Are There Jews in the History of Russian Culture?
Reading Current Literary Press
Henrietta Mondry
University of Canterbury
New Zealand
The pluralisation of post-Soviet society has resulted in a situation in which blatantly anti-Semitic publications coexist with secular and religious Jewish periodicals. The first group, by far the larger, is represented by, among others, Chernaia sotnia (Black Hundred ), Limonka, Duel (The Duel), Zavtra (Tomorrow), Slavianskoe edinstvo (Slavic Unity), Za russkoe delo (For the Russian Cause), Ia - russkii (I am a Russian), while the most prominent Jewish periodicals are Russkii Evrei (A Russian Jew), Lekhaim (Lehaim) and Evreiskaia gazeta (A Jewish Newspaper). A common feature which both Judophilic and Judophobic publications have in common is the invocation of Russian classics. On the pages of the journal Russkii evrei polemics takes place around the question of the anti-Semitism of Vasilii Rozanov or Pavel Florensky, while in the Russian Judophobic newspaper Ia - russkii (I am a Russian) a story of Sergei Esenin's murder by Jews is being recycled. The two approaches have one thing in common - acknowledgement of the anti-Jewish tradition in Russian history and intellectual thought. In addition, there is a new alarming trend emerging - the publication of new histories of Russian literature and thought, which ignore the fact of the very existence of the cultural phenomenon of the Jewish question in Russian culture. The latter goes in hand with the new tendency to avoid inclusion of Jewish writers and critics into anthologies of the intellectual histories of Twentieth-Century Russian culture. The last two tendencies ironically create a return to the pre-glasnost situation by creating blank spots, or belye piatna of the Russian history, thus subverting the achievements of glasnost. In this paper I will offer an outline of, and give characteristics to, the four tendencies of dealing with the role of the Jewish intellectual in Russian culture in current Russian publications. Although these trends have fuzzy borders, they can be categorised as 1) open anti-Semitism; 2) open discussion; 3) censoring by silence the problem of anti-Semitism; and 4) erasing the memory of Jewish thinkers and writers from Russian cultural history.
1. Russian classics in anti-Semitic press
In issue 7, May 1998 of the newspaper Ia - russkii ( I am a Russian) - which has on its front page an article with the title "Ivanova v Kreml', Kirienko v Izrail'" ("Let Ivanov go to the Kremlin, Kirienko to Israel") - there is an article devoted to the resurrection of the myth of murdered Russian peasant poet Sergei Esenin (1885-1925). The title of the article reads as a quotation from Esenin "Sergei Esenin: '...Kuda ni kin' - vsiudu zhidy'" ("Sergei Esenin: '...No matter where you look Jids are all over the place'"). Two photographs of Esenin are published. One, depicting a young blond and blue-eyed Esenin is inscribed "Sergei Esenin. Russkii, ariets..." ("Sergei Esenin, a Russian, an Aryan"), while the second depicts the poet's dead body and carries the inscription "I vot chto s nim sdelali nedocheloveki iz GPU" ("This is what the underhumans from the GPU did to him"). The author, Lystsov, maintains that Esenin's death was not suicide, but a camouflaged murder carried out by Jewish members of the GPU. According to Lystsov the Jewish communists murdered Esenin because the poet made public his views on the destructive role of Jews in the Russian revolution. Trotsky is accused as the main orchestrator of the murder.
The story of Esenin's murder by the Jews has been one of the topoi themes of the anti-Semitic press since glasnost'. In 1990, Molodaia gvardiia started publication of the "evidence" of the murder, and Trotsky was named as the Jewish commissar who revenged the Russian poet's public exposing of his grievances against the oppression of the Russian people by the "Zamarashkins"("Dirtlings") and "Chekistovs", the Jewish- communist heroes of his unpublished play. A new twist was given to the Esenin story in 1998 by a TV programme from Jewish journalist Edvard Radzinsky. The Russian writer Lystsov, who is writing a book Ubiistvo Esenina (Esenin's Murder), took offence at the fact that a Jewish journalist, a "bezdarnyi evreiskii pisaka" ("a giftless Jewish quasi-writer"), dared to make a programme on the crypto-Russian poet. In Lystsov's approach an appropriation of cultural property is taking place along racial lines, and the Jewish writer is not allowed to trespass on the territory of Russian cultural heritage. While Russian cultural history is being freed from racial contamination, Jews are being deprived of their own history. Thus the Jewish experience during the Nazi occupation of Europe is not only denied, but expropriated by Russians. The editorial comment announces that the article on Esenin's murder is the first in the new series which will be entitled "Kholokost"("Holocaust"). The explanation of this foreign word is given as follows: "Kholokost (po-grecheski zhertvoprinoshenie" ("Holocaust in Greek means ritual murder"). In this column was to appear stories of the "ritual'noe talmudicheskoe istreblenie Russkogo naroda v XX veke" ("ritual Talmudic extermination of the Russian nation in the 20th century").
