Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz
been sown. Light your holy candle
before desire, call it your leader, wherever it would take you: for love,
art, knowledge, idleness, like a stone into the water
or on the old path of serving the people—
but you—bring onto the old road
your spirit, your new spirit, and again proclaim:
“In my struggle I respect not obligation, not an order—
I celebrate my sovereign desire!”28
This message, embodied in such phrases as “no obligation to anyone,” or “greedily trust your own desire,” underlines the right of the individual to clear any obstacles to his happiness. Here we not only see Jabotinsky’s affirmation of Gorky’s heroes, but his commonality with Nietzsche, as well as with the heroes of such Decadent writers as Fyodor Sologub, Vasily Briusov, and Vasily Rozanov.29 There is also a similarity with Sanin, the hero of Mikhail Artsybachev’s novel of the same name and a popular figure with the Decadent crowd. The novel, Sanin, which appeared in 1907, came to exemplify the Decadent worldview in which the will of the individual for personal gratification permitted one to transgress all moral prohibitions.30
Needless to say, this message of individual freedom sharply strayed from the themes of conventional Russian-Jewish theater. Regarding these works, the scholar Viktoriia Litvina has commented, “In both these plays there is no national idea. Both are interesting only as signposts of Jabotinsky’s spiritual development.”31 According to Litvina, plays by Jewish authors ordinarily reflected the collective Jewish “problem”:
Take any Jewish play—they are astoundingly typical. In the fate of the characters is the fate of the people, in the plots are the conflicts of reality. The family of a cobbler killed in a pogrom; a son goes off to the revolution, a daughter is forced to become a prostitute. . . . The drama of a revolutionary who gives all his strength to the liberation of the Russian people, who see in him only a ‘kike.’ . . . Night-time ambushes of Jews . . . the apartments of conspirators . . . tears . . . blood . . . death. . . . The heroes’ thoughts are occupied by the highest problems of the life of their people. Their main anxiety, their life task is the search for a way out of this unendurable situation.32
Jabotinsky’s commitment to individualism has additional support in his autobiography, where he notes that when he was arrested and imprisoned in the Alexandrovsk Fortress outside Odessa in 1903 for the possession of illegal literature, he gave lectures to his fellow prisoners on Decadence and individualism.33 Incidentally, in autobiographical stories written about this period of his life, Jabotinsky described aesthetic problems and erotic and psychological issues—anything but politics.34 Despite the overwhelming evidence of Jabotinsky’s affiliation with Decadence, some scholars still try to connect Jabotinsky with Marxism and political radicalism.35 After all, he was arrested, and a police dossier on him exists.36 However, if there is one thing we know about the tsarist police, it is that their investigations were as likely to mystify as enlighten. In fact, a police file should not constitute the sole proof of political allegiance. Furthermore, although Jabotinsky was a close friend of Vsevolod Lebedintsev (1881–1908), a leader in the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) movement who was executed by tsarist authorities, SRs were anti-Marxist. Additionally, this same Lebedintsev was also an opera buff and a science student. Ties going back to their school days united the two men. In short, Jabotinsky may have sympathized with Marxism, but party affiliation has not been noted in his own writings or in the memoir literature. On the other hand, the body of evidence connecting him in his youth to Decadence, Nietzscheanism, and literary modernism is overwhelming.
Journalism provides another source for tracing Jabotinsky’s development in his early years, and we find a similar pathway. He reveals his struggle for fame and then his boredom in Odessa’s Russian-language culture (in Odessa he could have joined other language groups—Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian). In his autobiography he says that his journalistic pieces were often inspired by mockery and jest. However, he underestimates the role of journalism in shaping his worldview. One might come to the mistaken conclusion that his journalistic efforts were insignificant from the following account.
Most of the readers of [Odesskie] Novosti enjoyed reading my articles, but not one of them gave them serious attention, and I was aware of that. The only one of all my articles of that period that deserves to be saved from oblivion is the one in which I openly, in black and white, called myself and all the rest of my fellow journalists “jesters.” I devoted one of my articles to one of the writers of a rival newspaper—a decent, quiet, “neutral” man, neither clever nor stupid, anonymous in the full sense of the expression—of whom I had made a kind of dummy, and who I used to ridicule at every opportunity and even without one, just for the fun of it. That time I addressed myself directly to him, and I said: “Of course I have persecuted you without any reason or necessity, and I shall continue, because we are jesters for the reading public. We preach, and they yawn; we write with the bile of our heart’s blood, and they say, ‘Well written; give me another glass of compote.’ What is there for a buffoon to do in the circus but to slap the cheek of his fellow buffoon?”37
The other journalist in the passage was likely A. E. Kaufman, who wrote for Jewish and Russian newspapers.38 Jabotinsky apparently did write such an article, but in fact his depiction of it in his autobiography does not give a truthful rendering either of the importance of journalism in Russia at that time or of his own contribution to literary, political, and social discourse in Odessa and throughout Russia’s southwest in the early 1900s.
In that time period, journalists, and especially popular writers, were considered the conscience of society. Because there was no legally recognized political opposition to the tsarist government, journalists adopted this role. In fact, one definition of an “intelligent,” a member of the “intelligentsia,” encompassed the notion of political opposition.39 The job of journalist resembled that of the muckrakers in the United States of the same era: to hold the government accountable, to expose corruption and immorality, and to use examples from real life to provide a model of proper thought and behavior. Although Jabotinsky did not express a party line, he did articulate an idea of morality and the ideals of humanism, while standing up for the independent value of art and creativity.
The real change in his life trajectory occurred sometime in 1902, when Jabotinsky began to make occasional allusions to Zionism. In his autobiography he observes:
My Zionism was also considered something frivolous. True, I did not join any group, nor did I even know who the Zionists were in the city, but several times I devoted one or two fragments in a feuilleton to the subject. In a big and decent monthly published in St. Petersburg, an article by a certain Bickerman appeared, couched in the style that was then called scientific, in which he demolished Zionism, demonstrating that Jews were a happy people, satisfied with their fate. I wrote a lengthy answer, using arguments that would satisfy me even now. The next day I met one of my acquaintances, [Yehoshua] Ravnitzky, also a “Lover of Zion,” no doubt, and he said to me, “What is this new plaything you are toying with?”40
The article that Jabotinsky criticized had appeared in Russkoe Bogatstvo and was the work of Iosif (Joseph) Bickerman, who introduced a number of arguments to conclude that Zionism was utopian, and therefore unatttainable. He claimed that Palestine was far away and the Jewish masses—living traditional lives in the towns of Eastern Europe—were traders and artisans with no experience of farming. Thus, Zionism amounted to mere dreaming.
In his response Jabotinsky threw all he had against the article’s alleged pseudoscientific tone. He discussed Bickerman’s arguments as an example of the “cheapening of science.” As science became associated with convenience, it lost its value. For example, a book that costs half a penny cannot be esteemed, however brilliant it may be. Bickerman’s pseudoscience was like that—dirt cheap. Then Jabotinsky turned to the utopian claim, mocking Bickerman’s voice:
Whatever