Moskovskoe otd-nie Gos. Izd., 1922), 5–29. For a representative sample of monographs on the image of the Jew in English literature, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Abba Rubin, Images in Transition: The English Jew in English Literature, 1660–1830 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984); Anne Arest Naman, The Jew in the Victorian Novel: Some Relationships between Prejudice and Art (New York: AMS, 1980); Harold Fisch, The Dual Image: The Figure of the Jew in English and American Literature (London: World Jewish Library, 1971); Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (New York: Meridian, 1960); Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960); F. Montagu, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth

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Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1939); and David Philipson, The Jew in English Fiction (Cincinnati: Clark, 1911). Several of the preceding studies, especially those of Fisch and Ragussis, in addition to identifying and describing the well-known stereotypes, examine the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural functions of the stereotypes. 3.  Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4.  Julius, T. S. Eliot, 11. 5.  For an examination of the Jewish/Christian conflict between Shylock and ­Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, see Gary Rosenshield, “Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice,” Shofar 20 (2001): 28–51. 6.  That is, I intend to do for these works what I attempted to do in my article on The Merchant of Venice (“Deconstructing the Christian Merchant”): to show the complex artistic consequences, sometimes unintended, of exploiting the stereotype. 7.  Robert D. Kaplan “Euphorias of Hatred: The Grim Lessons of a Novel by Gogol,” The Atlantic Monthly 291, no. 4 (2003): 44. 8.  Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 61. 9.  Dostoevsky began writing Notes from the House of the Dead in 1859. But since he served a term of hard labor in Siberia in the first half of the 1850s, not returning to literature until the early 1860s, the decade of the 1850s had passed him by, literarily. Thus it is appropriate to include his depiction of Isay Fomich in the literature of the first half of the century. 10.  This different image of the Jew in the second half of the century has motivated my decision to save the discussion of Alexander Pushkin’s closet drama, The Covetous Knight (1830), for a book that I am writing on Pushkin and Dostoevsky, in which I will compare the image of the Jew in Pushkin’s drama (more like the image of the second half of the century) with the development of the Rothschild theme in Dostoevsky’s novel of the 1870s, A Raw Youth. None of the characters in The Covetous Knight are contemporary (the action of the work takes place in France of the Middle Ages) or Russian. Assuming the traditional medieval role of poisoner, the Jew Solomon, a variation of Barabas’s role in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, plays a relatively minor part in the work. In his later fiction, however, Dostoevsky goes back not to Gogol’s Jew but to Pushkin’s, using Pushkin’s Christian miser knight to explore the power of “the Jewish idea,” the idea of Rothschild, in Russia of the 1870s. 11.  Kunitz, in Russian Literature and the Jew, has written the most comprehensive survey of the subject, giving brief descriptions of the portrayal of Jews in both minor and major writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Safran takes a very different tack in Rewriting the Jew, examining different visions of Jewish assimilation and identity in nineteenth-century Polish and Russian literature. She chose, for understandable reasons, to work with less well known literary material, and in the case of better known writers, with their minor works. She begins with an example of a Jewish assimilation experience in Grigory Bogrov’s autobiographical novel Notes of a Jew (1871–1873). She then explores the doubts and fears over Jewish assimilation in the works of three non-Jewish writers of the second half of the

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nineteenth century: the Polish positivist novelist Elina Orzeszkowa, who feared that Jewish assimilation would take a Russian rather than a Polish direction; Nikolay Leskov, whose depiction of Jews often seems more characteristic of the first half of the century than the second; and Anton Chekhov, whose early work betrays an anxiety about Jewish difference, ambiguity, and absence of definition. 12.  I have thus bypassed the so-called corporals for the generals. As the studies of the less prominent nineteenth-century Russian writers show, there really is little significant difference—and we would hardly expect there to be—in the Jewish stereotype employed by major and minor writers in their respective periods. The comic stereotype of the ethnographer and writer of comic sketches, Vladimir Dal, differs little from Yankel in Gogol’s Taras Bulba. It is therefore what the prominent writers do with the stereotype that is most interesting and important from a literary and cultural perspective. In Russia, perhaps more than in any other European country in the nineteenth century, literature exerted an enormous influence on society, shaping the Russian public’s perceptions of the country’s political, social, and economic institutions—including the image of the Jew. 13.  Nevertheless, we are not dealing with a large body of material. Under the Soviets antisemitism was technically a crime, and as political oppression increased, both Jewish and non-Jewish authors avoided the portrayal of Jews in their works. By contrast, in English literature the negative Jewish stereotype still flourished among prominent twentieth-century non-Jewish writers. Studies continue to be written about the image of the Jew—usually stereotypes—in the fiction of Richardson, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and James Joyce. Of the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon writers, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have understandably received the most attention. 14.  See L. S. Dembo, The Monological Jew: A Literary Study (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), for an examination of the self-reflexive Jew in English and American literature: that is, the Jew who, cut off from God and others, and thus cut off from true dialogue, has only himself as the subject and object of his speech. 15.  Apophatic, or negative theology, attempts to define God by describing what God is not; it uses the negative as the main means of defining the positive. It is sometimes call “the way of negation.” 16.  In the medieval mystery plays, the devil often had red hair (a red wig), a goat’s beard, horns, deformed or cloven feet, and a tail. Hyam Maccoby points out that red hair was also an identifying mark of Herod in the passion plays of late medieval Germany and that red might imply blood money. Quoted in Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 20. On the English stage, Judas often wore a red wig (Fisch, The Dual Image, 16). Sander L. Gilman (The Jew’s Body [New York: Routledge, 1991], 39) notes that the deformed Jewish foot of the Middle Ages easily made the transition to the stock of modern Jewish stereotypical physical features. See also the devil portrayed as a Jew in The Temptation of Christ (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) by the Netherlandish

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Renaissance painter Juan de Flandes, who was active in Spain from 1496–1519. The Devil-Jew is depicted with horns, cleft feet, a long beard, and caricatured Jewish features: large protruding nose and lower lip, large ears, and red hair and beard. The detail of the Devil’s head can be found at http://www.wga.hu/html/j/juan/2/polypty1 .html (accessed January 27, 2008). Because the Jew was seen as having rejected Christ and his body, the icon of resurrection, his body was permanently diseased, incapable of being raised from the dead. It was marked not only by circumcision but also by various diseases, including, the most apparent, those of the skin. As an additional punishment for their crime against Jesus, Jews emitted a particularly foul smell (foetor judaicus), akin to that of the Devil. For an illuminating discussion of the association of Jews and disease at the end of the nineteenth century, see Sander Gilman, “Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews,” in Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 27–43; Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 37. 17.  The Jews who abduct the Christian child in “The Prioress’s Tale” are all filthy usurers. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas not only does everything he possibly can to kill Christians (poisoning wells, etc.), he uses his wealth to achieve ultimate power, scoring victories over both Christians and Muslims, and becoming for a while the governor of Malta. In The Merchant of Venice, usurious Shylock attempts to destroy Antonio, the exemplar of Roman friendship and Christian gentleness, by exploiting an unpaid bond. 18.  Thus, in nineteenth-century English literature, Dickens’s Fagin—a fusion of medieval devil and Renaissance usurer, a throwback to the devil-usurers of Marlowe and Shakespeare—is almost always seen as an exception. 19.  Zygmunt Bauman has emphasized the self-defeating aspects of the Jewish zeal to assimilate into European societies by mastering the language and culture of the countries in which they lived. Especially in Poland, the contribution of Jews to Polish culture became so disproportionately large that Poles began to rebel against culture itself as a Jewish bastion. “Because much of Polish culture was now the product of persons ‘tainted’ with an alien resented origin, culture and intellectualism became suspect; the nation did not trust its own artistic and literary culture, and such suspicion offered fertile soil for all sorts of anti-intellectual, obscurantist, and retrograde movements for which interwar Poland became notorious” (“Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 [1996]: 588). For Bauman’s analysis of the failure of the Jewish assimilation experience in Germany, see Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 102–59. Bauman, however, argues that this experience forced Jews into the vanguard of the “postmodern experience” (158). Bauman’s analysis coincides in many ways with Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the inauthentic and authentic Jew in Anti-Semite and Jew, tr. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1948), 136–37. There is a good deal of critical literature on the figure of the Jew as the alienated everyman in twentieth-century literature. See, for example, Fisch’s (The Dual Image, 83–84) treatment of Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses.

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20.  Rosenberg (From Shylock to Svengali, 49) remarks that “Cumberland anticipated fairly well what was going to happen throughout the nineteenth century. After him the figure of the good Jew, presented as a bloodless abstraction, gained almost as much currency as the Jew-villain.” One wonders whether this is an overstatement. I have not come across any work that actually documents the high currency of the positive Jew in nineteenth-century English literature. In any case, Rosenberg probably has in mind not prose works but plays, which, understandably, have long been forgotten. 21.  On the other hand, Mr. Riah plays a much less significant role in Our Mutual Friend than Fagin does in Oliver Twist. 22.  Almost all critics from Henry James have found the Jewish characters in Daniel Deronda artistically unsuccessful. Even Naman (The Jew in the Victorian Novel, 195), who admires what Eliot attempts to do in Daniel Deronda, concedes that the Jewish characters are wooden, even puppet-like. For one of the most sympathetic, and thus uncharacteristic, appraisals of the Jewish characters and themes in Daniel Deronda, see David Philipson, The Jew in English Fiction (Cincinnati: Clark, 1911), 122–55. 23.  Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali, 49. 24.  Contemporary directors of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice have made Jessica more melancholic in the fifth act of the play, presenting her as growing increasingly torn by her “betrayal” of her father. 25.  Fisch (The Dual Image, 13), as well as emphasizing the duality of the Jew, also emphasizes the Jew as a “problem” for the non-Jew, “a difficulty, something that one has to come to terms with before one can come to terms with oneself.” 26.  Bryan Cheyette, “Introduction: Unanswered Questions,” in Between “Race” and Culture, 11. The same idea informs Cheyette’s work on English literature: Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). “The radical emptiness and lack of a fixed meaning in the constructions of ‘semitic’ difference in this study results in ‘the Jew’ being made to occupy an incommensurable number of subject positions which traverse a range of contradictory discourses” (8). 27.  Disagreeing even with Montagu Modder’s notion that Jewish portrayal reflects social changes, Edgar Rosenberg (From Shylock to Svengali, 297), the author of perhaps the most authoritative book on the Jews in English literature, bemoans the dismaying sameness of the Jewish image, a sameness that is already implicit in the idea of stereotype. “For this, surely, is the conclusion which urges itself upon us at the end of this study: that the image of the Jew in English literature has been a depressingly uniform and static phenomenon, and that the changes and variations which were struck upon it in the course of the centuries fade into relative insignificance in the face of its monumental durability.” 28.  Jonathan Freedman, “Henry James and the Discourses of Antisemitism,” in Between “Race” and Culture, 78. 29.  Cited in Maud Ellmann, “The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,”

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in Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 89. 30.  Ellmann, “The Imaginary Jew,” 100. 31.  As Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, the Jew’s association with ambiguity often has been his most grievous misfortune, since ambiguity (chaos, the irrational, the messy) represents the gravest threat to the modern state, which desires above all else order and reason and strives to eliminate difference and diversity. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 110–15. 32.  For Paul this victory was imminent. Since for Augustine and the later Church this victory might be realized only in the distant future, a different idea about the Jews’ survival had to be advanced: the Jews were living testimony of a people rejected by God because of their rejection of Christ. 33.  Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 82–83. In general, early Old Testament figures are presented with considerable respect in Christian literature and thus treated quite differently from contemporary, rejectionist Jews. Protestant sects often identified themselves with the Old Israel. 34.  Fisch, The Dual Image, 14–15. Christian dependency on Jewish conversion is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the Jews are necessary for the salvation of Christians; on the other, they are frustrating the fulfillment of Christian history by obstinately refusing to convert. “The salvation of all peoples was, by their malice, diabolically suspended” (Léon Bloy, Le salut par les Juifs, cited in Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism [New York: Schocken, 1974], 161). 35.  Ragussis cites the actions and words of Charles Simeon, minister of Trinity Church at Cambridge for fifty-three years, who argues that evangelization of all nonbelievers had to begin with the proselytization of the Jews: “If you have any love to the Gentile world, you should bestow all possible care on the instruction of the Jews, since it is by the Jews chiefly that the Gentiles will be brought into the fold of Christ” (Figures of Conversion, 5). 36.  “Trollope’s portrait of the Judaized Englishman can be seen as a warning of the danger that lurked in Disraeli’s program of a Hebraized England. In novel after novel in the 1870s we find Trollope representing the threat of a Judaized England. . . . Such invaders, while apparently assimilated as Englishmen, in fact carry with them the threat of Judaizing England, not through religious proselytism but through the corruption of the traditional system of values defined as English” (Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 240). 37.  The population statistics for the end of the eighteenth century vary and are generally unreliable. John Klier estimates that 300,000 Jews came into Russia’s possession as a result of the three partitions. Austria added perhaps as many to its already existing Jewish population, and Prussia added about half that number (Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986], 19). For a detailed discussion of Jewish population statistics, see the section “Population and Migrations” and the various references to scholarly studies on the subject in Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew ­Under Tsars and Soviets, 2d ed. (New York: Schocken, 1987), 63–74. For the

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concerns of Polish nationalists, like the Polish positivist novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa, about Jews adopting Russian rather than Polish culture, see Safran, Rewriting the Jew, 87–90. 38.  For the most comprehensive examination of the Russian government’s policy toward its newly acquired Jewish population from the first partition of Poland to the death of Alexander I, see Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews. For the most recent work on the Jewish question in Russia after the death of Alexander I in 1825, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); John Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1983). 39.  In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great had offered rewards to Jews who converted. In 1817 Alexander I created the “Society of Israelite Christians,” an organization intended to support Jews who wished to convert. The Russian Bible Society also tried its hand. See Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, 165. On the other hand, one should not think that the Jews were one of the major concerns of the Russian government during this period. 40.  Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, 165–66. 41.  Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, 166–67. 42.  To a certain extent, most acculturalization projects had, as their hoped-for end, conversion to Christianity. For a discussion of the aims of the Russian administrators and Jewish maskilim (enlighteners) who shaped the educational reforms, see Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 49–96. 43.  Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, tr. Constance Garnett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 169–70. For the Russian source for the English translation, see A. I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), 1:208–9. 44.  Gogol’s tales based on Ukrainian folklore are an obvious exception. In Gogol’s Petersburg stories, the devil may manifest himself, but usually without his medieval accouterments. 45.  The valorization of male Nordic superiority in German racial theory often entails a corollary of female inferiority, the notion of race crossing over into gender. The Jewish male becomes marked by his ambiguous sexuality, his position between male and female. The association of the Jewish male with femininity gained cultural currency among many prominent early-twentieth-century intellectuals and writers through the work of Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903), who preached, in effect, what Jacques Le Rider has called a form of “metaphysical misogyny.” See Jacques Le Rider, “ ‘The Otto Weininger Case’ Revisited,” Jews and Gender: ­Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 22. Weininger’s ideas were not exactly new in 1904. As Léon Poliakov (The History of Anti-Semitism, 316) notes, Gustav Klemm “was already in 1843 distinguishing between an active (virile) race and a more primitive passive (feminine) race.” Weininger associates Jewish character with the feminine and thus with inferiority.

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For the Jew to approach the ideal of masculinity he must overcome the Jewishness (the feminine) in himself. Weininger, who could never measure up to his own masculine Teutonic ideal, a Sartrean inauthentic Jew, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. Weininger has been variously interpreted of late. For Weininger’s influence on prominent twentieth-century writers, see the essays in the collection edited by Nancy Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, Jews and Gender. For an examination of the “feminized Jew” in nineteenth-century German culture, with its focus on the Jewish male and homosexuality, hermaphroditism, and degeneracy, see Ritchie Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew,” Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23–39; John M. Hoberman, “Otto Weininger and the Critique of Jewish Masculinity,” Jews and Gender, 141–53. For the ominous consequences of the idea of the Jew as “a degenerative third sex” for all non-Aryans, see Daniel Boyarin, “Épater l’embourgeoisement: Freud, Gender, and the (De)colonized People,” Diacritics 24, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 1–41. For a brilliant analysis of the Jewish ideal of manliness, in contrast to the contemporary European notion, see Daniel Boyarin, “Goyim Naches, or, Modernity and the Manliness of the Mentsh,” Modernity, 63–87. 46.  Pobedonotsev allegedly made a statement to the Jewish publicist Alexander O. Zederbaum “that the only solution for the Jewish question in Russia was onethird should emigrate, one-third become Christianized, and one-third should perish.” See Baron, The Russian Jew, 49–50. Despite such a statement, Baron concedes that “at the same time, it must be noted that Pobedonotsev was not a racist” (356). Pobedonotsev (1827–1907) directed the education of the tsars Alexander III (ruled 1881–1894) and Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917). In 1880, he was appointed procurator of the Holy Synod, a position that he occupied until 1905. 47.  The German antifeminine, “Green,” and homoerotic spiritual and physical ideal also did not find a receptive audience among Russians. 48.  N. V. Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii, 7 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 2:124–25. The English translation is Constance Garnett’s from the Kent edition: The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Leonard J. Kent, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2:99. 49.  In the Russian Orthodox tradition, for which beauty is closely tied to spirituality, the possible disjunction of the beautiful, the good, and the true has generally not posed a significant theological problem. Icons are not paintings, objects of beauty, or imitations, but manifestations of divine light, windows through which heaven manifests itself in the phenomenal world. The Orthodox basilica was conceived as a visual simulacrum of heaven, and painted and adorned (in Russian, rendered as “made beautiful”) accordingly. The early chronicles report that the Russians chose Orthodoxy over the other faiths because, having visited Constantinople, they were so overwhelmed by the beauty of Hagia Sophia that they did not know whether they were on earth or in heaven. “We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is more beautiful than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.” See Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky (New York: Dutton, 1974), 67–68.