In this quasi-metaphysical light the story of Esenin's murder was shaping up as a story of Christian martyrdom at the hands of Jews. Esenin's well known and well documented violent behaviour was played down, and the plot of a passive and innocent victim of ritual murder by Jews was being created. Such a canonisation took the form of a poem-ballad on Esenin's death. Written by a certain Terentiev in the form of a monologue, the poem contains a disturbing story of Esenin giving an account of his own death: "Zhidobol'shevikami ia poveshen. A pered smert'iu...oni ikony zhgli bezbozhno...detei rossiiskikh ubivali...Oni zhivoi pitalis' krov'iu neschastnykh russkikh muzhikov" ("Jewish Bolsheviks had me hung. But before my death... they sacreligiously burned down icons... killed Russian kids... They gorged on the fresh blood of the Russian peasants").
Ritual murder by Jews has been resurrected by the right-wing press for some time now as a topos of classical anti-Semitism. Thus, in 1995, Chernaia sotnia (Black Hundred) (9-10-11) produced a pamphletwith the title Aleksandr Men' i delo Beilisa (Aleksandr Men and the Beilis Affair). The author, an alleged Doctor of History, Petr Lanin, sets out to re-evaluate the outcome of the Beilis Affair in 1913, when Kiev Jew Mendel Beilis was tried and found not guilty of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. Lanin uses Vasilii Rozanov's (1856-1919) infamous book Oboniatel'noe i osiazatel'noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi (The Attitude of Jews Towards the Smell and Touch of Blood) (1913) as a source for "scientific" knowledge. Lanin presents Rozanov as a Hebrew scholar who could decipher secret Jewish codes and could prove the importance of ritual murder due to the special significance which blood played in the Jewish belief system. Lanin treats Rozanov's book as the only text in which Rozanov deals with the topic of blood. This obscuring of the topic of blood and sensory perceptions in Rozanov serves as a mechanism for the falsification of Rozanov's work. Lanin fabricates the case of Rozanov's scientific anti-Semitism by playing on the ignorance of his readers, who were not familiar with the work of this complicated and understudied philosopher. What is more, Lanin does not mention that before his death Rozanov asked for the destruction of all the remaining copies of the book in question, admitting that it was slanderous toward Jews. Nor does Lanin mention Rozanov's remorseful asking for forgiveness for his former unjust accusations against the Jewish people and calling for reconciliation between Jewish and Russian people.
2. Open forum in Russkii evrei
While the anti-Semitic press uses the authority of Russian literary personalities to continue to create falsifications of the age-old prejudices against Jews, the Russian Jewish press attempts to counteract by publishing articles which offer a more balanced interpretation of the negative attitudes towards Jews among Russian writers. Unlike the "Doctor of History" of the Black Hundred who got the date of Vasilii Rozanov's death wrong (1918 instead of 1919), Russkii Evrei offers a tribune to scholars of repute. Thus, a number of articles by Efim Kurganov on Rozanov's anti-Semitism, appeared in Russkii Evrei in 1997 and 1998.
In his work on Rozanov's attitudes towards the Jews, Efim Kurganov demonstrates that Rozanov's ambivalent attitude towards Jews had an impact on Pavel Florenskii's racist views. At the same time, Florensky maintains that any Christian believer has to admit that physical salvation is promised only to Jews as the chosen people. This dynamic of contempt and envy underpinned Rozanov's attitude towards Jews. In his article "Vasilii Rozanov i Bibleiskii mir"("Vasilii Rozanov and the Biblical World") (Russkii Evrei, 4, 1997), Kurganov traces Old Testament themes in Rozanov's work. As a philosopher and enthusiast of life, Rozanov juxtaposed the much criticised (by him) sterility and asceticism of Christianity to the vitality of the Old Testament. As the author of a theory of sexuality, Rozanov praised the Judaic role of the family and respect for the life of the body. Rozanov insisted that the human body has the same noumenal qualities as the spirit, and did not divide the life of the body from the life of the spirit. Judaism was for him a prime example of a religion where the body is treated as an ontological category.
