Read your blog with deep interest. Was happy to read the
Wiki-excerpt. It prompted me to re-investigate the debate to see where,
and if, I went off the rails in my beliefs. After perusing the texts
below, I have to conclude, as in all things, the matter is a complicated
one. Mr. Dostoevsky was certainly a product of his times and his place,
and his insights and affirmations on the forces most threatening to the
peoples and the society he loved seemed to have been influenced and, in
no small measure, by his nations' most entrenched and popular
prejudices against the Jews. That there were bigger bigots and jerks
making great art in that same period, does not excuse an artist, endowed
with such literary power and such intellectual gifts, from using his
art to give those shits a sharp smack in the nose for all the world to
see -- as Nietzsche did to his once beloved-mentor, the rabid
anti-Semite Wagner.
Loved the blog, though. Here are some of the texts I found on the discussion you raised.
LINKS
4] Here's a link to an obit for a renowned
Dostoevsky scholar who struggled with the writer's views on race -- skip
to the penultimate paragraph...
All the best,
Emory