Use of the word "Zhid"

[James L. Rice]

Colleagues:                          Dinnertime+, Friday, 21 August 1998

I promised to say no more about Dostoevsky and the Jews on SEELANGS, but I
can allow myself to quote IN FULL the 5-line sentence from my book,
DOSTOEVSKY & THE HEALING ART (1985), from which Dan Rancour-Laferriere has
lifted a snippet -- thoroughly distorting the meaning, and discarding the
main point -- to serve his own hasty ends.  I wrote, 13 years ago:

"The APPARENT behavior change of his last decades, in the direction of
heightened anxiety and suspicion, with episodes of paranoid delusion,
DESERVES TO BE CAREFULLY CONSIDERED not only as A PROBABLE PSYCHIATRIC
COMPLICATION OF HIS EPILEPSY, but against <the> background of quite real
harassment by the state security agencies."  <Op. cit., page 81>

The main point here is that there are various (medical and human) ways of
understanding the sporadically documented outbursts of abusive language from
Dostoevsky, some of which were observed during or after the genuinely
psychotic interludes of 3 to 10 days (with paranoid hallucinations of
unknown content) that ROUTINELY concluded his epileptic seizures; others of
which deployed antisemitic stereotypes (especially in letters), but in many
different ways. Readers who are interested in Dostoevsky's personality,
intellect, and motivation as a writer of journalism, or fiction (where Jews
figure mainly positively, if rarely, and on quite different levels of
abstraction), should look carefully at each context in the letters, to
consider what effects he MAY HAVE wanted to achieve, including -- as I see
it -- not only at times seemingly knee-jerk signals of xenophobia, but also
exasperation at the spectacle of Russia falling face down in the mud, and at
his own political impotence.  Some of us read Dostoevsky as Russia's most
seditiously satirical novelist and journalist, who was determined above all
to "dissect anatomically all Russian attitudes toward authority," and not as
a compulsively xenophobic paranoid.  (Dostoevsky's underlying contempt for
Russia surfaces most clearly, I think, in his last piece of journalism, on
Geok-Tepe.)

So, when I referred (in an elaborately qualified speculation of 1985) to
"episodes of paranoid delusion" deserving "to be carefully considered," I
meant IN ALL THEIR COMPLEXITY, and not at all in order to support the
relatively limited arguments of Dan Rancour-Laferriere, as transmitted
lately on SEELANGS.  It might be added that one line of medical thinking
denies the use of terms for standard clinical psychopathology for the
neurological phenomena of epilepsy.  It may be splitting hairs, but I am not
the one who first proposed this distinction -- for ethical reasons.

I can only repeat that SEELANGS goads us into blurting out scraps of the
whole picture, when it would be far better -- in certain complex issues like
this one -- to get our act together first, and publish with careful
documentation.  Of course I don't pretend that my own squeals here above
are adequately documented, and if I'm out here yapping again I guess my
excuse is that I'm only human.

As for Daniel, I don't mind saying that I've been his friend since 1978, and
can't imagine anyone I'd rather argue with about this, in public or private.
He's a worthy interlocutor.  The only question is (for you folks out there
in cyberspace): has he done his homework?  For the time being, you see,
there's just no telling.

Jim Rice

At 04:35 PM 8/21/98 -0700, you wrote:
>21 Aug 98
>
>Colleagues,
>I am glad to see that Jim Rice will be publishing his study on Dostoevsky's
>use of the word "zhid."  In the meantime I feel obliged to object to his
>negative evaluation of Felix Dreizin's book, and in particular to his
>reluctance to translate Dostoevsky's "zhid" as "yid" or "kike."
>
>Dostoevsky resorted to denial as one way to deal with his anti-Semitism.
>In his 1877 essay on "The Jewish Question" in _Diary of a Writer_ he
>declares that "in my heart this hatred has never existed."  Yet he then
>asks: "Is it because I sometimes call a Jew a 'yid' [nazyvaiu inogda evreia
>'zhidom'] that I am accused of 'hatred'?  But, in the first place, I didn't
>think this was so offensive, and in the second place, as far as I can
>recall, I always used the word 'yid' in reference to a certain idea: 'yid,'
>'yidism,' 'the reign of the yids,' and so on.  This was a reference to the
>well-known notion, orientation, or characteristic of the times.  One can
>dispute this idea, or disagree with it, but one shouldn't be offended by a
>word" (Dostoevskii 1972-88, vol. 25, p. 75).  However, Dostoevsky knew
>perfectly well that the word was offensive, and he used the word in an
>openly contemptuous way in his private correspondence (see Dreizin).  It is
>not as if Dostoevsky were operating in a semantic vacuum.  He knew about
>the anti-Semitism around him ("well-known notion").  Even here he says that
>he doesn't think the term "zhid" is SO offensive ["TAK obidno"] - which is
>to say that he admits that it is at least SOMEWHAT offensive.
>
>In my previous posting I mentioned how the anti-Semitism fit in with
>Dostoevsky's projective tendencies.  Here is an example, again from _Diary
>of a Writer_: the jews are guilty of  "mercilessness" and of "disrespect
>for every people and race, and for every human creature who is not a Jew"
>(p. 84).  Since this claim is manifestly false (only an anti-Semite would
>believe it), then it must originate not in external reality (real Jews),
>but in some split-off portion of Dostoevsky's own mind.  It must, in short,
>be projected from within from some internal source - and what more likely
>source than Dostoevsky's own "mercilessness" and "disrespect" for Jews?
>(Dreizin, Rosenthal, Breger, and others have written about projective
>mechanisms in Dostoevsky).
>
>Jim Rice objects to my use of the term "paranoid tendencies" to
>characterize Dostoevsky.  Yet Rice himself writes of Dostoevsky's "episodes
>of paranoid delusion" (_Dostoevsky and the Healing Art_, 1985, p. 81;
>quoted by Dreizin, 106).  Clinicians generally agree that sporadic paranoia
>is common in the lives of epileptics.  Anti-Semitism is a form of paranoia.
> It is a paranoid delusion to believe that Jews as a class are hostile to
>you.  Of course anti-Semitic beliefs became increasingly common in the
>second half of the nineteenth century in Russia, and not everyone who held
>such a belief was epileptic.  But there are historical contexts which
>foster ethnic hatred and make it almost "normal," e.g., anti-Negro
>hostility among whites in the antebellum south.  Indeed, as psychologists
>Robert Robins and Jerrold Post observe in a recent book: "No one is ever
>completely free from the paranoid dynamic.  It is an innate human tendency,
>and under stress, otherwise psychologically healthy individuals, groups,
>and societies are susceptible to the paranoid appeal."
>
>There is nothing shameful about Dostoevsky's paranoid tendencies when they
>grace the pages of his literary art (let us call it the Golyadkin
>phenomenon, or let us even agree with Bakhtin's notion of "polyphony").
>But real life is something else, and in _Diary of a Writer_ Dostoevsky was
>making falsifiable (and false, and hateful) claims about reality.
>
>Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
>Professor of Russian
>Director, Russian Program
>University of California, Davis
>darancourlaferriere at ucdavis.edu
>
>