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50.  Many despicable figures have bemoaned their ugliness. One of the most salient examples is Franz Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers. “Why did nature burden me with this ugliness? Why me? Just as if she had been bankrupt when I was born. Why should I have this Laplander’s nose? Why should I have these blackamoor’s lips, these Hottentot’s eyes? I truly think that she made a heap of the most hideous parts of every human kind as the ingredients for me.” See The Robbers, tr. Alan C. Leidner, in Sturm und Drang (New York: Continuum, 1992), 188. 51.  Monsters and prostitutes with hearts of gold became period literary clichés. In the romantic-realist Dickens, where we expect to find physical and moral conflation (Fagin is perhaps the most famous Jewish example of this in nineteenth-­century literature), we encounter the same romantic disjunction: moral beauty in the plain, but in Dickens more rarely do we see evil in beautiful form. In Bleak House, the heroine, Esther Summerson, the epitome of spiritual and moral beauty, and not unattractive, is disfigured by smallpox halfway through the novel; but that hardly diminishes her in the eyes of the good. She is the recipient of marriage proposals from the novel’s most virtuous characters, and is granted happiness in the end. 52.  The prostitute with a heart of gold was a commonplace in Russian literature long before Dostoevsky began to exploit it. 53.  “It will be seen,” he writes, “as the story unfolds itself, that invariably the poet, the novelist and the dramatist reflect the attitude of contemporary society in their representation of the Jewish character, and that the portrayal changes with the economic and social changes of each decade.” Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England, vii. 54.  For the ebbs and flows in the history of Jewish tavernkeeping throughout Eastern Europe, see Heiko Haumann, A History of East European Jews, tr. James Patterson (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002). 55.  In Taras Bulba, the action takes place at a time when there was much less differentiation among the Eastern Slavic groups (Little Russian, White Russian, and Great Russian). Gogol uses the word “Russian” as a shorthand for all the Eastern Slavs, repeatedly speaking of the Russian land (russkaia zemlia), Russian strength (russkaia sila), Russian character (russkii kharakter), Russian nature (russkaia priroda), Russian soul (russkaia dusha), Russian faith (russkaia vera), and Russian feeling (russkoe chuvstvo). There are few vestiges of the word “Ukraine” in the text of 1842. For a “deconstructionist” response to the privileging of things Russian in Taras Bulba, see Wasyl Sirskyj (“Ideological Overtones in Gogol’s Taras Bulba,” Ukrainian-Quarterly Journal of East European and Asian Affairs 35 [1979]: 279–87), who argues that in the 1842 version of Taras Bulba Gogol made his hero the proponent of a chauvinist Russian nationalism and a defender of Russian Orthodoxy in order to undercut the text’s Slavophile ideology. Sirskyj suggests that Gogol included these chauvinist passages (more numerous in the later version) so that they would appear so obviously insincere that they could be “deconstructed” by his more perceptive readers. 56.  Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Scott’s Ivanhoe.

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Notes to Chapter 1 1.  Except for “The Prioress’s Tale,” where the subject is Jewish ritual murder, there are just a handful of references to anything Jewish in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. 2.  The translations of Gogol are by Constance Garnett from the Kent edition: The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Leonard J. Kent, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). The page numbers will appear directly in the text before the corresponding pagination in the following Russian edition: N. V. Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii, 7 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966–1968). When there is no citation from the Kent edition, I have translated the passage myself because of a special aspect of the text that needed to be brought out. 3.  Anton Chekhov will later make use of this image in “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (1894). 4.  For example, from the story “St. John’s Eve” (1831): “Why, in the old days one would dress himself as a Jew and another as a devil; first they would kiss each other and then pull each other’s forelocks” (1:44; 1:57). 5.  Joshua Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 36. 6.  The revised longer version is much more influenced by ideology, both religious and nationalistic, and more interesting in its representation of Jews. 7.  The protagonists of Taras Bulba are Zaporozhians or Dnieper Cossacks (Zaporozhtsy), a group of Ukrainian Cossacks who lived beyond the cataracts of the Dnieper River. In the text the word “Cossacks” will be used as a shorthand for Zaporozhian Cossacks. Gogol is not consistent in his usage, one-third of the time referring to the protagonists as Zaporozhians (Zaporozhtsy) and two-thirds of the time as Cossacks (kozaki and occasionally kazaki). 8.  Gogol generally uses the word “Russian” in the widest sense, to include all Eastern Slavs (present-day Great Russians, Ukrainians, and White Russians). The 1842 edition of the novel implies similarities rather than differences between Great Russians and Ukrainians. Much is still being written on the Russian and Ukrainian antipathies and sympathies in Taras Bulba. The debate, an old one, arose while Gogol was still writing. For a recent article that focuses on the competing (and irreconcilable) evidence regarding Gogol’s national sympathies and that analyzes Gogol’s attitude toward Russia and Ukraine, see P. Mikhed, “ ‘Privatizatsiia’ Gogolia? Vozvrashchaias’ k russko-ukrainskomu voprosu,’ ” Voprosy Literatury 3 (May– June 2003): 94–112. Mikhed sees Gogol as a man belonging to a prenationalist era, a defender of the Russian state in terms of its larger imperial and religious goals, as a sort of “heavenly homeland” (rodina nebesnaia). Mikhed also discusses the contemporary Ukrainian perceptions of Taras Bulba and the recent translations of the novel into Ukrainian in which many of the Russian references are omitted. Actually, the 1835 version has no mention of Russia at all. In the 1835 version, allegiances for the Cossacks, other than those to their warrior brothers, are of little consequence, especially if they interfere with pillaging and the chance to die valiantly in battle. 9.  This idea as well as others regarding the Russian soul and its virtues reflect,

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as Gippius writes, “Gogol’s personal and ideological movement toward the Slavophiles at the beginning of the 1840s.” See Vasilii Gippius, Gogol (Leningrad: Mysl’, 1924), 134. See also Wasyl Sirskyj, “Ideological Overtones in Gogol’s Taras Bulba,” Ukrainian Quarterly: Journal of East European and Asian Affairs 35 (1979): 279–87. For Sirskyj, Taras’s Russian patriotism in the 1842 version of the novel was not only insincere but probably made so blatant that no discerning reader could take it seriously (287). By contrast, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt argues that “Gogol’s fascination with the Cossacks was as important for his definition of the essence of the Russian man as were his masterpieces The Inspector General and Dead Souls, whose characters live in the heartland of Russia, in an era roughly contemporaneous with Gogol’s own” (The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992], 41). 10.  O. V. Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy v slavianskoi narodnoi traditsii (Moscow: Indrik, 2005), 7. Although Belova treats Slavic stereotypes of all groups that are perceived as other, most of the material relates to the stereotypes of Jews. 11.  The mythic nature of Gogol’s Cossacks in Taras Bulba was already suggested in the nineteenth century. It is now generally accepted by contemporary scholarship. Kornblatt’s study, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature, shows that other nineteenth-century writers had also invested in the cultural mythology of the Cossack. 12.  For a discussion of Gogol’s appropriation of Homer’s Iliad as a model for Taras Bulba, see Carl R. Proffer, “Gogol’s Taras Bulba and The Iliad,” Comparative Literature 17, no. 2 (1965): 142–50. Like other commentators, Proffer also acknowledges the influence of Ukrainian folk songs (dumy), the historical novels of Walter Scott, and the French école frénétique (Jules Janin, Eugène Sue). Vsevolod ­Setchkarev (Gogol: His Life and Works, tr. Robert Kramer [New York: New York University Press, 1965], 141) describes Taras Bulba as a “work that unites Walter Scott, Jules Janin, Ukrainian folk songs, German Romanticism, and, for good measure, Homer, whom Gogol esteemed very highly.” In a more patriotic vein, F. Ia. Priima (“ ‘Slovo o polku igoreve’ v tvorchestve Gogolia,” in Gogol’: Stat’i i materialy, ed. M. P. Alekseev [Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1954], 137–56) argues the “Igor Tale” as an inspiration and source for the novel. Taras Bulba remains one of Gogol’s most popular works and the work for which he is most famous outside of Russia. An American film was based on it starring Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis, and Christine Kaufmann (1962). Leos Janacek’s Taras Bulba (1921) is one of the composer’s most outstanding musical scores. 13.  For a discussion of Gogol’s sources and the ways in which Taras Bulba diverges from the historical record, often radically, see the series of articles by ­Romana Barhrij-Pilkulyk: “The Use of Historical Sources in Taras Bul’ba and The Black Council,” Studia Ukrainica 2 (1989): 49–64; and “Superheroes, Gentlemen or Pariahs? The Cossacks in Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Panteleimon Kulish’s Black Council,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 2 (1980): 30–47. Barhrij-Pilkulyk uses The Black Council, which in his view is a true historical novel à la Walter Scott, as a means of demonstrating the liberties that Gogol took with history, especially

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with regard to the economic and social life of the Cossacks in the time he portrays. But Gogol’s romantic poetic license with the historical record (coalescing centuries, among other things) was often noted in the nineteenth century. Valery Bryusov cites the critical debate about the historical and ethnographic authenticity of Gogol’s Ukraine, a debate that had begun not long after Gogol’s death. See Bryusov’s essay “Burnt to Ashes” in Robert Maguire, ed., Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 113. Much has been written about Gogol’s visions of becoming a historian and writing a history of Ukraine and a history of the Middle Ages, among other projects. As a romantic, Gogol was generally more interested in the heroes of history than historical events, especially those heroes that offered artistic possibilities. “A cult of individualism, turning into anecdotes and bordering on the fairy tale: this was the basis of Gogol’s understanding of history” (Gippius, Gogol’, 66). Gogol often did not see a sharp dividing line between history and literature, a view not uncommon at the time in theoretical works about history. See especially the section on history in ­Gippius’s chapter, “History” (Gogol’, 59–76). He writes: “A fine line existed between the history he was studying and the creations of his imagination. In addition, he sometimes would obviously weave into history his own imaginings” (59). G. A. Gukovsky comments that “there is not one specific historical fact” in the entire novel (Realizm Gogolia [Moscow: GIKhL, 1959], 126). What is least to be expected of Gogol is logic and consistency. See Gogol’s articles: “On the Middle-Ages,” “On the Teaching of World History,” and “View of the Formation of Little Russia” in Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:29–67. 14.  Setchkarev, Gogol, 141. 15.  It does not say how old Taras is in the 1842 version. It would be deflating for the reader to learn that he was an old man. In the 1835 version he is sixty years old. But in the 1835 version, his age (much more emphasized than in the later version), given his extraordinary fighting ability, only adds to his luster as an epic warrior. But alas, in the earlier version Taras attributes his capture by Polish forces to the diminished capacities of old age. When he was young, he could never have been overpowered by any enemy, however large. 16.  “The Cossacks are in some sense representative of Russians in a less corrupted and original form, the ‘Russians’ of ‘holy Rus’ ” (Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero, 46). Focusing on the utopic mode of Taras Bulba, Gukovsky (Realizm Gogolia, 1959) maintains that the novel is not supposed to be about an actual past; rather it is supposed to provide a model for the present and the future (nazidatel’noe pouchenie sovremennosti) (128). 17.  Petr Chaadaev, Letters on the Philosophy of History: First Letter, tr. Valentine Snow, in Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Mark Raeff (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 160–73. 18.  On the importance of the idea of glorious death for the Greek epic hero, see Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 81–102. 19.  The notions of brotherhood, comradeship, male bonding, and male affiliation have received a good deal of scholarly attention over the last decades. Much

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of this work has borrowed from, and creatively amended, the earlier work of Freud and Levi-Strauss. See especially Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Marion Boyars, 1984); and J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper, 1959). Eliot Borenstein, in Men Without Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), judiciously employs critical theories about masculinity and comradeship from Freud, Levi-Strauss, George Mosse, Eve Sedgwick, Luce Irigaray, John Remy, J. Glenn Gray, and Lionel Tiger in his study of the ideals of comradeship in Soviet literature of the 1920s. As mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, there has also been a vigorous debate in recent years regarding the influence of Weininger’s theories of masculinity on twentieth-century European literary culture. 20.  For the Greeks this would have been something like their local or Panhellenic games. 21.  On Cossack vitality as expressed in music and dance, see Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero, 54–58. It must be mentioned that the Cossacks had been warned before about drinking on expeditions. Before the Cossacks go on their campaign to Kovno, their leader warns them that anyone caught drunk will be shot like a dog and set out for the birds, because a man drunk on a campaign is not worthy of Christian burial (2:56; 2:74). This warning was taken more seriously by the Cossacks in the earlier version of the novel, in which they were defeated because they were vastly outnumbered by Polish forces, not because they were drunk. 22.  The idea that Taras Bulba was an implicit critique of Gogol’s own time was often exploited by Soviet criticism. Gukovsky (Realizm Gogolia, 133–99) interpreted “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” a story that appeared in the same collection as Taras Bulba (Mirgorod), as a devastating portrait of contemporary Cossacks, in whom the old Cossack ideals and virtues of vitality, wholeness, freedom, community, and national sentiment had all but disappeared. Taras Bulba was therefore a wake-up call to all contemporary Russians, reminding them that they still had the potential to change, to be like the Cossacks of old. Taras Bulba “was not so much about what existed in Russia but what Russians should and could be.” It told the contemporary reader “that even you could live and die like Taras Bulba and his comrades” (125). N. V. Stepanov’s analysis of Taras Bulba derives almost entirely from Gukovsky’s. See his N. V. Gogol’: Tvorcheskii put’ (Moscow: GIKhL, 1955), 166–211. The contrasting of Taras Bulba and “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” has a long provenance, dating back to Belinsky’s reviews of Mirgorod. See V. G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1953–1959), 3:439–41, 444–47. 23.  This association, as I have indicated earlier, can be seen later in the century in such disparate figures as Vasily Rozanov in Russia and Otto Weininger in Germany. 24.  A great deal has been written about gender in Taras Bulba, especially with regard to the sharp dichotomy between the male and female realms and the danger that the female poses for the male. See, for example, Knut Andreas Grimstad, “ ‘No Sissy Stuff!’: The En-Gendering Significance of Polishness in Gogol’s Taras Bulba,”

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New Zealand Slavonic Journal 36 (2002): 115–27; V. Sh. Krivonos, “Son Tarasa v strukture povesti ‘Taras Bul’ba,’ ” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk, Seriia Literatury i Iazyka 61, no. 4 (July–August, 2002): 10–18; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Cossacks and Women: Creation Without Reproduction in Gogol’s Cossack Myth,” in Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Death Transcended and the Female Threat,” The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 61–70; Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 84–85; George Grabowicz, “The History and Myth of the Cossack Ukraine in Polish and Russian Romantic Literature,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1975, 518. 25.  There are degrees of otherness. Although Belova focuses on the binary opposition of one’s own (svoi) and the other (chuzhoi), she concedes that some groups at times are less distant, less chuzhie, than others. When a Russian, a Gypsy, and a Jew are compared, the Russian will be svoi, the Gypsy drugoi (another), and the Jew chuzhoi, with the word chuzhoi here meaning something like “alien.” The Jew is never just an other (drugoi), he is always chuzhoi (alien). See Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 60. 26.  Knut Andreas Grimstad, “ ‘No Sissy Stuff!,’ ” 115–27. 27.  Kornblatt (The Cossack Hero, 63) argues well for seeing the Cossack as a “holy monk,” part of a saintly brotherhood. But the text also shows the monks (Russian or Catholic) represent a false brotherhood, a brotherhood opposed to almost every Cossack value. As the narrator states, the Cossacks hate Catholic priests more than they hate Jews. 28.  Gogol can conflate masculine and feminine here because the word for “sword” (sablia) in Russian is grammatically feminine. The word “sword” then can be grammatically feminine and metaphorically masculine. 29.  There are several passages in Greek literature in which Greek heroes taunt their opponents or goad their companions to action by comparing them contemptuously to women, but Gogol’s passage most evokes the scene in Apollonius’s The Argonauts, in which Heracles tries to shame into action Jason’s men, who, instead of searching for the Golden Fleece, have decided to remain on Lemnos, enjoying a life of sensual and other unheroic pleasures with the women of the island. But Gogol could have confined himself to The Iliad, which also includes this kind of taunt. For a discussion of this topos in ancient literature, see Michael A. Flower’s note in Herodotus, Histories: Book IX, ed. Michael A. Flower and John Marincola (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 140. 30.  Tovar in Russian means “object of trade” (predmet torgovli). The word is of Turkic origin. Tovarishchestvo (comradeship or collaboration) probably derives from the idea of collaboration for the purposes of trade. To a native Russian speaker, however, the idea of trade (tovar) does not seem to enter into the word tovari­shchestvo. 31.  In what has remained of Gogol’s earliest work about the Cossacks, a historical novel entitled The Hetman (Getman, 1830–1832), the accusation about the

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Easter cake is made more concrete by the narrator’s description of an incident that occurred at an Easter celebration. The narrator informs the reader that the Polish government levied a tax (otkup) on the Easter cakes that Orthodox Christians brought to the church for consecration. The collection of the tax was farmed out to the Jews, who are shown marking the cakes so that they can collect the tax. The Cossacks submit to this indignity, but they seethe with resentment. Ostranitsa, the hero, saves a Jew from the crowd but then curses him and violently flings him to the ground. Later the Jew is hanged upside down. Ostranitsa is horrified not because of any sympathy for the Jew but because the action of the crowd may call down upon the Cossacks the retribution of the Polish authorities and because it is unbefitting for a group of Cossacks to attack a defenseless man. None of this is presented comically (1:302). But in the comic conversation that an old Cossack has with his horse, he presents the hanging of the Jew, who “is hanging nicely from the gallows,” somewhat less seriously. The Jew, he reasons, is collecting taxes as a representative of the King, but on the other hand he is after all “the enemy of Christ, our holy God.” Moreover, the Jews, the enemies of Christianity, deserve their fate because they own the Orthodox churches and are in control of the liquor trade. The hanging or drowning of Jews (zhidy) seems to have been a narrative topos of historical fiction about the early Cossacks. 32.  Some of the incidents that Gogol describes undoubtedly have their origins in Slavic popular culture. The barrel, which plays an important role in the novel, has its counterpart in anecdotes about Christ’s transformation of a Jewish woman into a pig. The Jews try to test Christ’s omniscience by hiding a Jewish woman under a barrel (or in a stove) but Christ finds her and transforms her into a pig. (This is an explanation for why Jews do not eat pork, for they would be eating their own relative.) See Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 44. In the quoted episode, like Christ, the Cossacks find the Jews hiding in vodka barrels or in stoves, but they are Jewish men, not Jewish women. They do not turn them into swine but nevertheless slaughter them for committing sacrilege. Even more sinister barrels figure in blood libel stories in which the Jews are accused of murdering Christian children to extract their blood necessary for the preparation of matzoh (unleavened bread) for Passover. The Jews catch the children and put them in barrels full of nails. 33.  Yankel and the local Jews seem to come from Uman (Uman’). It is difficult to determine how large the community was in the rather vague time period (extending over several centuries) that Gogol describes, but it was located in an area that was periodically ravaged by revolts (accompanied by pogroms) in which the Cossacks often played an important role. In the seventeenth century it also was home to several Cossack regiments and, for a while, the hetman of the right (west) bank of the Dnieper River in Ukraine. Perhaps Gogol is making reference to a much later time (1768), when the city experienced a massive Ukrainian peasant and Cossack uprising against the Poles, described in Taras Shevchenko’s famous poem “Haydamaki” (1841), which resulted in large Jewish casualties. The town later attained considerable religious significance for Hasidic Jews. Rabbi Nachman, the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov and founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, expressed the

