work
The Jew (Turgenev)
The Jew
also: Жид, Zhid
An early short story (1846) by Ivan Turgenev, set among Russian and Jewish characters during a military campaign; Chekhov invokes its period title as an unfavorable point of comparison, judging Bezhetsky's military story "The Man Who Was Shot" superior to it. The Russian title uses a period ethnic term now considered a slur; the corpus retains the historical title for accuracy while flagging it.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 21 December 1886. Moscow. §10 Turgenev's "The Jew"
The Russian title "Жид" ("Zhid") was, by Turgenev's time, already a term with a pejorative edge rather than a neutral word for "Jew" (the neutral term was "еврей"/"yevrey"); it survives in the historical title of this 1846 story and is retained here for bibliographic accuracy, not endorsement. Chekhov's own casual use of the title, without comment, reflects the unexamined ambient antisemitism of the period's literary culture rather than any particular animus of his own toward Turgenev's story.