These were years of which the Jewish poet, Simon Frug, could sing: Round about all is silent and cheerless, Like a lonesome and desert-like plain.
If but one were courageous and fearless And would cry out aloud in his pain! Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night, And the days neither cloudy nor bright: O my people, how sad is thy state, How gray and how cheerless thy fate! But in this silence the national idea was slowly maturing and gaining in depth and in strength.

The time had not yet arrived for clearly marked tendencies or well-defined systems of thought.

But the temper of the intellectual classes of Russian Jewry was a clear indication that they were at the cross-roads.

The "titled" _inteligenzia_, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other _intelligenzia_, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.
True, the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language, which had arisen towards the end of the seventies, had lost in quantity.

The _Razvyet_ had ceased to appear in 1883, and the _Russki Yevrey_ in 1884.
The only press organ to remain on the battlefield was the militant _Voskhod_, which was the center for the publicistic, scientific, and poetic endeavors of the advanced intellectuals of that period.