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.