The Russian language boasts a formidable literary tradition. A handful of Russian words have made their way into English agitprop, apparatchik, commissar, gulag, Kalashnikov, nomenklatura, pogrom, samizdat, vodka, and now kompromat. But while the Russian language is expressive, it is mostly a borrower, not a lender, of words. The word intelligentsia made its first English appearance in 1918, shortly after the Russian Revolution. It exploded in usage thereafter. What was missing from the West’s conceptual inventory in 1918 that we had to import a foreign word from Revolutionary Russia?
Intelligentsia, a very Russian concept, is difficult to pin down with precision. Russia has always been a caste society and the intelligentsia was a particular caste, consisting of educated people who did not fit into one of the traditional categories—clergy, nobility, peasants, merchants, or the urban middle class. But the line of demarcation for membership was never clear. When I was a child in the Soviet Union, I thought it meant nice Jewish people who read books, wore spectacles, tucked in their shirts, and didn’t slurp their soup. In my parents’ circle, these were mostly engineers and scientists, with a smattering of musicians and doctors. None had any sort of formal connection to academic social science or the humanities, since in the U.S.S.R. these fields were political minefields, difficult for decent people to negotiate. But most seemed to dabble in poetry or playwriting, and all could recite large chunks of Evgenii Onegin from memory.
The concept of the intelligentsia was easier to define negatively. Anyone connected with the organs of state power—government functionaries, law enforcement, the military—fell way outside the pale. Party membership was disqualifying. A more-than-casual interest in sports, while not in itself disqualifying, was deeply suspect. Ultimately, membership came down to a self-designation, a certain recognizable set of manners, turns of phrase, and habits of mind. It was an aesthetic and an outward pose. “Intelligentnost’”—the quality of belonging to the intelligentsia—stood for whatever was perceived to be the opposite of the backwardness, stupidity, alcoholism, profanity, ignorance, and mud of provincial Russian life. Taken too far, it could become a kind of cult: a pious, atheistic godliness.
As a metaphysical ideal of intelligentnost’, imagine a professor of philology at the University of Vienna around the turn of the last century settling down in his library with a brandy, his pince-nez, and a volume of Proust, after an evening at the Philharmonic, where he watched Gustav Mahler conducting Beethoven. This fantasy of antique Central European gentility stood in contrast with a shabby and stunted Soviet reality. Decades of exposure to constant propaganda inevitably left its mark on all but the strongest of intellects. Cut off from contact with the outside world and normal cultural, intellectual, and artistic influences, the Soviet intelligentsia’s tastes were frozen sometime around 1937. Its members found escape in their book collections, which were always nearly identical, consisting of the same multi-volume editions of the nineteenth-century Russian and European classics, certain twentieth-century modernists and social realists, as well as volumes of foreign exotics like Lion Feuchtwanger, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Jack London, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, and a few other officially approved Westerners. Anton Chekhov was especially well-loved. A physician by temperament and training (the most intelligent of professions), his plays and short stories had no discernible politics and were characterized more than anything else by their fellow-feeling and concern with human decency.
