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

The Ridiculous Jew

The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

Gary Rosenshield

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.

9780804769853

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

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE - Gogol

CHAPTER 1 - Taras Bulba

CHAPTER 2 - Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context

CHAPTER 3 - Taras Bulba Otherwise

PART TWO - Turgenev

CHAPTER 4 - The Jew

PART THREE - Dostoevsky

CHAPTER 5 - Notes from the House of the Dead

CHAPTER 6 - Notes from the House of the Dead

CHAPTER 7 - Notes from the House of the Dead

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

Notes

Index

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.

—NIKOLAI GOGOL, 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.

—IVAN TURGENEV, 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!

—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Notes from the House of the Dead

In the fourth chapter (First Impressions) of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s semi-autobiographical 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 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 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 prerevolutionary 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 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 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 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 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 stereotype, 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 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 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.

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 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 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