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The Jewish Question in the Genre System of Dostoevskii's Diary of a Writer and the Problem of the Authorial Image

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Raffaella Vassena
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Abstract

The second edition of the Diary of a Writer (1876-1877) marked a crucial point in Fedor Dostoevskii's literary career: in spite of critics' attacks, many “ordinary” readers were overwhelmed by the author's charisma and began writing to Dostoevskii from different parts of Russia, expressing their views on the moral, social, and political issues dealt with in the Diary. Such success was also guaranteed by the original rhetorical and genre system of the Diary of a Writer, which, wisely modulated and addressed, aimed to involve readers and persuade them to share the author's beliefs. Raffaella Vassena explores the case of the article “The Jewish Question” in the issue of March 1877, where Dostoevskii's rhetoric actually failed to bring about what he had intended. By concentrating on new archival materials, Vassena investigates the reasons for this failure and submits a new perspective on the controversial question of Dostoevskii's attitude toward Jews.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 45 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Stuthes. 2006

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References

This article forms part of a larger project dealing with readers’ reactions to the rhetorical strategies Fedor Dostoevskii used in the Diary of a Writer, which was the theme of my dissertation: “II ‘Dnevnik pisatelja’ di F.M. Dostoevskij (1876-1877): Strategic di un genere ed effetto sul pubblico” (PhD diss., Universita degli Studi, Milan, 2003). I would like to thank William Mills Todd III, Fausto Malcovati, Damiano Rebecchini, and the two anonymous readers of Slavic Review for their valuable suggestions. The epigraph is taken from F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridlsati tomakh (hereafter PSS) (Leningrad, 1972-1990), 24:70. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1 Novyi kritik, “Dnevnik pisatelia, N. 1. Mal'chik s ruchkoi. Prichiny oskudnenii. Shkoly i g. Dostoevskii v roli Kify Mokievicha,” Novosti, 7 February 1876; Bukva, “Budushchie Dnevniki pisatelia g. Dostoevskogo i nyneshnie Guépes Al'fonsa Kappa-Starcheskoe ezhemesiachnoe briuzzhanie,” Novoe vremia, 11 Jánuary 1876; Anon., “Dnevnik pisatelia g. Dostoevskogo. Vypusk 1-i,” Syn otechestva, 4 February 1876.

2 For a study on the role of the Diary of the Writer in Russian society of the 1870s, see Volgin, Igor L., Dostoevskii-Zhurnalist: “Dnevnik pisatelia “ t russkaia obshchestvennost’ (Moscow, 1982)Google Scholar.

3 See S. S. “Literaturnye ocherki. Dnevnik pisatelia Dostoevskogo—Kharakteristika etogo dnevnika i avtora ego, kak myslitelia—Argumentatsiia G. Dostoevskogo i ee nedo-statki,” Odesskii vestnik, 29 May 1876; Anon., “Literatura i zhurnalizm,” Molva, 18 April 1876.

4 Kohn, Hans, Propheten ihrer VoUter (Bern, 1948)Google Scholar; David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews (translation of Dostoievskii et les juifs, 1976; Austin 1981); Dubnov, Simon, “Noveishaia evoliutsiia evreiskoi natsional'noi idei,” in Kostlianskii, A. I., ed., Formy natsional'nogq dvizheniia (St. Petersburg, 1910), 399–423 Google Scholar; Shrayer, Maxim, “Dostoevskii, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 273– 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grossman, Leonid, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow, 1925)Google Scholar; Ingold, Felix Philipp, Dostojewskii und dasjudentum (Frankfurt am Main, 1981)Google Scholar; Joseph Frank, “Foreword,” Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews. For a review of Goldstein's study and a more objective analysis of Dostoevskii's anti-Semitism, see also Morson, Gary S., “Dostoevsky's Anti-Semitism and the Critics: A Review Article,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 3 (1983): 302–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 On the writer's construction of an authence cast in some sort of role, see Walter J. Ong, “The Writer's Authence Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975):9-21.

6 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Complete Letters, ed. and trans. Lowe, David and Meyer, Ronald, 5 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1991), 1:121 Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., 1:162-63. Emphasis in the original.

8 On Dostoevskii's aesthetic thought, see Jackson, Robert L., Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, 1966; Physsardt, 1978)Google Scholar.

9 PSS, 25:30-31. Dostoevskii's annoyance with his critics is reported by his contemporaries: see F. M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh soxrremennikov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1990), 2: 462, 471, and Dostoevskaia, Anna G., Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1971), 250 Google Scholar. He also expresses his displeasure in some of his letters: see the letters to Varvara D. Obolenskaia (20 Jánuary 1872), Elena F. Junge (11 April 1880), Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev (16 August 1880), Pelageia E. Guseva (15 October 1880), in Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 4:15, 5:189, 5:267, and 5:278. See also the notebooks of 1876: “I have always been supported, not by critics, but by the public.” PSS, 24:301.

