David Bergelson's sober, elegant prose, the rigorous structure of his language, and the complexity of his style, marked a radical new development, particularly by comparison with the Yiddish writing that had preceded it. From a formal point of view, the chief, and certainly the most obvious, debt to Flaubert can be seen in Bergelson's use of the so-called style indirect libre, generally regarded as Gustave Flaubert's most important stylistic achievement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Yiddish literature was concerned with language in a way that had not been significant previously. In Nokh alemen, the indirect style is used in a macroscopic, all-encompassing way as if, some fifty years later, the Yiddish author had not only absorbed but also broadened Flaubert's lesson. The modernization of Yiddish as a literary language developed for the most part through contact with European literature.