Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism

by Susan McReynolds, Oksana Yakimenko (Translator)

Overview

ENG

Dostoevsky's Russian chauvinism and anti Semitism have long posed problems for his readers and critics. How could the author of The Brothers Karamazov also be the source of the slurs against Jews in Diary of a Writer? And where is the celebrated Christian humanist in the nationalist outbursts of The Idiot? These enigmas-the coexistence of humanism and hatred, faith and doubt-are linked, Susan McReynolds tells us in Redemption and the Merchant God. Her book analyzes Dostoevsky's novels and Diary to show how the author's anxieties about Christianity can help solve the riddle of his anti Semitism as well as that of his Russian messianism.

RUS

Националистические и антисемитские воззрения Достоевского долгое время создавали проблемы для его читателей и критиков. Как мог автор «Братьев Карамазовых» быть автором оскорблений в адрес евреев в «Дневнике писателя»? Как христианский гуманист мог допустить националистические выпады в романе «Идиот»? По мнению Сюзан Макрейнольдз, на первый взгляд загадочное сосуществование гуманизма и ненависти, веры и сомнения на самом деле закономерно, а корни национализма Достоевского лежат в его тревогах относительно христианства.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887193847
Publisher:	Bibliorossica
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Series:	Contemporary Western Rusistika
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

ENG

Susan McReynolds is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. She is currently editing a new Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov.

RUS

Сьюзан Макрейнольдз — доцент кафедры славянских языков и литератур в колледже искусств и наук Вайнберга Северо-Западного университета Исследовательские интересы включают русскую и немецкую литературу, антисемитизм и вопросы религии в XIX–XX веках Автор книг Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism и Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Read an Excerpt

Redemption and the Merchant God
DOSTOEVSKY'S ECONOMY OF SALVATION AND ANTISEMITISM

---

By Susan McReynolds
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-2439-4

---

Chapter One "I Am Not an Expert at Lulling to Sleep": The Struggle Between Faith and Doubt in Dostoevsky's Writings

DOSTOEVSKY'S AMBIVALENCE about salvation through the Crucifixion had several consequences. It decreed that his spiritual life would be one of constant oscillation between doubt and affirmation; it affected his reception by his contemporaries; and it shaped the plots of his writings, both his novels and his journalism. Preoccupation with the problem of resurrection runs throughout Dostoevsky's life and work. Longing for salvation drives the life stories of Dostoevsky himself and his primary characters, who undertake impassioned quests to discover the potential bases of transformation, the catalysts that could enable individuals and whole communities to overcome sin and begin anew. What T. A. Kasatkina writes about Crime and Punishment probably applies to Dostoevsky's entire output: like Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's essays and novels alike are "about resurrection, about how resurrection takes place and the circumstances under which it is impossible."

At times, Dostoevsky seems to triumph over his doubts and conveys a sense of certainty. He can be emphatic about the absolute, exclusive truth of Christianity. To the anonymous mother of an eight-year-old boy who writes him in 1878 seeking advice about child rearing, he advises:

Acquaint him with the Gospels, teach him to believe in God strictly according to the law. This is a sine qua non, otherwise he won't be a good person, but will at the very best turn into a sufferer, or in the bad case into an indifferent fat man [zhirnyi chelovek], and even worse. You won't think of anything better than Christ, believe it. (Pss, 30.1:17)

Readers responded to this confidence Dostoevsky could project. Many turned to him as someone who could restore faith, and we witness Dostoevsky enthusiastically playing this role in his letters. "You see before you a sick soul, who has found a confessor," writes the painter E. F. Iunge, daughter of Dostoevsky's friend and court lady-in-waiting A. I. Tolstaia (Pss, 30.1:329). Iunge exemplifies a significant category of Dostoevsky's contemporary readers, for whom he was a kind of iconic representative of faith. "As long as there is at least one man, with convictions, believing, loving, not an egoist-what a great consolation that is in difficult moments," she writes her mother of Dostoevsky (Pss, 30.1:330).

"You write that they have destroyed your faith in Christ," Dostoevsky responds to an anonymous young woman who writes him in spiritual despair. "But why didn't you first of all ask yourself: who are these people who reject Christ as Savior?" I'm not saying they are bad people, he explains, just appallingly ignorant about things they presume to judge, arrogant, and flighty. "You are not the first to lose faith," he says, and enigmatically assures her: "I know many negators who in the end turned with their whole being to Christ" (Pss, 30.1:140).

