Je suis concitoyen de tout homme qui pense. . . .

Lamartine¹

LIKE OTHER complex and abstract concepts, that of the intelligentsia may well reflect on our efforts to understand reality more than on reality itself, and the resulting discussions and debates may illustrate, in the first place, the inadequacies of mental strait jackets of our own making. Still, from about the 1860s or at least the 1870s intelligentsia as both subject and object of thought and action became an inseparable part of imperial Russian history until the collapse of the old regime in 1917.² Perhaps a different kind of intelligentsia is very prominent in the Soviet Union today. Moreover, the concept has expanded beyond Russia, notably to embrace “historically backward” societies, ranging all the way from Germany and even France to old Asian and new African nations. No wonder that self-definitions and definitions of intelligentsia abound and that they excite controversy.

In the imperial Russian context at any rate, two traits seem to be most frequently ascribed to the intelligentsia: education and a certain critical or at least independent stance. The first separates it from the masses, the second from the established system, more precisely from the government and its “unthinking” or “self-serving” followers. Yet the two traits have not been treated in the same manner in the discussions and evaluations of the intelligentsia. Education has been, on the whole, a noncontroversial characteristic, accepted by all commentators, although arguments developed on occasion over the more appropriate education for the intelligentsia (e.g., humanistic versus scientific or technical) or its required level (with “semi-intelligentsia” as a lower category).

By contrast, the issue of the critical stance has been central to the debate on the intelligentsia. The word intelligentsia itself, from which the designation of an individual member, an intelligent, is derived, apparently first entered the Russian language in the mid-nineteenth century as an adoption of the Latin word—Latin was common in Russian Orthodox seminaries—meaning “intelligence” or “mind.” Or it represented a borrowing of the German term Intelligenz used as early as 1849 to designate a social stratum distinguished by education and a “progressive” attitude. It came to denote the radicals and revolutionaries of the reign of Alexander II and, more broadly, opposition intellectuals. Although the history of the term remains not fully known, as well as disputed, it does seem that its application widened with time. In the official Soviet definition, intelligentsia refers simply to all “intellectual workers,” as distinct from industrial workers or peasants. But it is the normative problem of who, by rights, belongs to the intelligentsia, rather than the historical usage of the term, that has been crucial to the debate. Was Rakhmetov the true model for the group? Or, if sleeping on nails went too far for imitation, was it at least Rakhmetov’s creator, Chernyshevsky? Could all Russian revolutionaries and radicals, of whatever persuasion, justly claim membership? It was the intelligentsia broadly conceived as radicals that seven Russian intellectuals attacked in 1909 in a brillant and seminal publication entitled Vekhi, that is, Signposts or Landmarks. But what about the liberals, or the authors of Signposts themselves, for that matter? Or even conservative intellectuals? Was Dostoevsky an intelligent when he wrote The Possessed and The Diary of a Writer? Was Pobedonostsev? Witte? We are confronted, in effect, by a wide spectrum of definitions, ranging from dogmatic and revolutionary exclusiveness to the broad inclusion of “all intellectual workers.”

The broad approach is in many ways very attractive. It has the support of the enormous Soviet writing machine, and at the same time it finds considerable endorsement in popular usage, for, while leaders of Russian thought debated the special qualities that made one an intelligent, the common people came to apply the term to all those with education, for instance, all high school, or more exactly gymnasium, students. Also, it has been argued that history opted for the broad approach, as the evolution of the term on the whole indicates. Most importantly, narrow definitions threaten to interpret erroneously a long historical process in terms of a particular moment, rightly or wrongly perceived, highlighted by Belinsky’s protest, Dobroliubov’s literary criticism, or the battle over Signposts. On the other hand, still and all, no amount of literacy or university training per se can produce an intelligentsia, and it is impossible to understand that remarkable phenomenon simply as a chapter in the history of education or of “intellectual labor.” The ultimate of the broad approach is to resolve all problems related to the intelligentsia by denying its existence. To put it differently, it would seem that the critical or independent stance, call it alienation or merely a sense of separateness and distance, that has been central to the intelligentsia controversy, is indeed, together with education, a necessary component of the intelligentsia (the intelligentsia of imperial Russia in the present case), although I, for one, would prefer to view that stance in very broad and general terms. A brief look at history may clarify matters.³

The modern Russian secular educated public was created by the reforms of Peter the Great and his successors. Its very raison d’être was the turning of the country toward the West and Western Light. In Russian conditions, the government completely dominated that process. In contrast to Western states, Russia in the eighteenth century lacked an independent caste of lawyers, advanced private education, and a powerful church balancing the state or competing for the minds of men in the modern world. More fundamentally still, the development of Muscovy based on the service gentry and serfdom deprived the country of a middle class of any prominence—of precisely that Third Estate which was crucial to the Western Age of Reason. In Russia, the educated public, especially at first but to a large extent even throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, remained a small, thin, sectarian layer, conscious at all times of its break with the past and its separation from the masses. Its dependence on the government was almost total; indeed one might argue that rather than merely offering alliance to it, it fully identified itself with the government and its Westernizing policies.

It should be emphasized that for post-Petrine Russia the thought of the Age of Reason, the new ideology of the government and the educated public, was both highly appropriate and very important. If an application of reason held promise for the England of George III or the France of Louis XVI, it could easily be considered the only, and at the same time the most profoundly inspiring, hope in the much more backward Russian conditions. If reason called for a break with the past even in advanced European countries, Russia had in a sense already accomplished the break, and, to stress the point, the gulf between the new, reformed Russia and the ignorant masses increased throughout the century. In no other state had custom and tradition been challenged so directly and so bluntly in the name of reason and progress as they were challenged by Peter the Great in Muscovy. As for criticism, while the Russians did not have to worry about scholastic theology or, after the establishment of the Holy Synod, about an excessive power of the church in relation to state and society, the reforming emperor himself, his assistants, and his successors found the essentially secular Western outlook most congenial. Moreover, the critical approach of the Age of Reason broadly conceived could scarcely desire a better field of application than Russia. In a country where for decades literate people could not be found for immediate state needs, an attack on ignorance required no justification. Criticizing the old was directly helpful to the new in Russia. Didacticism too acquired an enlarged scope in the land of the tsars. If the philosophes wanted to reform early modern European societies along certain lines, in Russia such a society had to be formed in the first place. Throughout the century much of the educational effort of the government went simply into teaching its subjects European manners and usages. On the whole, from gunnery to the Academy of Sciences, from vaccination to periodicals, both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, in their very different ways, spent more time and effort teaching than any contemporary monarchs. In this respect, as in so many others, the two sovereigns did much to set the tone for the Russian culture of the Enlightenment. In other ways too the thought of the Age of Reason corresponded to Russian aspirations and needs. Cosmopolitanism, and certain proselytizing tendencies for that matter, proved extremely welcome to a country that wanted to join the European society of states. Even the trend toward religious tolerance found ready application in the increasingly multireligious and multicultural empire of the Romanovs.

