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| Dostoevsky in 1876 |
I just finished reading a remarkable book about Dostoevsky’s philosophy(1).
One chapter of the book particularly caught my attention. The author
demonstrates that the charge of anti-Semitism leveled against the writer is
unfounded. It reminded me of an article that I published here in September
2012: “A
spot on the beautiful garment”. It was about a so-called anti-Semitism of
Dostoevsky. When that article was published, Pierre Lamblé sent me a comment in
which he strongly disagreed with this assertion. He wrote: “The
anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky is a myth based on nonsense, on a misunderstanding
on the nature of his work, of his conditions of work and production, and on
anachronisms. We cannot comment on what D. wrote about the Jews in his time
with our current criteria of reading; in reality, he consistently expressed
feelings of sympathy for the Jews in general, and especially in his works of
fiction”. And he invited me to read a chapter he devoted to this issue in
his book. I followed his advice and found convincing answers in the ten pages
he dedicates to the question, in a section entitled “The Politics of
Dostoevsky”. In these pages, Lamblé criticizes a book published in 1976 by
David Goldstein, under the title “Dostoïevski et les Juifs” (Dostoevsky
and the Jews).
However, before I address a few arguments developed by Lamblé, one must
remember that Dostoevsky is dependent on the prevailing mentality of the Orthodox
society of his time and that he adopts many common anti-Jewish stereotypes:
taste for money, rootlessness, subservience, etc. But, as Lamblé explains it,
by having some of his characters take on these traits, the writer joins his
readers in their prejudice so as eventually to better underscore their vanity. We
find a similar “strategy” in the French writer Léon Bloy, friend of Jews and
slayer of anti-Judaism. In Le Salut vient des Juifs (Salvation comes from the Jews), Bloy,
too, highlights several typical clichés of Christian anti-Judaïsm, but it is
from this apparent attribution made of the average anti-Semite that he operates
a shift and asserts that “the Jewish people stop the History of nations as a
dam bars the course of a river, to raise its level”. Following a recent
attempt to censor Le Salut vient des Juifs, Alexis Galperin, the
great-grandson of Léon Bloy wrote: “The book explicitly adopts the method of
St. Thomas, which consists in exhausting every objection, that is, in letting
the opponent spit his venom ad nauseam. So, after the first pages, in which
Drumont, trampling the holy image of Moses, is lambasted as ‘turlupin
sacrilege’, the writer opens the window to the great medieval rush of
anti-Jewish violence, plunging, without hiding from it, into an abyss of
feelings from which he himself was not exempt. This is what he calls ‘the
premises of calculated violence’. In a perfectly planned ‘mise en abyme’(hall
of mirrors effect) the crescendo of hatred stops suddenly, abruptly, so that a
rise in the glory of Israel can eventually be realized, with an incomparable
power”.
Impossible to summarize here all the argumentation of Pierre Lamblé. Let
us look, with him, at two characters explicitly identified as Jews by Dostoevsky:
Isaiah Fomitch in Notes from the House of the Dead and Lyamshin in Demons.
Of course, both characters have somewhat ridiculous, and even rude, personal
aspects. But, observes Lamblé, “far from attracting to him the violence of
those who surround him, [Fomitch], on the contrary, attracts general sympathy
(...) Dostoevsky has taken up the caricatured figure of the Jew, but it is in
order to reverse fully the meaning it had...” As for Lyamshin, Lamblé notes
that in the group of conspirators who instigated the assassination of Chatov “Lyamshin
the Jew is the only one to react humanely to the terror that seizes him in
front of the monstrousness of the murder”. And when Dostoevsky writes that,
under the influence of this terror, “Lyamshin shouted with a voice that was
no longer human but animal”, he suggests that the man expels these “demons”
who took possession of the conspirators (and that the novel's title evokes). “While
all the others, ethnic Russians, are from now on possessed by the devil, by the
ritual murder committed in common, only Lyamshin, the Jew, is able to resist
and expel him (...) as he is protected by his religion and by his God, whom the
Russians had lost. We find, in this privilege granted by Dostoevsky to his
Jewish character, a mark of the utmost respect, and even, on the part of a
Christian, a quite extraordinary respect to the Hebrew religion and the sons of
Israel”.
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| Notes for The Brothers Karamazov |
On the other hand, about the article in the Writer’s Diary
entitled “The Jewish Question” Pierre Lamblé refutes once again, in a very
clear way, the charge of anti-Semitism. As he wrote in the comment he sent me
in 2013, Dostoevsky published work in newspapers only for financial reasons and
“he admitted himself that these articles were only commercial products
without real meaning”.
Besides that, since his conviction for participating in Petrashevsky’s
socialist circle in 1849, the writer was the object of closely scrutiny by
imperial censorship, especially in his articles, and was careful to appear
loyal to the regime which, as we know, was hardly favorable to the Jews.
Finally, as I remarked in “A spot on the beautiful garment”, the article on “The
Jewish Question” is immediately followed by another which shows a real sympathy
for the Jews and places them in the perspective rather of a “brotherhood”.
Finally, in underlining the lack of seriousness of the criticism
developed by David Goldstein, Pierre Lamblé points out that even the author of Dostoïevski
et les Juifs is compelled not to withhold the fact that, in several of his
writings, Dostoevsky systematically takes to heart “the defense of the Jews
in terms that do not contain any ambiguity”. But, notes Lamblé with humor, the
only way for Goldstein to explain this attitude, which completely contradicts his
thesis, is to describe it as the result of a “momentary aberration”!
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| Ivan Kramskoi (1837-1887) Insulted Jewish boy |
With his extensive knowledge of Dostoevsky's work and his penetrating
analysis of the writer’s thought, Lamblé does not hesitate to assert that “there
is probably no other Christian author who has brought respect for the Jewish
tradition to this level”. And he adds: “Let us compare what Dostoevsky,
in his Diary, writes elsewhere about French people (vomiting),
Englishmen, Germans, Poles, Catholics and the Pope, and finally Protestants
(without speaking of Russians themselves!) and we shall be forced to recognize
objectively that, far from mistreating Jews in particular, Dostoevsky shows them
a quite amazing benevolence”. Is this
not heartening?
Fiodor
(1) Pierre LAMBLÉ, La
métaphysique de l’histoire de Dostoïevski. La philosophie de Dostoïevski,
tome 2. Essai de Littérature et Philosophie Comparée, Paris,
L’Harmattan, 2001.
