Such an amorphous, value-laden definition of the intelligentsia can make concrete historical analysis difficult. A member of the intelligentsia could belong to or originate from a broad range of social, occupational and professional groups, including nobles and factory workers, officials and revolutionaries. He or she could embrace almost any political ideology or party, from monarchist to liberal to anarchist, and be a religious believer or an atheist, a nationalist or an internationalist. The intelligent also could represent almost any artistic movement or school of scholarly inquiry. Historians struggle valiantly to understand the intelligentsia in sociological, ideological and cultural terms. Not only do they seek to connect specific ideas to identifiable subcultures or social environments; their definitions also move back and forth between the intelligentsia as a 'subjective' state of mind and the intelligentsia as an 'objective' social stratum. Precisely because no single social circle, political movement or cultural current can contain the concept or reality of the intelligentsia, scholars end up distinguishing multiple intelligentsias: the noble intelligentsia, the 'democratic' (non-noble) intelligentsia, the liberal intelligentsia, the radical intelligentsia, the revolutionary intelligentsia, the worker intelligentsia, the peasant intelligentsia and so on. True to the very traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, historians are unable to avoid subjective judgements when trying to determine membership in the 'real' intelligentsia.[32]
Given the social and political diversity ofthe intelligentsia, even those historians who rely on subjective factors to define the group are reluctant to equate membership with a specific set of principles, beliefs or attitudes. Instead of compiling a laundry list ofsocial, political and moral traits, they represent the intelligentsia as a form of individual or collective self-definition. Self-declared members ofthe intelligentsia assumed a declasse position in Russian society by claiming to be above the interests and concerns of any particular social group or territorial community. Ironically, intelligenty propagated a myth of the intelligentsia that echoed the myth of the monarchy so many of them sought to oppose. Like the monarchy, members of the intelligentsia presented themselves as transcendent in the sense of being 'above class interests', though in contrast to the monarchy, they lacked concrete powers of intervention. Nor could the intelligentsia claim God-given or sacred authority; their moral authority remained strictly secular, sometimes even atheistic. Through education and personal behaviour, not election by God, individuals achieved social recognition as members of the intelligentsia.21
Whether one chooses to define the intelligentsia as myth, sociocultural self-image, political concept or sociological subculture, it remains necessary to explain how such a group arose in Russia and how it relates to the 'groups between'. Despite years of debate, argument and counter-argument, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the Russian intelligentsia had its origins in the Enlightenment culture of the educated nobility or educated service classes of the late eighteenth century. By that time, elite Russia possessed all the trappings of European fashionable society, including a small commercialised print culture organised around private publishing, journalism, the book trade and public theatre (with permanent buildings and paid entry). The producers and promoters of this culture included eminent personages with close ties to the court and highest social circles, in addition to individuals from the foreign community and lesser service classes.[33] Among consumers - for example, public theatre audiences and purchasers of popular prints and chapbooks - a humbler clientele also could be seen.23 Consumers from the labouring, commercial and lesser service classes did not necessarily identify with Enlightenment ideas or become self-conscious creators of a literary product, but clearly they participated in a public culture where high and low forms of art, literature and sociability inevitably overlapped. Nobles purchased chapbooks, and Enlightenment themes entered 'popular' culture. Lower-class people (chern') and petty bureaucrats attended the theatre, and among the authors of literary plays, one finds the serf M. A. Matinskii (17591829) alongside Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96). In principle at least, to be a participant in the cosmopolitan, pan-European Enlightenment required not noble status, but noble behaviour.24
Ironically, however, the social diversity of Russia's lived Enlightenment did not produce a corresponding cultural or ideological pluralism. When compared with the educated classes of the nineteenth century, those of the eighteenth articulated a uniform brand of Enlightenment thought barely distinguishable from that of the court. Prior to i800, Russia's governing classes, cultural luminaries and everyday consumers of print culture and the arts belonged overwhelmingly to the urban service milieu. In the nineteenth century, numerical growth and further social diversification produced educated classes of more varied ideological hues, yet the elite Enlightenment culture of the preceding century remained integral to the intelligentsia's understanding of justice, equality and progress. Despite the emergence of new cultural credos and organised political opposition, the government and educated classes continued to employ common categories of thought. Irrespective of political ideology, educated Russians defined themselves in relation to a contemporary European culture which they chose either to reject or to emulate. Perhaps more important, officials and self-proclaimed members of the intelligentsia, following the lead of the eighteenth-century educated service classes, also posed as carriers of civilisation and enlightenment to a presumably backward
LiteraryJournals in ImperialRussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1133; E. K. Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas inRussianEnlightenmentTheater (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), chapters 1-2. On the greater degree of commercialisation further west, see J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23 On theatre audiences, see the brief treatment in Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas, chapter 1. On the consumers of popular prints and chapbooks, see D. E. Farrell, 'Popular Prints in the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century Russia', unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980), pp. 34-41.
24 In practice, most participants in the Russian Enlightenment originated from the nobility, but the principle of social pluralism remained.
and benighted Russian people.[34] In so far as nineteenth-century educated Russians identified with a broader 'society', they claimed to embody its essential aspirations and beliefs. Social progress corresponded to their understanding of social progress, and Russia's future became theirs to imagine.
That the eighteenth-century educated nobility or educated service classes represented the cultural origins ofthe Russian intelligentsia may help to explain why the intelligentsia so often can be seen as a creation or creature of the state. But clearly the concept of the intelligentsia, with its suggestion of morally autonomous political opposition and social criticism, did not simply represent an extension of enlightened bureaucracy or the societal obverse of the government.26 The intelligentsia may have lacked strong ties to a broad audience or public, yet in social reach and influence it moved beyond the eighteenth- century educated classes. Indeed, early in the nineteenth century, a 'parting of ways' between the government and educated classes started to change the social and political landscape of Imperial Russia.27 The self-conscious arrival of the intelligentsia in the 1860s showed that the 'parting of ways' had developed into ideological and social identity. In the concept of the intelligentsia, the educated classes resolutely declared their independence from the educated service classes at a time when social, professional and cultural elites in Russia still lacked the autonomous institutions of a politically organised civil society.
33
G. Marker,
34
C. A. Frierson,