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90 Chapter Seven Sources of Dostoevsky’s Antisemitism in Notes from the House of the Dead: The Problem of Redemption and the Resemblance of Christians and Jews “N O W, I T S E E M S , we are entering a new life,” Dostoevsky proclaims in Time (Pss, 18:37), but Notes from the House of the Dead disappoints this hope for resurrection. Notes from the House of the Dead (alternately translated as Memoirs from the House of the Dead) began appearing in serial installments in the journal Russian World in September 1860. Dostoevsky halted its publication in that journal after January 1861 so that he could publish it in Time, where it began appearing in April 1861. Notes undermines Time’s faith in immanent resurrection in two primary ways: by questioning the possibility of reconciliation between the Russian people and the elite, which Time insists is a necessary precondition for salvation; and by raising concerns about the efficacy of the Crucifixion as a vehicle of redemption . The dead house, and all of Russia behind it, is a world to which redemption has not yet come, despite Christ’s death on the cross. Dostoevsky subjects the Crucifixion to critical scrutiny in several ways in Notes. He stages spectacles of suffering and death that have the potential to redeem those who witness them but fail to do so. The Christian premise that time has been transformed through Christ’s appearance on earth—the belief that his birth inaugurated a new era—is undermined by the persistence of empty time; the caesura of the Crucifixion was supposed to put an end to the kind of meaningless sequentiality in which the inhabitants of the dead house remain trapped. Christ’s life and death are further robbed of meaning through the disappointment of hopes placed in Christmas and Easter. In addition to interrogating the possibility of rebirth through Christ, Notes undermines Time’s optimism about resurrection through its ambivalent portrait of the Russian people. Time rallies its educated readers around confident assertions that union with the people and resurrection into a new life are just around the corner; Notes portrays serious moral obstacles to such a union. Time impresses on readers how difficult such reconciliation Sources of Dostoevsky’s Antisemitism in Notes from the House of the Dead 91 will be but believes that it will happen nevertheless. “Even our best ‘experts’ on the people’s life have failed to understand how wide and deep the gulf separating us from the people is,” Dostoevsky concedes in Time, “for the simple reason that they have never lived with the people.”1 The common man, Dostoevsky informs his educated readers, “will never think of you as one of his own”; “he will never think of you as his brother, . . . And he will never, never trust you” (Pss, 19:7). A difficult task faces the elite, he warns: “The trust of the people has to be earned now; we have to love them. . . . Do we know how to do this?” (Pss, 19:7). We do, Dostoevsky asserts. Despite the significant admissions about the deep gulf separating the elite and the people in Time, an assertive voice overrides any doubts that have been awakened. “We are optimists, we believe ,” Dostoevsky proclaims (Pss, 19:7). “Now the division is ending,” he states in the “Subscription Announcement for the Journal ‘Time’ for 1861” (Pss, 18:36). Reconciliation with the people will be accomplished through education, love, and mutual respect, Time confidently advises. “In all of our classes there are many more points of unity than difference, and this is the main thing.”2 Notes from the House of the Dead strikes a more hesitant note, however . It is as though the difficulties that are acknowledged but glossed over in Time receive real faces and voices in the characters of Notes. The narrator, a member of the educated elite, personally experiences the negative consequences of the gulf separating the classes. Members of the educated elite, he writes, “are separated from the people by the most immense abyss” (Pss, 4:198). “The prisoners in general regarded former members of the nobility with resentment and ill will,” he writes. “They watched our sufferings, which we tried not to show them, with delight.”3 “There is nothing harder than to gain the confidence of the people,” he warns (MHD, 32). Alexander Petrovich Gorianchikov never achieves the kind of union with the people hoped for in Time, casting the possibility of a new life for...

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