painful challenge. The Jewish prohibition “of all idle pleasure not based on work” is “precisely what we, Russians, lack.” For “deep in the soul of every Russian, lord or peasant, there lives a small and nasty devil of passive anarchism, which instills in us a careless and indifferent attitude toward work, society, the people, and ourselves.” The more evident is the fact that “the Jews are better Europeans than the Russians,” and that, “as a psychological type, they are culturally superior to, and more beautiful than, the Russians,” the greater the resentment of the somnolent and the self-satisfied. If some Jews manage to find more profitable and beneficial places in life, it is because they know how to work, how to bring excitement to the labor process, how to “get things done” and admire action. The Jew is almost always a better worker than the Russian. It is not something to get mad about; it is something to learn from. In the matter of both personal gain and service to society, the Jew invests more passion than the long-winded Russian and, in the final analysis, whatever nonsense anti-Semites may talk, they do not like the Jew because he is obviously better, more dexterous, and more capable than they are. 89 The concept “self-hate” assumes that the unrelenting worship of one’s ethnic kin is a natural human condition. To adopt the term for a moment, all national intelligentsias are self-hating insofar as they are—by definition—dissatisfied with their nation’s performance relative to other nations or according to any number of doctrinal standards. Gorky’s version—the bitter, ardent, and hopeless love of self-described Apollonians for beautiful Mercurians—was becoming increasingly common as more and more “passive anarchists” discovered the powerful but elusive charms of the Modern Age. Inseparable from nationalism (self-love), it was as painful and fragile an infatuation as the one that Mercurians had for Apollonians. The principal attributes of each side (heart/mind, body/soul, stability/mobility, and so on) never changed, but the intensity of mutual fascination increased dramatically—especially in Russia, where the local Apollonians were almost as unprotected by modern state nationalism as the traditional Mercurians were. To put it differently, the Jewish predicament in the age of universal Mercurianism was that they found themselves not only the best among equals but also the only ones without the cover of state nationalism (make-believe Apollonianism). The Russian predicament was that they found themselves not only the worst of all large European aspirants but also the only ones under an unreformed ancien régime (which comforted them not by calling them brothers but by insisting that they were eternal children). The result was