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...?"

"To whose interest is it that Europe should despise me, hate and fear
m