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Disraeli and the Merchant God: Victims and Villains, Jews and Europe
- Northwestern University Press
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46 Chapter Three Disraeli and the Merchant God: Victims and Villains, Jews and Europe T H E B I O G R A P H I C A L B A S E S of Dostoevsky’s concern with the problems of suffering children, bad fathers, and ultimately the Crucifixion reward investigation. The West became equivalent to the “Jewish idea,” the epitome of everything Dostoevsky could not tolerate within his conception of Christianity, by a long process. Sensitivity to the possible coincidence of victim and perpetrator in one figure or action—one element of Dostoevsky’s discomfort with the Crucifixion—may have a source in his European experience. Over the second half of the 1860s, the West becomes for Dostoevsky a place where a child dies because a father fails. Dostoevsky is the father responsible for his child’s death and a victim of the West himself. Life in the West confronted Dostoevsky with his own role as a bad father who contributed to the death of his child, and it convinced him that he himself was a victim of “Jewish” power—the triumph of money—that shackled him to the slave labor of a literary proletarian, ruined his health, and imprisoned him in Europe. This space where children die because of their fathers and where the dead child and the father who contributed to her death are linked as fellow victims of the West then becomes “Judaized” for Dostoevsky over the course of the 1870s. The possible coincidence of victim and victimizer in one person was one of Dostoevsky’s most significant personal psychological experiences, with immense consequence for the evolution of his heretical understanding of the Crucifixion. He bequeaths this experience to figures such as Raskolnikov. Understanding Dostoevsky’s own struggles with the potential coincidence of victim and victimizer can illuminate the challenges facing such a character on the path to redemption.1 Inspiring his characters’ complexity is Dostoevsky’s own biographical experience of and discomfort with the potential coincidence of self- and other-sacrifice, one basis of his anxieties about the Crucifixion. The characters who express Dostoevsky’s anxieties about Christianity share significant qualities with each other and with their author. Characters like Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov have trouble distinguishing Disraeli and the Merchant God 47 victims from perpetrators. Raskolnikov, for example, thinks of himself as the victim of the pawnbroker, whom he mentally accuses several times of taking his life away. They struggle with the phenomenon of how easily identifying with or defending victims can turn into being oneself an agent of their suffering . Ivan Karamazov, for example, moves easily between championing children and encouraging their corruption, as in his relationship with Liza Khokhlakova. Experiences in Europe played a catalytic role in the emergence of Dostoevsky’s anxieties about the potential coincidence of victims and victimizers . He was first compelled to endure an extended sojourn in Europe as a kind of economic exile from Russia. During the second half of the 1860s, he endured what he experienced as a kind of forced exile in Western Europe necessitated by debts that made it impossible for him to remain in Russia.2 The West becomes associated for him with the death of children; with his inadequacy as a father—his infant daughter Sonia dies, he believes, because his debts force them to live in Europe; and with his own victimization due to poor health and poverty. His first extended European exile thus establishes the West as a place that confronts Dostoevsky with the suffering of children, his own contributions as an inadequate father to that suffering, and the fact that the problematic father figure who contributes to the suffering of children is himself a victim as well—the distinctions between victim and perpetrator become blurred. Over the course of the 1870s, Dostoevsky visited Europe as a kind of medical pilgrim seeking a cure for his emphysema at various German spas. During this period, the West becomes explicitly Judaized in his perception . During the last years of his life, as Europe becomes increasingly Jewish for Dostoevsky, it also becomes increasingly associated with the abuse of children and Dostoevsky’s own sufferings. Problems of child abuse, Jews, and Dostoevsky’s intense anxieties about money and his own health become more and more entangled. By the end of his life, Europe has become a place of financial or medical exile where unscrupulous Jews, “Judaized” Germans, and the spectacle of suffering children interfere with his ability to work, and where Russia...