The Russian autocracy itself received rich support from the thought and practice of the Age of Reason. A belief in the enlightened ruler as the source of progress deeply permeated the thought of the Enlightenment. Moreover, it has been argued, this belief was intrinsic to that thought. In other words, if a society was sunk in ignorance and prejudice and was to be pulled out of its stupor, it required an outside force to do the pulling. The enlightened despot was to be such a force, and his presence became more imperative as that of God grew more distant.⁴

It was within the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment that the small but growing Russian educated public lived and labored throughout the eighteenth century. On the whole it worked well and accomplished much. In the course of a hundred years the Russian language itself was developed from a semiarchaic and chaotic condition to Pushkin’s standard and glorious modern idiom. At the same time, many educated Russians, no longer isolated in Muscovy, learned foreign tongues, to the extent that in the last part of the century French became the preferred language of the high and polite society in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as in other continental capitals. German intellectuals, for their part, made a particularly important and lasting contribution in the establishment of modern scholarship and science in Russia, highlighted by such events as the creation of the Academy of Sciences in 1725, of the University of Moscow in 1755, and the periodic mounting of scientific expeditions to study the enormous empire. By the end of the century Russia had, with great foreign help but above all through the efforts of its new educated public, seemingly acquired everything—all the learned disciplines, the sciences, the arts, including the opera and the ballet, all the fashionable forms of literature, from love lyric to classical tragedy to novel to feuilleton, a periodical press, and a brilliant court. St. Petersburg had arisen and kept rising as one of the most majestic and classical cities of Europe. For more than thirty years the country had been ruled by a remarkable soi-disant philosophe.

The thought and the literature of the Russian Age of Reason emphasized common Enlightenment themes. Criticism dominated both the belles-lettres and the journalism of the epoch, which, in accord with the spirit of the times, easily blended into each other. From Kantemir’s early satires to Krylov’s immortal fables—which take Russian literature already into the nineteenth century—most authors, Catherine the Great herself prominently included, concentrated on castigating the vices and foibles of their ungainly countrymen. Similarly, most of them stressed the one effective weapon against the ignorance and darkness surrounding them: education. In fact, perhaps the greatest writer of the century, Fonvizin, treated virtually no other subject, while numerous other Russian intellectuals, exemplified by the indefatigable Novikov, also made the promotion of enlightenment their lifetime concern. Still another major theme of the Age of Reason found particular application in imperial Russia, that of enlightened despotism. A characteristic product of the thought of the Enlightenment, the concept of the enlightened despot had nevertheless little or no relevance for such countries as Switzerland or even England; by contrast, as already indicated, it was entirely appropriate to the state of the Romanovs, and it became fully dominant there. It permeated eighteenth-century Russian poetry no less than historiography, and Sumarokov’s plays as much as Catherine the Great’s Instruction to the Legislative Commission. Moreover, Lomonosov’s praise of Peter the Great or Derzhavin’s of Catherine the Great had, in spite of all the exaggeration and bombast, a certain authentic ring. To repeat, the ideology of enlightened despotism faithfully reflected the historical position of a vast country driven into modernization by an autocracy supported by a small and sectarian educated class, separated from the masses.

The intellectual hegemony of the ideology of enlightened despotism in the Russian Age of Reason acquires major importance in our search for the intelligentsia. In the latter part of the eighteenth century Russia already possessed a considerable number of educated and articulate intellectuals, a variety of educational and cultural institutions, and publication on a significant scale.⁵ Furthermore, because of the very spirit and the fundamental intellectual assumptions of the age, these educated Russians were critically inclined, like their counterparts in other European countries. They deluged the presses with denunciations of the inequities around them, and at their best, as in the case of Fonvizin’s Minor, these denunciations acquired lasting value as superb literature as well as effective social comment. And yet it would be premature to speak of a critical intelligentsia. The missing social-psychological element seems to have been precisely a perceptual and critical distance between the intellectuals and the government. One had to emerge from the shadow of enlightened despotism before one could clearly see and criticize it. It is in this regard that Radishchev does indeed deserve to be considered a forerunner of the Russian intelligentsia, for he virtually alone turned against serfdom, the ruler, and the entire establishment, placing his hopes in a republic. It is in this regard too that the Soviet insistence on petty government oppression of the educated public and on quarrels between intellectuals and the authorities attracts more than antiquarian interest.⁶

The total commitment of the Russian intellectuals of the Age of Reason to the government and its policies stemmed in large part from their numerical, social, and functional weaknesses. Deprived of middle-class support, the Russian educated public of the Enlightenment sociologically resembled more the earlier and feebler European-educated elites than their contemporaries in western and central Europe. Without an autonomous base, it depended on government assignments and functions, in everything from quasi-menial work to high poetic inspiration. Thus the greatest poet of the epoch, Derzhavin, was also prominent as courtier, court bard, and even minister of justice. The splendid modern Russian culture that came into its own in the first half of the nineteenth century has been characterized as a gentry culture, again matching it with earlier rather than contemporary developments in other countries. It was this historical lag and the central role of the government in the Russian historical process that the ideology of enlightened despotism fitted, or seemed to fit, so well. As Plekhanov remarked in dealing with Russian eighteenth-century ode writers:

Our ode writers flattered beyond all measure. This, unfortunately, cannot be denied. But, in the first place, flattery in an ode was demanded by the custom of the time. It was a disgusting custom, but the contemporary readers and listeners knew that the exaggerated plaudits, contained in odes, had to be accepted cum grano salts. And the most important thing— precisely what I want to point out to the reader—the ode writers were adorers of autocratic power not only from fear but also out of conviction. From it, and from it only, they expected the impulse for progressive development in Russia. How then could they fail to glorify it and sing it in their odes?⁷