10 See Dostoevskii's letter to Vsevolod Solov'ev of 11 Jánuary 1876. Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 4:170. The novelty value of the Diary of a Writer had even been stressed in the announcement published in Russian newspapers in December 1875: “In the coming year, F. M. Dostoevsky's publication, A Writer's Diary, will appear monthly in separate issues. Each issue will be composed of sixteen to twenty-four pages of small print in the format of our weekly newspapers. But this will be not a newspaper; all twelve issues (from Jánuary, February, March, etc.) will form a whole, a book written by a single pen. It will be a diary in the literal sense of the word, an account of impressions actually experienced each month, an account of what was seen, heard and read. Of course, some stories and tales may be included, but preeminently it will be about actual events.” Dostoevsky, Fyodor, A Writers Diary, trans, and annotated Lantz, Kenneth, 2 vols. (Evanston, 1993), 295 Google Scholar.

11 Gary S. Morson, “Dostoevsky's Great Experiment,” in Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 10 See also Morson, Gary S., The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Evanston, 1988)Google Scholar.

12 I am grateful to William Mills Todd III for this insight, among many others.

13 Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton, 2002), 237–38Google Scholar; Zakharova, T. V., “Dnevnik pisatelia kak original'noe zhanrovoe iavlenie i ideinokhudozhestvennaia tselostnost',” Tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo: Iskusstvo sinteza (Ekaterinburg, 1991), 256–57Google Scholar.

14 For insinuations regarding Dostoevskii's split personality, see Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 16 December 1872, 6 and 20 Jánuary 1873; Golos, 14 Jánuary 1873; Birzhevye vedomosti, 6 February 1875, 9 Jánuary 1876.

15 In this regard, see the useful Deβnition of “implicit author” given in Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1983), 70–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 295.

17 Ibid., 749.

18 For the original use of obosoblenie, see ibid., 394. Dostoevski's “cult of earth” finds its complete expression in the Utopia of “The Land and the Children” in the July- August 1876 issue of the Diary of a Writer. Ibid., 589-94. Dostoevskii also uses the word obosoblenie in the Brothers Karamazov. In “Ot avtora,” he points to the “strangeness” of his hero Aleksei Fedorovich Karamazov, which could be sooner “a cause of harm” to him than “any guarantee of attention, particularly at a time when all are striving to unite the details of existence and to discover at least some kind of general meaning in the universal dissociation.“ PSS, 14:5.

19 For a canonical study of the feuilleton genre, see Zhurbina, Evgeniia I., Teoriia i praktika khudozhestvenno-publitsisticheskikh zhanrov (Moscow, 1969), 202–398 Google Scholar; Boris Tomashevskii, “U istokov fel'etona (Fel'eton v ‘Journal des Debats’),“Fel'eton. Sbornik stateipod red. Iu. Tynianova, V. Kazanskogp (Leningrad, 1927), 59-71.

20 For the feuilleton as the most important genre, see PSS, 21:67-68. Morson also traces the highly particular titles of the Diary of a Writer chapters—which help the reader establish a link between the different parts of each issue and understand the author's message—back to the feuilleton genre. Morson, “Dostoevsky's Great Experiment,” 51.

21 Consider “A Conciliatory Dream beyond the Scope of Science” (Jánuary 1877, chapter 2): in the Russian text, the root ver- appears about twenty-five times as verit', vera, verno; obshch- appears thirteen times as obshchii, obshchenie, vseobshchii, obshcliestvennyi, obshchechelovek, obshchechelovechnost', priobshchit', soobshchit'; the root mir- appears ten times as mir, mirovoi, vsemirnyi. PSS, 25:7-20. For the influence of the propoved’ genre on Dostoevskii's work, see Likhachev, D. S., “V poiskakh vyrazheniia real'nogo,” Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, 16 vols. (Leningrad, 1974- ), 1:5–13 Google Scholar; O. V Evdokimova, “Problema dostovernosti v russkoi literature poslednei treti XIX v. i Dnevnikpisatelia F. M. Dostoevskogo,“ Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, 8:177-91.

