eelings of confusion and
shame.

It is not my intention to demonstrate the soundness and justice of the
proposed measures and to force the door which to me was always open,
but I am going to take the liberty of adding a few more words about my
hump. When did the "Jewish question" leap on my back?--I do not know.
I was born with it and under it. From the very moment I assumed a
conscious attitude towards life until this very day I have lived in
its noisome atmosphere, breathed in the poisoned air which surrounds
all these "problems," all these dark, harrowing alogisms, unbearable
to the intellect.

Who needs it? Whom does it benefit? If all this exists and is
supported, if there are people who assert it fiercely and firmly,
there must be some definite sense in it; evidently, the Pale, the
educational norm, and the rest increase mankind's sum of joy, exalt
life, broaden the limits of human possibilities. Taking a logical
point of departure, that is what I thought, but this same logic
dictated to me an absolutely negative answer to all these questions:
no one needs it, it brings good to no one: all these discriminations
not only do not increase the sum of joy on this earth, but engender a
multitude of wholly unnecessary, aimless sufferings; some they
oppress, and others they badly corrupt. And yet I, a Russian
intellectual, a happy representative of the sovereign race, although
fully conscious and convinced that the "Jewish question" is no
question at all,--I felt powerless and doomed to the most sterile
tribulation of spirit. For, all the clear-cut arguments of my
intellect, the most fervent tirades and speeches, the sincerest tears
of compassion and outcries of indignation unfailingly broke against a
dull, unresponsive wall. But all powerlessness, if it is unable to
prevent a crime, becomes complicity; and this was the result:
personally guiltless of any offence against my brother, I have become
in the eyes of all those unconcerned and those of my brother himself,
a Cain.

The first consequence of my fatal powerlessness was that the Jew did
not trust me, which meant that I lost my self-confidence. Living
together with the Jews as my co-citizens, being in constant personal
and business relations with them, in the field of consorted social
work, I came face to face with the Jewish "problem" every single
day,--and every single day of my life I felt with intolerable keenness
all the falsehood and wretched ambiguity of m