Neither With Them Nor Without Them : The Russian Writer and the Jew in the Age of Realism

Debate over the representation of Jews in Russian literature has long been dominated by the dichotomy of anti- and philo-Semitic discourses. Rather than analyzing ""the image of the Jew"" in terms of negative or positive characteristics, and branding the authors respectively as anti- or philo-Semitic, Elena M. Katz explores the complex and the ambiguous construction of Jewishness as ""Otherness"" in the works of three of Russia's greatest nineteenth-century authors. Katz identifies Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev as creators of special modes of Jewish discourse in Russian literature. She tackles traditional tropes of Jews in light of the sociohistoric and cultural contexts of the time and of the writers' own politics and aesthetics.