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desire to be buried in Uman (Uman’ ), among the thousands of Jews who had been martyred there. He, too, may have had in mind the 1768 revolt. The first pilgrimage to the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman was led by his chief disciple, Reb Nosson, in the spring of 1811. From that point on, it became customary for Breslover Hasidim to try to make the journey at least once in their lifetime. 34.  Underlying the Cossacks’ anger may be Ukrainian stories that present the Jew and the devil as brothers. “While apostles Peter and Paul were traveling they met the devil and a Jew, and cut off their heads and threw them in a ditch. When they related this to Jesus, he got angry at the apostles for arbitrarily depriving someone of his life, and he ordered them to rectify the situation. The apostles setting the heads back on the bodies mixed them up, and from that time the Jew has the head of the devil and the devil has the head of the Jew, and that is why they are brothers” (Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 50). 35.  By contrast the Cossacks jump into the river to avoid death when escaping the pursuing Polish troops. When Yankel unexpectedly receives two thousand ducats from Taras Bulba, he experiences intense joy but at the same time he cannot help imagining what it was like to be the person from whom Taras stole the money. Yankel thinks that such a loss would drive anyone to the river. See the passage quoted on page 63 in Taras Bulba (2:113–14; 2:140–42). 36.  Anti-Jewish writers have, of course, often accused the Jews of constituting a Satanic brotherhood bent on the destruction of Christianity and on the creation of a new world order based on Jewish values (Mammon). There is little of that in Taras Bulba. The novel shows Jews having extended ties with Jews in other parts of Eastern Europe (Warsaw), but it does not present the Jews as part of a rival fraternal order. In fact, women and children are much more a part of the everyday lives of Jews than they are of Cossacks, not to speak of Jewish men hiding under the skirts of their wives to avoid capture by the Cossacks. In other instances, Jews personify not brotherhood but rampant individualism. 37.  Gogol’s treatment of the question of Jewish loyalty (and spying) differs from that usually found in the nineteenth-century Russian historical tale, which often emphasizes the exploitive alliance between Jews and Poles. Jews are often caught spying for the Poles and hanged—sometimes drowned—on the spot. In Bulgarin’s Mazepa the Cossacks catch a Jew spying for the Poles and drown him soon thereafter. But in Taras Bulba the hero looks upon the ingress and egress of Jews from the besieged Polish city as normal. And although the Jews are always in danger of being hanged by the Cossacks, including Yankel, Yankel is just as likely to be hanged by a Polish nobleman. 38.  The narrator and the Cossacks use the word zhidy for Jews. Even Yankel uses zhidy when referring to his fellow Jews. The narrator and Yankel each use the word evrei only once; evrei was the official Russian word for “Jew” since the end of the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century zhid was commonly used in the conversation of all classes, especially in Ukraine and South Russia, where the standard word for Jew was zhyd or zhid and not evrei. But from the 1830s, Russianspeaking Jews did not refer to themselves as zhidy, a fact that almost all Russian

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writers know. In Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight (1830), the Jew Solomon—who is called zhid by others and is listed as zhid in the cast of characters—refers to his fellow Jews as evrei. In nineteenth-century historical novels and romances, Jews are invariably called zhidy. In Bulgarin’s Mazepa the word evrei does not even appear. But in his Ivan Vyzhigin, which takes place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Jews refer to themselves only as evrei. For a discussion of the debate over the words zhid and evrei in the Russian press during the second half of the nineteenth century, see John Klier, “Zhid: The Biography of a Russian Epithet,” Slavonic and East European Review 60, no. 1 (1982): 1–15. In The Human Stain, which deals with a professor who resigns over an incident concerning a racial epithet, Philip Roth employs both the words “colored” and “Negro” in the speech of some of his African-American characters from the 1940s. What is worth noting here is not whether Roth gets the usage right or not but that he is trying to employ words that reflect actual usage. 39.  As is clear from his “Thoughts on Geography” (“Mysli o geografii,” 6:120–29), Gogol believed that geography had a near-deterministic influence on the character of peoples. Taras Bulba shows that this view applies to microcosmic as well as macrocosmic space. 40.  For a detailed examination of space and time in Taras Bulba, see Kornblatt, Cossack Hero, 71–90. Kornblatt argues that Cossack space, whether it be the steppes or the sech', is liminal, free, and undefined. It is certainly liminal, but perhaps not so undefined. As with all other things in Taras Bulba, there are flagrant contradictions in the text. The sech' functions as a definite space in several important ways. It is a sacred space that Jews, priests, and women are not allowed to enter. It is a space that has been carefully selected; it is beyond the cataracts, out of the reach of the Cossacks’ enemies; and it is the space from which the Zaporozhian Cossacks derive their name. Furthermore, the Turks can always find this Cossack space; they make periodic raids upon the Cossack territory and eventually even discover the place in the sech' where the Cossacks bury their treasure. 41.  Perhaps this is why Gogol uses the Ukrainian word for steppe (step), which is masculine, only once. All other references to the steppe are in Russian, where steppe is feminine (step’). 42.  The steppes are called “rivers of grass.” 43.  In Isaac Babel’s stories from Red Calvary, the most ardent desire of the narrator is to learn how to ride a horse, to be one with the horsemen in his Cossack detachment. He tells us that he succeeded in the end. But in one of Babel’s autobiographical stories focusing on his boyhood, his narrator’s main physical handicap, especially with respect to Russian boys, is his lack of ability to swim (umen’e plavat’ ). “It became my dream to learn how to swim. I was ashamed to admit to these bronzed boys that, having been born in Odessa, I hadn’t seen the sea until I was ten, and at fourteen I still did not know how to swim. . . . The ability to swim turned out to be unattainable. The fear of water (vodoboiazn’) of my ancestors—Spanish rabbis and Frankfurt money-changers—pulled me to the bottom. The water did not support me.” I. Babel’, Konarmiia (Alma-Ata: Zhalyn, 1989), 163.

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44.  In the Slavic popular tradition, black and red are the colors most associated with the devil and the Jew. See Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 51. 45.  The Cossacks accuse the Jews of placing stamps with their impious (unclean) hands (nechistoi svoieiu rukoi) on the Easter cakes (2:53; 2:55). See also Chapter 1 in this volume, note 29. 46.  “At last the Jews set up such an uproar that the one who was standing on the lookout had to signal to them to be silent, and Taras was beginning to be anxious about his own safety, till, remembering that Jews can discuss nothing except in the street, and the devil himself could not understand their language, he felt assured” (2:118; 2:148). 47.  “In the folk tradition the language of the other (chuzhoi iazyk) is perceived as a mark of something nonhuman” (Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 65). Whereas the episode concerning the incomprehensibility of the Jew’s language in Taras Bulba is fairly innocuous, milked for its comic possibilities, this notion, as with many other ideas associated with “the other” in popular culture, can have a dark side. In western Galicia, parents would warn children not to use nonsense or made-up language, motivating their prohibition by pointing out that the Jews used such language among themselves when they were torturing Christ (Belova, Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 66). 48.  In Russian and Ukrainian folklore the devil sometimes shows considerable limitations. He can even be fooled, or at least outwitted, by a Russian peasant. In the work of Nikolay Leskov (1831–1895) later in the century, the wily Russian peasant can often get the better of the Jew. 49.  As noted earlier, partly because of the influence of Weininger, the idea of the physically and morally effeminate Jewish male gained currency among prominent twentieth-century European writers. Indeed, in Gogol, the Jews are weak, cowardly, emotional, and gesticulate when they talk. They are the victims of Cossack aggression. But there is little evidence in the text that the male Jewish body is represented as female. Yes, the Jews are presented as cowering under the skirts of their wives, but often Cossacks call each other women when they are questioning each other’s manhood. The male Jews in Gogol are funny males. They do not dress or look like their wives. The traditional stereotype often presents Jewish fathers and daughters as physical and moral opposites. The Polish soldiers are effeminately dressed, sissies, but the text shows that they are good fighters, just as good as the Cossacks, at least in the later 1842 edition. 50.  Dmitry Chizhevsky, “Gogol: Artist and Thinker,” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 4 (1952): 266–69, has argued that hyperbolic details like “720 pounds” are employed ironically for comic deflation. But whatever impression Taras’s 720 pounds may have on some readers, they seem intended not to be taken literarily but metaphorically, as they might be in epic or myth. This is not supposed to be a “view from below.” Taras is not one of the dwarfs who “appear to be giants” (269). 51.  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. William Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 431.

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52.  “All the scenes with Yankel are calculated to create a comic effect (N. V. Stankevich could not recall them without laughing); even the cruel scene where the Jews are thrown into the water is depicted in the style of farce” (Gippius, Gogol’, 75). Vladimir Nabokov, in Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), is as dismissive of Gogol’s Cossacks as he is of Gogol’s “burlesque Jews.” Gogol’s comic or ridiculous Jew is a staple of the European literary and cultural tradition. The comic Jew often appears in the Ukrainian nativity puppet theater, which differs little, and ultimately derives, from the medieval European mystery play. 53.  This is the typical comic hyperbole of Gogol’s mature style, a characteristic of his writing that has always received a good deal of attention. 54.  In Taras Bulba the Jews are good at trade, but, as we have seen, they lack common sense, engaging in the most foolish, risk-taking behavior. Solomon’s loss of facial hair may be an allusion, probably unintentional, to apotropaic qualities of Jewish hair. Belova (Etnokul’turnye stereotipy, 62) recounts a story from Poland in which a man desiring to harm his neighbor, a smith, digs up the body of a Jewish man, cuts off some hairs from his beard, and strews them on his neighbor’s forge. 55.  Chizhevksy calls these diminishing comparisons Gogol’s “downward metaphors.” Chizhevsky, “Gogol: Artist and Thinker,” 273. 56.  Vladimir Zhabotinskii comments: “It is even impossible to call this hatred or sympathy for the Cossack revenge against the Jews. It is worse, it is a sort of carefree, unadulterated joy, undarkened by the slightest thought that the ridiculous legs moving in the air are the legs of living people, a sort of amazingly integral, unadulterated, contempt for an inferior race, which does not even condescend to antipathy” (Izbrannoe [Tel-Aviv: N.p., 1978], 63–64). 57.  Polish death is also presented seriously. Although the Cossacks look at their Polish warrior counterparts as pretty boys, the Poles, as I have noted, are courageous, excellent fighters. Once the Cossacks divide up their forces, they are no longer a match for the Poles, who easily defeat them. Epic heroes need worthy adversaries. In contrast to Taras Bulba, in Bulgarin’s Mazepa, Paley intercedes with his Cossacks who want to throw a Polish baby into the flames for fun (dlia zabavy) so that they can enjoy watching it burn to death. But Paley feels compassion. The baby brought up by Paley turns out to be Mazepa’s son and, next to Peter the Great, emerges as the positive hero of the novel.

Notes to Chapter 2 1.  V. V. Vinogradov, “Natural’nyi grotesk (Siuzhet i kompozitsiia povesti Gogolia) ‘Nos,’ ” Izbrannye trudy: Poetiki russkoi literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 5–44. 2.  See his article “O dvizhenii zhurnal’noi literatury v 1834 i 1835 godu,” Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:170. For other statements praising Scott, see Gogol’, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:376, 478. Gogol writes to M. P. Pogodin (October 22, 1836) from Geneva of settling down “again to reread all of Walter Scott” (7:156) and to V. A. Zhukovsky (November 12, 1836) from Paris of “having started to reread Molière, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott” (7:161).

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3.  The heroine of Turgenev’s “The Unfortunate One” (“Neschastnaia,” 1868) writes in her reminiscences that when nursing back to health the man with whom she had fallen in love she read to him from Walter Scott, playing as it were Rebecca to his Ivanhoe. “I was about to take my book to read—the novels of Walter Scott were very popular at the time—I especially remember reading Ivanhoe to him.” See I. S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. (Moscow: GIKhL, 1955), 7:181. 4.  Scott’s historical novels were so popular that for some time the novel became almost synonymous with the historical novel. See Gukovsky, Realizm Gogolia, 130. 5.  See Gippius’s citation of Moskovskii vestnik’s review of The Nevsky Miscellany, which lists the stylistic and structural devices of the Russian historical tale. It is a fairly accurate description of the style and structure of Taras Bulba from the point of view of the setting, the love story, the siege, and the copious use of a Jew derived from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. “These Jews (zhidy) are now very fashionable; they derive their heritage from Shakespeare’s Shylock and Walter Scott’s Isaac. The Jew must be a ubiquitous personage, appearing everywhere, like a deus ex machina, tying and untying all the threads of the plot.” See Gippius, Gogol’, 70. 6.  Kornblatt (Cossack Hero, 88–90) discusses this characteristic of the historical novel or romance in her discussion of Gogol’s use of narrators in his early work. 7.  The pagination of citations from Ivanhoe will appear in the text. They are taken from Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). Later Scott refers to Isaac’s “excess of subservience,” “meanness of mind,” and “timid apprehension” (236). 8.  There are many similar passages in Ivanhoe, the following being not less unambiguous about the cause of Jewish character than the one quoted in the text. “The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited; and the immense wealth they usually acquired in commerce, while it frequently placed them in danger, was at other times used to extend their influence, and to secure to them a certain degree of protection. On these terms they lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skillful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed” (61–62). 9.  One can only speculate, but it seems that Gogol had in mind a very different role for the beautiful young girl devoted to her father, her religion, and her people: a Polish temptress responsible for Andrii’s betrayal of the Cossack brotherhood. 10.  Georgy Ben (“Byl li Taras Bul’ba antisemitom i chto dumal ob etom Gogol,” Zvezda 7 [2003]: 204), calls it simply “ridiculous nonsense” (nesusvetnaia chush’). 11.  See this passage in Chapter 1, page 39. 12.  Although there are interesting sections in both of Bulgarin’s novels, they are also rife with exaggerated passions, hyperbolic characterization, frequent sensational plot twists, and, especially in Ivan Vyzhigin, a good deal of moralizing. 13.  Faddei Bulgarin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1990), 432–33. 14.  Faddei Bulgarin, Ivan Vyzhigin (Moscow: Zakharov, 2002), 294. 15.  Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, a secondary epic dealing with Poland during

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the early nineteenth century, features a Jew named Yankel (Jankiel) who is in many ways the antithesis of Gogol’s Yankel in Taras Bulba. Mickiewicz’s Yankel is an exemplary Polish patriot, a honest and hospitable businessman, an exemplary community leader, a brilliant and inspired musician, an accomplished singer of Polish ballads (the reputed composer of the Polish national anthem), a reconciler of Polish factions, and an assistant rabbi. Pan Tadeusz was published in 1834. In 1838, Gogol visited Mickiewicz in Paris. On two occasions, Gogol requested one of his friends to send him a copy of Pan Tadeusz, which he called a remarkable work. Gogol did not know Polish, and when he met with Mickiewicz and other Polish writers they spoke Russian or more often Ukrainian. No Russian translation of this anti-Russian work was made in Gogol’s lifetime. We do not know if Gogol could read Polish, nor do we know if he ever possessed a copy of Mickiewicz’s work. There are no references to Mickiewicz in any extant letter of Gogol after 1838, and there are no textual references in Taras Bulba to Pan Tadeusz. If one had to imagine an influence one would have to say that Gogol made sure to make his Yankel different in every way possible from Mickiewicz’s Yankel. But the portraits of the Jews in the 1842 edition are not significantly different from those of the 1835 edition, which could not have been influenced by Pan Tadeusz since most of it was written before Pan Tadeusz appeared in print. For Gogol’s references to Mickiewicz in his letters, see N. V. Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1940), 10:133, 152, 173, 233, 383.

Notes to Chapter 3 1.  Michael Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 1:257–58. In the 1835 version of the novel, Gogol is much more explicit about the Cossacks’ lack of national allegiance, their heterogeneity, and their desire to fight for the sake of fighting alone and not for any specific cause. “It was irrelevant where one fought as long as one fought, it was indecent for a man of noble nature not to be fighting. There were many Polish officers here. In fact, what nation did not have representatives here” (2:290–91). 2.  In his “View of the Formation of Ukraine” (1832), written two years before the first edition of Taras Bulba, Gogol says the Zaporozhian brotherhood “had preserved all the traits which one portrays in a band of brigands” (2:65). 3.  Sending children to the seminary is probably a topos of Russian historical narratives associated with the Cossacks of the seventeenth century. Paley in ­Bulgarin’s Mazepa sends Ognevik, a Polish child that he saves from the flames (actually ­Mazepa’s son), to a seminary to learn Latin and Polish so that he will be useful to the Cossacks when he grows up (Bulgarin, Sochineniia, 435). However, the seminary experience as well as Taras’s knowledge of the classics seems totally out of place in Taras Bulba. 4.  We never learn the name of Andrii’s Polish love. But this is not strange in the “phallocentric” context of Taras Bulba, where none of the female characters have names. The “Polish girl” (pannochka) is the Polish military governor’s daughter. As Karlinsky has stated, in Gogol “the women do not have names only functions.” See Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 84.

