| Sumario: | This paper offers a close critical reading of I. J. Singer's little-noted short story "Liuk." This story is read in a Russian rather than Yiddish literary context to show the way in which Singer, writing as a Jew disillusioned with the false messianic promise of the Russian Revolution, engages in a polemic with the established equation of dogs with Jews in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Tracing the development of this typology through a range of Russian fiction and poetry from Pushkin to Blok, this analysis seeks to demonstrate that Russian folk proverbs, as much as literary typologies developed from folk attitudes, equated dogs with Jews in the Russian popular consciousness. This attitude, while undergoing significant changes through the course of the nineteenth century in regard to Russian attitudes towards dogs, remained fundamentally unchanged in regard to Jews, even after the Revolution. By drawing on the Russian literary tradition in relation to Singer's treatment of a typological pairing of "general" and "dog" in this story, this paper seeks to illustrate Singer's hardening conviction that the world as he saw it was irredeemably animalistic, and that, however unconsciously, his work as a whole remained rooted in a determination to prove, through fiction, the truth of the biblical teaching that "the pre-eminence of man over beast is as naught."
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