The impact of the French Revolution and the tyrannical rule of Paul I, 1796-1801, checked the development of the Russian Age of Reason. But that age returned in full force, indeed with greater promise than ever, in the person and reign of Alexander I, 1801-25. The new Russian emperor, as much a product of the European Enlightenment as his grandmother, Catherine the Great, although of a later period of that Enlightenment, assisted by like-minded young advisers and friends, promised finally to bring light and reason to all his people, to abolish serfdom, to introduce mass education, and to establish a rational system of government. A devotee of enlightened despotism, he also tended to think ultimately in terms of a constitutional monarchy, thus sanctioning some popular participation in running the state. Alexander I was to have a remarkable reign, immortalized by the French invasion of 1812, the defeat of Napoleon, the entry into Paris, and the Congress of Vienna. Yet while the history of warfare was rewritten, empires collapsed, and regimes and boundaries changed again and again from the Iberian Peninsula to the Vistula, Russia itself remained unreformed. Except for some important improvements in education—not popular education, however—and certain other commendable measures, the empire of the tsars was much the same at the end of the reign as at the beginning. Autocracy and serfdom stood supreme. Then, following upon the emperor’s sudden death, the radicals and liberals to be known as the Decembrists staged their rebellion (two rebellions, in St. Petersburg and in the south, to be more exact).

The Decembrist movement and the Decembrist rebellion deserve attention for many reasons, not the least of which is the concern of historians with the intelligentsia. Palace revolutions had abounded in imperial Russia in the first century of its existence. Alexander I himself had ascended the throne as a result of such a military coup, which deposed and killed his father, Emperor Paul I. But, similar in many ways in form, the Decembrist uprising was vastly different in substance from these earlier military overturns. It represented the culminating act of a genuine liberal and radical movement composed of some of the best-educated, most idealistic, and generally most promising Russian youth. It seemed that after a hundred years of government tutelage in enlightenment and progress, Russian society was finally taking matters into its own hands. The views of the Decembrists, often carefully considered and well developed, ranged from a belief in a conservative constitutional monarchy to Pestel’s Jacobin republicanism. On the whole they marked both an emphatic reaffirmation of the principles of the Age of Reason and an advance beyond mere reliance on a benevolent ruler.

And yet there is ambivalence surrounding the Decembrists and their position and role in Russian history. The actual defeat of the Decembrists was complete. More broadly speaking, they lacked all, or almost all, social support, both in their own landed class—which, especially in the case of the leaders, meant the highest levels of Russian society, the people who, in fact, ruled Russia—and in other classes, with which they had no effective links. Moreover, their own relationship to the government was extremely complex. Aristocrats and officers of elite regiments, many members of the movement belonged to the top of Russian society. They resembled friends and advisers of Alexander I in their social backgrounds, French culture, general education, and their ideology of the age of Reason. Progressive reforms and constitution-making preoccupied both groups. The early Decembrist societies naturally wanted to further the good intentions of the government. Even later, when philanthropic associations were becoming conspiracies, Alexander I made his famous comment on an informer’s report to the effect that it was not for him to punish these men and these ideas. The provisional government to be formed after the Decembrist victory was to consist of liberal statesmen of the empire, notably Speransky. Indeed, the Decembrist movement, or rather many of its members, remained psychologically so close to the government and so permeated by the concept of enlightened despotism that their position was ambivalent to the end. This psychological ambiguity helps explain the critical collapse of the Decembrist leadership, especially in St. Petersburg, at the time of the uprisings. Colonel Prince Serge Trubetskoi, who had been elected “dictator” for the occasion, and his ranking assistants, Colonel Alexander Bulatov and Captain Alexander Iakubovich, all deserted the rebel cause. Trubetskoi and Bulatov swore allegiance to Nicholas I; Iakubovich offered his help to the emperor and generally behaved in the Senate Square in so bizarre a manner as to suggest a mental breakdown. Both Bulatov and Iakubovich might have come close to killing the emperor in the Senate Square. Later Bulatov committed suicide in prison. The Decembrists who did lead their troops in rebellion on the fourteenth of December showed a crucial lack of initiative during the hours of confrontation. It is generally agreed that their one hope of success lay in quick and decisive action; but nothing was done. And these were some of the bravest and most daring officers of Russia, heroes of Napoleonic wars. The psychological ambiguity must also account in large part for the collapse of the Decembrists during the interrogation and the trial, when so many of them confessed and repented and also tried desperately to enlighten Nicholas I about the true condition of Russia so he would reform it.

Still, with all their ambivalences, hesitations, and weaknesses, the Decembrists did take the decisive step of advancing beyond enlightened despotism to rebellion itself. Simple logic might suggest that they would be followed by more autonomous, more powerful, eventually even successful champions of reason—that through the opposition, if not through the government, Enlightenment would finally triumph in Russia. But historical logic is seldom simple. The next opposition to challenge the state took a long time to form, and its members bore little resemblance to the spendid officers who failed in the Senate Square.

Many explanations have been adduced to elucidate the crooked course of Russian history. Much has been made of the repression introduced by Nicholas I, who replaced constitutional talk with absolute allegiance to autocracy. Other specialists, searching for a broader perspective, have declared that in any case the Age of Reason had been a mirage as far as Russia was concerned: the only question was how it would evaporate, not how it would triumph. Economic, social, and political conditions all militated against the advance of liberalism in the realm of the tsars. A change in the intellectual climate should certainly be included among the relevant factors. Enlightenment lasted long in Russia. Still, as the country entered the second quarter of the nineteenth century, views associated with European restoration and reaction and the seminal postulates of idealistic philosophy and romanticism were making inroads on the long-dominant Weltanschauung of the Age of Reason. The death of Alexander I and the Decembrist rebellion and its suppression served to emphasize dramatically a change of generations, ideologies, even intellectual worlds.

Romanticism lacked the unity of the thought of the Enlightenment. Linked on the one hand to the profundities, or pseudo-profundities, of German idealistic philosophy, it expressed itself, on the other, in sheer literary innovation, in a shift in literary taste. Without an agreed-upon social theory, a comprehensive economic doctrine, or a clear political message, romanticism has frequently been described as an embodiment more of feeling than of thought, a sensibility more than an ideology. Yet it possessed major intellectual content. It aimed to penetrate beyond the superficial cognition of mere reason to a deep understanding and full, integral knowledge, to move from an empirical Verstand to a transcendental Vernunft. Often it emphasized such subjective modes of cognition as intuition or imagination. In the last analysis, the philosopher or the artist carried within himself the secret of knowledge and creativity. The romantic age tended toward subjectivism in a still more fundamental, although frequently concealed, sense. In spite of Hume’s philosophical critique and the authentic vein of scepticism present in the Age of Reason, the philosophes lived generally in a secure intellectual world that they had inherited from earlier centuries: neither the physical reality of the universe nor the basic intellectual and moral values were seriously questioned. But in the long run, it was precisely this fundamental security that secularization and a reliance on the critical intellect had put in jeopardy. The romantic generation responded to the threat in several ways, most strikingly by apotheosizing the role of the creative individual. The ego in German idealistic philosophy or the thinker and the artist in romantic esthetics were in effect creating the basic values of life and even, one could argue, the physical world itself.

