He went away, but a couple of years later I heard about him again from some mutual friends and I invited him to come and see me. Bewildered by our first encounter, he was obviously reluctant to visit me a second time, but everything was soon forgotten. I do not know whether he ever realized what profound trust I had shown him at our first meeting by speaking to him as I did.
Several years have gone by since then, and I no longer mind talking with anyone who asks me about M.—they are mostly people of the younger generation, though sometimes even the older ones now bring the subject up. Nowadays we talk about a great many things that used to be so taboo that most people in my circle did not even dare think about them. At present, however, we no longer wonder whether something is "forbidden" or not—we have just stopped
bothering and forgotten that kind of thing. But that is not all.
In the twenties, young people of education willingly gathered information for the authorities and the secret police, and thought they were doing so for "the good of the Revolution," for the sake of the mysterious majority which was supposedly interested in the defense and the consolidation of the regime. From the thirties, and right up to Stalin's death, they continued to do the same, except that their motivation had changed—they now acted to benefit themselves, in the hope of reward, or out of fear. They took copies of M.'s verse to the police, or denounced colleagues in the hope of getting their own writings published, or of being promoted in their work. Others did this kind of thing out of sheer terror—not to be arrested or destroyed themselves. They were very easily intimidated, and eagerly seized on any small favors offered to them. At the same time they were always assured that nothing about their activities would ever leak out or become public knowledge. This promise has been kept and the people concerned can calmly live out their days, enjoying the modest privileges their activities have earned them.
But people asked to da such work nowadays no longer have faith in any guarantees. There can be no return to the past for this new generation, which is by no means as terrified and submissive as earlier ones. These young people can never be persuaded, moreover, that their fathers were justified in their actions, nor do they believe that "everything is permitted." This does not, of course, mean that there are no longer any informers, but the percentage is much lower. Earlier I could expect the worst of any young man, not to mention corrupt members of my own generation, but it would now be rather a fluke if a scoundrel wormed his way into my circle of acquaintances—and even then he might hesitate to do anything really despicable, because in the new state of affairs it would not be to his advantage and everybody would turn their backs on him.
Among the new intelligentsia now growing up in front of our eyes, nobody blithely repeats old sayings like "You can't swim against the tide" or "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." In other words, the values we thought had been abolished forever are being restored, and they must be taken account of, even by people who could quite well do without them. This has come as a surprise both to those who never gave up these values and to those who tried to bury them once and for all. Somehow or other they lived on underground, taking refuge in all those hushed homes with their dimmed lights. Now they are on the move and gathering force.
The initiative in their destruction belonged to the intelligentsia of the twenties, which, as a result, ceased to be itself and turned into something different. At the present day we are witnessing the reverse process. It is astonishingly slow, and we are impatient. How can we be patient after all we have gone through?
Nobody can define the intelligentsia or say how it differs from the educated classes. It is a historical term that was first used in Russia and then spread to the West. The intelligentsia has a number of distinctive features, but they don't add up to a neat definition. The history of the intelligentsia is obscured by the fact that the word is often applied to people who do not belong to it by right. How can one use it to refer to technocrats or bureaucrats, even if they have university diplomas, or, for that matter, even if they write novels and epic poems? During the period of capitulation, the real intelligentsia was mocked at, and its name was appropriated by those who surrendered.
What, then, is the intelligentsia? If you take any one of its features, you will find it is shared with some other section of the community: a certain degree of education, the ability to think critically and the sense of concern that goes with it, freedom of thought, conscience, humanism . . . All these are especially important just now, because we have seen how their disappearance means the end of the intelligentsia itself: at the least attempt to change the values it embodies, it will itself lose its character and go under—as happened in this country. But it is not only the intelligentsia that preserves values —the ordinary people kept them alive even during the darkest times, when the so-called cultural elite was repudiating them. It may be that the intelligentsia is simply not very stable and that its values are correspondingly volatile. There is also a tendency to self-destruc- tiveness. The people who made the Revolution and were active in the twenties sprang from an intelligentsia which had given up one set of values in favor of others regarded as supreme. The result was a plunge into self-destruction. What does someone like Tikhonov or Fedin have in common with a real Russian intellectual? Nothing— except perhaps their spectacles and false teeth. But the younger people now appearing on the scene—some of them still in their teens —are a very different matter; you can see immediately that they are true intellectuals, though it is very hard to define the qualities involved. The Danish linguist Jespersen, tired of hearing arguments about how to define parts of speech, once jokingly remarked that ordinary people can always tell a verb from a noun, just as a dog can tell bread from clay. But the main thing is: these young intellectuals have appeared and the process is now irreversible—it cannot be stopped even by the physical destruction which the representatives of the past would love to visit on them. Nowadays the persecution of one intellectual only creates dozens more. We saw this during the Brodski affair.
The Russian intelligentsia has one feature which is probably not known in the West. Among the teachers of modern languages I encountered during all my years in provincial colleges, I only once met a true intellectual, a woman called Marta from Chernovitsy. She once asked me in great surprise why all those students who thirst after truth and righteousness are always so keen on poetry. This is so, and it is peculiar to Russia. M. once asked me (or himself, rather) what it was that made someone a member of the intelligentsia. He did not use the word itself—this was at a time when it was still a term of abuse, before it was taken over by bureaucratic elements in the so called liberal professions—but that was what he meant. Was it a university education, he wondered, or attendance in a pre- revolutionary grammar school? No, it was not this. Could it be your attitude toward literature? This he thought was closer, but not quite it. Finally he decided that what really mattered was a person's feelings about poetry. Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before—it is the golden treasury in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it is a fact.
My young friend who loves Blok and nourishes his own pessimism by reading him was for me the first sign of the intelligentsia's rebirth, and I find his pessimism unjustified. The new awakening is accompanied by the copying out and reading of poetry, which thus plays its part in setting things in motion again and reviving thought. The keepers of the flame hid in darkened corners, but the flame did not go out. It is there for all to see.