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In framing the Jewish "petite-bourgeoisie disease," Amos Oz lists a handful of ideological "visions" that informed the Zionist project from its inception: reestablishing the Davidic Dynasty; a handful of messianic dreams; a Marxist utopia; a sober social democracy; a serene, Viennese-like bourgeois state; and last but not least the Tolstoyan-Narodnik dream (Oz). This dream enriched the Jewish national revival in the Land of Israel with ideals of personal growth and social justice to be achieved through communal life and agricultural labor. In this sense, the combination of Tolstoy's moral radicalism and Anarchic Socialism perfectly fits the utopian undercurrents of Zionism. The Narodnik version of the Zionist dream indeed merits a study of its own, but the present article takes stock of the different modes of Lev Tolstoy's reception into Hebrew culture, with an emphasis on the influence he had on three of the most outstanding writers: Aharon David Gordon, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Lea Goldberg. None of these Hebrew intellectuals sufficed with a general review of the Russian novelist's great works (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection) and essays on public affairs, as they also delved into his aesthetic and ethical thought. In this respect, their affinity for the pillars of Tolstoy's work-his view of literature as an educational tool, the "simple life," vegetarianism, and pacifism-is part and parcel of a broader phenomenon among the Eastern and Central European intelligentsia during the first decades of the twentieth century.
All three writers who are the main concern of this essay were born in Eastern Europe and were deeply influenced by Russian literature and philosophy before and after their immigration to the Land of Israel. In fact, the reception of Tolstoy into Hebrew culture is part of a broader phenomenon of Jewish-Russian contacts at the turn of the twentieth century when educated Jews born in the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Western and Southern provinces of the Russian Empire started to look for modern means of selfrealization. These contacts are evident from the involvement of Jews in Russian intellectual life as well as from the flow of aesthetic ideals and political ideologies from the Russian public sphere into Jewish discourse. This reality had a crucial effect on the formation of Modern Hebrew culture, whose preoccupation...