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5.  Karlinsky, Sexual Labyrinth, 82. Some critics, especially Western, have seen Taras Bulba and the Cossacks as moral monsters, and that assessment has understandably influenced their assessment of the work. See, for example, Edmund Wilson, “Gogol: The Demon in the Overgrown Garden,” The Nation 175 (December 1952): 520–24; Victor Erlich, Gogol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 53–54. Hugh McLean has argued that Taras Bulba was less successful artistically because it was insufficiently tied to the primitive (oral) form of sexuality—or absence of sexuality—characteristic of Gogol’s best works (“Gogol’s Retreat from Love: ­Towards an Interpretation of Mirgorod,” American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists [The Hague: Mouton, 1958], 225–44). The novel has received little attention of late. In a 1992 collection of essays devoted to “recent Gogol scholarship,” to which fifteen Western and Russian scholars contributed, Taras Bulba is not discussed and commands just a handful of minor references. See Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). See also Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 97–100. But even earlier, there have been Russian critics who did not hold the work in high esteem. V. F. Pereverzez makes an invidious comparison between Gogol’s lesser works, usually with a Cossack or historical background (“the rather mediocre novella” Taras Bulba being the prime example) and those immortal works with a contemporary setting, such as The Inspector General and Dead Souls (Tvorchestvo Gogolia, 4th ed. [Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Osnova, 1928], 45). Russian and Soviet criticism used to praise the novel for the vitality, spontaneity, and wholeness (tsel’nost’) of its Cossacks, often viewing their excesses—as Belinsky did, and as the narrator of Taras Bulba does—as understandable in terms of the cruel times in which they lived and the difficulty of their situation and mission. Gogol’s readers were much less repulsed by the actions of the Cossacks than contemporary readers who read Taras Bulba against the atrocities of the twentieth century. 6.  Karlinsky (Sexual Labyrinth, 83) again expresses it more starkly: “Taras needs and wants his sons to kill people.” 7.  For a discussion of Taras Bulba as an orgy of revenge, see Iu. Barabash, “Sladkii uzhas mshchen’ia, ili zlo vo imia dobra? Mest’ kak religiozno-eticheskaia problema u Gogolia i Shevchenko,” Voprosy literatury 3 (May–June 2001): 45. He argues that after the execution of Ostap, Taras give no thought to the defense of Orthodoxy. In the earlier 1835 version of the novel, Taras is a much more sadistic killer, enjoying the torture of his victims. As the Cossacks pick up the crying children on their spears and throw them into the flames, Taras looks on with a terrible feeling of pleasure (uzhasnoe chuvstvo naslazhdeniia) (2:337). 8.  Barhrij-Pilkulyk, “Superheroes, Gentlemen or Pariahs?,” 37. The revenge motif may also have a historical antecedent. “Taras’s desire to personally revenge the death of one of his sons was also one of the reasons for Khmelnitsky’s uprising.” See Stepanov, Gogol’, 179. Revenge was a conventional plot element in most historical novels and romances of the time, especially in works about Mazepa, including Pushkin’s Poltava and Bulgarin’s Mazepa. Again what is important in Gogol is not plot motifs, which are often borrowed, but how Gogol employs them.

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9.  Epic heroes do not always behave well. In The Iliad, the Greeks go to Troy for booty as much as anything else. And Achilles is not averse to putting his own interests, including revenge, above the interests of his fellow Greeks. But in Taras Bulba, the narrator, both in his own voice and in the words of Taras himself, exalts the ideals of brotherhood, loyalty, and the larger causes of the Church and the Russian land. It is the tension between the rhetoric of the novel and the actual behavior of the epic hero that undercuts his status. 10.  See, for example, the representative Soviet interpretation of Stepanov, Gogol’, 166–211. “It is the people who are the main, fundamental hero of his novel” (185); and Kornblatt, Cossack Hero, 66–70. 11.  Both interpretations rely on a contrast between the life of the sech’ in Taras Bulba with contemporary Ukrainian life as portrayed in “The Two Ivans.” “The Two Ivans” and the first version of Taras Bulba were published in the same collection (Mirgorod) in 1835. 12.  The atrocities, to be sure, are the stock and trade of contemporary historical and romantic novels and tales. In The Robber Brothers (Brat’ia razboiniki, 1823), written twenty years before the final version of Taras Bulba, the twenty-four-yearold Pushkin writes about brigands who kill for pleasure and who find the groans of the women and children they slay amusing (smeshno). Bulgarin cites this passage from Pushkin in one of his chapter epigraphs in Mazepa. On the other hand, the narrator of Taras Bulba understands that the cruelty of the Cossacks must be justified for them to be seen by contemporary readers as heroic warriors and not barbarian murderers. The problematic nature of Cossack behavior has nothing to do with their behavior in battle, but rather with their brigandage and violence against the civilian population. 13.  One could easily argue for a similar deconstruction with regard to the presentation of beauty in Taras Bulba. On one hand, all the ills of the novel are ascribed to beauty; on the other hand, the narrator himself is attracted to beauty and lavishes his descriptive skills on it. Pavel Basinskii, in “Pamiati Bul’by, kotoryi ne liubil postmodernistov,” Literaturnaia gazeta, June 29, 1994, 4, offers a defense of Taras and the Cossacks, arguing against the positive portrayal of Andrii by Boris Kuz’minskii in “Pamiati Andreia,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 14, 1991, 6. But Basinskii distorts what Kuz’minskii says when he argues that Kuz’minskii views Andrii not as a traitor but as a refined and high-strung artist, a solitary figure (odinochka), a cosmopolitan, a priest of art in love with beauty, who, tragically at odds with prosaic everyday life, is subjected like a sacrificial victim to the crude masculine power of Cossack villains. S. A. Shul’ts argues that although Gogol consciously sides with Taras’s ethical positions, he unconsciously shows sympathy for Andrii’s “renaissance humanism,” his individualism, and aestheticism (Gogol’: Lichnost’ i khudozhestvennyi mir [Moscow: Interpraks, 1994], 59–61). See also the more political defense of Andrii by V. Ia Zviniatskovskii in Nikolai Gogol’: Tainy natsional’noi dushi (Kiev: Likei, 1994), 303, 308. Kornblatt correctly argues that Gogol attempts to create a Russian ideal in the Cossacks by emphasizing their wholeness, spontaneity, and vitality (46–60). But again these are intentions. The text also shows the Cossacks

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subject to divisiveness and decline (deterioration), not to speak of their attraction to civilization and a settled existence. Just as there are mythic aspects to the text, there are—probably unintentional—anti-mythic tendencies as well. Andrii may, in the end, be no less a Cossack than Taras. 14.  Ben, “Byl li Taras Bul’ba antisemitom,” 106. 15.  See Chapter 1, page 38 for the quotation describing Yankel’s gloating over the down payment he receives from Taras. 16.  Here Gogol outdoes the most daring Homeric burlesques of Hellenistic poetry. See for example Themocrates’ portrayal of Polyphemus in his third idyll. For the grotesque and burlesque in Hellenistic literature, see Barbara Fowler, The Hellenistic Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 44–65. 17.  Ben, “Byl li Taras Bul’ba antisemitom,” 203. 18.  Barhrij-Pilkulyk (“Superheroes, Gentlemen or Pariahs?,” 35) does not focus on the portrayal of the Jew in Taras Bulba, but he notes the “jarring imbalance” that occurs in the novel when “some common elements of the vertep (Cossack puppet theater)” are “combined with the tragic and epic elements.” He further argues that Gogol’s characteristic mixing of styles, which is very effective in his other romantic works, does not succeed as well in a more “serious” work like Taras Bulba. 19.  See Chapter 1, n. 30 regarding the Christian significance of the barrel. The barrel is also associated with a Jewish woman. 20.  The contention by V. V. Gippius (Gogol, 133) that Taras Bulba is characterized by “a rhythmic unity (ritmicheskaia tsel’nost’)” that is maintained through most of the work, is contested by Setchkarev (Gogol, 143), who holds that “in ‘Taras Bulba’ Gogol does not succeed in organically uniting the heterogeneous stylistic elements.” 21.  Comic scenes in historical tales or novels are not out of place. It is the way that Gogol employs them that makes them unique. See Gippius (Gogol’, 65–66) for the use of comic scenes in Taras Bulba. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio often appears with Shylock but not in any comic scenes. Belinsky (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1:298) noted the comic elements in the characterization of Taras Bulba but had in mind serious, high comedy, citing the early scenes in which Taras fights with Ostap, drinks vodka with both sons, and expresses joy that his sons were whipped at the seminary. He did not mention Taras’s scenes with Yankel. Wilson (“Gogol: The Demon in the Overgrown Garden,” 522) calls Taras a “comic monster” and Taras’s stay in Warsaw a “non-heroic episode of magnificent comic squalor,” but he adds nothing further. Homer uses low and homely material in The Odyssey but always links it to the serious moral concerns of epic narrative. According to G. O. Hutchinson, Homer’s “exploitation of epic norms is neither playful nor subversive” (Hellenistic Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon, 1988], 12). 22.  Later Taras will witness the torture and execution of his oldest son, Ostap, but the way Ostap dies makes him proud. It can be argued that Taras murders so many Polish women not to avenge the death of Ostap—why would he murder women for Ostap’s sake—but to avenge those who were the cause of Andrii’s betrayal and his own humiliation. See also on this point Barabash, “Sladkii uzhas mshchen’ia,” 45.

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23.  In the earlier 1835 version, beauty played a much lesser role. In the 1842 version Gogol considerably expanded the section devoted to Andrii’s relationship with the beautiful daughter of the Polish governor. 24.  Aleksandr L. Slonimskii, in his Tekhnika komicheskogo u Gogolia (Providence: Brown University Press, 1963), 49, cites this conversation as a quintessential example of Gogol’s late comic style, in which answers are employed to highlight humorous misunderstandings. As Slonimskii notes, this humorous reply was missing from the earlier 1835 edition of Taras Bulba. 25.  Might not we begin to link the 720-pound Taras with the enormous-lipped Mordechai, at least linguistically, through the device of ridiculous hyperbole? 26.  The description of the sufferings in Dubno probably has literary antecedents, including portrayals of suffering during sieges characteristic of the French l’école frénétique. 27.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett (Norton: New York, 1976), 478–79. 28.  The passage posed a problem for Boris Eikhenbaum (“Kak sdelana ‘Shinel’ Gogolia,” Skvoz’ literaturu [Leningrad: Academia, 1924], 184), who, in an attempt to reinterpret the passage against many of the humanitarian interpretations of the nineteenth century, including the insightful interpretation of Vasily Rozanov, argued that the content of the passage was aesthetically insignificant: Gogol simply manipulated the tone of the passage to perform a linguistic experiment in the shifting of stylistic registers. “Setting aside the question of the philosophical and psychological sense of this passage, we look upon it, in this instance, only as an artistic device (priem), and in terms of composition we must evaluate it as the introduction of declamatory style into the system of comic oral narrative (skaz).” 29.  Dostoevsky presents Devushkin’s sympathetic reaction to the treatment of Akaky as a misreading of Gogol’s intentions in “The Overcoat.” 30.  Perhaps the important official (znachitel’noe litso) in “The Overcoat” who later rebukes Akaky Akakievich, and is haunted by him from behind the grave, is really another projection—in part of course—of the author himself. Gogol’s description of the official’s reaction to Akaky is very similar to the clerk’s: compassion and regret. In contrast to the clerk, however, it does not last for long. He immediately begins to enjoy himself at parties and is on his way to a prostitute when he is “attacked.” Is he not in this way more like the author than the clerk, who, in contrast to the clerk, goes back to his former ways of mocking his hero? 31.  Auerbach, Mimesis, 431.

Notes to Chapter 4 1.  See Gary Rosenshield, “Gorškov in Poor Folk: An Analysis of an Early Dostoevskian ‘Double,’ ” Slavic and East European Journal 26 (1982): 149–62; Gary Rosenshield, “Old Pokrovskij: Technique and Meaning in a Character Foil in Dostoevskij’s Poor Folk,” New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose, ed. George J. Gutsche and Lauren G. Leighton (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1982), 99–110; Victor

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Terras, “Problems of Human Existence in the Works of the Young Dostoevsky,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 79–91; Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 29–31. 2.  E. A. Gitlits, in “Struktura i smysl rasskaza Turgeneva ‘Zhid’ ” (I. S. Turgeneva: Voprosy biografii i tvorchestva, ed. N. N. Mostovskaia [Leningrad: Nauka, 1990], 66), argues that the story did not elicit much response because, in contrast to the stories of Notes of a Hunter, it did not pay sufficient attention to contemporary Russian social problems. 3.  The story experienced problems with the censors and was held up for about six months. We do not know why. Boris Eikhenbaum, in his introduction to I. S. Turgenev, Povesti and Rasskazy (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 864, maintains that Turgenev did not sign his name to the story because he attached little importance to it. Gitlits (“Struktura,” 67) offers a different explanation, maintaining that Turgenev probably did not want the story to be known as his because he based the Russian protagonist on his father, who took part in the War of 1812 and was wounded in battle. He eventually retired as a colonel. Gitlits notes that Turgenev’s father shared many of the characteristics of the story’s protagonist (if one is to judge by the reminiscences of his father’s contemporaries). In order not to anger his mother, who was opposed to Turgenev’s literary career and was separated from her husband, Turgenev let the story be printed, but without his name. To this day the story has received little critical attention. In addition to Gitlits’s article cited above, there are a few brief descriptions of the Jewish stereotypes in the story. See, for example, Joshua Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 47–51; and Anne-Marie Pontis, Antisémitisme et sexualité (Paris: Lion, 1996), 118–24. S. E. Shatalov, in Problemy poetiki I. S. Turgeneva (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1969), 81–84, briefly discusses the narrator of the story. Most works on Turgenev mention the story but do not discuss it. 4.  For a discussion of Turgenev’s use of frame narrators, see Shatalov, Problemy poetiki, 81–85. 5.  A “cornet” refers to the lowest-ranking commissioned officer in the cavalry. 6.  Turgenev is alluding to Gogol’s Taras Bulba, but he was probably acquainted with several long-forgotten historical novels or tales that had similar images of Cossacks laughing at the death of Jews, including, as we have seen, Mazepa by Bulgarin, from which Gogol may have borrowed his drowning scene. 7.  I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 28 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), 5:115. Henceforth, citations from this edition will be given directly in the text. 8.  For a summary of the role that Germans played in the bureaucracy, the military, and other service professions—and the stereotypes that went with them—see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 111–14. 9.  Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1–2. 10.  Gitlits (“Struktura,” 65) is dismissive of the narrator’s role in the story, arguing that the story focuses neither on Nikolay Ilyich nor on moral questions, but on

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the feelings of a man about to die. Its primary aim, he holds, is to present a realistic representation of a dying man. 11.  Shatalov (Problemy poetiki, 81–83) dismisses the seriousness of Nikolay Ilyich’s story, arguing that against the background of the great war against Napoleon, a tale about a love intrigue can only be petty, especially when it ignores the tragic aspect of the relations between Jews and non-Jews. Nor can the story be a confession or expiation narrative, he maintains, because the narrator is too shallow. And when the tragic does manage to enter the story, it is against the intentions of the narrator. 12.  There is not sufficient information in the story to determine the nature of Girshel’s spying. Since the Russians and the Prussians were allies in the 1812 campaign, the only forces that Girshel could be spying for would be the French, which would mean he would spying against not only the Russians but the native Prussians as well. Girshel is a subject of Prussia not Russia. If Girshel is indeed spying for the French, there is no indication that he is doing it in defense of the ideals of the French Revolution. From a Prussian point of view, spying against the Russians, Prussia’s allies, might indeed be considered a treasonable offense. From the Russian point of view, Girshel is taken to be a spy because he is a local resident who has been given free access to the Russian military camp. 13.  Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, tr. Geoff Woollen (London: Hesperus, 2002), 65. 14.  If Turgenev intends an implicit comparison of Girshel with Christ, at most he is using the association to emphasize differences not similarities. The Russian soldiers do not jeer at or beat Girshel as the Roman soldiers do Jesus. In death Girshel is ridiculous, and in life morally corrupt. (Dostoevsky insisted that Christ was the only figure in the Western literary tradition who was positive but not comic.) As a spy, Girshel’s associations are with Judas. If there is an association, Turgenev exploits it to show Girshel in an even more unfavorable light, which is in accord with the story’s requirement of a basically unsympathetic character. 15.  Faddei Bulgarin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1990), 432. 16.  The narrative implies that Sarah is not Girshel’s only child, although, after Shakespeare and Scott, one finds many narratives in which the Jewish father, usually a widower, has only one child, a beautiful daughter. When Girshel pleads for mercy he mentions his children. The narrator also refers to him as a family man. And right before the execution the narrator mentions Girshel’s “intense anguish of parting with life, his daughter, his family.” 17.  Marlowe’s Abigail in The Jew of Malta is just as representative of the type. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe were drawing from the same well of stock situations and types, although Abigail actually preceded Jessica. The Merchant of Venice was in part a literary response to The Jew of Malta. 18.  Pontis (Antisémitisme, 120–21) also notes the narrator’s description of Sarah’s avarice and his revulsion at her role as her father’s accomplice. Pontis tries to see a better side of Sarah but concedes that the narrator does not provide enough information about her to draw any reliable conclusions. After the narrator intercedes for her mother, Sarah agrees to meet him the next morning, not evening. Pontis

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speculates that she will confess to him her father’s—and her own—venal intentions. Despite what the narrator says and shows, Gitlits (“Struktura,” 63) maintains that Sarah is pure, sincere, virtuous, unspoiled: an oriental young beauty unspoiled by civilization. He obviously wants to link her to the representation of the oriental, exotic beauty in Russian literature of the early nineteenth century. 19.  Sarah has been subjected to two terrible shocks in the course of twenty-four hours: she is about to witness her father’s impending execution, and just the day before she witnessed her house being raided and her mother humiliated by troops under Nikolay Ilyich’s command. 20.  See Chapter 3 for a discussion of this passage from “The Overcoat” concerning the clerk who felt sympathy for Akaky Akakievich and whose life was changed by his compassion. 21.  The Jews in Danzig and its surrounding areas were beginning their assimilation into German culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. The city was annexed to Prussia after the third partition of Poland in 1793, but the legal status of Jews as Prussian subjects had already been in place since 1773. For a brief historical account of the Danzig Jewish community from its beginnings, see Gershon C. Bacon, “Danzig Jewry: A Short History,” Danzig 1939: Treasures of a Destroyed Community (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 26–35. The main history of the community can be found in Samuel Echt, Die Geschichte der Juden in Danzig (Leer and Ostfriesland: Rautenberg, 1972). 22.  Often evrei is translated as “Jew,” whereas zhid, the pejorative, is sometimes translated as “kike” or “Yid,” but this is only a rough approximation of nineteenthcentury usage. For a more detailed discussion of the use of evrei and zhid in nineteenth-century Russia, see Chapter 1, n. 38. 23.  For a discussion of Shylock as a means of presenting a less virtuous Antonio, see Gary Rosenshield, “Christian Merchant in The Merchant of Venice?: Shakespeare’s Antonio and the Modern World,” Shofar 20, no. 2. (2001): 28–51. Like Turgenev, Shakespeare was not unaware of precedents in which the Jews were presented quite differently, thus he was not compelled to use a negative stereotype once he chose to employ a Jewish character. He was acquainted, for example, with Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, in which the roles of the Jew and Christian are the exact opposites of Shylock and Antonio. In addition, the earliest versions of the “bond plot” of The Merchant of Venice do not include any Jews. 24.  Gitlits (“Struktura,” 63), in an attempt partially to rehabilitate Girshel’s image, tries to show that Girshel has positive as well as negative characteristics: he suggests that Girshel is a clumsy spy; that his drawing is not that good and it was probably the first time that he engaged in this activity; and that he made a copy of the disposition of Russian troops not because of any enmity toward the Russians but because he was impoverished and needed to support his family. “He is an excellent family man and a loving father,” Gitlits says. He again uses poverty as the extenuation (opravdanie) of Girshel’s trying to wrest the narrator’s winnings by using his daughter as bait. But there is little evidence in the story to support Girshel’s impoverishment. In addition, the map Girshel draws is so good that the general ­orders

