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 new novel, "The Scum of the Age," picturing the life of the modern Jewish youth who were engulfed in the Russian revolutionary propaganda. But the hand which knew how to portray the horrors of the old conscription was powerless to reproduce, except in very crude outlines, the world of political passions which was foreign to the author, and the novel remained unfinished. [Footnote 1: See on that period Vol. I, p. 144 et seq.] The reaction of the eighties produced no change in Bogrov's attitude. He breathed his last in a distant Russian village, and was buried in a Russian cemetery, having embraced Christianity shortly before his death, as a result of a sad concatenation of family circumstances. Before the young generation which entered upon active life in the eighties lay the broken tablets of Russian Jewish literature. New tablets were needed, partly to restore the commandments of the preceding period of enlightenment, partly to correct its mistakes. CHAPTER XXI THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III. AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS 1. THE TRIUMPH OF AUTOCRACY