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.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III.  AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS

1.  THE TRIUMPH OF AUTOCRACY

On March 1, 1881, Alexander II. met his death on one of the principal thoroughfares of St. Petersburg, smitten by dynamite bombs hurled at him by a group of terrorists.  The Tzar, who had freed the Russian peasantry from personal slavery, paid with his life for refusing to free the Russian people from political slavery and police tyranny.  The red terrorism of the revolutionaries was the counterpart of the white terrorism of the Russian authorities, who for many years had suppressed the faintest striving for liberty, and had sent to gaol and prison, or deported to Siberia, the champions of a constitutional form of government and the spokesmen of social reforms.  Forced by the persecutions of the police to hide beneath the surface, the revolutionary societies of underground Russia found themselves compelled to resort to methods of terrorism.  This terrorism found its expression during the last years of Alexander II. in various attempts on the life of that ruler, and culminated in the catastrophe of March 1.

Among the members of these revolutionary societies were also some representatives from among the young Jewish intelligenzia. They were in large part college students, who had been carried away by the ideals of their Russian comrades.  But few of them were counted among the active terrorists.  The group which prepared the murder of the Tzar comprised but one Jewish member, a woman by the name of Hesia Helfman, who, moreover, played but a secondary role in the conspiracy, by keeping a secret residence for toe revolutionaries.  Nevertheless, in the official circles, which were anxious to justify their oppression of the Jews, it became customary to refer to the “important role” played by the Jews in the Russian revolution.