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his execution on the spot. Pontis (Antisémitisme, 123–24) concedes that ­Girshel is really spying but argues, like Gitlits, that he needs to spy because of his poverty, Jews being deprived of all occupations other than moneylending, factoring, and spying (le métier d’espion). But here she is not trying to use this information to illuminate the story but to show the economic realities that she thinks the story glosses over. ­Pontis dismisses the map as insignificant, but that is not what Nikolay Ilyich thinks; Nikolay Ilyich tries on several occasions to intercede for Girshel but never contests the charges against him. The strongest argument that can be made for Girshel with regard to spying is that he owes no allegiance to the Russians, given that Russian troops have made periodic raids in the villages for supplies, and that the raid for provisions that we observe is probably just one of many. But based on the rhetoric of the text and the audiences for whom the story is told (and written), it seems unlikely that Turgenev’s story is attempting to create extenuating circumstances for Girshel’s spying against Russian troops in the Patriotic War of 1812. The reader receives the “facts” through the prism of several narrative voices, none of which focuses on Girshel’s situation before he is apprehended. Again garnering too much sympathy for Girshel, especially for circumstances not related to the main action, would have weakened the story’s challenge regarding the justifiability of execution. For the rather complicated situation of Danzig Jewry under the siege of 1813, see Echt, Die Geschichte, 35–40. Jews on both sides (i.e., in Napoleon’s army and the Prussian army) fought and died in the war and were later buried in the same Jewish cemetery in Danzig. 25.  I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, ed. M. P. Alekseev, 28 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 14:180. Further references to this volume will appear in the text. 26.  Turgenev remarks that in contrast to Troppmann all those present in Turgenev’s party suffered from an enervated malaise (bespokoistvie, 117). 27.  Because Dostoevsky thought that the article focused too much on Turgenev, he found it self-serving and egotistic. Even in view of the severed head, he writes, Turgenev is concerned primarily about himself (o sebe). F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. G. Bazanov et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990), 29.1:128–29. A contemporary German critic, Julian Schmidt (­Characterbilder aus der Zeitgenössischen Literatur [Leipzig: Duncker, 1875]), maintained that Turgenev’s work was much superior to Hugo’s. Because Turgenev’s narrative was straightforward, factual, and nontendentious, it exerted a far more powerful effect on the reader. Cited from the notes to “The Execution of Troppmann” in Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie, 14:495. 28.  William Styron was more successful than either Hugo or Turgenev in his briefs against capital punishment. Later he took pride in the effects of an article he wrote for Esquire in November 1962, where he advocated amending the Connecticut criminal code, which prescribed mandatory execution or life imprisonment without parole for all first-degree murderers. A legislator, Robert Satter, who read Styron’s article, “introduced legislation that eventually brought about a more equitable procedure regarding capital offenders. So I felt that my initial ventures

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into journalism had hardly been wasted time” (“The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid,” Esquire 57 [February 1962]: 114, 141–45). See William Styron’s article on Ben Reid, whom he helped save from execution and then from life imprisonment without parole, in This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1982), 112–26. 29.  The Pocket Aristotle, tr. W. D. Ross (New York: Washington Square Press, 1958), 356. Aristotle seems particularly appropriate because Turgenev emphasizes the horror and compassion that Aristotle characterizes as the tragic emotions. If we take Oedipus Rex, Aristotle’s choice for the most successful tragedy, then eleos is clearly compassion not pity (which is what one feels for one beneath us) and fobos is not so much fear as terror or horror, that from which one recoils and flees, as Oedipus recoils before the horror of his situation and flees the city that he both saved and put in mortal danger. Fobos also describes perfectly the narrator’s reaction to Girshel’s hanging: overcome by compassion and horror, he runs away. 30.  “The Execution of Troppmann” also reveals that “The Jew,” despite its exploitation of the worst aspects of the Jewish stereotype in Girshel, did not take the most extreme example to bolster its case. The real test of Turgenev’s theory turned out to be Troppmann. Because of the absence of physical and moral consonance in Turgenev’s portrait of Troppmann—who turned out to be a handsome monster— the theory could not stand the test. 31.  The Notes of a Hunter, Turgenev’s first major large-scale work, is based, contrary to “The Jew,” on the lack of consonance of the outer and the inner, of the physical and the spiritual. In “The Singers,” the spiritual beauty and artistic potential of the Russian people is revealed in the most depressed material and physical conditions. This absence of consonance, though occasionally present in all literary periods, was an important characteristic of Romantic poetics. It was appropriated by the more romantically inclined Russian realist writers like Turgenev and Dostoevsky. 32.  See Kunitz, Russian Literature, 51. 33.  V. A. Knowles, in Ivan Turgenev (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 107–8, argues that the story disproves the accusations, based on Jewish images in some of the earlier stories, that Turgenev “was tinged with anti-Semitism.” 34.  Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:414. 35.  For example, Anton, the hero of I. I. Lazhechnikov’s novel The Infidel (­Basurman, 1838), saves the life of a Jew, Zachariah (Zakharii), who turns out to be the leader of a Judaizing heresy in Moscow. The grateful Jew later helps Anton on many occasions, in some cases even saving his life. “You are my benefactor (­blagodetel’ ). . . . Never will I forget your good deed. If I do, may the god of Jacob and the god of Abraham abandon me.” I. I. Lazhechnikov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 2:310. 36.  Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “Reading” Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, tr. H. Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981).

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37.  Sourvinou-Inwood, “Reading” Greek Death, 178. See her section on representations of hell (166–81). 38.  One could argue the canton system, which inducted young Jewish boys into the army, was the most widespread form of violence done to Jews in the Russian empire before 1881. It elicited from Alexander Herzen one of his most memorable passages regarding Jewish hardships in tsarist Russia (Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 169–70; see also the quotation from Herzen’s memoirs in the Introduction of this volume. 39.  See Chapter 1, n. 33, concerning the massive Ukrainian peasant and Cossack uprising against the Poles in 1768. 40.  Perhaps the story (recounted in Chapter 1, n. 34) that comes closest to the comic representation of violent Jewish death, depending of course on one’s sense of the comic, has to do with the Jew and devil whose heads have been cut off by the apostles Peter and Paul. 41.  See Bruce Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 33–39. Pieter Spierenburg, in The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression, From a Pre-Industrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), traces the changing attitudes toward corporal and capital punishment in Europe from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries. He focuses on the Netherlands but includes a good deal of material from France, En­ gland, and Germany. 42.  Spierenburg (The Spectacle of Suffering, 184) contests Foucault’s view in Discipline and Punish that the prison system was created as a way of exerting more subtle and extensive control over an aberrant population, arguing, on the contrary, that the expansion of prisons was in large part a direct consequence of the abolition of corporal and capital punishment and their substitution with incarceration. The Russian Criminal Code of 1845 had prescribed imprisonment in place of corporal punishment, but the reform was largely negated because Russia did not yet have the prisons to place the convicts. Nor did a large part of the population have enough money to pay fines in lieu of corporal punishment. See Adams, The Politics of Punish­ment, 31–34. 43.  The last public hanging in Britain took place on May 26, 1868. 44.  For a discussion of Elizabeth’s suspension of capital punishment, see Abby Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout: 1817–1845,” Slavic Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 613–15; ­Adams, The Politics of Punishment, 1–52; Cyril Bryner, “The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Petrovna,” Russian Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 389–416; A. ­Lentin, “Beccaria, Shcherbatov and the Question of Capital Punishment in XVIII-Century Russia,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 24, no. 2 (1982): 128–37; Will ­Adams, “Capital Punishment in Imperial and Soviet Criminal Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 18, no. 3 (1970): 575–77. Lentin (“Beccaria,” 130–32) notes that capital punishment was not abolished by Elizabeth, it was only suspended by various decrees while she was alive. Though capital punishment remained in

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the statute book, with the exception of crimes against the royal family and the state (treason), few executions were actually performed. On the other hand, certain forms of corporal punishment, especially severe beatings with the knout, could result in death. 45.  Adams (The Politics of Punishment, 1–52) discusses in detail the turn in the Russian government and in intellectual circles against corporal punishment during the nineteenth century. See also Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment,” 613–44. Mutilation was not formally abolished in Russia until 1817. The knout was abolished only in 1845, and branding remained law until 1863. 46.  Russian peasants in the nineteenth century understandably preferred corporal punishment to prison sentences, which often meant the impoverishment of their families. See Adams, The Politics of Punishment, 37–38. In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky shows that the loss of freedom was much more distressing to the prisoners than any corporal punishment they might incur. 47.  Quoted in Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, 194–95.

Notes to Chapter 5 1.  For a discussion of the relationship between Isay Fomich and his prototype as well as a review of the few references to Jews in Dostoevsky’s work before 1860, see David Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–31. 2.  A note in the Academy edition cites a document reminding the prison authorities in Omsk that the only permissible reading matter for prisoners consisted of religious books. See F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. G. ­Bazanov et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990), 4:303. In the text, all further references to this edition will appear with just volume and page numbers. In the notes, the volume and page numbers will be preceded by the abbreviated title of this edition (PSS). 3.  See his letter to his brother Michael from February 1854, the first letter he wrote on release from prison (PSS, 28.1:173). 4.  Smeshnoi, at least as Dostoevsky uses it, implies both the comic (eliciting laughter) and the ridiculous (eliciting derisive laughter). Myshkin is sometimes smeshnoi not only because he is comic but also because he elicits derisive laughter, especially when he is taken for an idiot. 5.  The narrator mistakes Yankel for his friend, “the red-headed Jew” (ryzhii zhid). Dostoevsky uses the word zhid when presenting Isay Fomich from the point of view of the prisoners; otherwise, he uses the neutral evrei. 6.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Dell, 1962), 97; PSS, 4:55. All translations from Notes from the House of the Dead are from the Garnett edition; they have been checked against the original in PSS, and revised for precision when necessary. Hereafter the pagination of the original text from PSS will follow that of the Garnett edition.

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7.  See, for example, PSS, 4:93, lines 19, 20, and 34–35; PSS, 4:94, lines 5 and 18. 8.  Some of the prisoners actually keep pets in prison of which they are quite fond. There is a whole chapter in Notes from the House of the Dead—“Prison Animals (Katorzhnye zhivotnye)”—devoted to the prisoners’ pets. 9.  Dostoevsky is not, however, categorical about moneylenders. Varya’s husband in The Idiot is not a bad man, though a moneylender. Even embittered Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov was, for a while, a hardfisted moneylender. 10.  I would suggest that one reason that Isay Fomich’s moneylending does not anger the prisoners is that he provides an essential service for the majority of the inmates. 11.  For the most complete discussion of Avram Kovner, see L. P. Grossman, “Dostoevskii i iudaizm,” in Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow: Svetoch, 1924); and Harriet Murav, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Dostoevsky’s articles on the Jewish question came out in the March 1877 issue of The Diary of a Writer. Most of what has been written about Dostoevsky and the Jews focuses on these articles. For a representative sample of this critical literature, see, in addition to Grossman’s and Murav’s works cited above, the following studies: Maxim D. Shrayer, “Dostoevskii, The Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 273–91; Joseph Frank, “The Jewish Question,” in Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 301–19; Gary Rosenshield and Judith Kornblatt, “Vladimir Solovyov: Confronting Dostoevsky on the Jewish and Christian Questions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 1 (2000): 69–98; Gary Rosenshield, “Dostoevskii’s ‘The Funeral of the Universal Man’ and ‘An Isolated Case’ and Chekhov’s ‘Rothschild’s Fiddle’: The Jewish Question,” Russian Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 487–504; Michael Katz, “Dostoevskii’s Homophilia/Homophobia,” in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation, ed. Peter I. Barta (London: Routledge, 2001), 239–53; P. Torop, “Dostoevskii: Logika evrei­skogo voprosa,” Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professora Iu. M. Lotmana (Tartu: Tartuskii universitet, 1992), 281–310; Gary Saul Morson, “Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism and the Critics: A Review Article,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 3 (1983): 302–17; Felix Philipp Ingold, Dostojewskij und das Judentum (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981), 99–192; Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, 1981; Robert Louis Jackson, “A Footnote to Selo Stepančikovo,” Ricerche Slavistische, vols. 17–19 (1970–1972): 247–57; P. A. Berlin, “Dostoevskii i evrei,” Novyi zhurnal, no. 83 (1966): 263–72; Joshua Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 51–54; A. Z. Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” Versty, no. 3 (1928), 94–108; A. G. Gornfel’d, “Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich,” Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 16 vols. (Petersburg: Brochaus, 1906), 7:310–13. For a more complete inventory of works on Dostoevsky and the Jewish question, see the notes to Shrayer’s article cited above. 12.  The idea of presenting himself as wife-murderer was probably a literary ruse to help with publication. See PSS, 4:276–77. Although the narrator resembles more a political prisoner than a murderer, the crime he admits to is uxoricide.

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13.  Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), 26. 14.  This is not to say that Russia never imagined an internal Jewish threat. In the late fifteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church was wracked by a heretical doctrine of the so-called Judaizers, supposedly led by a Jew named Zakhariah (Zakharii). The Judaizer heresy plays a prominent role in Ivan Ivanovich Lazhechnikov’s historical novel about the time of Ivan III, The Infidel (Basurman, 1838). 15.  Most of Dostoevsky’s characters who expound on religious ideas in the novels are not peasants but raznochintsy (people of non-noble classes) or, occasionally, noblemen: Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, Prince Myshkin and Lebedev in The Idiot, Shatov in The Possessed, and Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Women often embody ideas but tend not to talk about them. Peasants generally play minor roles in the novels, with the exception of Ardady Dolgoruky’s “father” in A Raw Youth and the peasant characters in “Akulka’s Husband” (Akul’kin muzh) from Notes from the House of the Dead. Representative of the more minor roles are the peasants in Myshkin’s stories (the merchant who slits his companion’s throat and the mother who smiles on her baby) and the peasant who confesses to Raskolnikov’s murder in Crime and Punishment. 16.  For an examination of Notes from the House of the Dead as religious autobiography in which resurrection from the dead is central, see Gary Rosenshield, “The Realization of the Collective Self: The Rebirth of Religious Autobiography in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (1991): 317–27. 17.  To hold the common people in contempt is the gravest of errors for the author, who came to see scorn for the people among the educated classes as the most formidable obstacle to Russia’s salvation. By placing these “old believers” in the same category as the contemptuous Poles, Dostoevsky is emphasizing how far their piety diverges from true Christian humility and compassion. 18.  Burning down temples has often been linked with fanatic individuals and religious groups. 19.  The most famous passage about the potentiality of the prisoners of the people occurs on the last page of the novel just before the narrator talks about his resurrection from the dead. “And how much youth lay uselessly buried within those walls, what mighty powers were wasted here in vain! After all, one must tell the whole truth; those men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people. But their mighty energies were vainly wasted, abnormally, unjustly, hopelessly. And who was to blame, whose fault was it?” (351; 4:231). 20.  The first reference to Mohammed in Dostoevsky’s works appears as a remark made in The Double by Golyadkin Senior to his double, Golyadkin Junior. Gol­ yadkin Senior praises the practice of the Turks who call on their God in their sleep, and he decries modern scholars who have besmirched the reputation of Mohammed (PSS, 1:158). In the notes to this passage for both versions of The Double, the Academy edition refers to the books that appeared on Islam in the 1840s critical of Mohammed, including Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 lectures, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship,

notes to chapter 5

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and the Heroic in History” (translated into Russian in 1856), and the 1843 study of the German Orientalist G. Weil, Mohammed the Prophet: His Life and Teachings. V. V. Borisova associates Mohammed in The Double with the theme of rebellion and apostasy (“Antropologicheskii eksperiment F. M. Dostoevskogo,” in F. M. Dostoevskii, Naiti v cheloveke cheloveka [Ekaterinburg: Ural’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1966], 4–8). James L. Rice, in his Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), sees the presence of Mohammed in The Double as critical to Dostoevsky’s understanding of the relation between epilepsy and creativity (268). In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov includes Mohammed as one of those great lawgivers and lawbreakers who have the right to commit crimes to realize their idea. Later, in The Diary of a Writer, the sword of Mohammed is used as a symbolic shorthand for Islamic military or secular power responsible for the destruction of the Byzantine state, and, in more modern times, for the subjugation of Christian populations under Turkish rule. The view that Mohammed suffered from epilepsy is attested in Islamic scholarship but it is not a common interpretation; it was entertained more widely by Christian commentators critical of the prophet. For a discussion of the controversy over Mohammed’s epilepsy, see M. Futrell, “Dostoevsky and Islam (and Chokan Valikhanov),” Slavonic and East European Review 57, no. 1 (1979): 25–26; Rice, The Healing Art, 260–68. For a more detailed discussion of Dostoevky’s use of Mohammed in his fiction, see Gary Rosenshield, “Religious Portraiture in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead: Representing the Abrahamic Faiths,” Slavic and East European Journal 50 (2006): 595–96. 21.  Dostoevsky asked his brother on two occasions (February 22, 1854 and March 27, 1854) to send him, along with many other works, a copy of the Koran. See 28.1:173, 179. Chokan Valikhanov could not have had much influence on Dostoevsky’s attitude toward Islam since Valikhanov was a Westernizer and critical of Islam. He is quoted as having said that European civilization represented the “new Quran of his life.” See Futrell, “Dostoevsky and Islam,” 20. 22.  For a more detailed view of Dostoevsky’s views on political and religious Islam, see Gary Rosenshield, “Religious Portraiture in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” 595–97. 23.  Dostoevsky’s attitude toward his fellow prisoners immediately after he was released from prison was far more negative than the picture he paints in Notes from the House of the Dead. See the letter of February 22, 1854 (PSS, 28.2:169–70). At least some of the inmates were refashioned to fit Dostoevsky’s new views of the people. See Chapter 7 in this volume for Dostoevsky’s letter on this subject. 24.  Arab Muslims had strongly influenced the Lezgians since the ninth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Lezgians had been converted to Islam. 25.  The narrator and all the prisoners not only like Nurra (they supposedly like Isay Fomich, too), they take his religion seriously. They do not come from all over the prison to watch him “perform.” 26.  Aley bears little resemblance even to the Russian variant of the “noble ­savage” (blagorodnyi dikar’ ). The idea of the noble savage is common to many Western

