Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism Gary Rosenshield Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky's Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism, by Susan McReynolds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. 241 pp. $69.95. Redemption and the Merchant God argues that in Dostoevsky's works (both fictional and nonfictional) the idea of the Crucifixion—on which the salvation of humanity depends—is based on a Western utilitarian calculus, which glorifies the most ethically intolerable and cruelest of all human actions: child sacrifice. Whether against intention or not, Dostoevsky's works demonstrate that the hope for humanity rests on an anti-Christian idea—the Crucifixion—anti-Christian because it is anti-Christ and because it is requires a father, "a merchant god," cruelly sacrificing his child in order to pay for the sins of his "adult customers" (p. 157). Both Dostoevsky's believers and unbelievers, McReynolds argues, understand this transactional calculus; however, the unbelievers, in contrast to the believers, courageously refuse to accept it. "Zosima accepts a relationship between humanity and the divine founded on the exchange of children; Ivan rejects it" (p. 157). Since the mistreatment of children is for Dostoevsky the greatest of all human sins, God's sacrifice of his son can only be an act of the greatest cruelty and cannot ipso facto serve as the basis for the salvation of others. "Christ's willing self-sacrifice is gradually eclipsed, and the role played by God the Father in the Crucifixion becomes increasingly sinister" (p. 9). Moreover, this idea about the Crucifixion "formed the basis of his mature antisemitism." The "heretical understanding of the Crucifixion … prompted Dostoevsky to effect a theological shift: he exonerates the Christian God-Father of what was to him an unforgivable trespass against morality, God's sacrifice of his child to benefit others, by transferring this guilt to the Jews" (pp. 8–9). The Russian people represent the highest form of anti-Judaism because they are willing to sacrifice themselves, of their own free will, for others without desiring gain for themselves. They are the real Christs, or at least potentially. The Russian people must take on "the redemptive imitation of Christ's self-sacrifice," although what McReynolds means is Christ's "seeming" self-sacrifice. Since the Crucifixion is invalid, individuals can no longer be saved as individuals, only nations can be saved, and only if they decide to "bypass the [End Page 195] Crucifixion and yet maintain allegiance to Christ." In his mature theology, the Jewish idea (the utilitarian sacrifice of children, and ultimately everything that is evil) is opposed to the Russian idea: disinterested self-sacrifice. As others have argued, McReynolds holds that Dostoevsky's extreme antisemitism, his attribution of all evil to the Jewish idea, is something that is not evident until the last decade of his life. In the 1860s the West is castigated for all the evils that will be ascribed primarily to the Jews in the 1870s. McReynolds attempts to demonstrate her thesis first through a presentation of the ideas in The Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky's journalistic enterprise of the 1870s, and then through an analysis of some of Dostoevsky's most prominent early and later works of fiction, including Poor Folk, Notes from the House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. The antisemitism of The Diary of a Writer as well as Dostoevsky's idealization of the Russian people is explicit, and all of it derivative. The importance of the fiction, according to McReynolds, is first that it shows from the beginning (from Dostoevsky's earliest novel, Poor Folk) that child-sacrifice, on which she claims most societies rest, including Russian society, is unethical and ineffective; and second that Dostoevsky's fiction belies the Russian idea: that is, the idea that the Russian people are freely self-sacrificing substitute Christs, the foundation notion of The Diary of a Writer. Relying primarily on Notes from the House of the Dead, McReynolds tries to show that the Russian people can hardly bear the role that Dostoevsky places upon them, for they are morally corrupt and cannot serve as the vehicles of...