Corey Robin

Tag: Dostoevsky

The Jewish canary in the liberal democratic coal mine

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Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle! —Dostoevsky One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about […]

Love and Money: On Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country”

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The title of Keith Gessen’s new novel is A Terrible Country, but the novel is less about a country than a city: Moscow. Not just Moscow as a city in its own right, though the city is very much a character in the novel, but the experience of Moscow by an American millennial, Andrei Kaplan, a 30-something academic in flight from his failures in Brooklyn, failures of love and work, family and friends. A Terrible Country, in other words, is the anti-Brooklyn novel. If the Brooklyn of the public imagination is the place where young intellectuals move to make their lives among writers, journalists, academics, and artists, public lives that happen out of doors, in parks and readings and rallies and talks […]