Key ideas: Published in 2023. "In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed Russians and concern humanity everywhere and always. My interest is not primarily historical. I focus not so much on how the social circumstances of the day shaped each thinker’s thought as on how the ideas of many profound thinkers confront each other in timeless debates about eternally relevant questions. After all, what makes great literature great—in fact, what makes a work literature in the first place rather than just a historical document—is its ability to transcend its immediate context." (G. Morson)
However tyrannical, tsarist Russia did not remotely compare with what replaced it. Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest’s 400-page classic study of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture from 1929 to 1933, begins by noting that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”...
Ultimate questions first posed in the nineteenth century, and made still more pointed by Soviet experience, fill the pages of Russian literature, criticism, and moral thought. They gave birth to distinctively Russian genres.
Is it any wonder that it was a Russian writer, Eugene Zamyatin, whose novel We pioneered the literary form we now call the dystopia —works that, like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, depict a hellish (or dystopian) world resulting from utopian aspirations? (Huxley and Orwell knew Zamyatin’s book and in turn inspired many more dystopias.)
Is it surprising that the first prison camp novel, Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, should have been Russian?
Or that Russians, who created modern terrorism, also specialized in a genre that might be called the terrorist novel? In addition to masterpieces examining terrorism, such as Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and Andrey Bely’s Petersburg, this genre also— amazingly enough—included riveting fiction written by prominent terrorists themselves.
Acting according to a theory justifying murder, Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, kills an old pawnbroker and her sister. He goes on to argue that “extraordinary people,” like Solon and Napoleon, not only may but should commit crimes when doing so advances a great idea. That would seem horrifying enough. And yet, Porfiry Petrovich, the detective pursuing Raskolnikov, observes: “It’s as well that you only killed the old woman. If you’d invented another theory you might perhaps have done something a thousand times more serious.”
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not only in scale but also in detail.
Surveying the carnage of Lenin and his successors in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, people have repeatedly asked: how did Dostoevsky know?
The answer is that he appreciated how Russian revolutionaries thought—he was himself a former radical who had served time in Siberia—and asked what such people would do if, having gained power, they could actually use their extreme ideas as a blueprint for practice. Hume in power would not have governed like Lenin.
Beginning with the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881), the Russian tendency to take ideas to extremes magnified otherwise indiscernible implications...
Why begin with the reign of Alexander II? For one thing, it was during this period that the questions I examine first received clear formulation. The intelligentsia, in the special Russian sense of the word we shall examine, was born, while the great philosophical novels of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy elucidated and contested intelligentsia beliefs...
Chernyshevsky’s articles, as well as those of Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and other radical journalists, defined a distinct view of the world that was to dominate intelligentsia thought...
The 1870s witnessed the birth of Russian populism (narodnichestvo), a term Americans trace to the 1890s but which, in its distinctively Russian variant, named a movement born two decades earlier. Young intelligents (members of the intelligent sia) heeded Herzen’s call to “go to the people,” that is, to leave the city for the countryside in order to instruct uneducated peasants and, if possible, stir them to revolt..
Some concluded that high culture, as morally tainted, should be entirely destroyed. Others rejected education which, they held, could only lead to a new class of oppressors. Still others denounced pure scientific research. We shall examine some splendid fiction, notably the stories of Vsevolod Garshin and the sketches of Gleb Uspensky, that captured the sense of guilt the authors themselves experienced.
Early populism fostered an argument used from then on. Instead of advancing reasons demonstrating the advisability of a given action, thinkers might simply argue that it is what “the people” demand. The people could not be wrong. Both left and right used this argument to justify Russian military intervention in the Balkans in 1876
Perhaps only Tolstoy, who delighted in opposing prevailing opinion, rejected both this war and the infallibility of “the people.”
In the eighth part of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s hero Levin, along with his wise father-in-law, contend that the common people neither know nor care about the concerns attributed to them. What’s more, they can err like anyone else. For that matter, there is no good reason to accept the idea of a unified people in the first place. “That word ‘people’ is so vague,” Levin shockingly observes.
