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The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Daniel R. Brower
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Extract

Historians have little reason to believe that the so-called intelligentsia corresponded to any real group of men in Russian society. It is true that the term has been used very frequently in the past one hundred years, but it has been denned in so many ways and been the subject of such bitter partisan debate that it has lost any objective meaning. Historians in the West can hardly communicate on the subject any longer, for no two of them seem to give the term quite the same meaning. The confusion extends even to terminology. The Russian word intelligentsiia has passed directly into the English language as a collective noun. But what then is the term for the individual—intelligent or intellectual? Some historians carefully use the Russian noun; others accept the English noun as the approximate equivalent.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 638 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1967

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References

1 Allan, Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia California Slavic Studies, III (Berkeley, 1964), 8–19.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., pp. 22-23.

3 Ibid.

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15 Ibid., p. 327.

16 Ibid., p. 456.

17 Raeff, “Some Reflections on Russian Liberalism,” The Russian Review, XVIII (July 1959), 228. Raeff seems to use this concept, though never spelled out, in his recent work, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia : The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 168-69.

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22 Billington, p. 233.

23 Raeff, Origins, pp. 9-10.

24 Leikina-Svirskaia, pp. 103-4.

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