Dostoevsky’s Post-Traumatic Antisemitism (article)

Whether or not we relate to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writings, few deny his literary genius. Those who do not enjoy wallowing with him in the viscid darkness of his characters’ tormented souls nonetheless appreciate his virtuosity in delving deeply into subconsciousness. While Dostoevsky’s opinions might be infuriating, he was certainly not shallow—except in his trite Jew-bashing, unfit for the brilliant thinker that he was. The source of Dostoevsky’s late-life antisemitism did not stem from his innate superficiality or crudity but from a profound existential quandary.

The epitome of Russian ultra-conservative, religious nationalist thinking, Dostoevsky began his public life as a novice writer among the “progressives” in a small literary circle of Charles Fourier and other European utopian socialists, whose writings were banned in Nicholas I’s Russia. Another offense was their declared distaste for political and religious despotism, on which they blamed the woeful state of their country’s domestic affairs. Their cure-all was socialist equality and justice. On April 23, 1849, participants in the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion.

Dostoevsky and his friends were tried and found guilty of conspiracy and “abusive remarks” about Russia’s authorities. On

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December 22, 1849, the convicts were lined up in Semenovskii Square to hear their verdict: immediate execution by firing squad. Dostoevsky thought that he had but minutes to live. Suddenly, an aide-de-camp galloped to the execution square. As per the prearranged plan, the last-minute imperial decree commuted death sentences to hard labor in Siberia. The near-death experience at the mock execution was shattering. One of the condemned lost his mind. Others had to learn to live with the trauma, “the horrible, immeasurably terrifying minutes of waiting for death” (Dostoevsky, 1873/1994, p. 157).

Dostoevsky’s way was to construct a comprehensive narrative of his last-minute survival. To describe it as a stroke of amazing luck would be an intellectual and spiritual reduction. The dramatic incident required an elucidation of why it happened—quite in line with later-day psychologists’ teaching about the nature of trauma: Constructing a profound interpretation of a dreadful ordeal serves as a uniquely beneficent coping mechanism, for the meaning people attach to their experiences may effectively alleviate suffering. Dostoevsky’s interpretation of his encounter with death had to ascribe meaningful import to his anguish to render it transformative and constructive.

For Dostoevsky, a vital shift of a “mental paradigm” occurred immediately after the mock execution (Miller, 2007, pp. 5-7). Having not yet repudiated his former convictions, he seemed to have already renounced his identity as a subversive, referring to Nicholas I as “His Imperial Majesty.” Just hours after the near-death ordeal, Dostoevsky was already deeply engaged in self-evaluation and penitence: “I look back at the past … how much time has been wasted in vain … lost in delusions, in errors … in ignorance of how to live … my heart bleeds … Now, I am being reborn into a new form … I shall be reborn…” (Dostoevsky, n.d.). His journey of innermost rebirth began when, hands and feet in irons, Dostoevsky set out across snow-covered Russia to serve four years in a Siberian hard labor prison.

The transcendent blueprint to guide him along the course of righteousness Dostoevsky found in the Gospels, the only book prisoners were permitted to keep. The New Testament was the source of his famous conversion from a nonconformist to a traditionalist religious thinker, whose numerous followers have since deemed him to be Russia’s prophet.

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Years later, Dostoevsky remembered his transformation as a long journey from the scaffold, where he and his friends had not felt the “slightest repentance” and believed that they were martyrs dying for a holy cause. Suddenly, the royal decision to refuse their sacrifice rendered it less lofty: that Nicholas I only wished to disgrace the rebels and teach them a lesson Dostoevsky clearly did not know at the time. For Fyodor, the tsar’s gift of life was a miracle—the conviction he would not disown even after he knew that he had not been in real danger. The near-death nightmare prompted Dostoevsky to retreat to his essence and reconnect to the deeply integrated Russian Orthodox piety of his childhood.

