The Evolution of Modern Hebrew Literature, 1850-1912 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V PERETZ BEN MOSHE SMOLENSKIN (1839-1884) The biographer of Peretz Ben Moshe Smolenskin, R. Brainin, is obviously right in saying that the Smolenskin whom we know from his novels and essays, is not the one that might have been, had he written under different circumstances. In his works we see only his silhouette, not his real portrait. While his literary personality and great talent were still in the making, his life was cut short, and Hebrew literature was bereft of one of its sincerest, most talented, and most sympathetic writers. It would perhaps seem strange, at first sight, to speak of a writer of forty five, who already had behind him some fifteen years of literary activity, as still having been in his literary teens. The talents of Byron and Poe were fully developed before they had reached the years of Smolenskin, and they would probably not have added much to their fame, had they attained to twice their actual age. The literary, at least, the poetic, career of Lamartine Was practically ended at forty, though he lived to be well advanced in years. In the case of Smolenskin, however, every page of his writings testifies to the fact that we have before us a man of great literary power, but, at the same time, that this power is artistically unripe, warped, and uncontrolled. And little wonder. Neither were his pre-literary life and training conducive to an adequate preparation for his literary career, nor, did the conditions under which he carried on his activity tend fully to bring out his literary powers. Born in poverty and brought up partly under the influence of the Yeshiboth (Tal- .mudic academies), and partly under that of Hasidism, ?in an atmosphere, hostile to the spirit of modernism and secular literature, Smolenskin received neither the education nor..