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notes to chapter 5

cultural traditions, with significant variations depending upon place and time. Although in the nineteenth century Russians generally held the Circassian mountaineers in contempt, romantically inclined writers and readers of the 1820s and 1830s fantasized about escaping the stultifying capital (Petersburg) and finding true freedom among the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. However, by 1861, this cult, nourished in part by the works of Lermontov and Marlinsky, had long worn itself out, and Dostoevsky was hardly a likely candidate for reviving this romantic escapism. See Susan Layton, “Nineteenth-Century Russian Mythologies of Caucasian Savagery,” in Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel Brower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 80–99. Dostoevsky’s Aley is not a daring, wild bandit, but a gentle, soft, intuitive, compassionate, chaste, and pious soul, moved more by the message of the Sermon on the Mount than by the adventures of his pillaging brothers. Furthermore, other than Nurra and Aley, Dostoevsky’s Caucasians are not distinguished from the other prisoners; they are a gloomy, morose lot, mostly brigands. Szymon Tokarzewski (Siedem łat kartogi [Warsaw: Gebethner i Wolff, 1918], 178–80) paints a much more sympathetic view of the Circassians as a group than does Dostoevsky. One reason that Dostoevsky may not romanticize the Muslims as a group, if Tokarzewski’s account is accurate, is that the Circassians generally sided with the Poles, protecting them against the Russian prisoners. For larger studies that take different approaches to the idea of the noble savage in European political and cultural thought, see Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Stelio Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990); Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928). 27.  The narrator’s emphasis on Aley’s chasteness, his soft or mild character (mia­gkost’ ), and perhaps even his virginal beauty, look forward to Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov. In the introduction to Alyosha at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator writes of Alyosha’s “wild, intense modesty and chastity (tselomudrennost’ ). He just could not listen to certain words and conversations about women. . . . Seeing that ‘Alyoshka Karamazov’ quickly put his fingers in his ears when they began to talk ‘about that,’ they would . . . shout vile things in his ears. . . . But in the end they left him alone and no longer teased him about being ‘a little girl’ ” (PSS, 14:19–20). 28.  We know very little about the real Aley. The editors of the Academy edition (PSS, 4:132) maintain that the probable prototype of Aley was the twenty-six-yearold Ali Delek Tat Otgly, who arrived at Omsk on April 10, 1849 and served four years for theft, leaving the prison on April 16, 1853. Emphasizing Aley’s feminine traits, Michael Katz (“Dostoevskii’s Homophilia/Homophobia,” 243) suggests that the relationship between the narrator and Aley (“a close homophilic bond”) has sexual overtones. Perhaps that is so. On the other hand, both the narrator and Aley are disgusted by the homosexual behavior of some of the prisoners. As a Victorian, Dostoevsky does not explicitly allude to homosexuality, but it is clear what is going on. Also see discussion earlier in this chapter.

notes to chapter 6

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29.  For a more detailed discussion of the influence of Aley on the creation of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot and Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, see Gary Rosenshield, “Religious Portraiture in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” 595–97; 602–64. 30.  As the narrator tells us, all the prisoners were obsessed (pomeshany) with the impression they made (kak naruzhno derzhat’ sebia) (4:12). But they were not performers in their daily lives. Isay Fomich represents the epitome of how not to conduct oneself: that is, to make oneself a laughing stock. It is not unusual to find in Dostoevsky’s works major characters in whom appearing ridiculous is their worst fear. 31.  Because of Jerome’s mistranslation of Exodus 34:29–30, Moses is often depicted in Western European painting and sculpture as having horns emerging from his head (instead of light streaming from his face) when he descends Mount Sinai with the ten commandments. We do not know whether Dostoevsky was aware of this way of depicting Moses before he made his first trip abroad in 1862, that is, after the publication of Notes from the House of the Dead. The Greek and Russian (and also the King James) versions do not contain the word “horns,” but correctly translate the Hebrew passage as “light emanated from Moses’s face.” But if Notes from the House of the Dead contains an unlikely reference to a work like Michelangelo’s Moses, it would be only to make Isay Fomich appear even more ridiculous by comparison. 32.  The major was an ominous figure for all the prisoners, his mere presence inspiring dread: “[On] byl kakoe-to fatal’noe sushchestvo dlia arestantov, on dovel ikh do togo, chto oni ego trepetali” (4:14). 33.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead and Poor Folk, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 391–92; PSS, 1:82.

Notes to Chapter 6 1.  See, for example, Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, 14–31; Ingold, Dostojew­ skij und das Judentum, 154–58; Jackson, “A Footnote to Selo Stepančikovo,” 247–57; Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jews, 51–54; Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i ­evreistvo,” 96–98; Grossman, “Dostoevskii i iudaizm,” 171–73; D. I. Zaslavskii, “Evrei v russkoi literature,” Evreiskaia letopis’ 1 (1923): 59–86; Gornfel’d, “Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich,” 7:310. Goldstein (Dostoyevsky and the Jews, 15–18), who discusses in detail the critical literature before 1980, disagrees with those like Jackson and Grossman, who, he argues, see redeeming characteristics in the portrait of Isay Fomich. 2.  Joseph Frank maintains that Dostoevsky’s readers probably interpreted his portrait of Isay Fomich in the general humanitarian mode of the novel. “Such touches [of humor], which are for us quite inadequate to redeem the distastefulness of the overall image, were probably sufficient guarantees of ‘humanism’ to Dostoevsky’s first readers, accustomed to seeing Jews treated only in a manner that excluded any sense of personal identification with them as individual human ­beings”

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notes to chapter 6

(Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986], 216). 3.  Jackson, “A Footnote to Selo Stepančikovo,” 252. 4.  Ingold, Dostojewskij und das Judentum, 70. 5.  Ingold, Dostojewskij und das Judentum, 57–70. 6.  Later investigations revealed that the Diary was far from an accurate transcription of the stenographic original. Anna worked on the Diary for many years and changed many details in an effort to present her husband in a better light. Anna also worked on a series of reminiscences, a far more imaginative recreation of her life with Dostoevsky than the transcribed Diary. Both the Diary (1923) and the Reminiscences (1925) were published years after her death in 1917. For the rather complicated history of the Diary, see Andrei Ustinov’s afterword, “Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Leningrad,” in Leto v Badene (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 204–6. 7.  Tsypkin is playing a double—or triple—narrative game in the novel, imagining his narrator imagining or dreaming about the hallucinations and dreams of Dostoevsky. It is not that the author is dissociating himself from the views of his narrator-hero with regard to Jews, but that the author and narrator both know that the biography of Dostoevsky they are creating is largely imaginative fantasy, though we must assume that the implied author is much more aware of all this than the narrator. 8.  Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, tr. Roger and Angela Keys (New York: New Directions, 1987), 115–16. The translation has been checked against Leto v Badene, (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003) 155. Hereafter the Russian pagination will follow the English directly in the text. 9.  The series of articles that is often collectively referred to as “The Jewish Question” appeared in the March 1877 installment of The Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelia). The four sections in chapter 2 and the two sections in chapter 3 devoted to the Jewish question are: “The Jewish Question” (“Evreiskii vopros”), “Pro-andCon” (“Pro i Contra”), “Status in Statu: Forty Centuries of Existence” (“Status in statu. Sorok vekov bytiia”), “But Long Live Brotherhood!” (“No da zdravstvuet bratstvo!”), “The Funeral of a ‘Universal Man’ ” (“Pokhorony ‘Obshchecheloveka’ ” ), and “An Isolated Case” (“Edinichnyi sluchai”). English translations can be found in F. M. Dostoevskii, The Diary of a Writer, tr. Boris Brasol (Santa Barbara: Smith, 1979), 637–59. For the Russian originals, see Dostoevskii, PSS, 25:74–92. 10.  For the longest pieces devoted to an analysis of Summer in Baden-Baden that I have come across, see Ustinov’s afterword, “Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Leningrad,” 192–218; Gary Adelman, “Tsypkin’s Way with Dostoyevsky,” New England Review 24, no. 2 (2003): 168–81; Susan Sontag’s “Introduction,” in Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, ix–xxi; Joseph Frank, “In Search of Dostoevsky,” New York Review of Books 49, no. 9 (2002): 74–76. Only Adelman and Frank discuss in any detail the Jewish question in Tsypkin’s novel. Adelman mentions Isay Fomich only once, being more concerned with the antisemitism of the real Dostoevsky. Frank’s excellent analysis of the novel focuses more on the passion of the Jewish narrator

notes to chapter 7

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(and Russian Jewish scholars in general) for a writer whom the narrator considers antisemitic. 11.  The translators perhaps are overinterpreting razdrazhitel’naia slabost’ to mean “obsessive-compulsive neurosis” (78; 113). 12.  After the brilliant success of his first novel, Poor Folk, Dostoevsky was lionized by literary society. But this period of ecstatic happiness, during which he was touted as a genius and the next Gogol, the reigning figure in Russian literature in 1846, did not last long. His initial success became overshadowed by the critical failures of his later works during the 1840s and by the ridicule to which he was subjected by some of those who had previously flattered him and sought his favor. The hypersensitive and ill-at-ease Dostoevsky, who came from a class lower than many of his literary rivals, especially the aristocratic Turgenev, did not deal well with his lowered status. All these woes were exacerbated by the acute psychological problems Dostoevsky experienced during this time, for which he sought out treatment. See Rice, The Healing Art, 3–65.

Notes to Chapter 7 1.  The name of the prototype of Isay Fomich Bumshtein was Isai Bumshtel’. See the brief note about Isay Fomich’s prototype in PPS, 4:283–84. 2.  Szymon Tokarzewski (Siedem łat kartogi, 178–80) does not present Isay Bumshtel, the real-life prototype of Isay Fomich, much differently than Dostoevsky. 3.  Jackson, “A Footnote to Selo Stepančikovo,” 252. 4.  Nor is Isay Fomich, in this regard, an absolute characterological anomaly in Dostoevsky. He is not the only character in Dostoevsky’s works for whom interpretive possibilities are cut off. Dostoevsky can, even in his best works, use his narrative voice to limit interpretation, quashing, for example, negative impressions of positive characters such as Father Zosima and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. This is not to say that they share any other similarities to Isay Fomich. In Dostoevsky’s comic and hagiographical modes, ambiguity is rare. 5.  In The Brothers Karamazov, however, Dostoevsky uses a different word for ecstasy: vostorg. 6.  “He was covered all over with wrinkles, and on his forehead and each cheek bore the marks of having been branded (kleima) on the scaffold. . . . He had hidden away a receipt which his friends had procured from a doctor immediately after his punishment. It was the receipt for an ointment supposed to remove all traces of branding in a fortnight. He dare not make use of this ointment in the prison, and was awaiting the end of his twelve years’ term of imprisonment, after which he fully intended to take advantage of the receipt, when he could live as a settler. ‘Else I shall never be able to get married,’ he said to me once, ‘and I certainly want to get married’ ” (97; 4:55). Isay Fomich’s words are uttered in heavily accented Russian for comic effect. 7.  Mutilation, of which branding (kleimenie) is a form, was usually the first type of corporal punishment to be outlawed in Europe. Branding on the face was

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notes to conclusion

characteristic of the later Middle Ages. In the early modern era, it was usually done on the shoulder, a mark much easier to conceal. See Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, 69–70. In 1817 Russia ended mutilation except for branding. Branding was not abolished until 1863. See Adams, The Politics of Punishment, 20, 26. 8.  See Michael Katz (“Dostoevskii’s Homophilia/Homophobia,” 239–53) for a discussion of homosexuality in the prison. The disgusting things that the narrator often refers to comprised more than drinking and brawling. That is obviously what Nurra meant (in the quoted passage on page 145 of Chapter 5) when he came up to the narrator, shaking his head in pious indignation. 9.  In Summer in Baden-Baden, Tsypkin, in order to force Dostoevsky to understand, at least on an unconscious level, the similarity of his situation and Isay Fomich’s, has Dostoevsky imagine himself being beaten, and to add to the humiliation, being watched by society women. 10.  While the narrator, as a character, is a wife murderer, all of Dostoevsky’s readers knew that the protagonist of Notes from the House of the Dead was also a thinly disguised portrait of Dostoevsky: a political prisoner and a writer. 11.  The Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, tr. Andrew MacAndrew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 59; PSS, 28.1:169–70. 12.  “Isay Fomich was there, too, looking much perplexed, despondent, listening greedily and apprehensively to our conversation. He was in great anxiety” (312; 4:204). 13.  The convict uses the plural “fly-smashers” (mukhodavy): that is, the narrator is one of a larger class of oppressors. The word seems to be the convict’s own creation. 14.  Rosenshield, “The Realization of the Collective Self,” 317–27. 15.  Frank, “In Search of Dostoevsky,” 74.

Notes to Conclusion 1.  For an examination of Rybakov’s novel as an attempt to use the aesthetics of Socialist Realism to represent the Holocaust, see Gary Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatolii Rybakov’s Heavy Sand,” PMLA 111 (1996): 240–55. 2.  Many Western commentators have found artistic deficiencies in Heavy Sand, agreeing with Paul Ableman in his review of Heavy Sand, who criticized Rybakov for his overly idealized figures and “paper saints” (“Propaganda,” Spectator 13 [June 1981]: 21–22). Curiously, Soviet critics praised Rybakov’s restraint in not ­heroicizing his characters. See, for example, Galina Liubatskaia, “Mir lichnosti i lichnost’ v mire,” Zvezda 2 (1980): 203–14; M. Eidelman, “Indestructibility: A Review of Anatolii ­Rybakov’s Novel Heavy Sand,” Soviet Studies in Literature 15, no. 4 (1979): 91–98. 3.  Anatoli Rybakov, Heavy Sand, tr. Harold Shukman (New York: Penguin, 1981), 58. Hereafter pagination for quotations from Heavy Sand will appear in the

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text with the page from the translation directly followed by the page from the Russian edition in Anatolii Rybakov, Tiazhelyi pesok (Moscow: Sov. pisatel’, 1982), 47. 4.  Paul Breines, in his Tough Jews (New York: Basic, 1990), discusses the creation of a similar character type in recent American literature, inspired not by the American wars but by the 1967 Israeli defeat of the Arabs. 5.  At the end of Evgeny Evtushenko’s “Babii Iar,” one of the first Soviet texts to broach the subject of antisemitism, the persona says, “Let the ‘Internationale’ thunder out.” 6.  Katerina Clark notes that this representation of the spirit of the hero after death is a commonplace of Bolshevik fiction (The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 181). 7.  It has been suggested that the narrator may even be playing “the role of Cossack.” See Carole J. Avins, “Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel’s 1920 Diary,” Slavic Review 94, no. 3 (1994): 701; Patricia Carden, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 130. 8.  Isaac Babel, Collected Stories, tr. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1994), 101–2. The Russian can be found in Isaak Babel, Detstvo i drugie rasskazy (Jerusalem: Aliia, 1979), 14. Hereafter pagination for quotations from “Crossing the Zbrucz” will appear in the text with the page from the translation directly followed by the page from the Russian edition. 9.  Carole J. Avins, “Introduction: Isaac Babel’s ‘Red Cavalry’ Diary,” in Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, tr. H. T. Willets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), li. 10.  One wonders whether the Gogolian image of the dead Jewess in Taras Bulba, who serves as a symbol of the terrible suffering of the civilian population, inspired not only the image of suffering women in The Brothers Karamazov but also the ­image of both the father and daughter in “Crossing the Zbrucz.”

