Satisfactory definitions of the Russian terms intelligentsiia and intelligent or intelligentka (as the individual male and female members of the group are respectively known) are elusive. For one thing the terms are somewhat anachronistic. Although it now seems that the word intelligentsiia occurs at least as early as 1836, when it appears in a diary entry by the poet Zhukovskii, it was evidently not used in the mid-nineteenth century by or about the group which is now commonly described as the intelligentsia. It therefore does not occur in Dostoevskii's works of the period 1861-2, which are examined here, although it does appear to have come into common use slightly later as Dostoevskii's novelistic career blossomed. A further difficulty lies in the fact that the term does not really denote a distinct social group but rather a collection of deracinated individuals from various social backgrounds who share certain attitudes, including an aspiration to create a new identity based on their cultural and political role in society rather than on their economic position. Nor, given the uncertainty about what precisely the term denotes, can there be complete agreement as to when the force which we now call the intelligentsia came into being.