The terms of intellectual discourse also changed. Although the usual contrasts between cosmopolitanism and particularism, between an atomistic and mechanistic world and one of organisms and organic growth, between harmony and strife, or between present-mindedness and historism can all be overdrawn, they help illuminate the transformation of European thought. Especially important, in Russia as elsewhere, was the emergence of romantic nationalism. Not that eighteenth-century Russians lacked patriotism—or failed to address themselves to the issue of Russia and the West for that matter. But what used to be a pedagogical problem of learning and progressing according to the universal postulates of the Age of Reason became a metaphysical issue of establishing and asserting the true principles of the unique Russian national organism, of ensuring its historical mission. The titanically creative philosopher, poet, or artist of the romantic period was also the consciousness, almost an incarnation, of his nation; and it was the romantic concept of the intellectual and the nation that stood out in glaring light on the new European scene.

The thirties—and in Russia the 1830s began on the evening of 14 December 1825 and lasted until 1839 or 1840, or even a few years beyond that date—have been described as a period of silence in the history of Russian thought. Both the superficial, escapist literature typical of the times and the happy gendarme reports concerning the state of public opinion support this characterization. Yet, following the earlier and increasing penetration of German idealistic philosophy into Russian universities and the seminal views of the pioneer Society of the Lovers of Wisdom, the new Weltanschauung was permeating the Russian intellectual scene. In 1836 it exploded with the publication—made possible by a censor’s mistake, to be sure—of Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter.”⁸

Written originally in 1829, the “Letter” argued that Russia had no past, no present, and no future. It had never really belonged to either the West or the East, and it had contributed nothing to culture. In particular, Russia lacked the dynamic social principle of Catholicism, which constituted the basis of the entire creative and rich Western civilization. By contrast with that civilization, Russia remained “a gap in the intellectual order of things.” Compared to Chaadaev’s proclamation, Radishchev or the most radical of the Decembrists could be considered well-integrated members of society: in the new intellectual climate, alienation had suddenly reached its ultimate.

Chaadaev’s outrageous formulation could not, of course, go unchallenged. The government, which was preaching and enforcing at the time the doctrine of Official Nationality, a derivative Russian version of the general European ideology of restoration and reaction bent on glorifying Russia and the Russian system, declared Chaadaev insane. Chaadaev himself soon changed his views, announcing in “The Apology of a Madman” that Russia had entered history and culture with Peter the Great—an honest change, in my opinion, for the original position was a psychologically unbearable one. Moreover, other outstanding young intellectuals joined the discussion.

The Slavophiles were a group of romantic thinkers, all of them landlords and gentlemen-scholars of broad culture and many intellectual interests, who, beginning in 1839, formulated a comprehensive and remarkable ideology centered on their belief in the superior nature and supreme mission of Orthodoxy and of Russia. Slavophilism expressed a fundamental vision of integration, peace, and harmony among men. On the religious plane it produced Khomiakov’s concept of sobornost, an association in love, freedom, and truth of believers, which Khomiakov considered the essence of Orthodoxy. Historically, so the Slavophiles asserted, a similar harmonious integration of individuals could be found in the social life of the Slavs, notably in the peasant commune — described as “moral choir” by Constantine Aksakov—and in such ancient Russian institutions as the zemskii sober. Again, the family represented the principle of integration in love, and the same spirit could pervade other associations of men. As against love, freedom, and cooperation stood the world of rationalism, necessity, and compulsion. It too existed on many planes, from the religious and metaphysical to that of everyday life. Thus it manifested itself in the Roman Catholic church, in Protestantism, and in the entire civilization of the West. Furthermore, Peter the Great introduced the principles of rationalism, legalism, and compulsion into Russia, where they proceeded to destroy or stunt the harmonious native development and to seduce the educated public. The Russian future clearly lay in a return to native principles, in overcoming the Western disease. After being cured, Russia would take its message of harmony and salvation to the discordant and dying West.

In its application to the Russia of Nicholas I the Slavophile teaching often produced paradoxical results, antagonized the government, and baffled Slavophile friends and foes alike. In a sense, the Slavophiles were religious anarchists, for they condemned all legalism and compulsion in the name of their religious ideal. Yet, given the sinful condition of man, they granted the necessity of government and even expressed a preference for autocracy: in addition to its historical roots in ancient Russia, autocracy possessed the virtue of placing the entire weight of authority and compulsion on a single individual, thus liberating society from that heavy burden; besides, the Slavophiles remained unalterably opposed to Western constitutional and other legalistic and formalistic devices. Yet this justification of autocracy remained historical and functional, therefore relative, never religious and absolute. And while affirming autocracy in principle, it withdrew nothing from the condemnation of Peter the Great and the actual Russian government that was his work. Moreover, the Slavophiles desired the emancipation of the serfs and other reforms, and, above all, insisted on the “freedom of the life of the spirit,” that is, freedom of conscience, speech, and publication. As Constantine Aksakov tried to explain to the government: “Man was created by God as an intelligent and a talking being.”⁹ Also, Khomiakov and his friends opposed such aspects of the established order as the death penalty, government intrusion into private life, and bureaucracy in general. “Thus the first relationship of the government and the people is the relationship of mutual non-interference. . . .”¹⁰ No wonder the Slavophiles were suspect, and their publications never escaped censorship and prohibition for long.

