Lev Levanda

Lev Levanda was born to a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Byelorussia. After spending three years at a state-sponsored school for Jews in his hometown, he entered the Vilna Rabbinical School in 1849, graduating in 1854 with a teacher's diploma.[2] He thereafter returned to Minsk and was appointed a teacher at the government-run Jewish school. He taught there until 1860, when he was appointed adviser on Jewish affairs (uchonyi evrei) to the Governor-General of Vilna, Mikhail N. Muravyov, a position he held until his death.[3] In this role he assisted with programs to study Jewish life and edited Russian-language state textbooks for Jewish children.[4] Levanda was instrumental in exposing false witnesses in a ritual-murder trial of several Jews from the shtetl of Shavl in 1861.[5]

Upon his arrival in Vilna, Levanda participated in the publication of the first Russian-language Jewish journal, Rassvet ('Dawn'), edited in Odessa by Osip Rabinovich, as well as its successor, Zion. His first novel, Shop of Imported Far-East Groceries, appeared in the pages of Rassvet in 1860.[6] Levanda's The Warehouse of Groceries: Pictures of the Jewish Life, a work of belles lettres, was serialized in Rassvet, and published as a book in 1869 (a Hebrew translation was published five years later).[2]

A supporter of the Russification of Eastern European Jewry, in 1864 Levanda was appointed editor of the region's official newspaper, Vilenskie gubernskie vedomosti ('Vilna Provincial News'), with a mandate to justify Muravyov's russifying campaign.[7] Following the banning of Rassvet and Zion, he began to contribute under a pseudonym to a number of liberal Russian newspapers in St. Petersburg and Vilna, including the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti.[6] In a series of articles, Levanda argued that the acquisition of civil rights hinged on the assimilation of the Jewish masses into Russian culture.[8]

In the 1870s and 1880s, he contributed to the Russian Jewish journals Evreiskaia biblioteka (Еврейская библиотека, 'Jewish Library'), Russkii evrei ('Russian Jew'), and Voskhod ('Sunrise'). In 1876 he published a collection of sketches under the title "Ocherki Proshlavo," followed later by a number of stories, such as "Chetyre Guvernera," "Lyubitelski Spektakl," and "Iz Dobravo Staravo Vryemeni," in Russkii evrei, Yevreiskoe Obozrenie, and Voskhod. He published over twenty articles on Jewish life in Poland with the title "Privislianskaia khronika" in Russkii evrei.[9][10] Other works of this period include "Essays of the Past" (1875), originally published in 1870 in Den; "Tipy i Siluety" ('Types and Silhouettes', 1881); and the historical novels The Wrath and Mercy of the Tycoon (1885) and Avraam Yosefovich (1887).

He published his best-known work, Goriachee vremia ('Seething Times'), set in the northern Pale of Settlement against the background of the Polish Uprising of 1863, in three instalments between 1871 and 1873 in Evreiskaia bibliotek.[11][12] In the novel, young Westernized Jews were urged by the hero, Sarin, to abandon Polish orientation (after 500 years of unhappy experience with the Poles) and become Russians.[1] The book was released as a book in 1875 under the title Goriachee vremia: Roman iz poslednego pol'skogo vosstaniia ('Seething Times: The Novel of the Last Polish Uprising').[13]

Levanda's political views changed dramatically following the 1881–82 pogroms across the Russian Empire, and the Russian state's hostile indifference to them.[14] With the subsequent rapid growth in Polish anti-Semitism, Levanda began writing about the rebuilding of a Jewish state in Palestine.[2] He became a leading activist for the Hibbat Zion movement and maintained close links with Leon Pinsker, author of the influential Zionist manifesto Auto-Emancipation. In "The Essence of the So-Called 'Palestine' Movement" (1884), Levanda discussed the ideas of Jewish self-determination as a "practical solution" to a "vicious cycle,"[15] and in 1885 published an important reconsideration of the position of the Jews in Russia, entitled "On 'Assimilation'".[7]

At the end of 1886, he first showed signs of a mental disorder—exacerbated by rumours of an imminent pogrom in the nearby town of Maladzyechna—as a result of which Levanda ceased his writing activities. In early 1887, his condition began to deteriorate sharply, showing signs of major depressive disorder; as a result, in May 1887, he was transported to St. Petersburg, but first refused to leave the house and was placed in a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital only after his friend Isaac Leib Goldberg promised to take him to Palestine. He died in hospital less than a year later.