At one and the same time, considerable headway was made by the periodical press in the popular vernacular, called Jargon, or Yiddish. The _Jüdisches Volksblatt_, a weekly publication, appeared in St. Petersburg from 1881 to 1890. The _Hausfreund_, the _Jüdische Volksbibliothek_, the _Jüdische Bibliothek_, edited by Spektor, Shalom Aleichem, and I. L. Perez, respectively, were published in Warsaw and Kiev between 1888 and 1895. _Der Jud_, a Yiddish weekly, was issued in Warsaw in 1899-1902. As for the Jewish press in the Russian language, the former mouthpiece of the progressive _intelligenzia_, the _Voskhod_, which appeared at the same time as a weekly and as a monthly publication, leaned more and more towards the national movement. Another Russian-Jewish weekly, _Budushchnost_, "The Future," which appeared in St. Petersburg from 1899 to 1903, was Zionistic in tendency. In the theoretic branch of publicistic literature the dominant figure during that period was Ahad Ha'am, whose articles endeavored to answer not only the exciting questions of the day, but also the perpetual problems of Judaism. His brief semi-philosophic, semi-publicistic essays, under the general heading _Perurim_ ("Titbits"), served as a lode star for those who hoped to find the synthesis of "Jew" and "man" in modern Jewish nationalism. In a series of articles he lashes "slavery in freedom,"[26] or the assimilation of the emancipated Jews of Western Europe; he criticizes the theory of "Nationalism without Zion," and the manifestations of a Jewish Nietzscheanism with its denial of the Jewish ethical doctrine. Not satisfied with mere criticism, he formulates in these articles the principles of a "spiritual revival"[27] in the sense of a nationalization of Jewish culture. The essays of Ahad Ha'am, which were subsequently collected under the title _'Al Parashat Derakim_, "At the Parting of the Ways,"[28] represent a profound and closely reasoned system of thought which is firmly grounded in historico-philosophical premises. In the forefront of publicists of a less theoretic turn of mind stood the talented Nahum Sokolow, the editor of the _ha-Tzefirah_ in Warsaw, who, after some vacillation, joined the ranks of political Zionism. In the border-land between journalism and literary criticism the most conspicuous figures were David Frischman and Micah Joseph Berdychevsky. The former emphasized in his brilliant literary essays the necessity of a "Europeanization" of Judaism, while the latter championed the cause of Nietzcheanism, protesting against the suppression of the "man" in the "Jew," and against the predominance of the spiritual over the material in the doctrine of Judaism. Berdychevsky is also the author of a number of sketches portraying the tragic split in the soul of the Jewish intellectual and the primitive harmoniousness of the old hasidic world.