Literary knowledge between translation and migration: The case of dostoevsky in Israel

In Dostoevsky’s 1872 Demons (famously badly translated as The Possessed), the great novelist’s reading of the battle between conservative and revolutionary, the various revolutionary nihilistic and absurd ideologies are pitted against a hapless and ineffectual elite utterly unable to cope with a destructive wave about to crash on them. But how could one read the early Zionists’ Hebrew translation of the novel, how could young socialist-Zionist intellectuals map their struggles, how could the post-Holocaust generation find meaning in the Demons? Here we have history translated and calibrated over and again: A post-1947 generation reading, a 1920s generation reading, and an 1872 novel analyzing an incipient political showdown.