The Special Sway Dostoevsky Held over Soviet Jewish Minds

Andrei Zorin, a well-known scholar of Russian literature at Oxford and a biographer of Tolstoy, stated in a recent interview that if we want to understand today’s manifestations of Russian imperial thinking, we need to turn not to Tolstoy, but to

Dostoevsky with his national-religious messianism. He expressed this worldview with an incredible force. Our current social experience tells us that this ideology generates horrible consequences. But if we want to understand how to combat it on the individual and societal level, we have to comprehend where it’s coming from, what emotions feed it, and why it’s attracting people who don’t seem to be monstrous in nature, and . . . not just in Russia. Dostoevsky cannot be replaced with anyone else here.

Zorin’s thoughts echo Gary Saul Morson’s in his essay “Why Dostoevsky Loved Humanity and Hated the Jews.” Morson concludes, eloquently and persuasively, that Dostoevsky’s hatred of the Jews was part and parcel of his ideological and religious beliefs, millenarian to the core. “Indeed,” Morson writes, “Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism coincided with his growing certainty that the end was at hand. . . . When Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic fever rages most intensely, he envisages a final battle between Christians and Jews or, more accurately, between ‘the Christian idea’ of idealistic self-sacrifice and ‘the Jewish idea’ of utilitarian materialism. . . . The problem is not individual Jews but the Jewish idea, whoever may accept it.”