Authors

Discussion

In the 1860s, the discourse in literary journals of the Russian empire was shaped by one’s affiliation with or rejection of socialist ideas. This climate shaped many of the best-known works of that decade, in particular Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. A curious and understudied term emerged during this time.Dostoevsky and his colleague at Epoch (Epokha), Apollon Grigoryev, began occasionally referring to Chernyshevsky’s camp at the journal, The Contemporary,as “White Arabia” (Belaia Arapiia), or to its members as beloaraptsy (commonly, but misleadingly, translated as “white negroes”). This paper will trace the origins of the term’s employment in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s plays and examine its afterlives in the anti-socialist writings of Dostoevsky and those sympathetic with his views. Special attention will be paid to Dostoevsky’s use of this term in his private correspondence, his journalism of the 1860s, and his travelogue and polemical essay, Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863). I argue that socialist thinkers and revolutionary actors became the target of a particular kind of racialization during the intense polemics over nihilism in the 1860s, which permits a preliminary genealogy of the role of racialization tactics in Dostoevsky’s anti-socialist writing more broadly.