The Westernizers were much more diverse than the Slavophiles, and their views did not form a single, integrated whole. Besides, they evolved rapidly and shifted their positions. Even socially the Westernizers consisted of different elements, ranging from Bakunin, who came from a gentry home very much like those of the Slavophiles, to Belinsky, whose father was an impoverished doctor and grandfather a priest, and Botkin, who belonged to a family of merchants. Yet certain generally held opinions and doctrines gave a measure of unity to the movement. The Slavophiles and the Westernizers started from similar assumptions of German idealistic philosophy, and indeed engaged in constant debate with each other, but came to opposite conclusions. While Khomiakov and his friends affirmed the uniqueness of Russia and the superiority of true Russian principles over those of the West, the other party argued that the Western historical path was the model that Russia had to follow. Russia could accomplish its mission only in the context of Western civilization, not in opposition to it. The Westernizers thus took a positive view of Western political development and criticized the Russian system. Contrary to the Slavophiles, they praised the work of Peter the Great, but they wanted further Westernization. Also, whereas the Slavophiles anchored their entire ideology in their interpretation and appraisal of Orthodoxy, the Westernizers assigned relatively little importance to religion, while some of them gradually turned to agnosticism and, in the case of Bakunin, even to violent atheism. To be more exact, the moderate Westernizers, such as the popular professor of European history at the University of Moscow Granovsky, retained religious faith and an essentially idealistic cast of mind, while their political and social program did not go beyond mild liberalism, with emphasis on gradualism and popular enlightenment. The radical Westernizers, however, largely through Hegelianism and Left Hegelianism, came to challenge religion, society, and the entire Russian and European system, and to call for a revolution. Although few in number, they included such major figures as the crucially important literary critic Belinsky, the great émigré oppositionist and intellectual-at-large Herzen, and “the founder of nihilism and apostle of anarchy,” Bakunin.

The quasi-total alienation from, indeed the rebellion against, Russian government and society on the part of radical Westernizers capped a complex and painful evolution. Apolitical in a fundamental sense, the Russian romanticists of the 1830s and 1840s had exalted idealistic philosophy, art, and friendship as against the crude and oppressive reality surrounding them. Indeed they claimed that only the ideal was real. Unable to maintain permanently this paradoxical position, Bakunin and Belinsky in particular tried in the years from 1837 or 1838 to 1840 a remarkable “reconciliation with reality”: basing themselves on a narrow and literal reading of Hegel’s celebrated dictum that the real was the ideal, they proceeded to affirm and even glorify Nicholas I and his Russia. That solution to their intellectual and existential dilemma also collapsed, and it was only after further evolution and eventual decomposition of their idealistic thought that the radical Westernizers reached sweeping negation. At times at least, Bakunin with his pandestruction and Herzen with his personal despair remind the reader—always in their own highly individual ways—of Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter.” But the much more numerous moderate Westernizers too were unlike the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. They also had believed the golden promise of German idealistic philosophy and discovered the irrelevance of that philosophy to reality—all reality perhaps, Russian reality certainly. They also were entirely out of step with the government, which kept marching (“mark time march” may be considered the appropriate command for the entire reign of Nicholas I) in defense of the Petrine state understood in terms of European restoration and reaction. Although a believer in God, an established academic figure, and a moderate and modest person, all by contrast with his onetime close friend Herzen, Granovsky during the last years of his life apparently rivaled the editor of The Bell in despair.

Nor was the government concerned only with the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. In 1847 it arrested in Kiev a small clandestine group known as the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius, which had postulated, in line with romantic nationalism, the Messianic role of the Ukrainians and a free democratic federation of Slavic peoples centered in Kiev. And two years later it arrested in St. Petersburg members of a larger society, or discussion circle, formed around Butashevich-Petrashevsky and inspired, this time, by utopian socialism, in particular by the writings of Fourier. Beginning in 1840 and 1841 the gendarme reports referred to a change in the mood, to something being wrong with the Russian educated public.

What had happened? What were the reasons that terminated, or at least greatly impaired, the more than century-old alliance between the government and the educated public in Russia, transforming the apparently monolithic image of the eighteenth century and, still, of the 1830s, with the government in virtually complete control, into a picture of alienation and opposition? Most prerevolutionary Russian scholars directly blamed the government itself, and more specifically Nicholas I. With a characteristically liberal, and occasionally radical, bias, they saw the educated public, in particular its intellectual leaders, as bearers of light and the conscience of Russia. These leaders naturally supported progressive Petrine reforms, and they offered their strong backing to the activities of Catherine the Great and the projects of Alexander I, although in these last two instances they might have been misled and mistaken to some considerable extent. But with Nicholas I cooperation ceased. The new emperor refused to solve the pressing problems of the country. Notably, he would not abolish serfdom, and he established a regime of unbearable reaction, oppression, and militarism. The last harrowing years of his rule, which followed the revolutions of 1848 in many European countries, raised oppression to an insane pitch and made a fundamental break between the state and all aware and self-respecting Russians inevitable. One is reminded of Nikitenko’s bitter comment that the main failing of the reign of Nicholas I consisted in the fact that it was all a mistake.¹¹ And yet, in spite of its apparent plausibility and its hallowed standing in Russian thought, the liberal view, at least in its simple form, fails to carry conviction. For one thing, the last years of Nicholas I’s rule were probably more painful than decisive in the relationship between the government and the educated public in Russia because the split between the two had preceded their onset. More importantly, Nicholas I was not called the most consistent of autocrats for nothing. The emperor’s beliefs, aims, and policies remained essentially the same in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. It was the educated public that changed.

Nor was that change primarily one in social composition. In spite of a repeated Soviet emphasis on the democratization of intellectuals, there is little evidence of such a democratization before the reign of Alexander II and the emancipation of the serfs. Indeed, according to the Soviet periodization itself, the reign of Nicholas I belonged still to the feudal, hence landlord-dominated, period of Russian history, while in Lenin’s own opinion the Russian liberation movement was then in its gentry phase. Moreover, whatever the exact numbers and distribution of nongentry intellectuals at the time, there is no reason to believe that they made the educated public more radical. There is even some fragmentary indication to the contrary, i.e., of a more radical inclination among students and other intellectuals from the gentry than among those from other classes.¹² The historian must, rather, seek clues in the evolving structure of intellectual life in the country.

Although the number of universities did not alter during the reign of Nicholas I—their founding, except for the earlier University of Moscow, constituted one of Alexander I’s greatest accomplishments—at least they developed their work and became better established in Russian society and culture. Other institutions of higher learning and even more notably the secondary schools, the gimnazii, did increase in number, attracting ever more students. The Russian periodical press experienced a great expansion and differentiation reflecting much of the rich thought of the period. Writing and publishing in general became more professional and, obviously, acquired more readers. As most commentators have noted, and as we have had occasion to observe, the intellectual development of the time centered frequently in ideological circles, which left their indelible mark on Russian thought and culture. Herzen and others referred to a quickening of intellectual life and even, for some, an intellectual emancipation.

