MAXIM D. SHRAYER
Anti-Semitism and the Decline of Russian
Village Prose
H
ow
DO WE NEGOTIATE
between an author's aesthetic achieve–
ment and ethical abomination? How do we make sense of a
writer who speaks with artistic honesty about his native peo–
ple, and yet with blindness and hostility about ethnic and religious
groups this writer deems alien
to
the culture and spirit of his land? In
studying the dynamics of an author's career, should we seek to identify
explosions of intolerance on the trajectory of an author's growth and
change? Even a brief glance at the heated discussion that followed the
publication of Anthony Julius's
T.
S.
Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary
Form
(I99 5) is enough to convince us that allegations of a given writer's
religious or ethnic prejudice can and often do polarize the critics' judg–
ments about the writer.
In Russia 's cultural space, where writers debate political issues in
daily newspapers and politicians compose novels and poems in jail, an
author's position on the Jewish question has often served as both a
barometer and shaper of public opinion. From the I860s onward, Russ–
ian writers have played a key role in formulating and presenting the
Jewish question
to
the public at large. From my perspective, the main
problem is not the novelty or profundity of a Russian author's writing
against the Jews, but rather the fact that anti-Semitic ideas were given
national legitimacy by being sandwiched between profound discussions
of Russian people and brilliant descriptions of the Russian countryside.
In studying anti-Semitism in literature, I have focused not only on the
meaning of the message about the Jews-a message that is more often
than not crude and pedestrian-but also on the ideological and cultural
codes that engender it. This brings me to the following inquiry into the
dynamics of the Jewish question in the writings of Russian Village
Prose.
The dissonant voices of the
derevenshchiki
(Village Writers) were
especially manifest on the Soviet literary scene in the I970S and early
I980s. Although never directly anti-Soviet, these writers managed to be
critical of what they perceived
to
be the causes of the disintegration of
