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L’antisémitisme dans les œuvres de l’écrivain russe-juif S. Jushkevich

Boris Czerny
p. 535-560

Abstracts

Anti-semitism in the works of a Russian-Jewish writer, S. Iushkevich. – Iushkevich’s works, which comprise numerous short stories and plays released between 1897 and 1927, while relatively unknown today even of specialists, were very popular in their time. Iushkevich’s first stories were received favorably by Russian liberal intellectuals who saw in him a faithful painter of Odessa’s Jewish lower classes. However, in some Jewish milieus he was very soon blamed for dealing with such themes as Jewish prostitution or the disintegration of the Jewish family which could be harmful to an image-conscious community having to cope with a generally hostile perception in Russian public opinion. Iushkevich’s extremely negative and unsubtle criticism of Jewish capitalists and bourgeoisie in certain of his plays deviated towards anti-semitism, raising a wave of indignation both in the Jewish community and among certain Russian intellectuals. In this article we try to determine to what extent certain of Iushkevich’s works are anti-semitic. We also address the question of the Russian-Jewish writer’s status and how his dependence on Russian literature could lead him to adopt the anti-Jewish stereotypes that it traditionally conveyed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Placing Iushkevich’s works back into the context of pre-1917 Russia allows us to study the evolution of certain anti-semitic representations and to define their invariants which have through time constituted the basis of anti-semitism.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Boris Czerny, “L’antisémitisme dans les œuvres de l’écrivain russe-juif S. Jushkevich”Cahiers du monde russe, 41/4 | 2000, 535-560.

Electronic reference

Boris Czerny, “L’antisémitisme dans les œuvres de l’écrivain russe-juif S. Jushkevich”Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 41/4 | 2000, Online since 15 January 2007, connection on 18 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/58; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.58

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About the author

Boris Czerny

Département d’études slaves, Université de Caen.
bczerny@aol.com

By this author

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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