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.
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