The never-ending literary toil, the candles, the applause, the lit-up faces; the circle of a generation and, at the center, the altar—the lecturer’s desk with its glass of water. Like summer insects over an incandescent lamp, the whole generation shriveled and burned in the flame of literary celebrations festooned with allegorical roses, each gathering having the feel of a cult performance and an expiatory sacrifice for the generation. . . . The eighties in Vilna as my mother remembered them. It was the same everywhere: sixteen-year-old girls trying to read John Stuart Mill, while at public recitals luminous personalities with bland features were playing the latest pieces by the leonine Anton, leaning heavily on the pedal and dying out on the arpeggios. But what actually happened was that the intelligentsia, with its Buckle and Rubinstein, led by luminous personalities and moved by a holy fool’s recklessness, turned resolutely toward self-immolation. The People’s Will martyrs, with Sofia Perovskaia and Zheliabov, burned in full view, like tall tar-coated torches, and the whole of provincial Russia with its “student youth” smouldered in sympathy. Not a single green leaf was to be left untouched. 65 In the 1870s and 1880s, some of the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and equality was overtly Christian. O. V. Aptekman, whose father was “one of the pioneers of Russian education among the Jews of Pavlodar,” found both the Gospel and the “people,” in the shape of Parasha Bukharitsyna, “the radiant image of a peasant girl,” in the Pskov province in 1874. “I was a socialist, and Parasha a Christian, but emotionally we were alike; I was ready for all kinds of sacrifices, and she was all about self-sacrifice. . . . And so my first pupil, Parasha, accepted my interpretation of the Gospel and became a socialist too. I was in a state of exaltation, which was to some extent religious; it was a complex and rather confused mental state, in which a genuine socialist worldview coexisted with the Christian one.” 66 Solomon Vittenberg, according to his disciple M. A. Moreinis, was a promising Talmudist when, at the age of nine, he learned Russian and persuaded his parents to let him attend the Nikolaev gymnasium . In August 1879, on the night before his execution for an attempt on the life of Alexander II and one day after his refusal to convert to Christianity, he wrote to his friends (most of whom were young Jewish rebels): Dear friends! Naturally, I do not want to die. To say that I am dying willingly would be a lie on my part. But let this circumstance not cast a