officer who gave her Russian books and once took her to the theater to see an Ostrovsky play (which impressed her so much she “thought of nothing else for several months”). And the Yiddish poet Aron Kushnirov, along with so many others, had World War I. It was so hard, but now it’s very easy, It’s been so long, but I have not forgotten The lessons I have learned from you, my tough old rabbi: My sergeant major, Nikanor Ilyich! Levitan had Chekhov; Bakst had Diaghilev; Leonid Pasternak had Tolstoy; and Antokolsky and Marshak, among many others, had Vladmir Stasov. Russian high culture was discovering the “powerful harmony” in the souls of Jewish “runts” even as they were discovering Russian high culture—as their first love. For Leonid Pasternak, Tolstoy embodied “the principle of love for one’s neighbor”; for the sculptor Naum Aronson, the commission to make a bust of Tolstoy was tantamount to joining the elect. “I had great hopes and ambitions but would never have aspired to sculpt the gods—for that is what Tolstoy was for me. Even to approach him seemed blasphemous.” 47 He did sculpt him, however, carving out his own place in eternity as he did so. Osip Braz painted the likeness of Chekhov that became the icon that every Russian grows up with. Marshak was to his gymnasium teachers what Peter the Great had been to his haughty Swedish “preceptors.” And Isaak Levitan became the official interpreter of the Russian national landscape—and thus a true national divinity in his own right. Tolstoy was prepared to do his part. When Stasov told him about the young Marshak’s great promise (of “something good, pure, bright, and creative”), Tolstoy seemed doubtful: “Oh, these Wunderkinder!” As Stasov wrote to Marshak: I feel the same way; I, too, have been disappointed before. But this time I defended and shielded my new arrival, my new joy and consolation! I told him that, to my way of thinking, there was a real golden kernel here. And my LEO seemed to incline his powerful mane and his regal eyes in my direction. And then I told him: “Do this for me, for the sake of everything that is sacred, great, and precious; here, take a look at this little portrait, which I have just received, and let your gaze, by fixing on this young, vibrant little face, be a long-distance blessing for him!” And he did as I