He “set off for prison in Siberia with the expressed intention of discovering … the Russian people there,” turning toward the narod (simple folk) as “the key to the spiritual salvation” in Russia (Miller, 2007, p. 7). Dostoevsky (1873/1994) subsequently attributed his disengagement from a universalist, “unRussian” outlook to “brotherly unity” with his fellow inmates, who brought him back to his “roots, to knowledge of the Russian soul” and spirit (p. 157). In every criminal, he saw the Gospels’ thief, crucified with Jesus, and admitted to paradise for his loyalty. From there, it was only a step toward Dostoevsky’s belief that the long-suffering Russians were a sacred “God-bearing people,” the guardians of purity and truth (Miller, 2007, p. 6; Ivanits, 2008, p. 3).

Dostoevsky’s strengthened religiosity acquired the distinctly Russian Orthodox form, with an emphasis on redemption through purifying pain. He wrote to his brother from the prison: “I … judged myself … mercilessly and harshly and at times even blessed my fate for sending me this seclusion, without which … this trial of myself … would not have taken place” (Grossman, 1963). Just as Dostoevsky felt that his own suffering restored the goodness of his tainted soul, patient acceptance of hardships and coercion by the peasants yielded national purity, he insisted: Through centuries of anguish, the Russian soul has been cleaned to holiness.

In prison, the “holy folk” mistreated and humiliated Dostoevsky, as though seeking quittance for centuries of abuse by the gentry. Privately, he complained about peasants’ ignorance and depravity; yet, as an aspiring prophet, he urged: “bow down before the people’s truth” (Ivanits, 2008, p. 6), for “our people are infinitely superior, more noble, more honest, more ingenuous, more gifted, and are imbued with a … loftiest Christian idea, which Europe, with its moribund Catholicism and stupidly self-contradictory Lu-

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theranism, doesn’t even understand … all Russian moral concepts and goals are loftier than those of the European world” (Frank & Goldstein, 1987, pp. 265, 276).

Prison behind him, Dostoevsky completed his Siberian sojourn as a private in an infantry regiment, and ten years after his “miraculous deliverance,” returned to public life to announce his hard-earned truth. He grieved that, like so many in his generation, he had been “contaminated” by socialism and “seduced” into disbelief. The “delirium” led him to the scaffold, but having regained life, he would guide his people out of wretchedness and sin toward redemption. Like his religious revival, Dostoevsky’s nationalistic messianism stemmed from the mock execution. The horrifying experience also defined his life’s mission.

Individual pursuits were inseparable from and must be harmonious with one’s homeland’s “historical purpose,” Dostoevsky thought, in line with a core tenet of European Romanticism. Except, arbitrarily, he reversed the Romantic assumption by taking for granted that his nation’s destiny reflected his own spiritual path, casting it “into cosmic terms” (Frank, 2009, pp. 51, 56). His survival and repentance generated a template for Russia’s near-annihilation, remorse, reparation, and ascent to righteousness. Dostoevsky regained life to reveal his people’s messianic purpose; they would be revived to fulfill it. His vision would save Russia; the “Russian Truth” would save the world.

Dostoevsky famously declared in his Notebooks that the “West has lost Christ and that is why it is dying” (de Lubac, 1995, p. 269). The degenerate Western civilization succumbed to nihilism and selfish individualism and was on the verge of an apocalypse. Russia, too, was in grave peril because its culture had been infected with secularism and socialism. The ensuant depravity threatened Russia’s annihilation along with the rest of the old world.

However, unlike the West, Dostoevsky was assured that Russia could be cured. It would withstand near-death—to be granted a compassionate second chance for spiritual recovery. Russia must suffer to purify itself and to earn renewal to be the world’s redeemer. Dostoevsky validated his beliefs with a late 15^th to early 16^th century state-sanctioned concept of “Moscow—the Third Rome.” The official narrative described Russia as the spiritual heir of the fallen Rome and Constantinople and the heart of the Chris-

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tian world on its way to deliverance. The ideology substantiated Dostoevsky’s messianic vision of Russia’s rebirth for the sake of universal salvation.

“The quintessence of Russia’s mission,” Dostoevsky wrote in 1869, “is to reveal … the Russian Christ, whom the world does not know and whose principle is embodied in our native Orthodoxy.” Herein “lies the very essence of our future civilizing mission and of the resurrection, perhaps, of all of Europe…” (Frank & Goldstein, 1987, p. 303). By way of European rejuvenation, a grand “renewal through Russian thought is being prepared for the world as a whole” (Frank & Goldstein, 1987, p. 276). The “genius of the Russian people” rendered them uniquely apt for the task of saving the world by “the light from the East that will spread to the blinded mankind” (Frank & Goldstein, 1987, p. 344).