The 1870s also witnessed the birth of Russian terrorism. The People’s Will not only successfully murdered government officials, it also created a whole new way of life. Russia became the first country where young men and women, when asked their intended career, might answer “terrorist,” an honored, if dangerous, profession.
Sofya Perovskaia, for instance, directed the operation that killed the tsar. Following family tradition, brothers and sisters joined the terrorist movement together, as the Lenin and Kropotkin siblings did. As some now associate terrorism with radical Islamists, nineteenth-century Europeans associated it with “Russian nihilism.”
After a series of assassination attempts, taking many innocent lives, the People’s Will at last succeeded in killing Alexander II [the Tsar-Liberator] on March 1, 1881, which brought reform to an abrupt halt and led to the polarization that was to shape Russian thought and politics thereafter...
Apologists for the radicals, and many struck by the romance of their dangerous lives, credulously accepted the claim that government obstinacy forced high-minded Russians into terrorism.
The joint appearance of these novels made possible a dialogue of allusions. When Dostoevsky’s detective Porfiry Petrovich taunts Raskolnikov with his unjustified faith in rational planning, he observes:
You are still . . . so to say, in your first youth, so you put intellect above everything, like all young people. Playful wit and abstract argument fascinate you for all the world like the old Austrian Hofkriegsrath, as far as I can judge of military matters, that is: on paper they’d beaten Napoleon and taken him prisoner, and there in their study they worked it all out in the cleverest fashion, but look you, General Mack surrendered with his whole army, he-he-he!"
Porfiry Petrovich alludes to Tolstoy’s rejection of a “science of war,” a skepticism Porfiry extends to criminology. Tolstoy describes General Mack showing up with bandaged head at General Kutuzov’s headquarters right after losing his army: “ ‘You see before you the unfortunate Mack,’ he said, his voice breaking.” Is Raskolnikov headed for a similar defeat? Does Porfiry Petrovich read The Russian Herald?
Writing in 1909, the critic Mikhail Gershenzon observed that “In Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist’s genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia.”...
What’s more, the great realists insisted above all on their independence and on fidelity to the truth as they saw it, even if that truth did not support progressive polemics. In a letter to A. N. Pleshcheev responding to criticisms that his story “The Name-Day Party” was not properly tendentious, Chekhov replied,
“Does my last story really show no ‘tendency’? You tell me that my stories lack a protesting element. . . .But don’t I protest from the beginning of my story to the end against lies? Isn’t that a tendency?”
As Chekhov well knew, from the intelligentsia’s point of view, it was not. The tsarist censorship was bad enough, but the intelligentsia added what was called “the second censorship.”
If these “toads and crocodiles” ever gained power, Chekhov complained, “they will rule in ways not known even at the time of the Inquisition in Spain,” an apparent exaggeration that proved an understatement...
As installments of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were appearing in The Russian Herald, Dostoevsky reviewed it in his one-person periodical, A Writer’s Diary... In an article entitled “Anna Karenina as a Fact of Special Significance,” he praised the book not only for its “perfection as a work of art,” and not only as a masterpiece superior to any in Europe, but also for proving that Russians can make a real contribution to world culture.
"If the Russian genius could give birth to this fact,” he concluded, “then it is not doomed to impotence and . . . can provide something of its own, it can create its own word.”
For Dostoevsky, this novel vindicated the very existence of Russian culture and, indeed, the Russian people. No country has ever valued literature more than Russia.
To be sure, other countries (including America) have shared a cultural inferiority complex, but it is hard to imagine an American finding national vindication in a novel. Literature exists to represent life, we naturally think, but Russians often speak as if life existed to provide material for literature: Is that why God created the Russian people?...The gods have inflicted countless tragedies on Russia so that novels about them could be written
It surprises many to learn that Stalin himself was a voracious reader. As Stephen Kotkin observed, “Stalin had a passion for books, which he marked up and filled with placeholders to find passages. (His personal library would ultimately grow to more than 20,000 volumes.)”
“The Leader (vozhd’) would always ask what I was reading,” recalled Artyom Sergeev, who lived for a while in the Stalin household. Recommending the Russian classics, Stalin observed that “during war-time there would be a lot of situations you had never encountered before in your life. . . .But if you read a lot, then in your memory you will already have the answers how to conduct yourself and what to do. Literature will tell you.”