Interestingly, Kurganov deals with the topic of blood in Rozanov without alluding to Rozanov's work on the Beilis Affair. For Kurganov, Rozanov's fascination and preoccupation with blood was a sign of Rozanov's vitalistic admiration of Judaism. He quotes the following extract on Rozanov's views on blood: "Krov' - zhizn', fakt. Religiia, nevol'no vziavshaia krov' v nit' soedineniia svoego s Bogom - i byla faktichna, zhiznenna"("Blood is life, it is a fact. Such a religion, which created a string of blood to symbolise its unity with God, was a religion of fact and life").( In this passage Rozanov alludes to the significance of the ritual of circumcision in Judaism which for the philosopher was a manifestation of the equation of the human and the divine body.) Rozanov's philosophy of sexuality was based on a rehabilitation of the biological body. His attempt to cross boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical led him to praise Judaism for its respect for the body. In this, Rozanov followed in the footsteps of Vladimir Soloviev, whose Judophilic views are well known. In Kurganov's article "Iudaizm i russkaia religioznaia mysl'" ("Judaism and Russian Religious Thought") in Russkii evrei, 2-3, 1998, the author examines only Rozanov's positive comments on the Talmud, which pertain to the writer's serious respect for Jewish laws and traditions. Unlike the "Doctor of History" in the Black Hundred publication, the author of the articles in Russkii Evrei does not get his facts wrong, but he applies some self-censorship in choosing mainly Judophilic evidence from Rozanov's work. This conciliatory position may be viewed as the author's attempt to counter one sided evidence of Rozanov's anti-Semitism by concentrating on Rozanov's Judophilic statements.
And indeed, when it comes to the exposure of Pavel Florensky's Judophobia, Kurganov shows a firmer approach in his 1999 article "Pavel Florenskii i evrei" ("Pavel Florensky and the Jews") in Russkii evrei . Unlike in the case of Rozanov, whose feeling towards Jews were ambivalent and based on the model of the Orientalist Other with its admiration and contempt, Pavel Florensky presents the case of a systematic anti-Semite. Kurganov demonstrates this systemacity of Florensky and exposes him as a forerunner of fascist discourse on race, purity and danger. Kurganov demonstrates that Florensky was the anonymous author of the two articles written during the Beilis Affairs and published in Rozanov's book The Attitude of Jews Towards the Smell and Touch of Blood, Florensky is shown as a proponent of the racist theory of the special strength of Jewish blood which demonstrates itself in the third and fourth generations. The subversive nature of Jewish blood is particularly dangerous, he says, because the person who carries such a drop of the Jewish blood is not recognised as a Jew, nor does he or she have any knowledge of his or her own Jewishness. Florensky's degree in Mathematics proved to be particularly useful in his ability to count the percentage of the Jewish blood in a "fifth" and "seventh generation" (Florensky, 24).
It would, however, be naive to think that the enlightening and humanistic policy of Russkii Evrei (with 999 copies a year) can counter the dissemination in 100 000 copies of one of the major anti-Semitic myths of ritual murder. Its popularity in folk beliefs did not fade away with the 70 years of education in atheism against religious prejudices. With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Israel in 1998, Nashe Otechestvo (Our Fatherland) (no. 82, 1998) published a panic inciting article predicting the rise of ritual murder of Christians by Jews: "...Vse ochen' prosto: 1998 god - eto god 50-letiia Izrailia. I konechno zhe chislo ritual'nykh ubiistv 'goev' dolzhno rezko podskochit'" ("It is really very simple: 1998 is the 50th anniversary of Israel. This means that the number of ritual murders of 'goyim' must sharply rise").
