The Reification of Evil and The Failure of Theodicy: The Devil in ...

Dostoevsky’s dazzling brilliance could harbor such primitive anti-Semitic fantasies. Suffice it
for the present essay to make these three remarks. First, his anti-Semitism seems to be only one
of his many hatreds, which also includes (in addition to Catholics and Lutherans), the Germans,
Poles, and French, among others. He was perhaps an irritable man to whom such strong
opinions came readily. Second, on Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, which seems especially virulent
among these hatreds, I share McDuff’s sad view that here, the great author is “in depressing
conformity to the rule” in literature that also stretches “from Chaucer and Shakespeare and
Marlowe through Smollett, Voltaire, Dickens and Thackeray to Eliot and Pound”. And finally,
while I have just called Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic diatribes “primitive”, as indeed they are, they
are also modern and continue through Nazi Germany – as demonstrated in the citation given
above from Dr. Faustus – and into the present time.