The intellectual landscape also changed. Russia was no longer a welcome junior member of the European society of nations of the Enlightenment, but one of the intensely competitive national romantic entities, generally disliked, despised, and denounced by the others. Such events as the Russian suppression of the Polish rebellion in 1831 and the Hungarian revolution against the Hapsburgs in 1849 gave a degree of verisimilitude to the hostile ideological image of Russia. Deep fissures on the inside matched the split on the outside. As we have seen, Russian intellectuals came to be divided among themselves, and they now also stood apart from the government. To be sure, the abandonment of the philosophy of the Enlightenment could be considered pure gain as far as Nicholas I and his associates were concerned, all the more so because it followed the Decembrist rebellion, which had demonstrated how far the Russian educated public could carry the principles of that philosophy. Metaphysics, religion, art, or poetry was bound to seem less of a threat in the eyes of the dedicated autocrat and his gendarmes than would have been an active interest of society in politics. Moreover, not only did the new Weltanschauung demote political and practical concerns but it contained within itself a strong affirmative and conservative bias. Historical, traditionalist, religious, and authoritarian arguments of the romantic age were used to define and uphold the doctrine of Official Nationality in its ramifications. Outside the government too affirmation and preservation were on the upswing, as was only natural when disciples of Schelling and Savigny replaced admirers of Voltaire and Rousseau in the intellectual leadership of Russia. As already noted, even Bakunin and Belinsky became passionate supporters of autocracy during their brief period of “reconciliation with reality.” It was no mere coincidence that the Russian educated public did not mount a single violent attempt against the state throughout the entire age of romanticism and idealism, from the late Enlightenment of 1825 until the 1860s, when a neo-Enlightenment had become an active force.

Yet, as it turned out, the Russian government obtained its peace and the Russian educated public its more or less successful reconciliation with reality at an exorbitant price. The philosophy of the Enlightenment was probably the last truly unifying ideology of the Western world. In Russia, as elsewhere, it was followed by division and fragmentation, the common language of the rulers and the educated public replaced by a babel of tongues. The poignancy and the special tragedy of the Radishchev episode was due precisely to the fact that the critic and Catherine the Great belonged to essentially the same intellectual camp. Even the Decembrists had found it difficult to separate their intentions and actions from those of the government of Alexander I, and their emotional attitude toward their rulers had remained ambivalent to the end. But there was no way for the gendarme Benckendorff to understand the Slavophiles, or for Nicholas I the Petrashevtsy. The connection was no more. At the same time the thought of Russian intellectuals, and to a certain extent of the government too, was becoming, so to speak, increasingly unreal. While scholars still argue whether an implementation of Speransky’s main proposals would have fundamentally changed the course of Russian history, or dispute the practical merits and demerits of Novosiltsev’s constitution or those of the Decembrists, no such debate swirls around the Slavophile program, Butashevich-Petrashevsky’s phalanx, or Bakunin’s anarchism. A constitution, especially a moderate constitution, might have been well within the possibilities of the Russian imperial system in the first half of the nineteenth century; by contrast, the views of Khomiakov, or Constantine Aksakov, or Bakunin, or the orthodox Fourierist Khanykov constituted pure utopia. There was peace, indeed a dead calm, largely because the government and the intellectuals no longer had a common language for communication or common subjects to discuss. The Crimean War served to deepen the split between the government and the intellectuals and even the educated public as a whole.

To sum up, there was an intelligentsia in Russia by the end of Nicholas I’s reign, in fact if not necessarily in name. Its members held views, sometimes complete ideologies, entirely independent and distinct from and often opposed to the position of the government. As we have seen, the very appearance of the new beliefs implied a criticism of the established mode of thought and often of the established order of things. Frequently the criticism became quite explicit, indeed reaching in the case of the early Chaadaev or the late Bakunin the ultimate in negation. It is also important to realize that the emerging intelligentsia had its functional basis in the universities, in the periodical press and publishing in general, and in private circles, not in direct execution of government assignments or in a conspiracy in the guard regiments. The classical problem of the government and the intelligentsia, of state and society, had been finally set, and, many would argue, the next major change came only with the communist victory in 1917.

Still and again, the developments in the intervening years proved to be anything but simple or straightforward. It must be emphasized that Russia had undergone two intellectual transformations in the second quarter of the nineteenth century: the change from the ideology of the Age of Reason to romanticism and idealism, and the disintegration of the new world view, or rather views. That last occurrence left little in the realm of ideas intact and less to bequeath. To be sure, the Slavophiles never abandoned their paradoxical position, but after 1860 few of them remained alive, and they were of slight consequence, except occasionally, as in the instance of Ivan Aksakov and Panslavism, as contributors to other ideologies. The Westernizers, by contrast, changed with the times and went in many directions, but in their evolution they exhibited best the disintegration of romanticism and idealism. That process, however, was all-pervasive. In Russian literature, beginning around 1840, realistic tendencies were replacing romanticism, prose poetry. In science, according to one estimate, Schelling’s doctrines attained their greatest influence in 1836, declining rapidly in popularity after that date.¹³ Here too Russia followed with some delay the general European trend. Before long, even Professor Michael Pavlov himself, immortalized by Herzen as the herald of Naturphilosophie, had abandoned idealism. Numerous other apostates included the seminal thinker of the original idealistic Society of the Lovers of Wisdom, Prince Vladimir Odoevsky. The Westernizers gave, in a sense, a concentrated expression to this entire process, and they brought out especially well its attendant protest, rebellion, and despair. The Petrashevtsy, for their part, disappeared into Siberia, and there was never again to be a primarily Fourierist group in Russia, although Fourierism can rightly be considered a component element of subsequent Russian radicalism.

What, then, did “the men of the sixties” receive from their predecessors, both in general and with particular reference to the emergence of growth of the Russian intelligentsia? One answer lies certainly in the institutional base itself, in the universities, the periodical press, book publishing, the circles for that matter, and other elements of Russian culture established and developed by preceding generations. Nor should one forget personalities. Certain dead “men of the forties,” especially Belinsky, became symbols and examples to the rising Russian intelligentsia. It was precisely Belinsky’s uncompromising rebellion against official Russia and, more broadly, against the world around him that made his image, permanently as it turned out, central for Russian intellectuals.¹⁴ A few leading ideologists of the time of Nicholas I, Herzen and Bakunin foremost among them, continued to play very prominent roles in the new intellectual climate, although they could never become completely integrated into the climate. As to ideas proper, the most important heritage was probably the romantic concept of people and the related notions of populism, narodnost’, and the peasant commune. Formulated in Russia most emphatically, fundamentally, and effectively by the Slavophiles—although by no means by the Slavophiles alone—these concepts were carried and modified by Herzen, Bakunin, and others to affect the entire Russian radical movement clear to the revolutions of 1917 and beyond. Generally secularized and frequently presented in a pragmatic or social scientific manner, populist doctrines nevertheless repeatedly revealed the original idealistic and quasireligious sweep.