Novelist Konstantin Simonov, who spoke with Stalin several times, noted the leader’s keen interest in and extensive knowledge of literature.1That knowledge impressed many writers.
If one knew Russian poetry by heart, it appeared, one’s humanness remained. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg recalled that in one prison she was allowed a single book a week:
That was when I understood what a really good book was: a book that would make you feel human again when you’d read it! For so long now it had been drilled into our heads that we weren’t human, that we were the dregs, garbage . . . not just by the prison guards, whom we despised, but by the newspapers, which we still hadn’t learned to disbelieve . . . But here were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky speaking to me, and in my human essence I felt myself their equal.
As anarchist Peter Kropotkin observed in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Russian literature, as the nation’s conscience, shapes morality and plays the most important role in a young person’s education. “In Russia there is not a man or woman of mark . . . who does not owe the first impulse toward a higher development to his or her teacher of literature.”
Other teachers instruct in their own subject, Kropotkin explains, but it is the teacher of literature who unites all learning into a meaningful and ennobling whole:
Only the teacher of literature . . . can bind together the separate historical and humanitarian sciences, unify them by a broad philosophical and humane conception, and awaken higher ideas and inspirations in the brains and hearts of young people. In Russia, that necessary task falls quite naturally upon the teacher of Russian literature.
War and Peace frequently explains why historians err about facts as well as meaning. The events novels describe are usually fictional, of course, but the shape of those events—the depiction of how things happen—is true. When historians create narratives that are false to the way things happen, the novelist will detect their naïveté.
In a number of passages in War and Peace, Tolstoy first paraphrases or quotes a historian’s account of an incident which, he argues, simply could not be true because things do not happen that way. Much of War and Peace consists of what might be called “negative narration”—an analysis of what could not have happened. Tolstoy often presents his alternative account as, if not necessarily correct, at least more likely than received historical narratives.
In 1909 seven prominent thinkers joined to produce the anthology: Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia.
Here we may single out one of its key observations: it is possible to trace two traditions in Russian literature and thought.
One consisted of writers whose greatness lay in the literary masterpieces they produced or the original ideas they developed. Among prose writers, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Chekhov belong to this tradition; among poets, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Fet; among philosophers, Chaadaev and Vladimir Soloviev.
The other tradition, according to the Landmarks contributors, celebrated radical “journalists” (in the Russian sense of makers of public opinion), especially Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, and, above all, Chernyshevsky...
The fundamental disagreement between the two traditions, then, concerned not only which writers to favor but also what literature was supposed to be. Radicals denounced calls for “artistic freedom” and defenses of works without an unambiguous political tendency as “art for art’s sake” appealing only to aristocrats, bourgeois individualists, or supporters of existing injustice.
The radicals did not, of course, describe themselves as opposed to truthfulness. Rather, they redefined “truth” to include not only the observable present reality but also the inevitable future in the making.
Great writers discern “types”—in the sense of prototypes—of people who are rare at present but bound to predominate in the future. They have what Belinsky called “the clairvoyant gift of presaging the future by the signs of the present.”...
The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have to bring their thinking into accord with the Party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required...
Here, then, is a key difference between the two traditions as they reappeared in the Soviet period.
For official writers, who regarded themselves as the heirs of Chernyshevsky and the radical journalists, reality is essentially Platonic. What is most real is not the brute facts, but something higher. Truth is not empirical, as “bourgeois objectivists” suppose, but “typical”: it is the truth of the world certain to come.
By contrast, the writers who adhered to the traditions of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov insisted on representing the world as we see it, depicting people as they are rather than as “positive heroes,” and conveying the truth of actual experience.
Model biographies for terrorists, drawn from a variety of literary sources, inspired numerous young men and women to adopt this dangerous but glamorous life. The terrorist Sergei Kravchinsky fled abroad a fter stalking and stabbing General Nikolai Mezentsev, the head of Russia’s security police, with a stiletto and twisting it in the wound. Having escaped, he turned to literature, or rather, to mythology.
