e with this renegade and informer in
the Commission on the Jewish Question which had been appointed by the
governor-general of Vilna. (See p. 189.)]

One who stuck fast in his denial of Judaism was Grigory Bogrov
(1825-1885). The descendant of a family of rabbis in Poltava, he passed
"from darkness to light" by way of the curious educational institution
of Nicholas' brand, the office of an excise farmer in which he was
employed for a number of years. The enlightened _Aktziznik_ [1] became
conscious of his literary talent late in life. His protracted "Memoirs
of a Jew," largely made up of autobiographic material, were published in
a Russian magazine as late as 1871-1873. [2] They contain an acrimonious
description of Jewish life in the time of Nicholas I. No Jewish artist
had ever yet dipped his brush in colors so dismal and had displayed so
ferocious a hatred as did Bogrov in painting the old Jewish mode of life
within the Pale, with its poverty and darkness, its hunters and victims,
its demoralized Kahal rule of the days of conscription. Bogrov's account
of his childhood and youth is not relieved by a single cheerful
reminiscence, except that of a young _Russian_ girl. The whole
patriarchal life of a Jewish townlet of that period is transformed into
a sort of inferno teeming with criminals or idiots.

[Footnote 1: See p. 186, n. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Shortly afterwards the "Memoirs" were supplemented by
another autobiographic novel, "The Captured Recruit."]

To the mind of Bogrov, only two ways promised an escape from this hell:
the way of cosmopolitanism and rationalism, opening up into humanity at
large, or the way leading into the midst of the Russian nation. Bogrov
himself stood irresolute on this fateful border-line. 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."

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