And how can I help feeling this extraordinary import, I, a Russian intellectual, if, together with the solution of the "question" my soul, too, is suddenly set free. It is delivered from all the habitual and harrowing experiences that, constant companions of my days and nights as they have been, have acquired all the peculiarities of those chronic and incurable ailments, to which the grave alone can bring release. For, if to the Jews themselves the "Pale," the "norm," etc., were a fatal and impregnable fact, which deformed their entire life, they were also for me, a Russian, something in the nature of a hump on my back, a stationary and ugly growth, arising no one knows when or under what circumstances. Wherever I went and whatever I did, the hump was with me; at night it disturbed my sleep, and in my waking hours, when I was among people, it filled me with feelings of confusion and shame.
It is not my intention to demonstrate the soundness and justice of the proposed measures and to force the door which to me was always open, but I am going to take the liberty of adding a few more words about my hump. When did the "Jewish question" leap on my back?—I do not know. I was born with it and under it. From the very moment I assumed a conscious attitude towards life until this very day I have lived in its noisome atmosphere, breathed in the poisoned air which surrounds all these "problems," all these dark, harrowing alogisms, unbearable to the intellect.
Who needs it? Whom does it benefit? If all this exists and is supported, if there are people who assert it fiercely and firmly, there must be some definite sense in it; evidently, the Pale, the educational norm, and the rest increase mankind's sum of joy, exalt life, broaden the limits of human possibilities. Taking a logical point of departure, that is what I thought, but this same logic dictated to me an absolutely negative answer to all these questions: no one needs it, it brings good to no one: all these discriminations not only do not increase the sum of joy on this earth, but engender a multitude of wholly unnecessary, aimless sufferings; some they oppress, and others they badly corrupt. And yet I, a Russian intellectual, a happy representative of the sovereign race, although fully conscious and convinced that the "Jewish question" is no question at all,—I felt powerless and doomed to the most sterile tribulation of spirit. For, all the clear-cut arguments of my intellect, the most fervent tirades and speeches, the sincerest tears of compassion and outcries of indignation unfailingly broke against a dull, unresponsive wall. But all powerlessness, if it is unable to prevent a crime, becomes complicity; and this was the result: personally guiltless of any offence against my brother, I have become in the eyes of all those unconcerned and those of my brother himself, a Cain.
The first consequence of my fatal powerlessness was that the Jew did not trust me, which meant that I lost my self-confidence. Living together with the Jews as my co-citizens, being in constant personal and business relations with them, in the field of consorted social work, I came face to face with the Jewish "problem" every single day,—and every single day of my life I felt with intolerable keenness all the falsehood and wretched ambiguity of my situation, that of an oppressor against one's will. In the doctor's office, at my desk, in the editorial room, in the street, finally in jail, where together with the Jew I fulfilled the all-Russian prison duty—everywhere I remained the privileged "Russian," the representative of the sovereign race, the baron,—without the baronial blazon. And with horror I noticed that even the eyes of a Jew-friend were dimmed with strange shadows ... that terrible images surged behind my friendly Russian shoulders and mingled wholly unsuitable noises and voices with my sincere plea for "world citizenship." ... And yet he knew me well, he knew my attitude toward the Jews,—how about those who know only that I am a "Russian"?
I remember having spent one night in talking with a very gifted writer, a Jew, who was my casual and most welcome guest. I was trying to convince him that he, a great master of the word, ought to write, but he repeated obstinately that although he loves the Russian language with all his artist's heart, he cannot write in it, in the language which has the word zhid.[1] Of course, logic was on my side, but on his side there was some dark truth—truth is not always lucid—and I felt, that my ardent arguments began, little by little, to sound like false and cheap babbling. So that I have not succeeded in convincing him, and when we parted I had not the courage to kiss him: how many unexpected meanings could be disclosed in this plain, everyday token of friendship and affection?
Things are altogether bad when even a kiss becomes suspicious and can be susceptible of "interpretation," as a complicated act of intricate and enigmatic relations! That is exactly what happened. And how many odd and nightmare-like misunderstandings were engendered by the poisonous mist in which we all wandered, both friends and foes, and in which the outlines of the plainest objects and feelings assumed the dismal grotesqueness of phantoms. I cannot help recalling here the case of E.A. Chirikov, which at the time excited much comment: the noble and fervent champion of the persecuted race, the author of the drama "Jews," which has more than any other Russian drama contributed to the dispersion of the evil prejudice,—this man was suddenly, in a most absurd manner, without a shadow of foundation, insulted by the accusation of anti-Semitism; and—to think of it!—it was necessary to furnish proofs that the accusation was false. What a painful, what a wholly disgraceful absurdity!
"Who needs all this? Who does not know it?" wearily thought every one of us, again and again realising the harrowing necessity of convincing some unbeliever, that two and two is four ... nothing but four!
And abroad? "What an injustice!"—thought I, when the cultured West, having separated me from Tolstoy, as if I had stolen him, handed me on the spot, a bill for the "excesses" known the world over, at the same time frowning unambiguously upon my eternal hump. The West refused to consider that I, too, am against this. I was considered a Russian, and the question was put this way: "Tell me, why in your country, in Russia?..."
It is ridiculous and utterly odd to think that our far-famed "barbarism" of which our enemies accuse us and which puts our friends out of countenance, is based wholly and exclusively on our Jewish question and its bloody excesses. Take away from Russia these excesses, leave, if you wish, the anti-Semitism, but in that externally decorous form in which it still exists in the backward portions of Europe,—and we shall become at once decent Europeans, and not Asiatics and barbarians, whose proper place is beyond the Ural. This is a fact the obviousness of which every new day of the present war makes more strikingly evident.
Of course culturally we are far behind the world, our economic life is undeveloped, our civic life is at a low level, and all the aspects of our life show clearly that we have not as yet broken the shell of the egg. But we are young, we are only beginning, and for a people who abolished serfdom only half a century ago, we have done quite a good deal,—so that, at the worst, lack of culture is the only reproach which a European with a sense of justice will fling at us. But it is enough to put side by side the words "Russian" and "Jew,"—and I become at once a barbarian, a dark and terrible being, who chills and darkens resplendent Europe. At once in America people begin to hate me, in England and France to despise me; with the swiftness of theatrical transformations Tolstoy's compatriot turns into the brother of those who drive nails into their neighbours' heads,—I become a barbarian. And even the German anti-Semite, a stupid and dull creature, looks down at me and warns England: "See with whom you are friends? Are they not the same people who...?"