REES 395, Thursday, 13 September 2007

Michael Makin“The Russian Intelligentsia”

Alexander II (reigned 1855-1881)

Leading intellectuals of the Russian left in the early 1860s

Nikolai Chernyshevskii, 1828-1889

Dmitrii Pisarev,1840-1868

Nikolai Dobrolyubov,1836-161

P. D. Boborykin(1836-1921, claimed to have first given

currency to the term “intelligentsia” in the mid-1860s)

Definition of the word intelligentsia from the online encyclopedia of

Cyril and Methodius (www.km.ru)ИНТЕЛЛИГЕНЦИЯ (от лат. intelligens понимающий, мыслящий, разумный), общественный слой людей, профессионально занимающихся умственным, преимущественно сложным, творческим трудом, развитием и распространением культуры. Понятию интеллигенция придают нередко и моральный смысл, считая ее воплощением высокой нравственности и демократизма. Термин «интеллигенция» введен писателем П. Д. Боборыкиным и из русского перешел в другие языки. На Западе более распространен термин «интеллектуалы», употребляемый и как синоним интеллигенции. Интеллигенция неоднородна по своему составу. Предпосылкой появления интеллигенции было разделение труда на умственный и физический. Зародившись в античных и средневековых обществах, получила значительное развитие в индустриальном и постиндустриальном обществах.

…that social stratum professionally engaged in mental, primarily complex, creative labor, the development and the distribution of culture. The concept is often given a moral sense too, when the intelligentsia is considered the embodiment of high ethical qualities and democratic values…

The novelists the radicals wrote about, and who themselves wrote

about the radicals

Fedor Dostoevskii (1821-1881)Sent to Siberia in 1849 for “radical” views, returns to Petersburg in 1860. By mid-60s is conducting a violent polemic with the left, targeting Chernyshevskii in “Notes from Underground” (1864), Utilitarian thought in general, and Pisarev and Dobrolyubov in particular in Crime and Punishment (1866). His most “anti-nihilist” novel is Devils (1871-1872).

Portrait of Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) by the famous portraitist

Kramskoi. Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (full version appeared in 1859) provides one of the classic

treatments of the so-called “superfluous man” in its eponymous hero, who famously hesitates to get

out of bed, fails in his courtship of the woman he loves, but – in a significant conclusion to the novel ignored by the

left – establishes an unconventional liaison with a “simpler” woman than his erstwhile beloved. The liaison

brings them both happiness and establishes a semi-rural pastoral on the edge of St Petersburg, restoring some of the elements of the hero’s

idyllic “dream” of his childhood on a country estate.

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883). Turgenev wrote six novels and many short stories, often

providing sophisticated portraits of psychological and social “types”. The term

“superfluous man” is his (from his “Diary of a Superfluous Man”, 1850). Chernyshevskii used

his story “Asya” (1858) to provide a devastating reading of the failings of the

Russian gentry. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) was appropriated by Pisarev as a

positive portrayal of the new generation of intelligenty from beyond the gentry – the so-

called raznochintsy. They are portrayed in the novel as inspired by “scientific” ideas and Utilitarian thought, rejecting the Romantic

values of the preceding generation. Turgenev himself was generally reluctant to express

political views directly (especially after an early encounter with imperial displeasure), but very sensitive to the intellectual environment of his

day.

Count Lev Tolstoi (1828-1910). Also a portrait by

Kramskoi. Tolstoi’s War and Peace

(1863-69) was intended, at least in part, to illustrate the positive role played by the

Russian aristocracy and gentry in the establishment of moral and social values, as well, of

course, as in the defense of the country in the Napoleonic

wars.

Demographics – the Russian narodEven at the end of the nineteenth century, however, Russia was overwhelming an illiterate, peasant society – hence the acuteness of the anxiety of Russia’s intellectuals. The literacy rate in 1897 was 21%. 80% of the population were legally classed as peasants.

From a description of a village in northern Russia at the end of the nineteenth century (the photograph is modern) – population over 1,000; the peasantry is engaged in raising crops and cattle, lumber, fishing; there are two churches and a village school with fifty children.

Although the era of Russian Modernism was quite different from the age of Alexander II in

politics and aesthetics, its leading authors remained very

preoccupied with social questions. The greatest

Symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), wrote a seminal

essay entitled “The People and the Intelligentsia” (1908), and agonized over his status as a

member of the latter.

The question of the relation of the intelligentsia to the country as a whole is equally crucial, although in rather different terms, for the

Soviet period, receiving abundant treatments – it is, for example, self-consciously explored in

terms of its intellectual heritage in Doctor Zhivago, the famous novel of the poet Boris

Pasternak (1890-1960). The novel was banned in the Soviet Union and published abroad in 1957, effectively beginning the period of so-

called tamizdat (publishing “there” (ie abroad) rather than “here” (ie at home)). It was

published in the Soviet Union only in 1988, at the time when the Russian intelligentsia was achieving its cherished goals, only to see its

own significance effectively end with the totalitarian régime which it had opposed. But the “people” with whom the intelligentsia was

to be contrasted were no longer the same – peasant Russia was fading away, and the

“people” were urban

Where is the narod now?For comparison – the village described in a previous slide, as seen

in 2003

Koshtugi in July, 2003. The village has a school with about twenty pupils (and no running water). The school covers eight years of the twelve-year curriculum (far more than the

nineteenth-century school which had fifty pupils), and will probably be closed within the next couple of years. Most year-round inhabitants (fewer than 200) are elderly. The

population of the village now is smaller than the number of village natives who died at the front in the Second World War. The only agriculture is very small-scale, subsistence

farming. The lumber industry is the only source of regular employment, and it is declining. The shell of one church remains, although it is in such a state of disrepair that it is dangerous

to enter.

Where is the intelligentsia today?

Left – group of academics at the end of a conference in provincial Russia, October 2004. Right – Roman Abramovich, one of the world’s fifty richest men (source of wealth – oil), for the last three years owner of Chelsea Football Club (London), on which he has lavished the best part of one billion US Dollars. The old intelligentsia is now largely powerless and impoverished; “new Russians” (some from the old

intelligentsia) hold wealth and power