22 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 396. Dostoevskii's idea of the Jews’ negative influence on the Russian economy was also influenced by Grinevich, M. I., O tletvorom vliianii evreev na ekonomicheskii byt Russii i o sisteme evreiskoi ekspluatatsii (St. Petersburg, 1876- )Google Scholar. Dostoevskii had a copy of Grinevich's work in his library. Grossman, Leonid, Biblioteka Dostoevskogo (Odessa, 1919), 159 Google Scholar. For an interesting analysis of Dostoevskii's view of Jews as an “aesthetic failure” equivalent to materialism, see McReynolds, Susan, “Aesthetics and Politics: The Case of Dostoevsky,” Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 4, no. 1 (2002): 91–104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Institut russkoi literatury i iskusstva (IRLI), St. Petersburg, f. 100, no. 29951 (Letters to F. M. Dostoevskii).

24 Dostoevskii's note is: “May issue … Letter about Yids.” PSS, 24:206. In this regard, it is revealing that the text of this letter, as well as most of the other letters about the Jewish question, was never published in the former Soviet Union due to the controversial nature of the topic (still an open wound in present-day Russia) and the harm that publication of such material would cause to the image of Dostoevskii. The authoritative edition of Dostoevskii's collected works provides an example of the attempt to avoid the problem; here the title of the final part of the March 1877 issue, “But Long Live Brotherhood!” is described as the “synthesis of Dostoevskii's view of Jewish question” (PSS, 20:284): such a statement is inaccurate, since it is far from summarizing Dostoevskii's position in any way. 25. “The place is cleansed, the Yid arrives, sets up a plant, makes a fortune, tariff is the savior of the fatherland. But after all, he's got it in his pocket. No: gave bread to the workers. And that's it… . Limiting the Jews’ rights is, in most instances, possible and righteous. Why, why do I ask myself, to continue to sustain this status in statu? Eighty million Russians live at the mercy of three million Yids. One must simply not care.” PSS, 24: 211-12.

26 “Now the Yids are becoming landowners, and people shout and write everywhere that they are destroying the soil of Russia. A Yid, they say, having spent capital to buy an estate, at once exhausts all the fertility of the land he has purchased in order to restore his capital with interest. But just try and say anything against this and the hue and cry will be at once raised: you are violating the principles of economic freedom and equal rights for all citizens. But what sort of equal rights are there here if it is a case of a clear and Talmudic status in statu above all and in the first place?” Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 520.

27 Lur'e's letters to Dostoevskii (1876-1877) have been published in Volgin, Igor, “Pis'ma chitatelei kDostoevskomu,” Voprosy Uteratury, no. 9 (1971): 181–82Google Scholar, and in Ipatova, Svetlana, ed., “Neizdannye pis'ma k Dostoevskomu,” Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, 12: 205–26Google Scholar. Only three of Dostoevskii's letters to Lur'e have been preserved: 16 April 1876, 11 March 1877, and 17 April 1877. Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 4:280, 360-61, 364-67.

28 Iakubovich, Irina D., Budanova, Nina F., and Fridlender, Georgii, eds., Letopis'zhizni i tvorchestva E M. Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg, 1999), 3:106 Google Scholar.

29 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29951.

30 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 538, 549.

31 Ibid., 608. On 14 September 1876, Novoe vremia carried a portion of a dispatch from the Vienna correspondent of the London Times. This article claimed that many of the Russian volunteers in Serbia were Slavophile or social democratic extremists, who, once organized into military units, could present a real danger to Russian stability. See PSS, 23:396.

32 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 672, 753.

33 Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia, 118; Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and tliejexus; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 304-19; Murav, Harriet, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and tlie Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford, 2003), 131–55Google Scholar.

34 Partly published in PSS, 29.2:281. Kovner quoted the December 1876 issue. PSS, 24:51-52.

35 Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 4:351-54. In the last part of this letter, Dostoevskii probably referred to Sofiia Lur'e.

36 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29924. The letter was signed “T.VB.” and on the envelope Dostoevskii wrote: “Jewish woman—anonymous. Not to reply. Jewish woman.” Partly published in PSS, 30.2:109. In the issue of October 1876 Dostoevskii had solicited the acquittal of Ekaterina Kornilova, who had been accused of having thrown her stepdaughter through the window.

37 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 894.

38 Ibid., 904-5, 904.

39 Ibid., 901.

40 Ibid., 908.

41 Ibid., 909.

42 A second point, which Dostoevskii did not mention in the Diary of a Writer, also reinforced anti-Semitic feelings: that Jews shed Christian blood during sacred rites. Yet, Dostoevskii read about some trials against Jews accused of infanticide in the newspapers and mentioned this theme, both in Brothers Karamazov (Book 11), and in a letter to Ol'ga A. Novikova of 28 March 1879. In the letter he referred to a trial that had taken place in Kutais from 5 to 13 March of that year, against some Jews who were accused of kidnapping and murdering a peasant girl named Sara Iosifovna Modebadze: “How disgusting that the Kutais Yids were acquitted. They are beyond doubt guilty. I'm persuaded by the trial and by everything, including the vile defense by Aleksandrov, who is a remarkable scoundrel here, a ‘hired conscience of a lawyer.'” Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 5:77.

