Birth Pangs: The Tsarist Censor
However benign Zamenhof's idea of a language by which 'the peoples would come together as a single family'[30] might be, first he had to over- come the barrier of censorship. Ironically, his father was himself part of the bureaucracy whose task it was to shield the citizens from knowl- edge regarded as undesirable by the Tsarist regime. The teacher Marcus Zamenhof was also employed, beginning in 1883, as censor, with respon- sibility as of 1885 for Hebrew and Yiddish publications. He pursued this task with the unshakable rigor of an assimilationist Jew; the Jewish authors and editors of Warsaw feared his pedantic attention to detail.[31]
For the son, however, his father's position had its evident advantage when in 1887 he asked permission to publish a prospectus on his proj- ect for a new language. Marcus Zamenhof persuaded his colleagues responsible for Russian-language publications to approve his son's work, characterizing it as 'benign nonsense'.[32] Permission to print was given on 2 June 1887, and the additional permission needed for distribution on 26 July. Thus was born the 40-page Russian-language booklet by which the youthful dreams of Lazar Zamenhof had their first concrete result. Editions of the so-called First Book followed in Polish, French, German, English, Hebrew and Yiddish, to be followed by further teaching mate- rials in the language. By 1891 the numbers had reached 33 Esperanto textbooks in 12 languages.
The author asked the readers of the First Book to sign and return a slip of paper promising that the signer would learn the language if it turned out that ten million other people did the same. But, rather than merely promising, most interested readers started learning right away. By September 1889 Zamenhof was able to publish a first address list of 1000 people who had learned the language, the vast majority of them living in the Russian Empire. In this compilation we can see the beginning of efforts to organize the Esperantists, and, given that Russian society came late to defining a path to industrialization, also a political challenge— at least in the eyes of a regime habitually wary of spontaneous interest groups, even if their aims were entirely innocuous.[33]
The Russian State Historical Archive in Saint Petersburg contains 130 Tsarist administration dossiers concerning Esperanto publications from 1887 to 1917. As a study by the Leningrad Esperantist S.K. Khvorostin, based on these documents, reveals,[34] Zamenhof's earliest publications sailed smoothly through the censorship process, probably because the authorities still regarded the activities of this language creator as a neg- ligible and therefore not impermissible affair. But by the autumn of 1888 Zamenhof ran into the first significant setback when he unsuc- cessfully petitioned to publish a weekly journal for the growing numbers of learners of Esperanto.[35] The head of the Chief Administration for the Periodical Press, Evgenii Feoktistov, recommended to Viacheslav Pleve, at the time the deputy minister for internal affairs, that he rejects the peti- tion on the grounds that 'there is no one in the censorship office who can review publications in newly invented languages'. Pleve agreed.[36]
At the same moment Zamenhof found himself in something of a crisis. In September 1888 his father was dismissed from his position as censor and risked also losing his job as teacher. Marcus Zamenhof had already attracted the disapproval of his superior in Saint Petersburg, Nikandr Ziusmen, head censor of Yiddish and Hebrew publications, because he allowed the publication in a Yiddish periodical of a satirical poem pro- testing against the pogroms (1887). Shortly thereafter, when the Hebrew- language periodical Hazefirah (Red Dawn) in Warsaw published an article about the deleterious effects of too much wine on the intellectual capabilities of the individual, Ziusmen, known for his excessive drinking, declared the article 'an offense against the Tsar' and Marcus Zamenhof, forced to take the blame, lost his position.[37] Only by payment of a large sum of money did he succeed in avoiding more drastic consequences.
For the son, obliged to support the father financially, a period of bur- densome years ensued. As a young ophthalmologist, he tried to achieve professional stability in a number of locations. Because the ill fortune of his father also put an end to helpful contacts with the Warsaw censorship office, Zamenhof now found himself more frequently engaged in strug- gles with the bureaucrats. In a 6 June 1891 letter, Zamenhof wrote that the provincial censorship committees refused to engage with Esperanto- related publications and required that all such permissions be sent to Saint
Petersburg.[38] A strange ambivalence characterized the policies of the Saint Petersburg Chief Administration. In the period 1891-92, Zamenhof was unsuccessful in publishing a new book or republishing an old one, but at the same time, thanks to the favorable attitude of the censor for foreign affairs, Etienne Geispits, it proved possible to import Esperanto-language publications from other countries into Russia—among them the princi- pal publication of the emerging international movement, La Esperantisto, published in Nuremberg as of 1 September 1889.
In April 1892, the Russian ministry for internal affairs approved the first Esperanto society in Russia, Espero, in Saint Petersburg. In the fol- lowing two years the still tiny movement went through its first internal crisis. Wishing to move beyond personal responsibility for the language, in January 1893 Zamenhof proposed that the subscribers to Esperantisto^[39]form an International Esperantist League; to them he later presented a project for reforms in the language, partly under pressure from Esperantists who remained unhappy about the slow dissemination of Esperanto and blamed it on structural weaknesses in the language. A vote was taken, and a clear majority of subscribers declared themselves opposed to any lin- guistic changes. This in turn put an end to the plan for an international organization. Yet for the expansion of the movement the abandonment of reforms proved a stabilizing factor, and Zamenhof himself went out of his way to demonstrate that Esperanto was suitable just as it was, also for literary projects. His translation of Hamlet, published in 1894, 'enjoyed an incomparable influence and was more effective for the propagation of the language than even the cleverest theoretical exhortations'.[40]
From 1894 to 1899, Esperanto publications were allowed to enter Russia from abroad, and, on presentation of a petition to the office that censored foreign publications, that office also allowed the printing of a few items in Russia itself.[41] As Khvorostin summarizes the situation, the Tsarist censor had not formulated a clear position on Esperanto: 'Permission or refusal depended on the arbitrary decision of a given censor.'[42]
Even if sporadic, obstacles always existed for the Russian Esperanto movement. But suspicion, pettiness and denials could not prevent Esperanto from finding more and more support in Russia. The early pioneers were primarily urban intellectuals, among them many doctors, teachers and writers—people whom we might collectively characterize as the educated elite in a reactionary country. They sought in the lan- guage of Zamenhof—as Drezen explains—'a certain relief from the grey monotony of social life in the Tsarist dictatorship'. Drezen adds that 'all Esperantists in this oppressed land, devoid of all signs of political free- dom, were to some degree idealists, dreaming of high ideals quite dif- ferent from the crude reality around them'.[43] Although Zamenhof had put Esperanto at the service of everyone, regardless of national or social background, and did not explicitly work for the support of the power- less, it was precisely these people who felt themselves specially called. Nothing reveals more strikingly the fact that in Russia Esperanto was particularly attractive to members of minorities than the high percentage of Jews among the first Esperantists.[44]