a miracle an arbitrary violation of the
natural, logical, inevitable order of things. But to him who
contemplates life proper, not the table of multiplication,--logic
itself appears as the greatest of all miracles. Oh, if logic would
really reign supreme in life; oh, if in our cursed human existence,
where there are so many aimless and unnecessary sorrows and tears and
wild outrages, the simplest "two and two is four" would not be the
rarest of miracles, equal to the transubstantiation of water into
precious wine. Would millions of individually innocent human beings
perish in this most terrible of wars, if instead of a dark and
terrible _alogism_ a clear and lucid syllogism lay at the basis of our
intricate and enigmatical existence? It is logic that is the true
miracle, and "two and two is four" is that extraordinary happiness,
which falls so seldom to our lot!

And just as I rejoiced as at miracles, at Russia's achievement of
temperance, and Poland's rebirth in the same way, I now marvel at the
coming solution of the "Jewish question," the immemorial and darkest
of alogisms. There is something festive in it; it stirs up in me a
feeling of serene and immense joy, bordering on religious
exaltation.... And the fact that for me, as well as for many other
Russian writers, _all this_ was never even a problem, does not by any
means diminish the extraordinary character of what is going to happen;
for a plain brotherly kiss is almost a miracle and can move one to
tears at the time when the rule of life and its highest wisdom is a
fierce war of brother against brother.

And how can I help feeling this extraordinary import, I, a Russian
intellectual, if, together with the solution of the "question" my
soul, too, is suddenly set free. It is delivered from all the habitual
and harrowing experiences that, constant companions of my days and
nights as they have been, have acquired all the peculiarities of those
chronic and incurable ailments, to which the grave alone can bring
release. For, if to the Jews themselves the "Pale," the "norm," etc.,
were a fatal and impregnable fact, which deformed their entire life,
they were also for me, a Russian, something in the nature of a hump on
my back, a stationary and ugly growth, arising no one knows when or
under what circumstances. Wherever I went and whatever I did, the hump
was with me; at night it disturbed my sleep, and in my waking hours,
when I was among people, it filled me with f