Under the name Stepniak, Kravchinsky published two books romanticizing terrorism and terrorists: a novel, Career of a Nihilist, written in English, and Underground Russia, written in Italian but rapidly translated into Russian and widely known. Presented as nonfiction, Underground Russia more closely resembles a Russian Orthodox paterikon, a collection of incidents from saints’ lives. Stepniak ascribed almost superhuman qualities to terrorist men and women. The terrorist, he exclaimed,
is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero. . . The force of mind, the indomitable energy, and the spirit of sacrifice which his [romantic] predecessor attained [only] in the beauty of his dreams, he attains in the grandeur of his mission, in the strong passions which this marvelous, intoxicating vertiginous struggle arouses in his heart...
Proud as Satan rebelling against God . . .the Terrorist is immortal. . . .It is this . . .imposing mission, it is this certainty of approaching victory, which gives him that cool and calculating enthusiasm, that almost superhuman energy, which astounds the world.
Remarkably enough, the most famous of all terrorists, Boris Savinkov, also wrote (under the pseudonym Ropshin) a series of novels about terrorists. As Lynn Ellen Patyk has observed, Savinkov began both careers at the same time, in 1903, when he published his first story and joined the Socialist Realist Combat Organization.
Under his leadership, that organized group of terrorists would successfully murder Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve (1904) and the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, governor-general of Moscow (1905).
In 1909, Savinkov published Pale Horse, the first of a series of novels devoted to terrorism. They contributed to what Patyk calls “Ropshin-Savinkov’s self-mythologization” on the basis of “Russian modernism’s neo-romantic cultural mythologies.”... He saved reviews of his books along with clippings about his terrorist exploits. The same project included both.
It is clear that Savinkov wrote novels and memoirs to glorify his terrorism. But I suspect the reverse is also true: he turned to terrorism in the first place in order to provide compelling material for fiction. It is well known that he was indifferent to ideology and would ply his trade under any banner. Terrorism and literature, revolution and reading: he brought Russia’s two most prestigious occupations together.
In his poem “It’s Too Early to Rejoice” (1918), Mayakovsky demanded that great artworks be lined up against the wall and summarily executed. Aleksei Gastev, a leading spokesman for the “Smithy” (Kuznitsa) group, called for a complete transformation of art as part of a movement to “mechanize not only . . .production” but also “everyday thinking . . . [to] render individual thinking impossible.” Only collectivized art, completely different from the individualistic art of the past, should be possible.
At the first conference of the Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization, founded in 1917), historian Richard Stites observed, a euphoric Proletkultist insisted “that all culture of the past might be called bourgeois, that within it—except for natural science and technical skills . . . there was nothing worthy of life, and that the Proletkult would begin the work of destroying the old culture.”
“In Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist’s genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia,” declared critic Mikhail Gershenzon in the notorious anthology Landmarks.
If ever a book caused a scandal in prerevolutionary Russia, this was it. The volume, in which seven prominent thinkers sharply criticized the intelligentsia, became the period’s most widely debated— or rather, vilified—publication....
We can appreciate how notorious this book on the intelligentsia became if we consider that one recent historian, assuming that e very intelligent (member of the intelligentsia) had read it, took its circulation figures as a first step in calculating the size of the intelligentia.
To grasp why this anthology struck a nerve, one must first appreciate that its seven prominent contributors used the term intelligentsia in a sense very different from its meaning in English today. England had never had an intelligentsia in this sense, and, so far as the seven thinkers were concerned, this was a condition to which Russians should aspire....
No matter how well (or ill) educated one was, one had to think in the right way...
In Landmarks, the liberal (formerly Marxist) politician Peter Struve observed that “the word ‘intelligentsia’ can, of course be used in various senses. . . . Obviously, by ‘intelligentsia’ we do not mean . . .the ‘educated class.’ . . The intelligentsia [in the strict sense] is a totally unique factor in Russian political development” and only includes those of a particular political persuasion.
“The intelligentsia, in this political definition,” Struve explained, “made its appearance only during the age of reforms,” that is, the reign of Alexander II. Struve specified that earlier thinkers like Radishchev, Novikov, and Chaadaev, who were clearly well educated and what we would today call intellectuals, do not qualify as intelligents “in our sense of the word”; neither do Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov.
