HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I UNTIL THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER III
by S.M. Dubnow
A Project Gutenberg EBook
7. JEWISH LITERATURE IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE
The left wing of "enlightenment" was
represented during this period by
Jewish literature in the Russian language, which had
several noteworthy
exponents. It is interesting to observe that, whereas all
the prominent
writers in Hebrew were children of profoundly
nationalistic Lithuania,
those that wrote in Russian, with the sole exception of
Levanda, were
natives of South Russia, where the two extremes, stagnant
Hasidism and
radical Russification, fought for supremacy. The founder
of this branch
of Jewish literature was Osip (Joseph) Rabinovich
(1817-1869), a
Southerner, a native of Poltava and a resident of Odessa.
[1] Alongside
of journalistic articles he wrote protracted novels. His
touching
"Pictures of the Past," his stories "The
Penal Recruit" and "The
Inherited Candlestick" (1859-1860) called up before
the generation
living at the dawn of the new era of reforms the shadows
of the passing
night: the tortures of Nicholas' conscription and the
degrading forms of
Jewish rightlessness.
[Footnote 1: See above, p, 219.]
The fight against this rightlessness was the goal of his
journalistic activity which, prior to the publication of
the _Razswyet_,
he had carried on in the columns of the liberal Russian
press. The
problems of inner Jewish life had but little attraction
for him. Like
Riesser, he looked upon civil emancipation as a panacea
for all Jewish
ailments. He was snatched away by death before he could
be cured of this
illusion.
Rabinovich's work was continued by a talented youth, the
journalist Ilya
(Elias) Orshanski of Yekaterinoslav (1846-1875), who was
the main
contributor to the _Dyen_ of Odessa and to the
_Yevreyskaya
Bibliotyeka_. [1] To fight for Jewish rights, not to
offer humble
apologies, to demand emancipation, not to beg for it,
this attitude
lends a charm of its own to Orshanski's writings. His
brilliant analysis
of "Russian Legislation concerning the Jews"
[2] offers a complete
anatomy of Jewish disfranchisement in Russia, beginning
with Catherine
II. and ending with Alexander II.
[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 220 et seq.]
[Footnote 2: The title of his work on the same subject
which appeared in
St. Petersburg in 1877.]
Nevertheless, being a child of his age, he preached its
formula. While a
passionate Jew at heart, he championed the cause of
Russification,
though not in the extreme form of spiritual
self-effacement. The Odessa
pogrom of 1871 staggered his impressionable soul. He was
tossing about
restlessly, seeking an outlet for his resentment, but
everywhere he
knocked his head against the barriers of censorship and
police. Had he
been granted longer life, he might, like Smolenskin, have
chosen the
road of a nationalistic-progressive synthesis, but the
white plague
carried him off in his twenty-ninth year.
The literary work of Lev (Leon) Levanda (1835-1888) was
of a more
complicated character. A graduate of one of the official
rabbinical
schools, he was first active as teacher in a Jewish Crown
school in
Minsk, and afterwards occupied the post of a
"learned Jew" [1] under
Muravyov, the governor-general of Vilna. He thus moved in
the hot-bed of
"official enlightenment" and in the
headquarters of the policy of
Russification as represented by Muravyov, a circumstance
which left its
impress upon all the products of his pen. In his first
novel, "The
Grocery Store" (1860), of little merit from the
artistic point of view,
he still appears as the naive bard of that shallow
"enlightenment," the
champion of which is sufficiently characterized by
wearing a European
costume, calling himself by a well-sounding German or
Russian name (in
the novel under discussion the hero goes by the name of
Arnold),
cultivating friendly relations with noble-minded
Christians and making a
love match unassisted by the marriage-broker.
[Footnote 1: In Russian, _Uchony Yevrey_, an expert in
Jewish matters,
attached, according to the Russian law of 1844, to the
superintendents
of school districts and to the governors-general within
the Pale.]