“The men of the sixties” learned little from “the men of the forties” also because they were in rebellion against them, much as champions of romanticism had earlier assailed proponents of the Enlightenment. Whereas “the fathers” grew up, as we have seen, on German idealistic philosophy and romanticism in general, with its emphasis on the metaphysical, religious, esthetic, and historical approaches to reality, “the sons,” led by such young radicals as Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev, hoisted the banner of utilitarianism, positivism, materialism, scientism, nihilism, and especially realism. “Nihilism”—and also in large part “realism,” particularly “critical realism”—meant above all else a fundamental rebellion against accepted values and standards: against abstract thought and family control, against lyric poetry and school discipline, against religion and rhetoric. The earnest young men and women of the 1860s wanted to cut through every polite veneer, to get rid of all conventional sham, to get to the bottom of things. What they usually considered real and worthwhile included the natural and physical sciences, simple and sincere human relations, and a society based on knowledge and reason rather than ignorance, prejudice, exploitation, and oppression. The casting down of idols—and there surely were many idols in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere—emancipation, and freedom constituted the moral strength of “the men of the sixties.” Yet few in our age would fail to see the narrowness of their vision or neglect the fact that they erected cruel idols of their own.

The intellectual transformation in Russia formed part, once again, of a broader change in all of Europe that has been described, for example, as a transition from romanticism to realism. The remarkable directness, crudeness, and self-confidence of the nihilists and other Russian radicals stemmed largely from a new faith in materialism and a new cult of science. As has been pointed out with no special reference to Russia, it was at that time that science became an all-encompassing vision of the world through a linkage of previously separate disciplines, moreover a vision that could still be grasped by a high school student, and it was also at that time that science acquired an immediate usefulness through instant connection to technology.¹⁵ Such popularizers of the new outlook as Buchner and Moleschott replaced Schelling and Hegel as rulers of Russian minds. Still, while there is no reason to separate Russia from Europe as a whole in this any more than in the preceding periods, the Russian development had its exaggerations and its peculiarities: in fact, it can be argued that in the “neo-Enlightenment” of the second half of the nineteenth century, just as in the Enlightenment proper, the Russians reproduced the original Western ideological model so faithfully and so starkly that their version bordered on caricature.

The Weltanschauung of the 1860s in Russia followed the death of Nicholas I, the catastrophic conclusion of the Crimean War, and the coming of Alexander II’s reign of “great reforms” with the all-important emancipation of the serfs decreed on 19 February 1861. By contrast with the Decembrist fiasco and the resulting repression and stagnation that formed the background for romanticism in Russia, the government and the events were moving fast. The intellectual response was also quick. The rapid polarization of the Russian educated public in the early 1860s was one of the most striking and signifcant developments of the period. The usual explanation that radicalism was largely caused by repression as well as by disappointment with “the great reforms” lacks precision, to say the least: it would appear that radical or revolutionary action preceded as often as it followed government measures, while it was much too early to judge the results of “the great reforms.” In any case, in the new intellectual climate the radical opposition grew, and it was to have a checkered, complex, but in certain ways continuous history until the revolutions of 1917. On the other hand, it was during the early 1860s that such figures as Dostoevsky, Pobedonostsev, and Katkov moved sharply to the Right.

The radical and revolutionary movement, however, was by no means the only manifestation of the Russian intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century. The reforms themselves, together with a general quickening of the economy, offered vast new opportunities to those people who were professionally trained and, to a lesser degree, to all educated people. Whereas Russia possessed about twenty thousand subjects with higher education in 1860, another eighty-five thousand went through institutions of higher learning in the next four decades.¹⁶ There was also, finally, a certain democratization of intellectuals as well as a general decline of the landed gentry following the emancipation of the serfs. By the end of the century, the new Marxist teaching was competing effectively with the older populism for the allegiance of the Left, while liberalism grew steadily as a more moderate answer to Russian needs. After the Revolution of 1905, Russia even acquired a constitution, legal political parties, elections, and other accoutrements of European political life. Indeed, in the opinion of many specialists, the country in general and the intellectuals, the intelligentsia in particular, were following the classical Western scheme of development, when hit by the First World War and the revolutions of 1917—a complex and controversial subject, which I am not in a position to discuss in this brief piece. Moreover, at the turn of the century the intellectual climate was again changing in Russia, leading to what has been called a cultural Renaissance or the Silver Age and reshuffling, once more, the basic elements of intellectual orientation, outlook, and history.

These developments, however, take us past the nineteenth century and well beyond the emergence of the intelligentsia. To return to that emergence and to conclude, the Russian intelligentsia was a result of the reforms of Peter the Great and of the whole process of Westernization. It obtained from the West its indispensable education and the entire intellectual and cultural framework for its existence. But, in Russian conditions, the other necessary element for the formation of an intelligentsia, a certain autonomy, a critical and independent stance, proved very difficult to establish. Russian reality and the belief in enlightened despotism gave the Petrine state a virtually unbroken hegemony over the intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century and in the first quarter of the nineteenth. Even the Decembrists remained, in spite of their desperate and tragic rebellion, psychologically and intellectually entangled with the image of the enlightened ruler and state. Only a further and more independent development of the Russian educated public in the second quarter of the century, together with the change in the intellectual climate from Age of Reason to romanticism, provided a sufficient distance between the intellectuals and the government and made it possible for an intelligentsia to emerge. That newly created tiny intelligentsia, brought up on German idealism and romanticism, quickly experienced a defeat or even collapse of its intellectual world as men and women of the sixties, with their simpler and more activist creed, swamped their “superfluous” predecessors of the forties. Yet, as I tried to indicate, there was some meaningful connection and continuity between the generations, exemplified in the triumphant cult of Belinsky. And once an intelligentsia had been formed, there was no turning back.

