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58 Chapter Four A Synagogue Mistaken for a Church: Dostoevsky’s Demon and the Jews “Give me your blessing, father,” she begged him. “Take good care of everything! You will have to give me an account of it all some day,” he said, his last words proving that Christianity is the religion for misers, after all. —Balzac The true gageure, the wager which all works of art must be . . . —Baudelaire T H E W E S T I S A P L A C E where Dostoevsky experiences the contrast between two kinds of spiritual economies, an experience that reflects his anxieties about Christianity and contributes to his eventual articulation of the “Russian” and “Jewish” ideas. Throughout his life, Dostoevsky was intensely aware of the difference between a type of calculating approach to wealth accumulation and the desire for a sudden windfall, for transformation through risk taking. His own words and behavior, and the observations of those who knew him, testify that Dostoevsky had a personal economy of risk, wager, and largesse; for much of his life, he suffered from a gambling addiction.1 The emergence of Dostoevsky’s antisemitism is linked to the moment when he overcame his gambling addiction. Dostoevsky’s faith in money/ gambling as a vehicle of redemption—his need for salvation through risk taking—did not disappear. When he gave up gambling, Dostoevsky began to invent the Jews as the embodiment of the faith in money’s transformative power that had been at the root of his addiction; and the need for risk taking that no longer expressed itself through gambling began to be acted out through faith in the Russian people. Dostoevsky identifies the Russian people—maligned and discounted by Europe—as the greatest wager; championing their mission in the Balkans enables him to take part in a kind of holy folly and experience the thrill of betting against the odds. For much of his life, Dostoevsky attests, he was plagued by a “demon”: A Synagogue Mistaken for a Church 59 the desire for redemption through money, specifically a gambling windfall that would enable him to redeem the many debts, financial and personal, that tormented him.2 Dostoevsky spent much of his life feeling trapped in cycles of debt and redemption. In addition to his patient wife Anna Grigorevna and their children, Dostoevsky bore responsibility for numerous other dependents , some of whom accused him of failing them. When his beloved brother Mikhail died in 1864, Dostoevsky assumed his considerable financial obligations, including responsibility for Mikhail’s widow and children. This turned into a terrible moral burden. Mikhail’s widow, Emilia Fyodorovna, blamed Dostoevsky for her husband’s death and her family’s penury. “O, golubchik, it is hard, it was too much to take on myself this haughty thought, three years ago, that I could pay all these debts . . . ! Where am I supposed to get the health and energy for this!” he exclaims to Maikov in a letter from August 1867 (Pss, 28.2:213). His first wife, Maria Dmitrevna, entrusted Dostoevsky with the care of her son, Pasha, on her deathbed, and Dostoevsky took his role as stepfather seriously. He frequently tormented himself with the belief that he failed to take proper care of all these dependents. “What will become of my Petersburgers [Chto zhe budet s moimi peterburgskimi], Emilia Fedorovna and Pasha and the others?” he asks. He needs “money, money, but there isn’t any!” (Pss, 28.2:207). He often experienced himself as a failed husband and father, and feelings of guilt and inadequacy drove him to roulette as a way of saving himself. My wife is expecting, he writes Maikov in late 1867 of Anna’s pregnancy with Sonia; we need to spend the winter somewhere with a good climate and where we speak the same language as the doctors, we need to move, “but there’s no money” (Pss, 28.2:207). I can’t stop worrying about “what will happen to those who depend on my help,” he confides. “All these thoughts are killing me” (Pss, 28.2:212). “How necessary accursed money is for me!” he exclaims (Pss, 28.2:292). Desire to redeem himself from these oppressive obligations drove him to roulette. I was tormented by the seductive thought of sacrificing the little money I had at play so as to turn it into more, and so help everyone all at once, he confesses. “A seductive thought tortured me: sacrifice 10 Louis d’or and...

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