Index

Abbott and Costello, 85 Ableman, Paul, 244n2 Adams, Bruce, 236n45 Adelman, Gary, 242–43n10 Aksakov, Ivan Sergeevich, 17 Alexander I, 14, 211n39 Alexander II, 6, 10 Alexander III, 212n46 aliens, 52–53, 84, 117, 126–27, 131, 202, 203, 218n25. See also the Other Andrii (in Gogol’s Taras Bulba): betrayal of Cossack brotherhood, 43–48, 60, 62, 76–86, 192, 224n9, 228n22; description, 36–37, 227–28n13; and Jewish death, 88–89, 93; seduction of, 55–56, 141, 229n23. See also Taras Bulba (Gogol) antisemitism: Aryan racial superiority, 16, 211–12n45; Dostoevsky on, 165–66, 169, 174, 242–43n10; German racial/gender theory, 16–17, 211–12n45,47; international Jewish conspiracy, 17; in Pound and T. S. Eliot, 3, 12, 207n13; in Russia, 17, 20, 207n13, 238n14, 245n5; in Turgenev, 234n33. See also Jewish question Apollonius, The Argonauts, 218n29 apophatic technique, 36, 89, 94–96, 141, 207n15 appearance/reality dichotomy, 18–19 Aristotle, 121, 234n29 artistic device, 121–22 Aryan racial superiority. See under antisemitism assimilation/acculturation, 6–7, 9, 13–15, 17, 206n11, 208n19, 211n42, 232n21. See also conversion Auerbach, Eric, 54, 117, 148, 161, 164 author/character binary, 11–12, 29, 209n25, 229n30 Avins, Carole J., 201, 245n7 Babel, Isaac, 2, 7, 8, 96, 117, 197; Red Cavalry, 200–204, 221n43, 245n7

Baden-Baden. See Tsypkin, Leonid, Summer in Baden-Baden Barabash, Iu., 226n7 Barhrij-Pilkulyk, Romana, 215–16n13, 228n18 Baron, Salo W., 212n46 barrels, 44, 219n32, 228n19 Basinskii, Pavel, 227–28n13 Bauman, Zygmunt, 208n19, 210n31 beauty: beauty/ugly dynamic, 213nn50–51; comic/beautiful binary, 160; concept of, 81–82, 85–86, 95, 159–60, 212n49, 227–28n13, 229n23 Beilis case, 20 Belinsky, V. G., 217n22, 226n5, 228n21 Bellow, Saul, 8 Belova, O. V., 29, 124, 215n10, 218n25, 223n54 Ben, Georgy, 80–81, 94, 224n10 betrayal: and beauty, 85–86; of Christ, 153–54; of Cossack brotherhood, 33–34, 37, 40, 45, 47–48, 60, 77–79; in Ivanhoe (Scott), 62; of religious faith, 28; spying as, 103, 108, 141; women’s role, 43 body. See Jewish body Bogrov, Grigory, 206n11 Bolshevik Revolution, 203–204 Borenstein, Eliot, 216–17n19 Borisova, V. V., 238–39n20 branding, 181, 183, 190, 236n46, 243–44nn6–7 Breines, Paul, 245n4 Breslover Hasidim, 219–20n33. See also Hasidic Jews brotherhood/comradeship (tovarishchestvo). See under Cossacks Bryusov, Valery, 215–16n13 Bulgarin, Faddey: and Gogol, 70–71; Ivan Vyzhigin, 9, 21, 30, 69, 72–73, 224n12; Mazepa, 30, 69–73, 111, 220–21nn37–38, 223n57, 225n3, 226n8, 230n6; portrayal of women, 69–70 Bumshtein, Isay Fomich. See Isay Fomich

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index

Bumshtein (in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead) canton regiments, 14–15, 235n39 capital punishment, 22, 104–106, 109–13, 116–25, 180–81, 233–34nn26–28. See also crime/ criminality Catherine the Great, 211n39 Catholic Church, 140. See also Russian Orthodox Church Chaadaev, Petr, 21, 32 Chaucer, Geoffrey, “The Prioress’s Tale,” 9, 208n17 Chekhov, Anton, 7, 102, 206–207n11, 214n3 Cheyette, Bryan, 11, 209n26 children, portrayals of, 72–73, 89, 93–94 Chizhevsky, Dmitry, 222n50, 223n55 Christ, depictions of, 150–52, 159–60 Christianity, 13, 143–48, 150–52, 156–60, 191, 210n32, 238n15, 239–40nn25–26. See also religion/religious ritual; Russian Orthodox Church Christmas, 144–46, 153–57, 177 Clark, Katerina, 245n6 comedy/comic characters: as character contrast and definition, 21, 48, 54–59, 82–89, 94–95, 141–42; comic association, 86–87, 94–95, 175, 184, 222n50, 228n21; comic/beautiful binary, 160; as comic relief, 85, 91, 136–42, 156–57, 174, 180, 191–93, 243n6; and common Jewish stereotypes, 6–9, 22–23, 28–31, 69, 73, 191–92, 207n12, 223n52; compassion for, 109, 114; and corporal punishment, 180–84; Jewish body/ physical characteristics, 109, 155, 196; and Jewish death, 123, 126, 218–19n31, 223n52, 235n41; misogyny, 37; and religion, 152–57, 163, 175, 191; seriocomic “little man,” 159–62; as villains, 8–9, 81. See also stereotypes compassion and sympathy, 103–23, 126–27, 160–61, 202, 223n57, 232n20, 234n29 comradeship (tovarishchestvo). See under Cossacks Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, 212n49 conversion: and assimilation, 13–15, 17, 58, 70, 127, 190, 210n36; conversos, as threat, 6–7; Old Testament figures, 210n34; opposition to, 13–14; problematic nature, 210n34; as response to Jewish question, 14, 17, 212n46; rewards for, 211n39; Russian policies, 16–17; in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, 13, 113; ultimate Christian victory, 13, 210n32,35 coronet, rank of, 230n5 corporal punishment, 125, 175, 179–84, 235n41–42, 235–36nn44–46, 243–44nn6–7 Cossacks: background, 32, 49, 76, 214n7, 215– 16n13, 225nn1–3; brotherhood/comradeship (tovarishchestvo), 33–36, 43–49, 95, 188, 190, 216–17n19, 218nn27,30, 227n9; in Bulgarin,

70–71; “the Cossack ideal,” 17, 33–35, 40–41, 188, 196–97, 216n16, 217nn21–22; Cossack/ Jewish binary, 49–60, 82–87, 117, 141, 222nn49–50, 223n55; Cossack morality, 77, 226nn5,7; deconstructed, 75–80; as defenders of Russian Orthodox Church, 32, 34, 75–80; diminution of epic hero, 82–87, 192–93; in early stories of Gogol, 218–19n31; Jewish/ Cossack binary, 49–60, 223n55; noble death, 58–60, 78, 124; physicality, 55–56; in Pushkin, 62; as romantic mythic heroes, 29–30, 32, 76–79, 214–15n9, 215n11, 215–16n13; and Russian ideal, 17, 33–35, 40–41, 107, 216n16; sech, 34–35, 37, 43, 50, 77, 217n20, 221n40, 227n11; warrior ethos, 33–35, 55–56, 63, 77–78, 83, 225n1, 226n6. See also Taras Bulba (Gogol) Cournos, John, 4 crime/criminality, 136–37, 142, 180, 190–91, 233–34n28. See also capital punishment; corporal punishment Cumberland, Richard, The Jew, 10 Dal, Vladimir, 27, 207n12 Danzig, 232n21, 232–33n24 death: in Bulgarin, 70–71, 111, 112; Cossacks’ death, 58–60, 78, 109, 124, 228n22; execution/ capital punishment, 22, 104–106, 109–13, 116– 23, 180–81; in Gogol, 22–23, 58–60, 68–69, 88–89, 92–95, 223n57, 228n22; historiography of violent death, 123–28, 230n6; Jewish/ Cossack binary, 58–60; representation of spirit, 245n6; in Turgenev, 19, 22, 109–11. See also Jewish death devil: in folklore, 211n44, 222n48; Jews associated with, 8–9, 28–29, 52–53, 137–40, 207–208n16, 220nn34,36, 222nn44,46, 235n40 The Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky article, 6, 143, 148, 165–66, 174, 237n11, 238–39n20 Dickens, Charles, 8, 10, 27, 160, 208n18, 209n21, 213nn50–51 dirt/unclean hands, 52–53, 222n45 Disraeli, Benjamin, 210n36 Dnieper River, 49, 214n7, 219–20n33 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 160 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: antisemitism/Jewish question, 6–7, 20–21, 135, 165–66, 169, 174, 237n11, 242–43n10; background, 12, 131–32, 164–67, 185–86, 206n9, 237n12, 239n23, 243nn11–12; Christianity/religious ritual, 13, 143–48, 150–52, 156–60, 191, 210n32, 238n15, 239n25; comedy/comic characters, 132–33, 136–42, 152–56, 159–63, 174–75, 180–84, 191–93, 243nn4.6; concept of beauty, 159–60; crime/criminality, 136–37, 142, 180; existential mode, 164, 170; function of negative stereotype, 19–20, 23–24, 131–32, 154, 160–61; and Gogol, 96, 128, 132, 156, 229n29, 245n10;

index Islam/Muslim characters, 148–52, 239nn21,24; mixed stylistic levels, 152, 157–59, 161–62, 241–42n2; nature of comic in literature, 159–60, 236n4; obsessive-compulsive neurosis, 166, 243n11; portrayal of children, 89–90; reality/potential dichotomy, 148, 158, 177, 238n19; and Turgenev, 156, 233n27; works: The Brothers Karamazov, 18–23, 89–90, 199, 237n9, 238n15, 240n27, 243nn4–5, 245n10; Crime and Punishment, 19, 108, 132, 135, 146, 151, 238n15, 238–39n20; Diary of a Writer articles, 6, 143, 148, 165–66, 174, 237n11, 238–39n20; The Double, 163, 238–39n20; The Idiot, 19, 23, 150, 152, 158, 160–61, 237n9, 238n15; Notes from the Underground, 186; Poor Folk, 19, 100, 159–61, 163, 164, 168, 243n12; The Possessed, 7, 166, 238n15; A Raw Youth, 206n10, 238n15; Uncle’s Dream, 132; The Village of Stepanchikovo, 132, 163, 174. See also Isay Fomich Bumshtein; stereotypes; Tsypkin, Leonid dress, 60 drowning scene (in Gogol’s Taras Bulba), 1, 68–71, 94, 96, 117, 180, 188, 223n52 Druzhinin, Alexander, 100 Dubno, 78, 83, 88, 229n26 Easter/Easter celebration, 145, 157, 218–19n31, 222n45 Eastern Slavic groups, 213n55, 214n8, 219n32, 222nn44,47 ecstacy/religious ecstacy, 179 Edgeworth, Maria, Harrington, 10 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 229n28, 230n3 Eliot, George, 14; Daniel Deronda, 10, 209n22 Eliot, T. S., 3, 11–12, 207n13 Empson, William, 11 England/English literature: beauty/ugly dynamic, 213nn50–51; evolution of Jewish characters, 10–14, 21, 23, 42, 115–16, 206–207nn10–12, 209nn20–22,24,26–27, 213n53; Judaization, 210n36; as New Israel, 13–14; and Russian literature, 30. See also individual authors epic heroes, 29–30, 32, 76, 78–79, 214–15n9, 215–16n13, 227n9 epilepsy, 238–39n20 evrei, 220–21n38, 232n22, 236n5. See also zhid Evtushenko, Evgeny, 245n5 execution/capital punishment, 22, 104–106, 109–13, 116–23, 180–81, 235nn41–42 existentialism/existential writing, 88–96, 164, 170, 203–204. See also religion family, portrayals of, 57–58, 111–13, 195–99, 231n16 femininity, and Jewishness, 36, 58–59, 211–12n45, 217n23, 222n49 Fisch, Edgar, 13, 209n25



Flandes, Juan de, 207–208n16 Florinsky, Michael, 76, 225n1 folklore/folk theater, 27–28, 62, 73, 211n44, 215n12, 220n34, 222nn47–48, 223n52 Foucault, Michel, 235n42 Frank, Joseph, 192, 241–42n2, 242–43n10 Freedman, Jonathan, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 12 gender: femininity and weakness, 218n29; German racial/gender theory, 16, 211–12n45; Jewishness and femininity, 36, 58–59, 211–12n45, 217n23, 222n49; and Russian language, 218n28; in Taras Bulba, 217–18n24, 218n29 Germany/German culture: racial/gender theory, 16, 211–12n45; stereotypes of, 104 ghettoes, 49 Gilman, Sander L., 207–208n16 Gippius, Vasilii, 214–15n9, 215–16n13, 224n5, 228n20 Girshel (in Turgenev’s “The Jew”): compared to Shylock, 127; compared to Troppmann, 119–22, 234n30; compared to Yankel, 108; compassion for, 104, 106–107, 126–27, 202; description, 6, 9, 102, 121, 200, 231nn12,14, 232–33n24; execution, 180–81; function of stereotype, 19, 21, 22, 102–103, 107–108, 115; interest in money, 103, 108; reaction to death sentence, 1, 105–106; rehabilitation of, 232–33n24. See also “The Jew” (Turgenev) Gitlits, E. A., 230nn2–3, 230–31n10, 231–32n18, 232–33n24 Gogol, Nikolai: apophatic technique, 36, 89, 94–96, 141, 207n15; comedy/comic characters, 28–31, 54–60, 82–87, 218–19n31, 222n50, 228n21; compassion, 232n20; concept of beauty, 85–86, 227–28n13, 229n23; conflation of Jewish stereotype, 30–31; Dikanka stories, 28–29; and Dostoevsky, 96, 128, 132, 156, 229n29, 245n10; early stories, 27–30, 211n44, 218–19n31, 224n6; eccentricities of, 12; existentialism/existential writing, 88–96; function of stereotypes, 19–23; geography and character, 221n39; homogeneity in Jewish characters, 72, 82, 94–96; ideal Russians, 17, 213n55, 214n8; intertextuality, 5, 70–71, 203, 223n2, 224n5, 224–25n15; legacy, 2, 96, 99–100, 128, 132, 156, 203, 245n10; mixed stylistic levels, 84, 87, 91–96, 223nn52–53, 224n5, 228nn16,18,20, 229nn24,28; portrayal of, women, 35–37, 62–63, 81–82, 85–96, 224n9, 225n4, 245n10; Russian ideal, 17, 33–35, 40–41, 227–28n13; Russian nationalist ideology, 21–24, 32–33, 40–41, 61–62, 70, 75–80, 213n55, 214–15nn8–9; and Scott’s Ivanhoe, 21–22, 62–69, 215nn12–13, 223n2, 224n5; sexuality in works of, 225n4, 226n6;



index

treatment of death, 22–23, 58–60, 68–69, 88–89, 92–95, 223n57, 228n22; works: Dead Souls, 18, 99, 226n5; The Inspector General, 226n5; “Nevsky Prospect,” 18; “The Nose,” 61; “The Overcoat,” 60, 90–93, 95, 99–100, 114, 160, 229nn29–30, 232n20; “St. John’s Eve,” 214n4; “The Two Ivans,” 227n11; “View of the Formation of Ukraine,” 225n2. See also Cossacks; Jewish death; stereotypes; Taras Bulba; Yankel Goldstein, David, 241n1 Grigoryevna, Anna, 164, 242n6 Grimstad, Knut Andreas, 36–37, 217–18n24 Grossman, L. P., 241n1 Gukovsky, G. A., 79, 215–16n13, 216n16, 217n22 Hagia Sophia, 212n49 hagiography, 148–52, 156–60, 193, 199, 243n4, 245n6. See also religion Hasidic Jews, 202–203, 219–20n33. See also Jews Heavy Sand (Rybakov), 195–99, 244n2 Helen of Troy, 82 Herzen, Alexander, 15, 235n38 Holocaust, 196 Homer: The Iliad, 61, 82, 215n12, 218n29, 227n9, 228n16; The Odyssey, 228n21 homo economicus, 8–9, 38–41, 63–69, 134–35 homosexuality/homophobia, 211–12nn45,47, 240n28, 244n8 Hugo, Victor, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 126, 233n27 humanitarian passages/humanity, 23, 81, 85–86, 91–93, 114, 127, 241–42n2 Hutchinson, G. O., 228n21 Ingold, Fillipp, 163–64 intertextuality, 61–73; in Babel, 203–204; in Dostoevsky, 191–93; in Gogol, 21–22, 70–71, 80–82, 196–99, 203, 223n2, 224n5, 224–25n15; Jewish stereotypes, 5–8, 21, 23, 27–30, 58, 113, 115–16, 202–204; Russian literature, 69–73, 203–204; in Turgenev, 156, 203, 224n3; of violent death, 123–28 Isaac of York. See under Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe Isaeva, Maria Dmitrievna, 132 Isay Fomich Bumshtein (in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead): as anti-hero, 164; antisemitic caricature, 165; bathhouse scene, 1, 137–40, 142, 159, 177; branding, 181, 183, 190, 236n46, 243–44nn6–7; compared to Yankel, 128, 132, 133; critical reception, 161–64; description, 1–3, 6, 9, 134, 157–59, 243n6; function of, 12, 21, 23–24, 163–64, 175, 181–84, 188–90, 191–92; Isay Fomich/ Dostoevsky dynamic, 166, 168–71, 183–93, 244nn9–10; prison entrance scene, 182–83, 189, 244nn12–13; religious contexts, 152–59, 163, 175–79, 241n30; similarities with narrator,

184–90, 192; as typical Jewish stereotype, 132–34, 157, 163, 174, 191, 243nn1–2. See also Notes from the House of the Dead (Dostoevsky) Islam/Muslim characters, 142, 148–52, 175, 191, 238–39nn20–21, 239n24 Jackson, Robert Louis, 163, 174, 189, 241n1 James, Henry, 11, 209n22 Janacek, Leos, 215n12 “The Jew” (Turgenev): context, 15, 99–100, 200, 230n3, 230–31nn10–11, 232–33n24; critical reception of, 4, 100; function of stereotype, 19, 21, 22, 102–103, 107–108, 122, 234n30; Jews as everyman, 117, 122; narrative structure and plot, 100–101; Nikolay Ilyich, 101–102, 104, 106–107, 202; and Red Cavalry (Babel), 200–204; religion/religious practices, 141; Sarah in, 100–101, 103, 112–13, 141, 202, 231–32nn16,18–19. See also Girshel; Turgenev, Ivan Jewish body: body/soul dichotomy, 18–20; centrality of stereotype, 15–17; comedy/ comic characters, 57–60, 109, 155; in Gogol, 15–20, 30, 54–58, 87, 89, 196, 222n49; Jewish/ Cossack binary, 54–58, 222nn49–50, 223n55; medieval mystery plays, 207–208nn16–18; physical and moral defects, 102–103; physiognomy, 57, 63, 89, 223n54; Scott’s Isaac of York, 63–64; in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, 65; in Turgenev’s “The Jew,” 102–103. See also stereotypes Jewish death: in Babel, 117, 200–204; and Bolshevik Revolution, 203–204; as comedy, 93–94, 123–24, 126, 218–19n31, 223n52, 235nn40–41; drowning scene (in Taras Bulba; Gogol), 1, 68–71, 94, 96, 117, 180, 188, 223n52; in Gogol, 58–60, 88–89, 92–95, 109, 123–28, 202, 218–19n31; legacy of the stereotype, 195–204; in Rybakov, 195–99; in Turgenev, 101, 105–106, 110–13, 116–17, 123–28, 202–203 Jewish question, 6–7, 14, 17, 20–21, 135, 212n46, 237n11, 242–43n10. See also antisemitism Jewish stereotype. See stereotypes Jews: as cultural threat, 6–7; as everyman, 117, 122, 208n19; Hasidic Jews, 202–203, 219–20n33; and individualism, 220n36; intertextual portrayals of, 63–73, 80–82, 113, 115–16, 202–204; Jew/non-Jew binary, 142, 149, 157–59, 231n11; Jewish/Christian relations, 67–69; Jewish/Cossack binary, 48–60, 141, 222nn49–50, 223n55, 245n4; Jewish/Polish alliance, 220n37; oppression of, 67–69; Patriotic War of 1812, 232–33n24; racial identity, 11; religious/spiritual context, 140–42, 152–59; Russian-Jewish relations, 183–93, 220–21n38; Zhid, 114–17, 159–62, 232n22. See also ridiculous Jew; stereotypes Judaism, 140–42, 152–59

index Judaization, 40–41, 82–83, 210n36, 238n14 Judas, 52, 108, 141, 153–54 Julius, Anthony, 3 Kaplan, Robert, 4 Karlinsky, Simon, 77, 225n4, 226n6 Katz, Michael, 240n28, 244n8 kinship/blood kinship, 17, 45 Klemm, Gustav, 211–12n45 Klier, John, 210n37 Knowles, V. A., 234n33 Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, 79, 214–15nn9,11, 216n16, 218n27, 221n40, 224n6, 227–28n13 Kovner, Avram, 135 Kulish, Panteleimon, The Black Council, 215–16n13 Kunitz, Joshua, 29, 206–207n11 Kuprin, Alexander, 20 Kuz’minskii, Boris, 227–28n13 Lazhechnikov, Ivan Ivanovich, 283n14 Le Rider, Jacques, 211–12n45 Lermontov, Mikhail, 239–40n26 Leskov, Nikolay, 7, 206–207n11, 222n48 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Nathan the Wise, 10 London Society for Promoting Christianity, 14 Maccoby, Hyam, 207–208n16 Malamud, Bernard, 8 Mandelshtam, Osip, 8, 96 Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, 9, 10, 13, 21, 42, 116, 208n17, 231n17 martial epics, 83, 107. See also warrior ethos martyrology, 198–99 masculinity, 216–17n19, 218nn28–29, 227n13 McLean, Hugh, 226n5 medieval mystery plays, 9, 207–208n16 Mendelssohn, Moses, 10 The Merchant of Venice. See Shakespeare, William Mickiewicz, Adam, Pan Tadeusz, 224–25n15 Mikhed, P., 214n8 miscegenation, 17 misogyny, 37, 211–12n45 Modder, Montagu, 20, 209n27, 213n53 Mohammed, 238–39n20 money/moneylending, 38–41, 80–81, 103, 108, 134–35, 142, 237nn9–10 monsters, 213n51, 228n21, 234n30 morality, and historical novels, 77, 226nn5,7, 227n12, 228n21 Moses, 241n31 Muslims, 142, 148–52, 175, 191 mysticism, 198–99 Nabokov, Vladimir, 223n52 negation, 22–23, 30, 35–37, 43–44, 207n15 Nekrasov, Nikolay, 100