In a sense, an account of the very difficult emergence of the Russian intelligentsia is a study in the power of the Russian ruler and state— and every student of Russian history can write his own commentary on that power. In a very generous review of my Parting of Ways, an excellent historian criticized my treatment of the Decembrists. He accused me of a contradiction for writing, on the one hand, that “Many of [them] remained psychologically so close to the government and so permeated by the concept of enlightened despotism that their position was ambivalent to the end,” and, on the other, that “the salient characteristic of the Decembrist movement was its rejection of autocracy and enlightened despotism.”¹⁷ The point is, of course, that both statements are correct, whatever the felicity or infelicity of expression. Nor did the matter disappear with the Decembrists. Working on the so-called state school of Russian historiography, I was repeatedly impressed by the crushing might of the Russian state and by how hard it was for Russian intellectuals to criticize that state from the outside. At about the same time I had several interesting conversations with a specialist on Granovsky who was particularly concerned that that sensitive liberal and Westernizer was also a monarchist unable to escape the framework of enlightened despotism.¹⁸ There is little need to continue from instance to instance by way of repeated illustration on the subject of the Russian ruler and state and their relationship to the intellectuals, all the more so because other students of Russian history will have their own long lists. So, to finish with a more far-reaching observation than most: in a recent public lecture Professor Leopold Haimson interpreted the collapse of the Kadet leadership at the time of the great Russian Revolution as a result of a psychological trauma produced by the decline and fall of the state and especially of the emperor; in fact, he spoke of a true psychological regression.¹⁹ In other words—the comparison is mine, not Professor Haimson’s—almost a hundred years after the tragedy in the Senate Square, at another critical point in Russian history, leaders of opposition again lost their self-control and all control over the events around them because they could not fully sever their ties with the image of the ruler.

That time at least the ruler was killed and the problem settled.

Or was it really?

NOTES

1. Lamartine, “La Marseillaise de la paix,” Chefs-d’oeuvre poétiques (Paris, 1920), pp. 255-61, quoted from p.258

2. For an outline of the topic of the Russian intelligentsia, with particular attention to the origins of the word and the concept, see especially: Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” Daedalus, Summer 1960, pp. 441-58 (the entire volume is entitled The Russian Intelligentsia); Alan P. Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia: The Mind of Russia,” California Slavic Studies III (1964): 1-32; the Introduction (pp. 3-22) to V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtorori poiovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1971); Richard Pipes, “‘Intelligentsia’ from the German ‘Intelligenz’?: A Note,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (September 1971): 615-18; Michael Confino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Daedalus, Spring 1972, pp.1 17-49; and, most comprehensively and in greatest detail, Otto Wilh. Muller, Intelligencija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes, Frankfurter Abhandlungen zur Slavistik, Vol. 17 (Frankfurt, 1971).

3. Because of the limitations of space, I shall refer here only to my own works, which should serve to support many of the opinions dispensed rather freely in the present brief piece. Most relevant is A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford, 1976), which in effect covers the eighteenth century as well as the first half of the nineteenth. Two books discuss two major specific topics, both of them of import for the emergence of the intelligentsia: Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), and Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959). A History of Russia, 3d ed. (New York, 1977), provides an overall perspective. For other relevant studies of mine, see the bibliography of A Parting of Ways.

4. See, for instance, a reaffirmation of this view, with particular reference to more backward countries, in Lucien Goldmann, “La pensée des ‘Lumières’,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, year 22, no. 4 (July-Aug. 1967), pp. 752-79, especially pp. 768-69.

5. For the latest and fullest treatment of the last subject, see Dr. Gary Jon Marker’s dissertation, “Publishing and the Formation of a Reading Public in Eighteenth Century Russia” (University of California, Berkeley, 1977).

6. In general, Soviet interpretations of the Russian Enlightenment emphasize not cooperation with but struggle against the government on the part of the educated public. For my criticism of these interpretations, see A Parting of Ways, pp. 43-49. In the West, Professor Marc Raeff argued in an interesting, although ultimately unconvincing, manner for an alienation of the eighteenth-century Russian gentry from the state, entitling his book appropriately: Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966).

7. G. V. Plekhanov, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli, vol. III (Moscow, 1919), p. 32.

8. My fullest discussion of the “Letter,” and in something of a comparative perspective, is in “On Lammenais, Chaadaev, and the Romantic Revolt in France and Russia,” The American Historical Review 82, no. 5 (December 1977): 1165-86.

9. L. Brodskii, Rannie slavianofily (Moscow, 1910), p. 95. Both this quotation and the next one are taken from Constantine Aksakov’s celebrated memorandum to Alexander II entitled “O vnutrennem sostoianii Rossii” (“About the Internal Condition of Russia”). The memorandum was published in Brodskii, op. cit., pp. 69-122.

10. Ibid., p. 80. Italics in the original.

11. Professor of Russian literature, censor, and prominent conservative intellectual of serf origin Alexander Nikitenko rendered this judgment in his diary in 1859, several years after the death of Nicholas I. A. Nikitenko, Moia povest 0 samom sebe i 0 tom “chemu svidetel v zhizni byl.” Zapiski i dnevnik. (1804-1877 gg.), 2d ed., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1905), vol. I, p. 553.

12. In addition to the references in A Parting of Ways, pp. 270-73, I would like to cite two recent books: Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca and London, 1975); and Alain Besançon, Education et société en Russie dans le second tiers du XIX^e siècle (Paris, La Haye, 1974). Besançon even argues that the classical image of the commoner intellectual (intelligent-raznochinets) was itself a gentry invention and preceded the effective appearance of these lower-class intellectuals.

13. Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (Stanford, 1963), P. 337·

14. The latest striking contribution to the great cult of Belinsky to come to my attention was that by Vladimir Soloviev in a speech of October 11, 1898, to the Philosophical Society, reported in Georgij Florovskij, “Zur Biographie Vladimir Solov’evs, Kirche im Osten 18 (1975): 20-33.

15. On the new European intellectual climate, and the cult of science in particular, see, e.g., the first three chapters (pp. 1-56) in Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1877 (New York and London, 1935).

16. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii, p. 70. One is reminded that: “The most down-to-earth definition one can give of the intelligentsia is to say that they were the ‘student youth’ trained in the various establishments of the ‘Ministry of National Englightenment’,” Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” p. 454.

17. Professor John Keep’s review in Slavic Review 37, no. 1 (March 1978): 124-25; quoted from page 125.

18. The specialist was Dr. Priscilla Reynolds Roosevelt, and the conversations took place at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in late July and early August.

19. The lecture, entitled “The Crisis of Russian Liberalism on the Eve of the First World War,” was delivered in Berkeley, California, on June 1978. Also I discussed the issue with Professor Haimson after the lecture and on the following day.