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psyche. Berdyczewski declared: there is no reform, only liberation from restraints. This liberation will bring about savagery, destruction, and death: it is up to you to choose between death by suffocation and going up in flames. ‘I hate the people who persecute the divine Enlightenment and I am the enemy of our great luminaries who imposed upon us the whole system of dead laws and regulations. I am suffocating here’ (‘Mahanaim’).
    In Berdyczewski’s stories there are fateful encounters between man and the Devil, between man and the mysterious laws of  the universe, the world of spirits and demons. ‘There is a Providence’, he wrote in ‘Mahanaim’; ‘everything that happens down here is observed up there.’
    Berdyczewski’s passionate pursuit of mythological darkness does not always succeed. There are quite a few stories where, while he rushed to expound the great game between God and Satan, a certain impatience manifests itself in relation to man. In ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’ there is a sentence that reveals the limits of his powers of narration, and yet it is a wonderful, unforgettable sentence, almost a miniature epic poem in crystal: ‘Man is the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones.’
    Seven hundred and seventy-seven different definitions have been produced by philosophers and poets down the ages: man is a political animal, a rational being, a fallen god, a refinement of the ape, a restless being, a playing being. But before Berdyczewski nobody defined man as ‘the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones’. In ‘Without Her’ the hero confronts a choice: whether to be a holy monk or a sinful lecher. There is no middle way. The two extremes resemble one another, because they are both associated with burning, with ecstasy. There is no question of the third way: emasculation, brutishness, the dull routine of a sheep.
    Berdyczewski may have resembled, not just externally, the hero of his story ‘Alone’: ‘A short man ... who came here to complete his education. One of those people who suffer torments before they can manage a kiss ... but polish their shoes twice a day.’
    He was an autodidact, a refugee from the Jewish shadow state that still existed. He could not live in it and he could not live without it, but always and only over against it. A small man who polished his shoes twice a day and found it hard to kiss, yet who longed for madness because beyond it he spied a chance of height and depth, a short-cut to the heart of the great cosmic drama that involved the stars and winds, the desires, the cycle of nature, the great forces, bursting through the limitations of civilisation to become a beast or a god or both. He was a ghost-hunter, and that is why he was a stranger to most of the writers and the handful of Hebrew-readers of his time, most of whom were devotees of national revival and renewal, and to most Hebrew-readers of our own day too. So much for the introduction: now the discussion can begin.
    A blazing original and a faint copy (concluding remarks)
    I must reply to one question that has been asked repeatedly, in at least five different versions, something that implies a veiled attack on Berdyczewski, or me, or both of us. The question is: what is his message? Or, as our dear teachers used to ask in the good old days before there were messages, ‘What was the poet trying to say?’ I hate this question, because it implies one or other of the following: either the poet is incoherent, and didn’t manage to say what he wanted to say, and we, the class and the teacher, are poised to extract something clear from his weird mutterings, or the poet is speaking in some kind of mysterious language that we have to translate into human speech (Bialik wrote ‘In the City of Slaughter’ to teach us that when you are attacked you should strike back and not just take it passively - poor man, how he wrestled and rhymed, all because he could not put