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4.5 - The Intelligent

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Konstantine Klioutchkine
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter surveys the changing meanings associated with the figure of the intelligent in Russian literature from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its focus falls on the period between 1860 and 1880, when the term ‘intelligentsia’ entered the Russian press as a way of identifying ‘intellectual proletarians’: educated people alienated from the state, society, and the means of production. The chapter offers an overview of the varying literary representations of the intelligentsia in changing historical contexts: before and after the Revolution of 1917, during the cultural Thaw that followed Stalin’s death, and in late- and post-Soviet culture. The chapter also sketches the ‘pre-history’ of the intelligentsia: the retroactive projection of the term intelligentsia onto several generations of educated people who lived before the notion came into use in the 1860s.

Keywords

intelligentsiaRussian intelligentsiaSoviet intelligentsia
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 756 - 771
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Berlin, Isaiah, Russian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Brower, Daniel R., Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Confino, Michael, ‘On intellectuals and intellectual traditions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia’, in Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 83–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frede, Victoria, Doubt, Atheism and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Manchester, Laurie, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Nahirny, Vladimir C., The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Conviction (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983).Google Scholar
Pipes, Richard (ed.), The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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