Citing the Bible with reference to Russia was vital for Dostoevsky. In the Old Testament, time and again he would come across the designation of Israel as the “chosen people” in a Covenant with God. Yet, the Jews had lost the Covenant, and Christians inherited it; therefore, he believed the Russian Orthodox were the reincarnation of God’s “chosen people.” In the vision of the prophet Isaiah, Israel could reach wonderful ethical and spiritual heights to be “light upon the nations”—the part Dostoevsky allotted for Russia alone. It must have indeed been infuriating for him to read in his beloved Book, which he accepted verbatim, about the Israelites’ eternal distinction.

Perhaps even more exasperating was the Jewish obstinacy. A despised minority expelled from their Promised Land and dispersed far and wide, they had lost their national sovereignty and common language; yet, during centuries of the darkest and most hopeless exile, amid humiliation and abuse, the Jews, as one nation, held on to their unique, everlasting relationship with God. They refused to forsake the Covenant because it was the sole source of their vitality as a people. They kept believing—for two millennia—that God would surely redeem His people.

Earlier in life, Dostoevsky defended the Jews. His antisemitism developed simultaneously with his ideology. Like other Jew-haters with messianic ambitions, he had to undermine “the Yids” and “the Yidism” to make space for his own “chosen people.” Ivan Shatov, a key character in The Possessed, thus outlined Dostoevsky’s beliefs: “If a great people does not believe that the truth is to

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be found exclusively in itself, if it does not believe that it alone is able to revivify and save all the rest, that it is designed for that very purpose, then it is no longer a great people, but only an ethnographic unit…” There was only one truth, he concluded, “and therefore only one people can have the truth of God … That one God-bearing people is the people of Russia” (McGann, n.d., p. 43).

Dostoevsky’s antisemitism was different from his general chauvinism toward foreigners. While lashing out at the Jews for their alleged sins—big and small, from greediness to conspiracy to rule over the world—he did not reject them with contempt, the way he cast off the Poles, the Turks, and many others; he was obviously preoccupied with “the Jewish question” and “vigorously denied” his antisemitism. Dostoevsky might have even felt guilty for vilifying the Jews; yet, he rationalized his hate via glaring projections. “I sometimes imagine,” Dostoevsky wrote, for example, “what if there were not three million Jews, but three million Russians in Russia, and there were eighty million Jews? Well, how would they treat Russians … Wouldn’t they turn them into slaves?” He went on to write, “Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination, as they used to do with alien peoples in ancient times” (Morson, 1983, p. 80). His Jewish rivals forever remained the Old Testament Israelites in his eyes.

A powerful mind, Dostoevsky was oblivious to the injecting of his private meanings into Russia’s national narrative. It never occurred to him that his prophecies might be arbitrary or serve an ulterior purpose. In fact, his passionate diatribes about Russia’s ascent from ignominy to a would-be messianic triumph reiterated and indirectly affirmed the immense merit of Dostoevsky’s personal journey from apostasy to spiritual guidance.

Except that there were the Jews, who insisted on their own version of the messianic process and tacitly undermined his eloquent narrative. Dostoevsky knew that the Jewish people could not survive outside their everlasting relationship with God—and he hated them for their refusal to perish. Frustrated by their rejection of national oblivion as part of his forecasted “pan-humanness,” Dostoevsky designated “the tribe” as “the enemies of humanity.” Clinging to the source of their vitality, the Jews stealthily challenged Dostoevsky’s vision and relegated his country’s status from the world’s savior to an “ethnographic unit.” Simultaneously, they devalued his own status as Russia’s prophet and undercut the purpose of his spiritual journey. Increasingly resentful and unreasonable as

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time went on, Dostoevsky (1880/1984) relished every antisemitic libel and welcomed every reason to revile the Jews, “the bearers of antichrist” (p. 191), unconsciously recognizing them as the existential adversary.

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