3. Censorship by Silence
The existence of anti-Semitic publications goes hand in hand with the silencing of the phenomenon of Judophobic thought in Russian culture. It especially manifests itself in the interpretation of the Russian philosophers of the fin-de-siecle. As has been illustrated earlier in my paper, there has been a rise of interest in the thought of this era, which was characterised by the proliferation of racism in the medical and scientific discourses which found their way into Russian cultural discourses. One of the ways in which contemporary Russian culture has been recycling these discourses is in the conversion of various statements and pronouncements of the thinkers into political slogans. On a par with this tendency is the trend to sensor episodes in the lives and works of prominent Russian thinkers which are linked to the Jewish question. Thus, in the 1999 edition of the Filosofy Rossii XIX -XX stoletij: Biografii, idei, trudy published by the reputable Akademicheskii proekt, the entry on Vasilii Rozanov does not mention his involvement in the Beilis Affair, or his book The Attitude of Jews Towards the Smell and Touch of Blood. In spite of the fact that Judaism and Jewish laws and way of life played one of the main parts in his philosophy of sexuality, there is no mention of it. Thus not only his Judophobic, but also Judophilic work, like Iudaizm (Judaism, 1903) is not mentioned. Without Judaism, Talmud and Jews, Rozanov's work is not only distorted, it is simply incomprehensive. The "blank spots" of Russian history which glasnost purportedly unveiled are blurred by the obscurity of such censorship. A similar situation is the entry on Father Aleksandr Men' who, we might recall, was accused in the "Black Hundred" pamphlet for his denial of the existence of blood libel among Jews. The word "Jew" is not mentioned in the entry on Men', and his murder is described in hazy terms like: "9 sentiabria 1990 o. Aleksandr Men' byl zverski ubit utrom, kogda iz doma na elektrichku - sluzhit' liturgiiu v svoem prihode"("On the morning of 9 September Father Aleksandr Men' was cruelly killed when on his way to catch the train - to conduct the service at his parish"),(p. 516). Information about the train is especially touching in the context of the absence of any information of the motives of the murder or political affiliation of the possible assassins. Men's Jewish origins and his conciliatory views on the continuity between the Old and the New Testament without privileging the latter to the first, are not mentioned. Is it surprising that a Russian reader will find the pamphlet of the "Black Hundred" more "informative" and "reliable"?
A similar situation repeats itself in the new two volume Encyclopaedic Dictionary of twentieth-century Russian literature Russkie pisateli, XX vek, edited by the Director of the Pushkin House, N.N.Skatov by Prosveshchenie (1998). As was noticed by A. Reitblat and N. Eliseev in their respective reviews of the publication, there is a conspicuous absence of significant Jewish writers and poets, while the obscure literati, but prominent ideologues of the Black Hundred movement like Vladimir Purishkevich and Sergei Nilius are given glorious write-ups.The absence of the Pavel Kogan and Viktor Shklovsky in the encyclopaedia is of special significance, while space is given to Sergei Nilius, the publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Sion. The author of the article on Nilius presents the case of The Protocols as the only existing document which pertains to the struggle for "mirovoe gospodstvo " ("world domination"). Nilius is praised for the commentaries he wrote for the document, which made his edition of the Protocols an especially influential paper. There is no work on the alternative views to those of the author of the article on Nilius in the bibliography. As has been observed by Eliseev, in spite of the presence of a great number of Russian Orthodox writers in the Dictionary, there is a conspicuous absence of Father Men'. Together with Viktor Shklovsky, his absence is indicative of the tendency towards an ethnic cleansing of Russian cultural history.
