was founded in Berlin in 1784. Compare Vol. I, p. 386,
n. 3.]

On the contrary, it laid the foundations for a national literary
renaissance which in the following period was destined to become an
important social factor.

5. THE JEWS AND THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

As for the Russian people, an impenetrable wall continued as theretofore
to keep it apart from the Jewish population. To the inhabitants of the
two Russian capitals and of the interior of the Empire the Pale of
Settlement seemed as distant as China, while among the Russians living
within the Pale the sparks of former historic conflagrations, the
prejudices of the ages and the unenlightened notions of days gone by
were still glimmering beneath the ashes. The ignorance of some and the
vicious prejudices of others could not very well manifest themselves in
periodical literature, for the simple reason that in pre-reformatory
Russia, throtled by the hand of the censorship, none was in existence.
Only in Russian fiction one might see the shadow of the Jew moving
across. In the imagination of the great Russian poet Pushkin this shadow
wavered between the "despised Jew" of the street (in the "Black Shawl,"
1820) and the figure of the venerable "old man reading the Bible under
the shelter of the night" (in the "Beginning of a Novel," 1832). On the
other hand, in Gogol's "Taras Bulba" (1835-1842) the Jew bears the
well-defined features of an inhuman fiend. In the delineation of the
hideous figure of "Zhyd Yankel," a mercenary, soulless, dastardly
creature, Gogol, the descendant of the haidamacks, [1] gave vent to his
inherited hatred of the Jew, the victim of Khmelnitzki [2] and the
haidamacks. In these dismal historic tragedies, in the figures of the
Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable,
terror-stricken creatures." Thus one of the principal founders of
Russian fiction set up in its very center the repelling scarecrow of a
Jew, an abomination of desolation, which poured the poison of hatred
into the hearts of the Russian readers and determined to a certain
extent the literary types of later writers.

[Footnote 1: Name of the Ukrainian rebels who rose in the seventeenth
century against the tyranny of their Polish masters. Compare Vol. I, p.
182, n. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Compare Vol. I, p. 144 et seq.]

In the back-yards of Russian literature, which were then most of all
patronized by the reading public, the literary slanderer Thaddeus
Bulgarin