Yet the same man who writes so reassuringly about negators eventually embracing Christ also betrays an ambivalent attitude toward the possession of faith. When corresponding with readers such as Konstantin Pobedono stsev and Nikolai Liubimov, he worries that he has not made Father Zosima, his representative of Christianity, convincing enough; but when other readers believe he has portrayed faith successfully, he objects. Pobedonostsev was disturbed by the "power and energy" of Ivan Karamazov's "atheistic positions." He complains to Dostoevsky, "An answer" to Ivan's challenge "hasn't yet appeared, but ... is necessary." After reading the critique of God's world put forth by Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev writes Dostoevsky in August 1879: "Your 'Grand Inquisitor' made a strong impression on me. I haven't read much else that is so powerful. But I waited-from where will there be a rebuff, objection and clarification-and it hasn't come yet" (Pss, 15:491).

The refutation, Dostoevsky assures him, will come "as the last words of the dying elder," Zosima's homily of faith and acceptance of God's creation, seeming injustice and all. Liubimov, who edited The Brothers Karamazov for publication in the Russian Messenger, proofread and critiqued each installment. Like Pobedonostsev, he frequently objected to the vigor of the novel's critique of God and expressed his concerns to Dostoevsky. "It is for this theme," the affirmation of faith, Dostoevsky assures him, "that the entire novel is being written" (June 1879, Pss, 30.1:68).

Despite such assurances to readers like Pobedonostsev and Liubimov, however, Dostoevsky knew that the primary quality of his spiritual life was struggle or conflict. When other readers reported that they found stable faith portrayed in his art, Dostoevsky objected. Some of the first readers of The Brothers Karamazov accused him of presenting simplistic portraits of secure believers in figures such as Father Zosima and Alyosha Karamazov. He responds to their objections by emphasizing his doubts and the strength of the case against God he makes through Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor. "The scoundrels tease about my uneducated and retrograde belief in God," he complains. "These blockheads can't imagine such a powerful denial of God as the one put in the Grand Inquisitor and the preceding chapter.... Their stupid nature can't even imagine such a powerful negation as what I passed through," he boasts (1880-81 notebooks, Pss, 27:48).

Dostoevsky took special pride in his love for Christ alone, even a Christ outside of the truth. The strength of his doubts and his special access to the spirit of atheism played a similar role in his spiritual life-like love of Christ, they too were points of jealous pride and identity for Dostoevsky. The novelist and former schoolteacher L. A. Ozhigina carried on a brief correspondence with Dostoevsky; her letters are no longer extant, but we have one of his. In a curious exchange, she apparently accords him the power to instill faith, but he rejects this ascription. "You think I'm one of those people who save hearts, settle souls, drive away grief?" Dostoevsky asks her. "Many people write me this-but I know for certain that I am more capable of instilling disillusionment and disgust. I am not an expert at lulling to sleep, although I've tried it sometimes. But some creatures simply need to be lulled" (February 1878, Pss, 30.1:9).

In mature works like "The Peasant Marey" (published in the February 1876 Diary), Dostoevsky composes a spiritual biography for himself according to which he experienced a decisive spiritual transformation while in prison in the early 1850s. His writings from the period immediately after his release from prison, however, contradict the narrative Dostoevsky composed for himself decades later. Instead of the conclusive conversion to popular Christianity Dostoevsky later claimed to have experienced, we find an existence characterized by ongoing struggle and illness, apparently spiritual as well as physical. In the famous 1854 letter to Fonvizina that declares his allegiance to Christ, post-prison camp Dostoevsky also confesses to being in a state of anticipation.

I am in some kind of expectation of something; it is as though I am still sick now, and it seems to me that soon, very soon something decisive must happen, that I am approaching a crisis in my life, that I seem to have ripened for something and that there will be something, maybe quiet and clear, maybe terrible [groznoe], but in any case inevitable. But perhaps all this is my sickly deliriums [bol 'nye bredni]! (Pss, 28.1:177)

Confessions like these seriously undermine Dostoevsky's later claim to have undergone a decisive conversion experience in prison.