4. Towards ethnic cleansing of literary criticism
While the academic editions conduct their anti-Jewish policy by means of silence, the purity of Russian cultural history from Jewish critics is being protected vocally by the right press. In issue no. 3, 1998, of Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary), a mouthpiece of anti-Semitic propaganda under the disguise of the anti-Zionist campaign since Brezhnev's times, an open attack is launched against the Jewish author of the recent Russian literature textbook. The anti-Semitic meaning of the article is already graphically present in its title, "Progulka s Isaakom Erukhimovichem po prospektu Russkoi klassiki"("A Stroll Along the Avenue of Russian Classics with Isaak Son of Ierukhim"). The title contains both a direct mocking of the author's ethnicity through an emphasis on the degree and continuity of Otherness to at least two generations (first name and patronymic - Isaak Erukhimovich), and an implication of "Jewishness" as an anti-Russian ideology through the literary allusion to Andrei Siniavsky/Abram Terts's book Progulki s Pushkinym (Strolls with Pushkin). It is as the author of this book in which Siniavsky/Terts challenged the cult of Aleksandr Pushkin as part of Soviet patriotic officialdom that Igor Shafarevich, the author of the infamous Rusophobia, equated Siniavsky's blasphemous behaviour with that of Salmon Rushdi. As if the title of the article is not sufficiently explicit, the Jewish conspiracy against Russian literature is further emphasised in the subtitle "(Dogmy zabluzhdenii ili soznatel'noi lzhi ? )" "(The Dogmas of Misconceptions or of Conscious Lies?)". The first attack on the Jewish author by his Russian reviewer is based on his insufficient insight into the style of the Russian language. The reviewer explains that Kaplan has only a "formal" knowledge of Russian but lacks a special ear for Russian sounds. Moreover, he levels the same accusation at Julii Aikhenvald, the famous Jewish expressionist critic of the Russian Silver age, whom Kaplan, in turn, quotes. The reviewer mocks Aikhevnvald's choice of lexis and arrives at the following conclusion on the famous critic: "Kak mozhno s takim znaniem russkogo iazyka izmeriat' tsennosti volshebnogo russkogo slova?" ("How is it possible to measure the value of the magic Russian word with this kind of knowledge of the Russian language?"). The anti-Semitic position of the reviewer carries a two-fold meaning. On one hand, the author uses the old prejudice which views Jews as inarticulate people whose Otherness manifests itself in their inability to speak "people's" language, only some sort of a doggerel instead. The linguistic limitations of Jews present them as intellectually handicapped and illogical. On the other hand, with this taxonomy inverted, another taxonomy is being introduced which privileges intuition over cold intellect and which leads to the belief that the Jews have no soul. And indeed, the supposed calculating nature of the Jewish author of a textbook on Russian literature is exposed when the reviewer accuses him of pursuing commercial aims in writing a book for too wide an audience, embracing not only school pupils but also undergraduate students. But the main shortcoming is seen in the author's lacking the 'right' approach to literature; the right approach is to see literature as "kladez' dukhovnogo opyta naroda, vyrazhaiushchego ego natsional'nyi kharakter i nravstvennye ustremleniia"("the treasure of the spiritual experience of the nation, which expresses its national character and moral aspiration"). The conspiratory subtext of his article is made explicit at the end of the review, where it is stated that
Bukval'no vsia russkaia klassika vosstaet protiv grabitel'skikh, zagovorshchicheskikh podkhodov i v etom smysle - protiv makhinatsii nyneshnei vorovskoi rossiiskoi "maliny"...okopavshikhsia nyne v kremlevskikh palatakh
("Absolutely all Russian classical literature rebels against predatory and conspiratory attitudes and in this way - against current Russian extortionist "Mafia"...who found a refuge behind the Kremlin walls").
It is necessary to stress that, while in the description of Russian literature the word "russkii" is used, which denotes ethnically Russian, in the characterisation of the gangsters the word "Rossiiskii" is used, which denotes various inhabitants of the Russian territory.
Should there be in existence a non-censored Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Russian philosophers, or of the Russian Twentieth-Century Writers, which the author of the above article could have consulted, he would be able to find out that before his death Vasilii Rozanov asked for forgiveness for his anti-Jewish statements, and, among other things, for slandering Russian Jewish critics, including July Aikhhenvald. He dubbed Jewish critics of the Silver Age "korifeii v kritike", and the reason for their achievements was explained by their hard work:
And so Flekser-Volynsky, by taking onto himself, onto his own name, onto his personal destiny in literature, all the hellish torment of mockery, curses, malicious attacks, accomplished this biblical...TRUTH - for Russian literature. Then along came the noble Gershenzon, with images of the past,...in general with the whole of his remarkable work for the benefit of Russian literature, ... then Vengerov, that upright and noble toiler in bibliography, ...and finally Aikhenval'd, who, although it is hard for a Russian to confess this - still wrote his wonderful "Silhouettes of Russian Literature" and, by virtue of the elegance of his "article" - put Belinsky in his place once and for all. And now, now, truly for fame and honour there is no better reward, for the benefit they have brought to Russian literature - God has granted them the title of "leading lights" of criticism.
Indeed, it takes more than to recite old myths about Esenin's murder and the blood libel to come up with an unbiased history of Russian literature and thought. As witnessed by the examples in this paper it also takes more than ten years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, or 15 years since glasnost,to come up with such a history.
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