The Ridiculous Jew

The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

Gary Rosenshield

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804769853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Russian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is a study devoted to exploring the use of a Russian version of the Jewish stereotype (the ridiculous Jew) in the works of three of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Rosenshield does not attempt to expose the stereotype—which was self-consciously and unashamedly employed. Rather, he examines how stereotypes are used to further the very different artistic, cultural, and ideological agendas of each writer. What distinguishes this book from others is that it explores the problems that arise when an ethnic stereotype is so fully incorporated into a work of art that it takes on a life of its own, often undermining the intentions of its author as well as many of the defining elements of the stereotype itself. With each these writers, the Jewish stereotype precipitates a literary transformation, taking their work into an uncomfortable space for the author and a challenging one for readers.

PART ONE

Gogol

CHAPTER 1

Taras Bulba

Gogol’s Ridiculous Jew, Form and Function

One of the most notable ironies concerning the image of Jews in European literature is that the most influential portraits of Jews were anomalies for their creators. Marlowe and Shakespeare each wrote only one play where Jews figure prominently, and aside from The Merchant of Venice, which includes the most famous Jewish character in Western literature, Jewish references in Shakespeare are rare.¹ This is no less true of Dickens. Oliver Twist would probably have been Dickens’s sole work in which a Jew figured prominently had he not thought to compensate for the medieval Fagan by creating the positive Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). In conformity with the general European pattern, Nikolay Gogol, who penned in Taras Bulba the most influential portrait of Jews in nineteenth-century Russian literature, also wrote relatively little about Jews.

Since Jews had, by the 1830s, lived in Western Ukraine for centuries, it is not surprising that writers there, such as the early ethnographer, lexicographer, and author of comic sketches, Vladimir Dal, included them in their works. Gogol’s early stories derived from Ukrainian life and folklore appeared in 1831–1832 in the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, which included the stories “The Fair at Sorochintsy,” “St. John’s Eve,” “A May Night, or The Drowned Maiden,” “The Lost Letter,” “Christmas Eve,” “A Terrible Vengeance,” “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” and “A Bewitched Place.” In these stories, there are few Jewish characters, and none of especial interest. The occasional references to Jews are equally unremarkable. As traders, innkeepers, and drivers, Jews figure as part of the Ukrainian landscape. A Jewish tavernkeeper in “Christmas Eve” does not want to serve drinks on credit to a rich Cossack. Jewesses appear at booths in “The Fair at Sorochintsy.” The hero of “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” driven home from his regiment in Mogilev by a Jew, is delayed because the Jewish driver will not drive on the Sabbath. There are also occasional but not unexpected disparaging remarks. “Petro had only one gray jacket with more holes in it than gold pieces in a Jew’s pocket” (1:37; 1:49).²

The few Jews who do appear are invariably treated comically and never evoke sympathy or serious consideration from narrator or author. “The majority of the officers drank hard and were really good at dragging Jews around by their earlocks as any Hussars” (“Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” 1:176; 1:210). The Jew mentioned above who drives Ivan Fedorovich home is bitten by a dog when he descends from the carriage on arrival. This is presented as a comic incident in a larger humorous scene.³ Nor is there any sympathy in the narrator’s description of the outrageous behavior of the Polish nobility toward the Jews, as in the following passage in which the emphasis falls not on the Jews but on the Poles: “Their masters were at the height of their revelry, playing all sorts of tricks, pulling the Jewish tavern keeper by the beard, painting a cross on his impious brow, shooting blanks at the women, and dancing the Cracovienne with their impious priest (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:156; 1:185).

In Gogol’s early stories, the Jews are implicated along with Poles and Russians in the spiritual decline of the age, and they are at times linked with the devil. “Our gentry initiate Polish fashions and have copied their sly ways.... they have sold their souls, accepting the Uniate faith. The Jews are oppressing the poor (Zhidovstvo ugnetaet bednyi narod)” (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:158; 1:187). But the Jews appear no worse than the Russians, who are presented as Judases, betrayers of their own Orthodox faith, often exchanging Catholicism for Orthodoxy. Gogol’s Ukrainian devil is no Miltonian Lucifer; rather he is a middling figure, who can on occasion be outwitted, defeated, and even humiliated. He often appears less formidable or objectionable than Great Russians (Moscovites) or foreigners.⁴ Nevertheless, in his many forms and disguises, the devil is still the main power disrupting the life of the village of Dikanka in the stories in Gogol’s Dikanka collection. Almost every human activity and natural phenomenon is associated with the devil, from pipe-smoking and revelry to pigs and the moon.

