![]() ![]() ![]() The minor figure of Lyamshin in The Possessed, a member of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary “five,” is, as Mr. In fact, Dostoevsky depicted only one Jewish character at any length (Isai Fomich Bumstein in The House of the Dead). Goldstein does not unduly inflate the importance of the Jewish Question for Dostoevsky, and he happily makes no attempt to endow it with more significance than it actually has in the body of the novelist’s work. * One may fear, at first sight, that it is the type of book described in the old story about the mythical Academy of Sciences which, offering a prize for a scientific study of the elephant, was mildly astonished to receive an entry entitled: The Elephant and the Jewish Question. David Goldstein’s Dostoyevsky and the Jews is a valuable study on a subject which cannot help being of interest to any reader of Dostoevsky, and it goes a long way toward lighting up one unhappy aspect of this complex, baffling, and self-contradictory genius. ![]()
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