Abstract

"The Ghost of Judaism: Reading Russian Literature after Levinas" is a religious and philosophical treatment of Osip Mandelstam, Isaak Babel, and particularly Fyodor Dostoevsky, using the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the Russian-born Franco-Jewish philosopher of radical ethics, as a specific moral focus. Levinas's thought attends to the difference between openness and objectification; to the distance between the human face and the iconic image; between the act of addressing someone and the content of what is said; and between poetry's ability to rehumanize objects which have been reduced to tools and the irresponsibility of the poetic muse. By building on and going beyond existing ethnocritical studies of 'Jewishness' and anti-semitism in Russian literature, and by considering Levinas's idea, grounded in religion, that ethics precedes ontology, this dissertation offers a Judaic ethical reading of three exemplary writers from three different genres that is distinct from prevalent models of philosophical interpretation