Lev Levanda  Lev (Yehuda Leyb) Osipovitch Levanda (, ; June 1835 – 18 June 1888) was a Russian author, belletrist, and publicist. His literary work made him a leading figure in the circles of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. Originally a vocal proponent of the assimilation of Jews into Russian culture, Levanda became a strong supporter of their emigration to Palestine following the 1881–82 pogroms across the Russian Empire. Lev Levanda was born to a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Byelorussia. After spending three years at a state-sponsored school for Jews in his hometown, he entered the Vilna Rabbinical School in 1849, graduating in 1854 with a teacher's diploma. He thereafter returned to Minsk and was appointed a teacher at the government-run Jewish school. He taught there until 1860, when he was appointed adviser on Jewish affairs ("uchonyi evrei") to the Governor-General of Vilna, Mikhail N. Muravyov, a position he held until his death. In this role he assisted with programs to study Jewish life and edited Russian-language state textbooks for Jewish children. Levanda was instrumental in exposing false witnesses in a ritual-murder trial of several Jews from the shtetl of Shavl in 1861. Upon his arrival in Vilna, Levanda participated in the publication of the first Russian-language Jewish journal, "" ('Dawn'), edited in Odessa by Osip Rabinovich, as well as its successor, "Zion". His first novel, "Shop of Imported Far-East Groceries", appeared in the pages of "Rassvet" in 1860. Levanda's "The Warehouse of Groceries: Pictures of the Jewish Life", a work of belles lettres, was serialized in "Rassvet", and published as a book in 1869 (a Hebrew translation was published five years later). A supporter of the Russification of Eastern European Jewry, in 1864 Levanda was appointed editor of the region's official newspaper, "Vilenskie gubernskie vedomosti" ('Vilna Provincial News'), with a mandate to justify Muravyov's russifying campaign. Following the banning of "Rassvet" and "Zion", he began to contribute under a pseudonym to a number of liberal Russian newspapers in St. Petersburg and Vilna, including the "Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti".