Nadson died of consumption when he was twenty-five years old—for “beautiful are the thorns of suffering for humanity.” His fame lasted into the early twentieth century, and so did his image of a Jew weighed down by “the burden of woes” and the “futile expectation of deliverance.” The more visible the Jews became as bankers, brokers, doctors, lawyers, students, artists, journalists, and revolutionaries, the more focused Russian highbrow literature became on Jews as victims of abuse. For Chekhov, Uspensky, Garin- Mikhilovsky, Gorky, Andreev, Sologub, Korolenko, Kuprin, Staniukovich, Artsybashev, Briusov, Balmont, Bunin, and countless others (whatever their private ambivalence), the members of the “disparaged nation” had come out of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” not Gogol’s Taras Bulba (which had attempted to transfer to high culture the rhetoric of Cossack resentment). There were some dignified old men with silver beards and some beautiful Rebeccas with fiery eyes, but the overwhelming majority were pathetic but irrepressible victims of insult and injury. Jews were not “the people,” but they were good people. 62 Overall, however, Jews were as marginal to the Russian literary imagination as “the Jewish question” was to the ambitions of most Jewish converts to Pushkin and/or the revolution. Most Jews joining reading circles, Russian schools, secret societies, and friendship networks sought admission—and were welcomed—not as Jews but as fellow believers in Pushkin and the revolution, fellow Mercurians longing for Apollonian harmony, fellow rebels against patriarchy, and fellow sufferers for humanity. In the small towns of the Pale of Settlement, secular education often began at home or in all-Jewish reading circles, sometimes led by a student in the role of the yeshiva rabbi. “I remember as if it were today,” wrote one circle participant, “with what remarkable feeling of fear and awe I and other students sat on a wooden bench near a large brick oven that was hardly warm. Opposite us, at a table, sat a young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight.” As another memoirist said of her circle leader, “his knowledge was unlimited. I believed that, were there only a few more like him, one could already begin the revolution.” The main subjects were the Russian language, Russian classical literature, and a variety of socialist texts, mostly Russian but also translations from English and German. Better Russian led to more and more reading, and reading usually led to an epiphany similar to the one the future revolutionary M. I. Drei experienced upon reading D. I. Pisarev’s “Progress in the World of Plants and Animals”: