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Karl Radl · 2016-12-06T11:01:29Z

Nikolai Gogol and the Jews I was not very familiar with Russian literature until two years ago when I picked up and read the first part of Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’. After finishing this book I was hooked on the almost unique ability of Russian authors to not only construct pathos, but maintain a dark and delightful humour while doing so. The master, and to a significant extent, the creator of this style within Russian literature – who also inspired H. P. Lovecraft among others - is the aforementioned Nikolai Gogol. (1) Gogol, who was actively hostile to organised religion as a young man, (2) had deeply-held religious convictions that derived from a series of personal crises that he experienced and which he found his way out of only with ‘divine guidance’. (3) As a result of this conviction Gogol took Jesus Christ as his personal role model (a-la Thomas a Kempis’ ‘The Imitation of Christ’) (4) and read deeply in both Christian theology and philosophy. (5) He also took Jesus’ well-documented opposition to the jews, in addition to their own behaviour, very seriously and sought to understand the jewish question from an intellectual point of view. This was part and parcel of his view of life as being in service to greater things than the self. (6) This view, as I have said, was applied by Gogol to the jewish question. Commenting on this Maguire writes: ‘The difference is that Warsaw itself is not enclosed and, for Gogol, cannot be, for it lacks an identity of its own. It is part of the Russian Empire, but it is not Russian. Poles lives there, but it is full of Jews, who are always “placeless” in Gogol and who here inhabit filthy surroundings (dirt being, as we remember, matter out of place.)’ (7) The ‘placelessness’ of the jews is clearly a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew. The fate of the jewish people is to unceasingly wander the earth as a punishment for their crucifixion of Jesus. A necessarily agent for ensuring this fate is found in jewish behaviour, which causes non-jews to hate, revile and periodically drive out the jewish people. This is seen in several of Gogol’s novels and short stories. For example in ‘Dead Souls’ jews are portrayed as being voracious consumers of food and wealth, but who mysteriously never seem to contribute anything positive at all to society. Thus engendering resentment from the non-jewish population. Further in ‘Taras Bulba’ Gogol depicts the jew Yankel as simply being demonic in nature. (8) This suggests that Gogol identified the ‘placeless’ jew as not only cursed by his own actions (a-la the Wandering Jew) but directly with his status as an agent of the devil in the material world. This perspective fits nicely with Gogol’s own strident belief in the supremacy of Orthodox Christianity and that the spirit of the anti-Christ was abroad in the world. (9) As such in his story ‘Hetman’ Gogol has the jews desecrate Christian churches. This act deeply angers the Cossacks who, with the shout ‘Hang all the Jews! Drown them all, the heathens, in the Dnieper!’, go on a rampage with the aid of the local peasantry intending to cut the throats of any jew they find. (10) This amply demonstrates Gogol’s view that the jews were both the spirit of the anti-Christ that is abroad in the world and also that they were ultimately responsible for the ill-treatment that was meted out to them by dint of their own sacrilegious actions, provocations and depredations. In stories such as ‘Taras Bulba’ and ‘Hetman’ Gogol openly advocates and celebrates the persecution and mass murder of the enemies of Christianity: in particular Muslims and jews. (11) Gogol’s genocidal anti-Judaism – to say that he was anti-Semitic would simply not be accurate – is an uncomfortable subject for many and not a few of his biographers such as Henri Trogat, (12) Donald Fanger (13) and Gavriel Shapiro (14) simply fail to mention it. While others, such as Victor Ehrlich, (15) have desperately tried to claim that Gogol was merely ‘satirising’ anti-jewish views while not holding them himself. This, as we have seen, is absolute nonsense as Gogol was very much a true believer in what he said and as Ruth Coates has styled him: a ‘messianic Orthodox nationalist.’ (16) References (1) Donald Fanger, 1979, ‘The Creation of Nikolai Gogol’, 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. 101; A. P. Briggs, 2001, ‘Pre-Revolutionary Russian Theatre’, p. 67 in Neil Cornwell (Ed.), 2001, ‘The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature’, 1st Edition, Routledge: New York (2) Robert Maguire, 1994, ‘Exploring Gogol’, 1st Edition, Stanford University Press: Stanford, p. 84 (3) Ibid, p. 83 (4) I have documented Thomas a Kempis’ views on the subject of jews in the following article: http://www.semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2014/04/thomas-kempis-imitation-of-christ-and.html (5) Maguire, Op. Cit., p. 83 (6) Ibid, p. 84 (7) Ibid, p. 74; also Henri Trogat, 1974, ‘Gogol: The Biography of a Divided Soul’, 1st Ed...