He played the provincial card—“I cannot even find a competent person”—but that was just a gambit. No doubt he was hoping that Korolenko would invite him to write for his important thick journal, Russkoe Bogatstvo. However, in a letter to Korolenko a little over a year later, Jabotinsky suggested that his problems stemmed from the fact that his writings were out of step with the leading fashions; he did not fulfill the social demands of “critical realism”—that is, he was not sufficiently politically engaged. Even specialized journals, such as Mir Bozhii, rejected him for ideological reasons. Jabotinsky continues,
For two years the liberal journals in the cities have been regularly returning my works to me, mainly poems, rejecting them. . . . And what is more, Mir Bozhii sent one poem back to me only because “its idea was deeply false from the sociological point of view.” I considered such a treatment of the issue to be sui generis—and a very dangerous kind of censorship; so I wrote an open letter about it to Novosti. But since this letter is another of my works, it too was not printed. [As they say,] “They beat them and don’t even let them scream.”14
However, there is something disingenuous in Jabotinsky’s complaints, since he was a popular journalist with a decent salary, and his articles appeared regularly in Odesskie Novosti. Maybe he considered popularity in provincial Odessa beneath him, although he acknowledged that he enjoyed the attention he received from the locals, including the young ladies of the town.15
Jabotinsky had more luck as a journalist and dramatist with the Decadent crowd that was forming in the last decade of the nineteenth century than with populists like Korolenko. Already in 1892, Dmitry Merezhkovsky had shocked Russia’s elite with his lecture, “The Causes for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature and New Trends in It,” which inaugurated the Decadent movement in Russia.16 With Merezhkovsky came other writers, such as Zinaida Gippius and Akim Volynsky, whose work was published in the journal Northern Flowers (Severnye Tsvety).17 These and other writers condemned populism, social criticism, and the judgment of literature strictly for its political value. In contrast, these authors defended the individual’s right to ignore society’s problems and to give expression to beauty, love, and a person’s internal emotions—eros, joy, or sadness.
Jabotinsky strongly identified with this new movement. Although in his autobiography he insisted that he preferred adventure novels—apparently he was trying to give the impression that in his youth he was not an egghead or budding intellectual, but rather a “can-do” person—in fact, he read highbrow literature: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pushkin, as well as Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov. Chekhov apparently had a huge influence on young Russians in the 1890s. Kornei Chukovsky, later a famous Soviet poet and a friend of Jabotinsky’s in Odessa, describes Chekhov’s omnipresence: “Chekhov’s books seemed the only truth about everything that was happening around us. You read a Chekhov story and then look out of the window and see a continuation of what you have just read. All the inhabitants of our city, all of them without exception, were, for me, characters from Chekhov. . . . And I perceived every cloud, every tree, forest path, every landscape, in the city or the countryside, as quotations from Chekhov. I had never before observed such an identification of literature with life; even the sky above me was Chekhovian.”18
While in Rome, Jabotinsky introduced Chekhov to an Italian audience.19 In all, Jabotinsky published a few articles in the Italian press, but in this, his first serious publication of literary criticism, he wanted to give a taste of the latest currents in Russia. Published in the literary journal Nuova Antologia (1901), the article concentrates on Maxim Gorky and Chekhov. In an article that pays tribute to “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” Ivan Turgenev’s famous portrayal of the intellectual’s dilemma in Russia, Jabotinsky portrays Chekhov as offering a diagnosis of society’s problems while Gorky provides the solution.20 For Turgenev, both Hamlet and Don Quixote had embodied positive and negative qualities: Hamlet was plagued by contemplation and fear of action, while Don Quixote shot off into action without thinking.
Naming the new trend a “literature of moods,” Jabotinsky contrasts Chekhov and Gorky. Chekhov is the “singer of pain, preeminent creator of that grey and depressing emptiness that contemporary life has become.” Jabotinsky continues, “In Chekhov we have only a single feeling, a single note, to which all the melodies of his plays are attuned. . . . Real boredom will catch up with you later and you will be tortured for several days as if by a nightmare, by the terrible thought: ‘What is the damn point of life in this world!’”21
In contrast to the Chekhovian Hamlet, Jabotinsky presents Gorky’s protagonist, the barefoot wanderer (bosiak). “For Maxim Gorky’s tramps, morality does not exist. His wanderers do not shrink from committing crimes, even crimes that are savage—yet by no means petty in intent and execution.”22 Jabotinsky points out that the wanderer is misunderstood by many who want Gorky’s hero to represent their own political viewpoint. They interpret him as a member of the proletariat or representative of the simple people. In fact, the wanderer is neither. He is an individual, but one entirely indifferent to social issues or the problems of others. Nonetheless, the character’s appearance is timely because “the time has not come for contemplation, but for constructive action; yet in order to build, one must struggle. And to be able to struggle, one needs to have desire, passionate and bold desire.”23 Jabotinsky prefers Don Quixote to Hamlet.
According to Jabotinsky’s biographers, when he returned to Odessa in 1901, he intended to return to Rome to finish his law degree.24 However, he was offered a full-time position with Odesskie Novosti, a job that included a significant salary increase. Furthermore, he became the paper’s theater critic, a role that gave him access to the city’s opera and theaters free of charge. Though still a young man, he attained a prized status among Odessa’s bourgeoisie. He describes this position: “The sense of being popular . . . was sweet and pleasant at the age of twenty-one. ‘Journalist’ was an important title in the Russian provinces in those days. It was pleasant to enter the city theater, one of the most beautiful in the country, for free, with the usher dressed in the solemn attire of the time of Marie Antoinette, bowing and accompanying you to a seat in the fifth row, which was adorned with a bronze plaque engraved with ‘Mr. Altalena.’”25 Only a few years earlier Jabotinsky’s theatergoing had entailed waiting many hours for a low-cost seat in the upper rows.
The themes of individuality and creativity that appealed to him in Italy found expression in his talks at the Literary Club in Odessa, in his newspaper columns, in his stories, and in the plays that he wrote and produced at the City Theater.26 In all of these venues, he found different readers, but his message was the same: individualism. Two of his dramas were staged at the Odessa City Theater, Blood (Krov’, 1901) and It’s All Right (Ladno, 1902).27 A typical monologue from It’s All Right conveys the timbre of his voice and the content of his thinking. The play is not rooted in any plot but patched together in monologues. The protagonist, Korol’kov (whose name comes from the Russian for “small king”), expresses the author’s preoccupations, especially the assertion that the individual has priority over the collective and has a right to purely personal goals. A typical monologue expresses Jabotinsky’s radical individualism:
I acknowledge one sole right
for myself alone—only one, but for all that,
vast, without limits. No one
must. There is no obligation. A child involuntarily
comes into the world, and life hits him cruelly and painfully,—
so is he not right to consume his whole life
in the struggle for happiness, for his own personal happiness? . . .
the right to oneself is given to all at birth.
No obligation to anyone. Chase after pleasure,
be happy, greedily believe your desire—
and be afraid to sacrifice yourself, because