To the end of his life, Dostoevsky embraced what he calls "duality." "You write about your duality [dvoistvennost']," he replies to Iunge. "This is why you are dear to me, because exactly the same thing as this split [razdvoenie] in you exists in me as well, and has been in me all my life. It is a great torment [muka], but at the same time a great pleasure [naslazhdenie.]" He recommends faith in Christ as a solution-though not a completely effective one-to this duality, and he tellingly confesses the necessity of accepting the desire to believe as a substitute for belief itself. "Do you believe in Christ and his promises?" he asks Iunge. "If you believe (or very much want to believe), then give yourself to him completely, and the torments from this duality will be greatly softened, and you will receive a spiritual solution [iskhod dushevnyi], and that is the most important thing" (Pss, 30.1:147).

Many of Dostoevsky's original Russian readers identified irresolvable spiritual tension as the defining feature of his art. Unlike Iunge, these readers perceived a permanent oscillation between faith and doubt at the core of Dostoevsky's work. Writing in the Literary Journal, Dostoevsky's contemporary V. K. Petersen claims to discern a "constant fight" in Dostoevsky's soul (Pss, 15:508). Dostoevsky, Petersen writes, is "an extremely interesting type of man who believes in spite of the most despairing doubts," someone "eternally doubting and daring to look deeply into the abyss of negation" (Pss, 15:508-9).

Other early Russian readers suspect that if Dostoevsky's writings do contain any resolution to the problem of faith, it is in favor of doubt. E. F. Tiutcheva, daughter of the poet Tiutchev and a lady-in-waiting for the imperial family, believed that Dostoevsky's words were remarkably effective at communicating objections to religion but inadequate to the task of restoring faith. "Dostoevsky took on a too difficult task," she maintains. "Expose the sore, put it on display-that can be done, but who will heal it?" she asks Pobedonostsev (October 1879, Pss, 15:495). Not a writer like Dostoevsky, she answers: "The dark spirit of temptation and high-handed doubt isn't banished with words [slovopreniiami], but with prayer and fasting" (Pss, 15:495). Another contemporary, the Slavophile I. V. Pavlov, agrees with Tiutcheva's conclusion. The "stench of the abysmal fall" is portrayed in The Brothers Karamazov "with stunning, troubling clarity," whereas Christian ideals "come out dim and pale" in comparison, Pavlov fears (Pss, 15:499).

Dostoevsky was well aware that his novel could be interpreted as a victory for Ivan. "Until the end of the novel," he concedes, "it is possible to understand these ideas and positions incorrectly" (i.e., as a victory for Ivan). "And just as I feared, that's what happened," he writes, regarding the reactions of Liubimov and Mikhail Katkov, the conservative editor of the Russian Messenger (Pss, 30.1:70). Regarding Zosima's homily, he admits, "I tremble for it in this sense: will it be a sufficient answer. All the more because it's not a direct answer to the positions previously expressed (in the Grand Inquisitor and before), to the specific points, but only oblique."

Many of Dostoevsky's readers, including some of the most prominent, do in fact believe that Ivan's rebellion overshadows Zosima's faith. The editors of Dostoevsky's collected works, for example, write, "In spite of Pobedonostsev's desires and the subjective intentions of Dostoevsky himself," nonetheless "a certain unstable equilibrium between pro et contra is constructed" (Pss, 15:492). "As far as the reader is concerned," they contend, "the ideas and aesthetic effect created on him by the rebellious chapters were so powerful that they not infrequently unquestionably overshadowed the impression created by Zosima's homily."

Far from enjoying newfound faith, the man who emerged from Siberian prison was tormented by the difficulty of regeneration. Shortly after being released, Dostoevsky writes in the 1854 letter to Fonvizina, "The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, evil, foul; you recognize all this, you reproach yourself-but you cannot master yourself. I experienced this" (Pss, 28.1:177). His notebooks from 1864 express similar frustration. "The tragedy of the underground," Dostoevsky confides in his notebooks, consists of "the consciousness of something better and the impossibility of achieving that something." "What is there to support those who wish to reform themselves?" he asks. "Consolation, faith? There is consolation from no one, faith in no one!" (Pss, 16:329).