In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, Sonya, a radical young woman, and her revolutionary friend Naum confront her engineer father Ilya Isakovich and his friend, the engineer Obodovsky. Contrary to intelligentsia protocol, Ilya Isakovich takes his profession with the utmost seriousness and views “the split between revolutionaries and engineers” as one separating wreckers from builders. “You o ught to be ashamed of yourself, Papa!” Sonya exclaims in horror. “The whole intelligentsia is for revolution!”
In reply, her father challenges her definition of intelligentsia: “Don’t we belong to the intelligentsia, then? We engineers who make and build everything of importance—don’t we count as intelligents?” The answer, from her perspective, is no, and so “an anguished wail [came] from Sonya.” Throughout the discussion, “Naum and Sonya were . . .so full of scorn that they had forgotten to eat.”
For the two engineers, the real issue is the intelligentsia’s attitude toward work. Ilya Isakovich asks, where does “your party gets its funds? All those meeting places, safe houses, disguises, bombs, all the moving around, the escapes, the literature—where does the money come from?” Much of it, as everyone knew, came from “expropriations”—the euphemism for robberies—and so Naum indignantly refuses to answer. “Well, there we have it,” Ilya Isakovich concludes. “There are thousands of you. It’s a long time since any of you had a job. And we aren’t supposed to ask any questions. Yet you don’t consider yourselves exploiters.” For Solzhenitsyn, the “engineers” represent the path not taken, the Russian future sacrificed to totalitarianism.
What “socialism” meant was almost always left vague, usually with the explanation Bazarov gives in Fathers and Children: our present business is destruction, those who come after will decide what to build.
Socialism so conceived was not so much an economic doctrine—like government ownership of the means of production and distribution—as a utopian or millenarian vision of a world that had banished evil once and for all. Terrorist Vera Figner explained that she “accepted the idea of socialism at first instinctively,” understanding it to mean nothing more than “altruistic thought . . .equality, fraternity, and universal happiness.”...
As Gershenzon paraphrased the point,
Public opinion . . . maintained that all life’s woes have political causes; with the collapse of the [tsarist] police state, health and courage, as well as freedom, would at once prevail. Everyone blindly believed this assertion, which removed all responsibility from the individual. This was one reason why the hopes for revolution assumed the character of religious chiliasm [i.e., millenarianism].
No one was responsible for his or her actions because actions are completely determined by the social environment, which alone is responsible for crime. As in all utopian thinking, evil derives from a single cause, which the utopian thinker knows how to eliminate.
The Landmarks contributors, by contrast, proclaimed “the practical primacy of spiritual life over the external forms of community” and pointed to the appalling morals of intelligents in their daily lives. Why should we believe that people who cannot properly arrange their own lives could arrange the lives of everyone else, or that those who now behave badly now would behave better as political dictators?
As the enlightened characters in What Is to Be Done? repeat, there is no “human nature” since people are infinitely malleable. All utopian thinkers share this view, for how else could human malfeasance be eliminated?
It was this line of thinking that led the Soviets for many years to ban genetics, which suggested that behavior does not derive entirely from social cause.
To tolerate other opinions, or consider the views of those who disagree, was to show lack of commitment to the cause. Elena Shtakenshneider memorably referred to what was called the “second censorship”:
I once worked up the courage to tell my friends that I don’t like Nekrasov. That I don’t like Herzen—I wouldn’t have the courage. . . . We now have two censorships and, as it were, two governments, and it’s hard to say which one is more severe...
The “second censorship” often weighed more heavily than the tsarist one, which only forbade (“negative censorship”) but did not prescribe (“positive censorship”) what to say.
Dismissing “the wood lice and mollusks we call the intelligentsia,” Chekhov warned that “under the banner of science, art, and oppressed free thinking among us in Russia, such toads and crocodiles will rule in ways not known even at the time of the inquisition in Spain.” Dostoevsky referred to intelligents as people proudly wearing an ideological “uniform".