43 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 912. Goldstein suggests that Dostoevskii's interpretation is based on the following verses from the Old Testament: Lev. 20:26; Deut. 7:1-3, 6-8; 20:10-15; and 30:4-5. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and thejews, 124.

44 Dostoevsky, A Writers Diary, 912.

45 Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and thejews, 96-97.

46 Brafman extrapolated this expression from Schiller's essay the Sendung Moses, which was translated into Yiddish in 1866 and described the life of thejews during the four-hundred-year exile in Egypt. See Schiller, F., Samtliche Werke, 5 vols. (Munich, 2004), 4:785 Google Scholar.

47 Grossman, Biblioteka Dostoevskogo, 158.

48 Nechaeva, V. S., ed., Opisanie ruhopisei F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1957), 524 Google Scholar.

49 Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 916.

50 For Dostoevski's rhetorical technique of conciliation through concession and paradox, see also Belknap, Robert L., “Dostoevsky's Nationalist Ideology and Rhetoric,” Review of National Literatures, no. 3 (1972): 89–100 Google Scholar.

51 S. E. Lur'e, letter of 13 February 1877. Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, 12:209 - 11. Dostoevskii replied to this letter on 11 March, promising to use the story of Dr. Hindenburg in the following issue of the Diary of a Writer. For a discussion of the passage about Hindenburg, see Safran, Gabriella, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in tlie Russian Empire (Stanford, 2000), 135–46Google Scholar. It is worth noting that, after the March 1877 issue was published, Dostoevskii became annoyed widi Lur'e, who kept writing him even after her father had forbidden her to leave for Serbia. Dostoevskii's disappointment concerning Lur'e's failed promise, as well as some remarks in her last letters about Russian Orthodoxy, led him to break off correspondence with her at the end of 1877. See Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, 12:219, 223. It cannot be ruled out that this decision was in part influenced by Dostoevskii's realization that in June 1876 he had presented ajew as a model for all Russian women: ajewish woman who, as he was by then convinced, could never have been really Russian.

52 Dostoevsky, A Writers Diary, 923.

53 In Dostoevskii's genre picture, Gabriella Safran sees an intended resemblance with the Nativity Scene. Safran, Reuniting the Jew, 138.

54 Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia, 176; Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, 138-41.

55 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29924. On the envelope, Dostoevskii wrote: “Jewish woman, take into account.” Partly published in PSS, 30.2:113.

56 In the March 1877 issue, referring to the readers who had accused him of anti- Semitism, Dostoevskii wrote: “Might they not be accusing me of hatred because I sometimes call the Jew a ‘Yid'? But, in the first place, I never thought this was so offensive, and in the second place, as far as I can recall, I always used the word ‘Yid’ to denote a wellknown idea: ‘Yid, Yid-ism, the Kingdom of the Yids,’ etc.” Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 902.

57 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29924.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Let us consider just a few examples: in the March 1876 issue there are some remarks about the French being the first supporters of European socialism; in the July- August 1876 issue, he dedicates a whole paragraph to the pugnacity of the Germans; in the same issue, he claims that the Russian woman is superior to the English woman.

61 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29951. On the envelope Dostoevskii wrote: “About Yids.“

62 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29754. Partly published in PSS, 30.2:115-16. On the envelope Dostoevsky wrote: “Permission to be treated,” since Kuznetsova, having read in the April 1877 issue that Dostoevskii was going to Ems to be treated for an illness, had wished him a full recovery.

63 IRLI, f. 100, no. 29755. On the envelope Dostoevskii wrote: “The Jewish question for a Jew.“

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 319.

67 PSS, 30:263. On the envelope Dostoevskii wrote: “NB. Answer. X.“

68 See Dostoevskii's letter to Nikolai E. Grishchenko on 28 February 1878 and to Viktor F. Putsykovich on 29 August 1878. Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, 5:12-13, 57-58. Other remarks against Jews can be found in Dostoevskii's letters to his wife, written in Ems between July and August 1879. Ibid., 5:114-15,119-20,124.

69 Ibid., 5:246.

70 PSS, 26:147. For an analysis of Dostoevskii's “symbolic capital” at the time of his speech on Pushkin, see Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 497-547; Levitt, Marcus, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), 122–46Google Scholar; Pollard, Alan P., “Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech and the Politics of the Right under the Dictatorship of the Heart,” Canadian-American Slavic Stuthes 17, no. 2 (1983): 222–56Google Scholar.