But the Jews are no more associated with the devil than the Russians. In a curious passage in “The Terrible Revenge,” the hero, Danilo, suspects his father-in-law of being in league with the devil not because of any association with Jews, but because his father-in-law will not drink the “Jews’ vodka,” the vodka that Danilo stole from the Jews at Brest (“The Terrible Vengeance,” 1:145; 1:172). In the only scene in which the devil and a Jew appear together (“The Fair at Sorochintsy”), they are antagonists. The devil pawns his red jacket to a Jew and says he will return for it in a year. But it seems to the Jew too long a time to wait, so he sells it. When the devil comes back to reclaim his coat, the devil gives the Jew the scare of his life. The Jew faints but is revived by the pig-allies of the devil and is compelled to confess what he did (1:22–23; 1:32–33).

The Jew in the early work of Gogol is an alien but he does not loom more ominously than Germans (that is, European foreigners), Turks, or Gypsies. He is associated with money but more often than not he is the object of abuse by the “native” populations. He is also amusing to Gogol’s narrators whether praying, being pulled by the beard, or being bitten by a dog. And he is no less a victim of the devil than the other inhabitants of Dikanka. As Kunitz argues, the Jew is treated contemptuously for comic effect, but without malice or hatred.⁵

Nothing about Gogol’s attitude toward Jews changed significantly in the years separating the early Dikanka stories (1831) and the two versions of Taras Bulba (1835 and 1842).⁶ But in Taras Bulba, in which Gogol transforms the Cossacks⁷ into romantic epic heroes representative of a lost Russian past,⁸ the Jews are cast in a radically different role. They still serve as comic relief, but now they are exploited as devices for highlighting, apophatically, the greatness of the Russian soul as embodied by mythic Cossacks.⁹ In Taras Bulba, Gogol conceives most of his characters in complementary sets of binary oppositions. Sometimes he extols his heroes not only by dramatically portraying the Cossacks’ martial virtues and inexhaustible exuberance but also by contrasting them with various sets of negative others (women, Poles, priests, aliens, and Jews). The Cossack is thus defined equally by what he is and by what he is not. A Cossack is not a Pole, not a woman, and, most of all, not a Jew. But this process is reciprocal, whether intended or not, for the Jew becomes inevitably defined in terms of the Cossack: that is, apophatically, as a non-Cossack. As O. V. Belova, who has studied popular ethnic stereotypes among the Slavs, argues, one creates a portrait of the other (chuzhoi) in order to discover one’s own true identity (osoznat’ sebia samogo).¹⁰

In this chapter, I shall examine Gogol’s use of the secondary or literary epic to portray the Russian national ideal embodied in the semi-historical mythic Cossack,¹¹ the basis for understanding the role of the Jew in the novel. The focus here falls on the portrayal of the Cossack martial ethos, sacralized brotherhood, and Russian spiritual vitality. I shall then examine how Gogol utilizes the Jewish stereotype to reinforce this ideal by negation, first by showing how “the way of negation” works with another antithetical other, women, with whom the Jew has much in common, and then by contrasting Cossack and Jewish attitudes toward money, trading, and brotherhood. These are the most obvious categories in which Gogol’s binary oppositions hold sway. Equally important, however, are the different ways that Jews and Cossacks relate to their environment (space) and inhabit their bodies. The description of the Jewish body is especially important, for it is the foundation of Gogol’s comic portraiture. The Jew’s scrawny physique, alien dress, and wild gesticulations are prime reasons, as we shall see, why the Jew cannot be taken seriously, why he cannot be presented problematically and existentially, even in death. There is nothing that defines both Cossack and Jew more than death, and it is precisely in death that the Jew appears the most ridiculous.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the literary context of Gogol’s representation of Jews. Since Gogol creatively assimilated the literary culture of his time, we can better understand the Jews in Taras Bulba when seen against the most popular novel of the times, Scott’s Ivanhoe, which included the most famous literary portraits of Jews since Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. To highlight what Gogol could have done and chose not to with the material at hand, given the fact that he quotes from Scott in reference to his own Jew, Yankel, I compare Gogol’s comic treatment of Yankel in Taras Bulba with the more problematic and existential treatment of Isaac of York and Rebecca in Ivanhoe. But it is also important to compare Gogol’s treatment of the Jews in Taras Bulba with the portrayal of Jews in the most popular contemporary Russian novels, such as Faddey Bulgarin’s Mazepa and Ivan Vyzhigin, both of which preceded Gogol’s work and included more serious portrayals of both positive and negative Jewish types.