In Crime and Punishment, Lebeziatnikov, Dostoevsky’s caricature of an intelligent, praises a woman who, after seven years of marriage, abandoned her husband and children. Her suitably “frank” letter to him explained her actions:
I can never forgive you that you deceived me by concealing from me that there is another organization of society by means of communes. I have only lately learned it from a great-hearted man to whom I have given myself and with whom I am establishing a commune. I speak plainly because I consider it dishonest to deceive you . . .
The whole complex of intelligentsia behavior, morals, dress, manners, and beliefs lent themselves to parody, which, like caricature, works by exaggerating or otherwise foregrounding something real. Lebeziatnikov, Dostoevsky’s narrator observes,
was one of the numerous and varied legions of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.
From the start, Dostoevsky appreciated the significance of the intelligentsia’s exalted view of itself. The hero of Crime and Punishment (1866), Raskolnikov, divides humanity into two groups, the numerous people “of the present” and the few “people of the future.”
The latter, a small group of “extraordinary” human beings, bring progress and a “new word,” while the former, the vast majority of “ordinary” people who are always “conservative and law abiding,” defend the past. They exist as mere ethnographic “material that serves only to reproduce its kind . . .they live under control and love to be controlled...
In all likelihood, no one alive ever belongs to that saved “humanity”; it is people of the future who will benefit from the intelligentsia’s activity. As Semyon Frank paraphrased this way of looking at things,
the abstract idea of happiness in the remote future destroys the concrete moral relationship of one individual to another and the vital sensation of love for one’s neighbor, one’s contemporaries, and their current needs. The socialist is not an altruist. True, he too is striving for human happiness, but he does not love living people, only his idea. . . . Since he is sacrificing himself to this idea, he does not hesitate to sacrifice o thers as well.
Terrorists, therefore, felt little or no compunction about killing dozens of innocent bystanders and they eventually engaged in random killing (throwing bombs into cafes).
Herzen, as well as Dostoevsky, foresaw such an outcome. For such revolutionaries, Herzen warned as early as 1862, living people serve only as “the cannon fodder of liberation."...
Tkachev had argued for it long before: “Since the people themselves do not understand their own good, what is truly good for them must be forced upon them.” This is Raskolnikovism with a vengeance.
Berdyaev is mistaken when he says that the intelligentsia was destroyed by the people for which it once made such sacrifices. The intelligentsia destroyed itself, burning out of itself . . .everything that conflicted with the cult of power.
—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
What happened to the intelligentsia after a portion of it, the Bolsheviks, seized power?...
Let us follow Solzhenitsyn’s and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s discussion of the postrevolutionary intelligentsia.
In the Soviet intelligentsia’s first stage, lasting through the 1920s, many intelligents (particularly those belonging to other radical parties) died at the hands of the Bolsheviks, while others found themselves in exile...
The intelligentsia, in short, fell into what Solzhenitsyn called “a hypnotic trance, having willingly let themselves be hypnotized.” Self-hypnosis of this kind afflicts not only Russians, he continued.
To the extent that a society’s educated people begin to resemble the classic Russian intelligentsia, deliberate suspension of moral judgment becomes common. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn warned, “the process is repeating itself in the West today” (1974)
In her chapter “Capitulation,” Mandelstam argued that by such thinking the old intelligentsia destroyed itself. “This was the period of mass surrender when they [intelligents] all took the path marked out by the pre-revolutionary extremists and their post-revolutionary successors.”
What exactly made these intelligents act contrary to their values?
For one thing, Mandelstam explained, they could not bear to oppose anything called “revolutionary.” For another, they came to accept an overpowering idea, “that there is an irrefutable scientific truth by means of which . . . people can foresee the future, change the course of history at will, and make it rational,” thereby achieving “heaven on earth.” Still more important “for them was the end of all doubt, and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically obtained truth.”
As Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor explains, certain basic facts of human nature—the lure of certainty, the irresistible appeal of escaping from doubt, the comfort of joining in collective affirmation—predispose people to surrendering their consciences...
Osip “really was in a state of confusion,” Nadezhda explained. “It is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times. To some degree, as we stood at the crossroads, we all had the temptation to rush a fter everyone else, to join the crowd that knew where it was going. The power of the ‘general will’ is enormous—to resist it is much harder than people think.”...
