The DSEELC Literature and Culture Forum welcomes Dr. Susan McReynolds (Northwestern University) to Ohio State for her talk "For Those Who Can See: Dostoevsky's Role in the Evolution of 'Aryan Christianity'"
Abstract: Dostoevsky is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important contributors to the complex story of how Christianity has interacted with the pressures of modern thought. In this paper, Professor Susan McReynolds outlines a crucial but under-appreciated aspect of how Dostoevsky attempted to transform Christian belief into a modern sensibility capable of surviving in a rationalist, skeptical era. Focusing on what he called “the Russian Idea,” she explicates how his primarily German aesthetic idealist philosophical heritage equipped him with a vocabulary and set of values he could draw on to create a “Russian Christ.” The process by which Dostoevsky Russianized the figure of Jesus, Dr. McReynolds shows, displays many parallels with the Germanization and Aryanization of Christ being accomplished by some of his contemporaries in Germany, with equally portentous implications for the twentieth century. This paper thus supplies a missing Russian chapter to the re-evaluation of the relationship between Christianity and fascism, exemplified by studies such as Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-45 (Cambridge 2003) and Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton 2008)
This event is open to the University community.
