Several years later the authors of this circular had reason to share Lilienthal's disillusionment over the "benevolent intentions" of the Government. This, however, was not strong enough to uproot the original sin of the Haskalah: its constant readiness to lean for support upon "enlightened absolutism." The despotism of the orthodox and the intolerance of the unenlightened masses forced the handful of Maskilim to fall back upon those who in the eyes of the Jewish populace were the source of its sorrow and tears. There was a profound tragedy in this incongruity. The culture movement in Russia of the second quarter of the nineteenth century corresponds in its complexion to the early stage of the Mendelssohnian enlightenment in Germany, the period of the _Me'assefim_. [1] But there were also essential differences between the two. The beginning of German enlightenment was accompanied by a strong drift toward assimilation which led to the elimination of the national language from literature. In Russia the initial period of Haskalah was not marked by any sudden social and cultural upheavals. [Footnote 1: So named after the Hebrew periodical _ha-Me'assef_ "The Collector," which 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,