[6] Upon his arrival in Vilna, Levanda participated in the publication of the first Russian-language Jewish journal, Rassvet [ru] ('Dawn'), edited in Odessa by Osip Rabinovich, as well as its successor, Zion.

[3] 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.

[8] 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.

[11][12] Other works of this period include "Essays of the Past" (1875), originally published in 1870 in Den [ru] ('The Day'); "Types and Silhouettes" (1881); and the historical novels The Wrath and Mercy of the Tycoon (1885) and Avraam Yosefovich (1887).

[10] He published his best-known work, Seething Times, set in the northern Pale of Settlement against the background of the Polish Uprising of 1863, in three instalments between 1871 and 1873 in Evreiskaia biblioteka.

[13][14] In the novel, young Westernized Jews were urged by the hero, Sarin, to abandon Polish orientation (after 500 years of unhappy experience with the Poles) and become Russians.

[3] He became a leading activist for the Hibbat Zion movement and maintained close links with Leon Pinsker, author of the influential Zionist manifesto Auto-Emancipation.

In "The Essence of the So-Called 'Palestine' Movement" (1884), Levanda discussed the ideas of Jewish self-determination as a "practical solution" to a "vicious cycle,"[18] and in 1885 published an important reconsideration of the position of the Jews in Russia, entitled "On 'Assimilation'".