This chapter surveys the changing meanings associated with the figure of the intelligent in Russian literature from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its focus falls on the period between 1860 and 1880, when the term ‘intelligentsia’ entered the Russian press as a way of identifying ‘intellectual proletarians’: educated people alienated from the state, society, and the means of production. The chapter offers an overview of the varying literary representations of the intelligentsia in changing historical contexts: before and after the Revolution of 1917, during the cultural Thaw that followed Stalin’s death, and in late- and post-Soviet culture. The chapter also sketches the ‘pre-history’ of the intelligentsia: the retroactive projection of the term intelligentsia onto several generations of educated people who lived before the notion came into use in the 1860s.