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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."
Lacking a definite practical foundation, Pinsker's doctrine could not but accomodate itself to the Palestinian colonization movement, although its insignificant dimensions were entirely out of proportion to the far-reaching plans conceived by the author of "Autoemancipation." Lilienblum and Pinsker were joined by the old nationalist Smolenskin and the former assimilator Levanda.
In them the future prominent scientists, scholars, and litterateurs were reared, and there the foundations were laid for the activities of Goldfaden, Gurland, Harkavy, Kantor, Landau, Levanda, Mandelkern, Paperna, Pumpyansky, Rosenberg, Steinberg, and others. Their fate was that of Mendelssohn's Bible translation. The end became a means, the means, an end.
Some of them fled to places of safety, and returned to Judaism. The gifted young poet Simon Yakovlevich Nadsohn died of a broken heart. Sorkin, the classmate and friend of Levanda, committed suicide, while Levanda, the great novelist of assimilation, was so affected by the massacres and their consequences, that he became melancholy, and died in an asylum for the insane.
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. During this stage of his career, Levanda was convinced that "no educated Jew could help being a cosmopolitan."
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. Alongside of journalistic articles he wrote protracted novels.
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