The tradition of Hebrew belles lettres in Eastern Europe began with anti-Hasidic satires by Galician maskilim in the 1820s and ended with desperate attempts to preserve the remnants of Hebrew literary activity in Poland on the eve of World War II. The intervening period witnessed 120 years of intense creative activity, during which modern Hebrew literature flourished in various geographic centers as a highly stratified and ramified system that laid the foundations of its canon.