The last chapter of Part 1 (Chapter 3) deals with what I shall call the deconstructive—that is, unintended—consequences of Gogol’s comic treatment of the Jew, for in places, probably unintentionally, the binary opposition between Cossack and Jew occasionally weakens, in one instance to such an extent that Cossack and Jew come to occupy the same space, concretely represented when Taras lies down on the same mattress to sleep as Yankel, and when in a reversal of roles he hides in Yankel’s cart. The effect of this conflation and reversal is that the Jew plays an important role in undermining the main project of the novel: the creation of a Russian national hero and a heroic epos for modern Russia. But equally unexpected is the appearance of an existentially serious Jew, a Jewess to be more exact, whom Gogol uses as a symbol of human suffering. Just as the comic Jew undermines the heroic text, the existential Jewess casts doubt on the exploitation of the comic Jew as a means of apophatically creating an epic hero. If Jewish death can be treated as seriously as Cossack death, what is one to make of those episodes in which Jewish death is treated not only unproblematically and unexistentially but comically, even ridiculously? Is the stereotype unintentionally challenged, or is there method to this artistic aporia? An analysis of another work by Gogol, “The Overcoat”(Shinel’), gives us a way of better understanding the ambiguous nature of the comic representation of the Jew in Taras Bulba and the unusual role of the narrator or author himself in the text.

TARAS BULBA AS MYTHIC EPIC

Generically Taras Bulba is a nineteenth-century literary or secondary epic employing typical epic devices, including catalogues of warriors, extended epic similes, and long formal speeches.¹² But it also incorporates elements of the historical novel as practiced by Scott and his imitators, abounding in local color and detailed descriptions of clothes and interiors. The episodic plot involves the attempts of the hero, Taras Bulba, to defend the Russian lands and the Orthodox faith from their traditional enemies, the Catholic Poles in the west and the Tatars and Turks in the east and south. The epic becomes the vehicle by which Taras’s deeds are immortalized and come to serve as inspiration for future generations. As is common in Christian secondary epics, there is little of the supernatural machinery of primary or folk epics in which the gods intercede to advance the missions of their human wards. The only semblance of the supernatural in Taras Bulba is Christ’s receiving the slain Russian martyrs and placing them by his side. Gogol also does not adhere to the traditional high style of epics. A prose epic, Taras Bulba shows its romantic provenance by mixing high, middle, and low styles, frequently introducing low comic elements—similar to those in Gogol’s early comic stories—into some of the most serious episodes of the text, including the deaths of both of Taras’s sons.

As has been pointed out, Taras Bulba himself is conceived more as a mythic or romantic hero than an epic one. And the novel itself is less a paean to a way of life that has been lost than a glorification of the Russian soul and spirit as embodied in the primitive Cossack defenders of the Russian land and religion (Russian Orthodoxy). Gogol does not describe the Cossacks from the historical record; he imaginatively refashions them for their ideological and religious roles.¹³ In contrast to the oft-stated Soviet view, the Cossacks were hardly stalwart defenders of Russian lands. Originally formed from peasants escaping Russian serfdom, over time they became a formidable military force. But they often shifted allegiances, alternatively allying themselves, when convenient, with Russians, Poles, or Turks. Nor were they ever purely Russian; they comprised disparate elements, including Poles, Tatars, and even Jews. Although there were many “warriors” among them, many Cossacks farmed and even lived by trade. Despite all the narrator’s rhetoric in Taras Bulba praising the Cossacks’ loyalty to and defense of Russian Orthodoxy, the Cossacks cared as little about religious allegiance as national allegiance; they were a martial brotherhood living primarily for booty, reveling, and fighting. Setchkarev describes them as “idealized beasts.”¹⁴ The apotheosis of the Cossack life, even in Taras Bulba, is death in battle; an old man arouses only suspicion. “There were no very old men in the camp, for no Dnieper Cossack died a natural death” (2:48; 2:66).¹⁵

Gogol is not implying that contemporary Russians should emulate the Cossacks by becoming warriors. Shaped by their experiences and their times, the Cossacks could be brutal, killing women and children without compunction. But Gogol presents their cruelty as justified by historic necessity, for during those times only ruthless warriors could successfully defend the Russian lands and the Russian Orthodox Church. Furthermore, their ruthlessness was not intrinsic to their nature, it was the era that made them what they were: “The inherently peaceful Slav spirit (drevle mirnyi slavianskii dukh) was tempered in the flames of warfare and the Cossack organization arose” (2:27; 2:39). Most important, beneath their rough exterior there was a broadness and depth of soul to be found nowhere else on earth. This depth had been lost by the Cossacks’ more civilized nineteenth-century Russian descendants, who lived in a world obsessed with materialism, refinement, and sex.¹⁶

Reacting to the contemporary charges by Petr Chaadaev¹⁷ and other intellectuals that Russia had contributed nothing to civilization and that Russians were fated to be an ahistorical people, Gogol creates an epic celebrating the superiority of Russian national character epitomized in the broad Russian soul, evident in the hero’s attempt to rouse his fellow warriors to action. “Meanwhile in silence he prepared himself to rouse them all at one moment by uttering the Cossack battle cry, so that courage might come back anew to the heart of each with greater force than before, a revitaliz...