Salvation is difficult for the characters of Dostoevsky's novels. The underground man fails to escape from his mouse hole through the hope held out by Liza's love; Raskolnikov's moral rebirth seems unconvincing to many readers; Myshkin reverts to idiocy; Ivan Karamazov seems to succumb to madness and a possibly fatal illness; the direction of Dmitry Karamazov's spiritual development is in question at the end of the novel. Death by suicide or murder, or perdition through emigration and conversion to Catholicism befall major characters of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky's novels betray contradictory impulses; they seem fissured by tension between the urge to portray the attainment of Christian faith-salvation from sin into new life-and the ambiguity of what actually gets represented. Crime and Punishment, to take one of the novels as an example, clearly wants to be the story of Raskolnikov's resurrection. When the novel begins, Raskolnikov is trapped in his coffinlike garret, seeking a way out. "He did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness," we are told. "He longed to forget himself all together, to forget everything, and then to wake up and begin life anew." The epilogue asserts that Raskolnikov rises to a new life on the banks of a Siberian river with Sonia at his side, but many find his alleged resurrection unconvincing. The conclusion seems "implausible" to many readers, Philip Rahv writes. Joseph Frank likewise faults the attempt to portray Raskolnikov's regeneration as a failure. Raskolnikov's "adoption of a new set of values," he writes, "is brushed in too rapidly and too perfunctorily to be really successful."

Robin Feuer Miller analyzes "a quintessentially Dostoevskian development" shaping the evolution of The Idiot from notes to final publication, a development that reveals the depth of Dostoevsky's fears about the difficulty of regeneration. Dostoevsky's starting point when he sets out to write the novel, Miller explains, is the "conviction that true goodness arises out of the abyss of human evil and suffering." Yet he seems incapable of portraying a spiritual reversal from sin to salvation: "In the novel, however, no character undergoes such a far-reaching development." The early plans for action are "linear ones-where development and permanent changes in the characters occur-whereas the overall shape of the novel itself, in contrast to the notes, is a zigzag or a circle."

The problem of redemption becomes increasingly acute in Dostoevsky's writings after Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. Raskolnikov's ambiguous ending, Frank writes,

would be a story that to preoccupy Dostoevsky throughout the remainder of his creative life. For time and again we shall see him returning to the challenge of creating a regenerated Raskolnikov-of creating, that is, a highly educated and spiritually developed member of Russian society who conquers his egoism and undergoes a genuine conversion to a Christian morality of love.

Like Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's other major novels can be read as failed (or at least unconvincing to many) redemption narratives. Characters such as Gorianchikov (the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead), Raskolnikov, Myshkin and other characters from The Idiot, and Stavrogin long for moral resurrection, but many readers believe they never achieve it.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Redemption and the Merchant God by Susan McReynolds
Copyright © 2008 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Note on the Text     xi
List of Abbreviations of Works   Fyodor Dostoevsky     xiii
Introduction: Speaking with the Devil     3
Part I
"I Am Not an Expert at Lulling to Sleep": The Struggle Between Faith and Doubt in Dostoevsky's Writings     23
"He Gave His Son": The Problem of the Crucifixion as Child Sacrifice in Dostoevsky     31
Disraeli and the Merchant God: Victims and Villains, Jews and Europe     46
A Synagogue Mistaken for a Church: Dostoevsky's Demon and the Jews     58
Part II
"I Have the Heart of a Lamb": Roots of the Russian and Jewish Ideas and the Problem of the Crucifixion in Poor Folk     69
"God Sent Her to Us as a Reward for Our Sufferings": The Origins of Dostoevsky's Preoccupation with Child Sacrifice in the Dialogue Between Time and The Insulted and Injured     78
Sources of Dostoevsky's Antisemitism in Notes from the House of the Dead: The Problem of Redemption and the Resemblance of Christians and Jews     90
"I Don't Want Your Sacrifice": The Morality of the Son in Crime and Punishment     117
From Prince Christ to the Russian Christ: Problems of Resurrection in The Idiot and the Development of Dostoevsky's National Messianism     133
"This Is What I Cannot Bear": The Obliteration of Moral Distinctions Through the Crucifixion in Demons     144
"You Can Buy the Whole World": Zosima's Christian Faith and the Jewish Idea in the Diary of a Writer     157
Notes     199
Index     231

Editorial Reviews

"Can we read Dostoevsky without worrying about his Antisemitism? Susan McReynolds makes a convincing case that we cannot. She places Dostoevsky's Jewish obsession at the center of his imagination. No one with an interest in Dostoevsky or in the history of his era should ignore this compelling book." —Jeffrey Brooks, author of When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917

From the Publisher