Encounters with Mephistopheles

Class starts Jan 8 10:45am-12:00pm

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

This class will explore the ultimate source of evil as it has been visualized and understood in the 20th century by two writers whose works evolved out of their immediate experiences with Nazi totalitarianism.

We will read two works of fiction—one long and one short—that explore this subject in radically different ways—one by a German securely domiciled in America in 1943, the other, by a Czech Jew who, as a teenager, found himself in Theresienstadt before being sent to Auschwitz. Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann, contains an interview with Beelzebub; Night and Hope, by Arnošt Lustig, depicts the true evil as something terrifyingly invisible in the horrors of the “model” Nazi concentration camp. These visions collide but do not cancel each other out in the history of the 20th century.

Today, colonial and post-colonial history is thought by many, especially within academia, to embody the ultimate evil of our time. Alternatively, in contemporary film and popular fiction, the devil has usually been portrayed as simply an ancient evil (e.g., “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” etc.); but Mann and Lustig link their representations of the devil to quite other factors and invite us to a deeper reflection on the nature of this ultimate evil as we collectively drive into the conflicts and catastrophes of the 21st Century.

Depending on how quickly we can move through the two main texts, we may (as I hope) be able to reserve some time for a consideration two additional texts that represent Soviet reality, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Master and Margarita, which are listed below as “Further Reading.”

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following texts:

Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann, (NY: Knopf publishers). Paperback available through Amazon.
Night and Hope, Arnošt Lustig (George Theiner, translator). Available in hardcover or kindle through Amazon. If unavailable or difficult to obtain, I will provide copies for the class.

Further Reading:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, H. T. Willetts, translator, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). Paperback available through Amazon.
The Master and Margarita, Nikolai Bulgakov, translators Diana Burgin, Katherine Tiernan O’Connor; (Harry N. Abrams publisher). Paperback available through Amazon.

Questions? Read our 2025 Winter Program FAQ.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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