Nicholas I, 14 Nicholas II, 212n46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 164 noble savage, 239–40n26 Notes from the House of the Dead (Dostoevsky): Akim Akimovich, 176–77, 179; “Akulka’s Husband,” 136, 174, 238n15; Aley, 18, 23, 150–59, 176, 239–40nn26–28; as autobiography, 4–5, 133, 141, 175, 189–93, 238n16, 244nn9–10; barracks scene, 177–79, 241n32; bathhouse scene, 137–40, 142, 159, 177; Christmas chapter, 144–46, 153–57, 177; context, 15, 18, 131–32, 156–59, 191–93, 206n9, 239n23; critical reception of, 4–5, 161–64; Easter passage, 145, 157; function of stereotype, 3, 20, 23, 96, 131–32, 154–57, 181–84, 188–91; intertextuality, 191–93; Jew/ non-Jew binary, 142, 149, 157–59, 231n11; Old Believers, 146–47, 157, 238n17; prison entrance scene, 182–83, 189, 244nn12–13; religion/religious practices, 141–52, 146–47, 238n15; Sabbath rituals scene, 154–55; salvation plot, 175, 189; textual ambiguity, 190–93 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 234n29 Old Believers, 146–47, 157, 238n17 Old Testament/Old Israel, 210n34 Orzeszkowa, Elina, 206–207n11 the Other/Otherness: class system, 186–88; degrees of, 218n25; as everyman, 117, 122; Jews as, 11, 52–53, 108, 141; and salvation, 184, 189; in Slavic tradition, 222n47; women, 35–37; women as, 35–37 Pale of Settlement, 6, 9, 124 Paris, public executions, 125 parricide, 12 Pasternak, Boris, 8, 96 Paul, Saint, Letter to the Romans, 13, 210n32 Pereverzez, V. F., 226n5 pets, in prison, 237n8 phylactery, 159 physiognomy, 55–57, 63, 89, 223n54. See also Jewish body piety, 77, 147, 175, 238n17, 239n25 Pobedonotsev, Konstantin, 17, 212n46 pogroms, 7, 10, 124, 201, 219–20n33 Poland: Jews and Polish culture, 208n19; Pan Tadeusz (Mickiewicz), 224–25n15; partition of, 14, 15, 140, 210–11n37, 232n21; Poles/Jewish alliance, 220n37; Polish death, 223n57; as Russia’s enemy, 70 Poliakov, Léon, 211–12n45 Pontis, Anne-Marie, 231–32n18, 232–33n24 Pound, Ezra, 11–12, 207n13 Priima, F. Ia., 215n12



index

prison systems, 131–32, 235n42, 236n2, 237nn8,10, 244n8 prostitutes, 213nn51–52 public execution, 118–20, 124–25 public executions, 118–20, 124–25 Pushkin, Alexander, 62, 206n10, 220–21n38, 226n8, 227n12; The Captain’s Daughter, 62; The Covetous Knight, 206n10, 220–21n38; Poltava, 226n8; The Robber Brothers, 227n12 Rabbi Nachman, 219–20n33. See also Hasidic Jews race, German racial/gender theory, 16–17, 211–12n45,47 Ragussis, Michael, 5–6, 13–14 realist fiction, 117, 148, 161, 164, 198–99 Rebecca. See under Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe Red Cavalry (Babel), 200–204, 221n43, 245n7 Reid, Ben, 233–34n28 religion/religious ritual, 141–52; and class, 148, 191, 238n15; comedy/comic characters, 152–57, 163, 175, 191; eccentricity/fanaticism, 146–47, 238n18; expression of in Dostoevsky, 238n15, 239n25; Islam/Muslims, 142, 148–52, 175, 191, 238–39n20, 239n24; Jew/non-Jew binary, 142, 149, 157–59, 231n11; Judaism, 140–42, 152–59; piety, 77, 147, 175, 238n17, 239n25; religious passion, 175–79; ritual and performance, 153–56, 163, 176–78, 241n30; Sabbath ritual, 154–55; spiritual context, 140–42. See also Christianity; Russian Orthodox Church religious autobiography, 4–5, 133, 141, 175, 189–93 Restif-de-la-Brentonne, 125 resurrection/spiritual resurrection, 174, 183, 187, 189–92, 207–208n16, 238n16 revenge/revenge themes, 77–79, 95, 226nn7–8 ridiculous Jew: as common representation, 2–3, 23–24; Jewish death in Gogol, 71–72, 96, 112, 125–26, 199; Jewish death in Gogol’s Taras Bulba, 71–72, 96, 112, 125–26, 199; literary context, 87, 133–34, 192, 204, 223n52, 229n25; religious ritual in Dostoevsky, 175; religious ritual in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, 175 ritual murder, 17 Rosenberg, Edgar, 209nn20,27 Roth, Philip, 8, 220–21n38 Rozanov, Vasily, 16, 20, 217n23, 229n28 Russia/Russians: Alexander II, 6, 10; antisemitism, 17, 20, 207n13, 238n14, 245n5; Beilis case, 20; Bolshevik Revolution, 195–96; canton regiments, 14–15, 235n38; Catholic church, 140; class system, 186–88, 190–91, 238n17; conversion policies, 16–17; corporal punishment/capital punishment, 124–25, 181, 235nn41–42, 235–36nn44–46, 243–44n7; crime/criminality, 136–37, 142,

180, 190–91; demographics, 210–11n37; German occupation, 197–99; Judaization, 40–41, 82–83; Pale of Settlement, 6, 9, 140; partition of, Poland, 14, 15, 140, 210–11n37, 232n21; Patriotic War of 1812, 232–33n24; Russian ideal, 17, 33–35, 40–41, 101–104, 107, 227–28n13; Russian-Jewish relations, 183–93; Russian language, 220–21n38; Russian Revolution, 20; Russian-Turkish relations, 148; Russo-Japanese War, 20; social system, 190–91; Soviet era, 7–8, 195–99, 207n13, 217n22, 227nn10–11, 245n6; spirituality, 175, 191. See also Cossacks; Russian Orthodox Church Russian Bible Society, 211n39 Russian literature: absence of consonance, 234n31; intertextuality, 69–73, 203–204; noble savage, 239–40n26; reality/potential dichotomy, 148, 158, 177, 234n31, 238n19; and society, 207n12; society, 207n12; Soviet era, 197, 245n6 Russian national character: and class, 148, 191, 238n15; in Gogol’s Taras Bulba, 21–24, 32–33, 40–41, 61–62, 70, 75–80, 213n55, 214n8; Jews place in, 183–93; literary context, 22, 23, 131, 141, 158; in Turgenev, 107–108 Russian Orthodox Church: class system, 176; concept of beauty, 212n49; Cossacks as defenders of, 32, 34, 75–80; and ecstacy, 179; in Gogol’s early works, 218–19n31; Judaization, 238n14; martyrology, 198–99; piety and spirituality, 143–48, 157; and Russian nationalism, 213n55; salvation, 184, 210n34; threats to, 140 Rybakov, Anatoly, 2, 7–8, 96; Heavy Sand, 195–99, 244n2 Sabbath. See under religion/religious ritual Safran, Gabrielle, 206n11 salvation, 184, 210n34 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 164, 208n19 Satter, Robert, 233–34n28 Schiller, Friedrich, 213n50 Schmidt, Julian, 233n27 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, 61–73; ambiguity of Jewish characters, 224n8; comedy/comic characters, 81; and Gogol, 21–22, 62–69, 215nn12–13, 223n2, 224n5; Isaac of York, 63–66, 116, 224n5; popularity of, 223n2, 224nn3–4; Rebecca, 10, 13, 58, 62, 64, 66–67, 113, 124 sech, 34–35, 37, 43, 50, 77, 217n20, 221n40, 227n11 seminary, 36, 55, 76–77, 225n3, 228n21 sentimental/mock-sentimental binary, 92–93 Sermon on the Mount, 151, 239–40n26. See also Christianity Setchkarev, Vsevolod, 32, 215n12, 228n20

index Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice: contemporary nature, 24, 170; evolution of Jewish characters, 9–10, 27, 63, 115–16, 209n24; exploitation of negative stereotype, 42, 126–27, 193, 208n17, 231n18, 232n23; function of comic scenes, 228n21; Jessica, 10, 58, 63, 113, 209n24; literary context, 21, 231n17, 232n23; religious conversion, 13, 113; Shylock, 3, 58, 65, 80–81, 170, 193, 224n5, 232n23 Shatalov, S. E., 231n11 Shevchenko, Taras, 219–20n33 Shul’ts, S. A., 227–28n13 Shylock. See under Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice Siberia, 15, 132 Simeon, Charles, 210n35 Sirskyj, Wasyl, 213n55 Slavic popular culture, 219n32, 222nn44,47 Slonimskii, Aleksandr L., 229n24 Society of Israelite Christians, 211n39 Solovyov, Vladimir, 7, 16 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane, 123 Soviet era, See under Russia/Russians Spierenburg, Pieter, 125, 235nn42–43 spirituality/spiritual regeneration, 162, 175, 189, 212n49 Stepanov, N. V., 217n22, 227n10 the steppes, 49, 221nn40–42 stereotypes: ambiguity of, 210n31, 211–12n45, 224n8; in Anglo-American literature, 8–14, 27, 30, 42, 80–81, 207nn13–14, 208nn17–18, 232n23; associated with devil, 8–9, 28–29, 52–53, 137–40, 207–208n16, 220nn34,36, 222nn44,46, 235n40; and character definition, 102–103, 107–108, 116, 188–92; as comic relief, 28–29, 54, 56–57, 86–87, 174; compassion/sympathy for, 103–107, 110–11, 114–15, 126–28, 160–61, 202; during Soviet era, 7–8, 195–99, 207n13; evolution of, 11–12, 206–207nn10–12, 209nn20–22,24,26–27, 213n53; good Jew, 10–11, 80–82; homo economicus, 8–9, 38–41, 63–69, 134–35; as inscribable, 11–12; intertextuality, 2–8, 19–24, 27–30, 80–82, 131–32, 202–204, 232n23; Jewishness and femininity, 36, 58–60, 211–12n45, 217n23, 222n49; literary contexts, 5–8, 21, 27–30, 58, 61–73, 137; male/female dichotomy, 217–18n24, 222n49; money/ moneylending, 38–41, 80–81, 103, 108, 134–35, 142, 237nn9–10; and reality, 20–21; religious contexts, 140–42, 154–57; and Russian national character, 22, 23, 30–31, 131, 141, 158; and self-identity, 29, 209n25; sympathy/compassion for, 117–23; timidity, 105; transformation/discrediting of, 21–24, 78–84, 122–23, 196–99, 202–204, 234nn30,35, 241–42nn1–2, 243n4; the Zhid, 114–17, 159–



62, 220–21n38, 232n22, 236n5. See also Jewish body and individual authors Styron, William, 233–34n28 Summer in Baden-Baden. See Tsypkin, Leonid, Summer in Baden-Baden Suslova, Apollinaria, 167 swimming, 49, 221n43 sympathy. See compassion and sympathy Talmud, as threat, 17 Taras Bulba (Gogol): critical reception of, 3–4, 215n12, 217n22, 226n5, 227n10, 227–28n13; deconstruction of beauty, 227–28n13; diminution of epic hero, 82–87, 192–93; drowning scene, 1, 68–71, 94, 96, 117, 180, 188, 223n52; film version (1962), 215n12; as historical romance novel, 32, 62, 75, 76, 198; intertextuality, 21–22, 61–73, 80–82, 196–99; legacy of, 196–204; literary context, 31, 61–73; Mordechai, 56–57; as mythic epic, 31–33, 76–79, 95, 215n11, 222n50, 227n9, 227–28n13; as national epic, 199, 213n55; phallocentric context, 225n4; plot structure, 226n8; revenge themes, 77–79, 95, 226n7; setting and context, 15, 213n55, 214nn7–8, 216n15, 219–20n33; sources for, 215–16nn12–13, 219n32; Soviet era interpretation, 217n22, 227nn10–11; stereotype form and function, 3, 27–60; Taras/Yankel binary, 48–60, 82–87, 141. See also Cossacks Tiger, Lionel, 216–17n19 Tokarzewski, Szymon, 239–40n26, 243n2 Tolstoy, Leo, 7, 16 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 139 trade/traders, 41–43, 223n54 tragedy/tragic representation in Aristotle, 121 Trilling, Lionel, 105–106 Trollope, Anthony, 14, 210n36 Troppmann, Jean Baptiste, 118–19, 126, 233n26 Tsypkin, Leonid, Summer in Baden-Baden, 164–71; Jewish question, 242–43n10; and Jewish stereotypes, 20, 133, 183–84, 192–93, 244n9; motive for writing, 12, 23, 189–90, 242n7 Turgenev, Ivan: antisemitism, 234n33; artistic device, 121–22; and Babel, 203; background, 230n3; comedy/comic characters, 109, 153–54, 235n41; compassion and sympathy motifs, 103–108, 110–15, 118, 126–27, 202, 234n29; and Dostoevsky, 156, 233n27; eccentricities of, 12; on execution/capital punishment, 22, 104–106, 109–13, 116–23, 180–81, 233nn26–27; exploitation of stereotype, 19–20, 22–23, 102–103, 107–109, 114–23, 126–28; intertextuality, 156, 203, 224n3; Jewish death, 19, 22, 101, 105–106, 109–13, 116–17, 123–28, 202–203; portrayal of women, 111–13, 122, 231n16; Russian nationalism, 101–104,



index

107–108; works: “A Living Relic,” 19; “The End of Chertopkhanov,” 123; “The Execution of Troppmann,” 22, 117–23, 126, 233nn26–27, 234n30; Notes of a Hunter, 230n2, 234n31; “The Unfortunate One,” 7, 122, 224n3. See also “The Jew”; stereotypes Turkey, 148 Ukraine, 2, 50, 96, 213n55, 214n8, 215–16n13, 219–20n33, 227n11. See also folklore/folk theater Uman (Uman’), 219–20n33 underworld, 53 Uniate Church, 140 usury, 41–43 uxoricide (wife murder), 136, 174, 237n12 Valikhanov, Chokan, 148, 239n21 villains, 8–9, 81 Vinogradov, V. V., 61 Vremia (journal), 143 warrior ethos, 33–35, 55–56, 63, 77–78, 83, 225n1, 226n6 Warsaw, 50–52, 56, 83–84, 87, 89 Way, Lewis, 14 Weininger, Otto, 16, 211–12n45, 216–17n19, 217n23, 222n49

Wilson, Edmund, 228n21 Wilson, Robert, 232n23 women: Bulgarin portrayal of, 69–70; German racial/gender theory, 16, 211–12n45; Gogol portrayal of, 35–37, 62–63, 67, 81–82, 85–96, 224n9, 225n4, 245n10; male/female dichotomy, 217–18n24, 222n49; as negative stereotypes, 21–23, 30, 35–37, 43–44, 136–37; Scott portrayal of, 66–67; Turgenev portrayal of, 111–13, 122, 231n16; uxoricide (wife murder), 136, 174 Yankel (in Gogol’s Taras Bulba): and brotherhood, 46; as character model, 2, 7, 128, 133; compared to Turgenev’s Girshel, 108; description, 9, 50–52, 58, 219–20n33; function of, 3, 21–22, 40, 223n52; as good Jew, 80–82; passion for money, 38–41, 64, 134, 220n35; religious context, 140–41; and Scott’s Isaac of York, 64–66; Taras/Yankel binary, 48–60, 82–87, 141; zhid/evrei binary, 236n5. See also Taras Bulba Yankel (in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz), 224–25n15 Yiddish, 56 Zakhariah (Zakharii), 238n14 Zaporozhians. See Cossacks Zederbaum, Alexander O., 212n46 Zhabotinskii, Vladimir, 223n56 Zhid, 114–17, 159–62, 220–21n38, 232n22, 236n5