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Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since 1880s explores the construction of the Jew's physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal "exotic" and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.
List of contents
Acknowledgements. A Note on Transliteration. List of Illustrations. Introduction.1. Russian Anthropological and Biological Sciences and the ¿Jewish Race,¿ 1860s-1930. 2. Stereotypes of Pathology: The Medicalization of the Jewish Body by Anton Chekhov, 1880s.3. Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body and Incest.4. Ilya Ehrenburg and His Pecaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s. 5. Criminal Bodies and Love of The Yellow Metal: the Jewish Male and Stalinist Culture, 1930s-1950s. 6. Sadists¿ Bodies of the Anti-Zionist Campaign Era: 1960s-1970s. 7. Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew. 8. The Repatriated Body: A Russian Jewish Woman Writer in Israel Or the Corporeal Fantasy of Dina Rubina, 1990s to the Present. 9. The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000s.10. The ¿Real¿ Jewish Bodies of Oligarchs: Important Jewish Personalities and Post-Soviet Corporophobia.11. The Post-Soviet Assault on the Jew¿s Body: The New Racial Science. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index of Names. Index of Subjects.
About the author
Henrietta Mondry is Professor and Director of the Russian Program at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her recent books include Populist Writers and the Jews: In the Footsteps of Two Hundred Years Together, St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005 (in Russian); and Pure, Strong and Sexless: Russian Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Summary
Explores the construction of the Jew's physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts since the 1880s.