During this stage of his career, Levanda was convinced
that "no educated
Jew could help being a cosmopolitan." But a little
later his
cosmopolitanism displayed a distinct propensity toward
Russification. In
his novel "A Hot Time" (1871-1872), Levanda
renounces his former Polish
sympathies, and, through the mouth of his hero Sarin,
preaches the
gospel of the approaching cultural fusion between the
Jews and the
Russians which is to mark a new epoch in the history of
the Jewish
people. Old-fashioned Jewish life is cleverly ridiculed
in his "Sketches
of the Past" ("The Earlocks of my
Mellammed," "Schoolophobia," etc.,
1870-1875). His peace of mind was not even disturbed by
the
manifestation, towards the end of the sixties, of the
anti-Semitic
reaction in those very official circles in which the
"learned Jew" moved
and in which Brafman was looked up to as an authority in
matters
appertaining to Judaism. [1] But the catastrophe of 1881
dealt a
staggering blow to Levanda's soul, and forced him to
overthrow his
former idol of assimilation. With his mind not yet fully
settled on the
new theory of nationalism, he joined the Palestine
movement towards the
end of his life, and went down to his grave with a
clouded soul.
[Footnote 1: Levanda sat side by side with this renegade
and informer in
the Commission on the Jewish Question which had been
appointed by the
governor-general of Vilna. (See p. 189.)]
One who stuck fast in his denial of Judaism was Grigory
Bogrov
(1825-1885). The descendant of a family of rabbis in
Poltava, he passed
"from darkness to light" by way of the curious
educational institution
of Nicholas' brand, the office of an excise farmer in
which he was
employed for a number of years. The enlightened
_Aktziznik_ [1] became
conscious of his literary talent late in life. His
protracted "Memoirs
of a Jew," largely made up of autobiographic
material, were published in
a Russian magazine as late as 1871-1873. [2] They contain
an acrimonious
description of Jewish life in the time of Nicholas I. No
Jewish artist
had ever yet dipped his brush in colors so dismal and had
displayed so
ferocious a hatred as did Bogrov in painting the old
Jewish mode of life
within the Pale, with its poverty and darkness, its
hunters and victims,
its demoralized Kahal rule of the days of conscription.
Bogrov's account
of his childhood and youth is not relieved by a single
cheerful
reminiscence, except that of a young _Russian_ girl. The
whole
patriarchal life of a Jewish townlet of that period is
transformed into
a sort of inferno teeming with criminals or idiots.
[Footnote 1: See p. 186, n. 1.]
[Footnote 2: Shortly afterwards the "Memoirs"
were supplemented by
another autobiographic novel, "The Captured
Recruit."]
To the mind of Bogrov, only two ways promised an escape
from this hell:
the way of cosmopolitanism and rationalism, opening up
into humanity at
large, or the way leading into the midst of the Russian
nation. Bogrov
himself stood irresolute on this fateful border-line. In
1878 he wrote
to Levanda that as "an emancipated cosmopolitan he
would long ago have
crossed over to the opposite shore," where
"other sympathies and ideals
smiled upon him," were he not kept within the Jewish
fold "by four
million people innocently suffering from systematic
persecutions."
Bogrov's hatred of the persecutors of the Jewish people
was poured forth
in his historic novel "A Jewish Manuscript"
(1876), the plot of which is
based on events of the time of Khmelnitzki. [1] But even
here, while
describing, as he himself puts it, the history of the
struggle between
the spider and the fly, he finds in the life of the fly
nothing worthy
of sympathy except its sufferings. In 1879 Bogrov began a
new novel,
"The Scum of the Age," picturing the life of
the modern Jewish youth who
were engulfed in the Russian revolutionary propaganda.
But the hand
which knew how to portray the horrors of the old
conscription was
powerless to reproduce, except in very crude outlines,
the world of
political passions which was foreign to the author, and
the novel
remained unfinished.
[Footnote 1: See on that period Vol. I, p. 144 et seq.]
The reaction of the eighties produced no change in
Bogrov's attitude. He
breathed his last in a distant Russian village, and was
buried in a
Russian cemetery, having embraced Christianity shortly
before his death,
as a result of a sad concatenation of family circumstances.
Before the young generation which entered upon active
life in the
eighties lay the broken tablets of Russian Jewish
literature. New
tablets were needed, partly to restore the commandments
of the preceding
period of enlightenment, partly to correct its mistakes.
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