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PARTISAN REVIEW
consistently depict the Jews as guilty of ravaging the Russian country–
side and of treating the Russian people with arrogance and superiority.
Astaf'ev revealed a rabid intolerance against the Jews with the utmost
clarity and directness in the character of Georgii (Goga) Gertsev-a
predator and profiteer. Still, Astaf'ev concluded his novel with a rendi–
tion of the first eight verses of chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes. Speaking of "a
time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace," the
writer thus left some hope for the renewal of a Russian-Jewish dialogue.
From here Astaf'ev's career might have gone in opposite directions, one
of tolerance or one of hostility and denial. He chose the latter path.
In I984, a popular Moscow review of foreign literature,
Inostrannaia
literatura,
printed a translation of Stephen King's
The Dead Zone.
Less
than two years later, Astaf'ev published
Pechal'nyi detektiv [A Sad
Detective],
a novel that draws a horrific picture of a provincial Soviet
city in the mid-I980s. In the same year, he also published the infamous
short story "Lovlia peskarei v Gruzii" ["Catching Cudgeons in Geor–
gia"]. In August of I986, Astaf'ev received a letter from Natan Eidel'–
man (I930-I989), a Moscow historian of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Russian culture. Eidel'man's letter, written not from
the vantage point of a Jewish nationalist, but rather a liberal who is
repulsed by any display of prejudice-be it against Georgians, Jews, or
Kazakhs-contained a warning that Astaf'ev had betrayed his talent by
succumbing to intolerance and xenophobia. Astaf'ev replied in the most
intemperate manner. Eidel'man wrote his second, final letter, and the
correspondence quickly became -in the words of the emigre writer VI.
Solovyov-a bestseller of late Soviet
samizdat.
What strikes one most
about Astaf'ev's reply-even more than its malevolent anger stemming
from a sense of cultural inferiority-is a complete lack of independent
thinking about the Jewish question. Astaf'ev made three main points in
his letter. First he accused the Jews of being the enemies of the Russian
national renaissance; according to Astaf'ev, they controlled Russian cul–
ture and regarded ethnic Russians with intellectual arrogance and con–
tempt. Then he stated that the Jews destroyed Russian Orthodoxy and
Monarchy, and were guilty of regicide: "the [last Czar and his family]
were executed by the Jews and the Latvians, headed by the inveterate,
double-dyed Zionist Iurkovskii
[sic;
Astaf'ev refers to the Bolshevik
Iurovskii]." Lastly, Astaf'ev suggested the problems that Jews encoun–
tered in the Soviet Union were a consequence of their own crimes
against Russia, the crimes for which they were now paying.
Astaf'ev thus reproduced a primitive version of Western and Russian
anti-Semitic ideas, a kind of crude selection from
Protocols of the Elders
