The Art of Sincerity: Essayistic Mode in the Works of Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner and Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This article examines the complex of connections between Yosef Ḥ ayyim Brenner’s work and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s art and thought. A writer, critic, editor, publicist, and translator, Brenner was a key figure in the Hebrew republic of letters in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although Brenner’s writings deal extensively with existential dilemmas of the Jewish people, his fiction and publicist writing demonstrate an obvious affinity for Russian literature, particularly Dostoyevsky’s narrative art. The first part of this article discusses ideological and poetic aspects of Brenner’s works that combine his experience of “recovering” from the ideas of universalist socialism during his service in the tsarist army with his affinity for Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. The second part addresses the influence on Brenner’s early conceptual novels of the artistic stratagems employed by Dostoyevsky to critique the Enlightenment in Notes from the Underground. The third part offers a comparative analysis of the artistic stratagems used in the publicist writings of Dostoyevsky and Brenner, particularly their attempts to incorporate fictional elements into journalistic texts.