Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism

Notes

199 Notes INTRODUCTION Zen'kovskii, “F. M. Dostoevsky, V. Soloviev, N. A. Berdiaev,” quoted in M. A. Maslin, Russkaia ideia i ee tvortsy (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), 323. 1. Many excellent studies of Dostoevsky’s attitudes about Jews have been made, and I draw on them throughout this work. The works on which I am building include Gary Adelman, Retelling Dostoevsky: Literary Responses and Other Observations (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001); Felix Dreizin, The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Ethnocriticism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990); Joseph Frank’s foundational, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, including Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and especially the final volume, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871–1881 (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Ronald Hingley, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978); David I. Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Felix Ingold, Dostoevsky und das Judentum (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1981); Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Gary Rosenshield, “Vladimir Solovyov: Confronting Dostoevsky on the Jewish and Christian Question,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 (2000): 69–98; Gary Saul Morson, “Apologetics and Negative Apologetics ; Or, Dialogues of a Jewish Slavist,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jeffrey Rubin Dorsky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Harriet Murav, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Gary Rosenshield, “Dostoevsky’s ‘The Funeral of a Universal Man’ and ‘An Isolated Case’ and Chekhov’s ‘Rothschild’s Fiddle’: The Jewish Question,” Russian Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 487–504; Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire 200 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); James Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Maxim Shrayer, “Dostoevskii, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 273–91. 2. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 202, 217, 552 (hereafter cited in text as BK with page number). 3. The scholarship discussing Dostoevsky’s relationship to Christian faith is vast, and I cite only a few of the works on which I have drawn here. In addition to Frank’s indispensable biography, I have relied on the following works: Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson, eds., Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience (London: Anthem Press, 2005); Malcolm V. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); V. N. Zakharov, ed., Evangel'skii tekst v russkoi literature XVIII–XX vekov: tsitata, reministsentsiaa, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr; sbornik nauchykh trudov (Petrozavodsk: Petrozavodskogo Universiteta, 2001). 4. Steven Cassedy, “The Progressive Yiddish Press in America Looks at Dostoevsky at the Turn of the Century,” Dostoevsky Studies: The Journal of the International Dostoevsky Society, n.s., vol. 9 (2005): 53–65, quotation at 65. 5. Pattison and Thompson, Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, 7. 6. Gary Rosenshield, “Mystery and Commandment in The Brothers Karamazov : Leo Baeck and Fedor Dostoevsky,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 483–508, quotation at 484. Rosenshield provides extensive discussion of the scholarship devoted to the problem of Dostoevsky ’s relationship to Orthodoxy (486–87). Appreciating the radical differences that distinguish Dostoevsky’s beliefs from Orthodox faith can be extremely difficult, Rosenshield explains, because Dostoevsky had such a profound impact on the subsequent development of Orthodoxy. “Russian Orthodox theologians, thinkers, and critics,” Rosenshield writes, “are not in accord about Dostoevsky, yet Zenkovsky argues that however much Dostoevsky ‘constituted a break with the classical formulations of the Church Fathers,’ his writings were the greatest influence on the Russian Orthodox religious renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (488; for original Zenkovsky quotation, see V. V. Zenkovsky, “Dostoevsky’s Religious and Philosophical Views,” in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed...