The Thinking Reed

The lack of correspondence between the ideals and values which the intelligentsia acquired and the ways of the Russian state, and the inability of this state to ‘integrate’ the intelligenty, to include them in its system, making them a necessary part of official society — these were the conditions that created the Russian intelligentsia, a peculiar social stratum of ‘educated critics of the Russian political and social order’.24 Consequently, a struggle for democracy became to an important extent the content of the history of Russian culture and the Russian intelligentsia. ‘The belief that literature and art, and to a somewhat lesser extent scholarship and science, had a primary responsibility to society became axiomatic in Russian left-wing circles,’ writes Pipes.25 Hence the special attitude of writers, critics, artists and scholars towards their work, and their conception of the role of art as part of social ideology and a weapon in the social struggle. In Russia the intelligent was necessarily the bearer of a certain system of ideas — radical-democratic, anti-serfdom, anti-bourgeois and, later, socialist. This radical left-wing ideology did not come from nowhere but was due to the social position of the Russian intellectuals. However, the ‘exceptionality’ of Russia’s intelligenty was only relative. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century Tugan-Baranovsky wrote that in the West, too,

under the influence of the natural course of development of social relations, an ‘intelligentsia’ in our Russian sense of the word is appearing, which in many of its features resembles our Russian intelligentsia, an intelligentsia which not only is not affiliated by virtue of its interests to the bourgeois class but actually fights against that class.26

Subsequently, Gramsci and Sartre tried to rethink the concept ‘intellectual’, treating it as very similar to the Russian concept intelligent.27 With Sartre, who rejects the ‘purely-functional’ conception of the intellectual, what — on the contrary — is put in the foreground is the moral content of spiritual activity:

The intellectual’s most immediate enemy is what I will term the false intellectual and what Nizan called a watch-dog — a type created by the dominant class to defend its particularist ideology by arguments which claim to be rigorous products of exact reasoning.28

Sartre, too, regards an oppositional attitude and left-wing radicalism as characteristics of the true intellectual.29 To distinguish this notion from the traditional one he introduces the concept ‘new intellectual’, with essentially the same meaning as Russian intelligent.

If the oppositional attitude, criticism, rejection of the state’s values are predicated by the concept intelligent, then there is some foundation for the paradoxical thought of G. Pomerants: ‘that the intelligentsia as a special social stratum came into being first of all in Russia… and only later began to take shape in Western Europe and the USA.’30 The exceptionality of the Russian intelligentsia consisted, therefore, not in the non-existence of anything similar in the West (as P. Struve claimed in Vekhi) but in the fact that Russia’s intelligentsia ‘arrived too soon’ — that it took shape as a special stratum in historical conditions that were extremely unfavourable to it. In this lies the tragic element in its history.

Westernists and Slavophils

This tragic element is especially evident in the views of P.Ya. Chaadaev, our intelligentsia’s first ideologue, Russia’s first original thinker. In Berdyaev’s words, his ‘philosophical letters’ marked for Russia ‘the first awakening of independent thought’.31 And that voice with which, perhaps, began our entire real spiritual history was already a voice of despair. Chaadaev’s revolt, wrote Berdyaev, was not only directed against the established order, it was a ‘revolt against Russia’s history’.32 To Chaadaev, Russia’s past seemed to be a sort of endless marking time: