Mikhail O. Gershenzon ^People

Unable to gain entrance into a Russian university where there were quotas for Jews, he was sent to study engineering in Berlin. Thereheaudited courses on history, especially those taught by Theodore Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke. Retur- ning home, he gained entrance to Moscow University, ironically arriving at the same time thatthousands of Jews were forced toevacuate the city. During the late 1890s, Ger-shenzon began publishing articles on Russian intellectual history. nI time he became known as a master stylist in Russian. Applying ideas from decadence and modernismto the study of Russian national culture, Gershenzon composed complimentary por- traits of such heroes as Pavel Chaadaev, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Aleksandr Herzen. In addition, Gershenzon depicted the aristocratic culture of Russia under Nicholas I as a patristic idyll where kindness, stupidity, and noble insouciance joined together to form a society that was spiritually whole. For Gershenzon, spiritual wholeness and completeness were operative categories that defined whether a person was positive or negative. Although refusing to convert, he did not practice Judaism nor believein its tenets. Instead he conceived of a cosmic force that united all beings and objects together in the universe. Hisinterest in modern Judaism culminated in his two books that were published in early Soviet Russia: Kleich very (The Key to Faith, 1921) and Sud'by evreiskogo naroda (The Fate of the Jewish People, 1922).