With the old intelligentsia discredited or gone, Solzhenitsyn explained, the label intelligent first became a term of abuse (usually accompanied by the adjective “spineless”) and then indicated an entirely diffeent group of people. Used in this new way, the term “intelligentsia” referred to “the whole educated stratum, every person who has been to school above the seventh grade,” or, as Andrei Amalrik observed, the entire middle class.
Even when applied more narrowly to professionals, technocrats, and bureaucrats, Nadezhda Mandelstam observed, the term designated people sharing nothing with those tracing their intellectual lineage to Landmarks and the nineteenth-century classics—nothing “except perhaps their spectacles and false teeth.”
Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam agreed that a third stage of the Soviet intelligentsia had begun. Some dissidents, who were reviving the “new stratum” of prerevolutionary humanist thinkers, might constitute the nucleus of a new intelligentsia.
"Is not that nucleus whose beginnings we think we already discern today,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “a repetition of the one that the revolution cut short, is it not the essence of a ‘latter-day Vekhi [Landmarks]’?”
What unites these new humanists, according to Solzhenitsyn, is “the purity of their aspirations . . . spiritual selflessness in the name of truth. . . . This intelligentsia will have been brought up not so much in libraries as on spiritual sufferings.”.. They do not share an ideology, as nineteenth-century intelligents did, but a spirituality—“a thirst for truth, a craving to cleanse their souls.”
If so, Solzhenitsyn concluded, then we may need a new word for such people. “It would be better if we declared the word ‘intelligentsia’ . . .dead for the time being. Of course, Russia will be unable to manage without a substitute for the intelligentsia, but *the new word will be formed not from ‘understand’ or ‘know’ but from something spiritual.”*
Nadezhda Mandelstam also detected the beginnings of a new intelligentsia accepting the humanistic values of the prerevolutionary “new stratum” and the Russian classics: You will not catch these people saying, “You can’t swim against the tide” or “You c an’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” “In other words, the values we thought had been abolished forever are being restored". . . .
If the initiative in destroying humanistic values had “belonged to the intelligentsia of the twenties,” Mandelstam argued, then “at the present day we are witnessing the reverse process.” Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessor, but in accord with the great writers, the new intelligentsia adheres to no specific ideology. It values, instead, “the ability to think critically . . . freedom of thought, criticism, humanism.”
What made people capable of such unprecedented evil? Or as Solzhenitsyn phrased the question, why was it that Macbeth and Iago destroyed only a few people whereas Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler killed millions?
Solzhenitsyn answered that Macbeth and Iago had no “ideology,” no all-encompassing system defining good and evil and removing responsibility for an individual’s actions. And that makes all the difference, because real evildoers do not resemble literary villains who rejoice in doing evil. No, they imagine they are doing good.
Before a person can do evil, Solzhenitsyn explained, he must discover “a justification for his actions” so that he can tell himself that his stealing, destroying, killing, and torturing serve the good.“Ideology—that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but re- ceive praise and honors.”
The Spanish Inquisitors invoked Christianity, the Nazis race, and “Jacobins (early and late) . . . equality, brotherhood and the hapiness of future generations.”...
Ideology provides what Bakhtin, in his early essay on ethics, called an “alibi.”The logic of the alibi is: it may look as if I performed this act, but it was not I. Someone or something else is responsible . One thinks: my “I” was, or might as well have been, far away, since the agency was not mine....
The idea that people are entirely products of their environment—of their society, of the age in which they live—offers a wide range of possible alibis.
“I am nothing in myself, a mere particle in a necessary social evil,” the doctor in Chekhov’s Ward Six excuses himself. “Consequently, it is not I who am to blame for my dishonesty, but the times [. . .] If I had been born two hundred years later, I should have been different.”
In Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Lara discovers the “root cause of all the evil” around her —people’s willingness to slaughter and celebrate slaughter—in “the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion.
People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.”
In The Master and Margarita, the demonic “choirmaster” Korovyov literally makes people sing in chorus without the ability to stop. As with the beliefs they profess, the agency leading to the words they sing is not their own.
In the first dystopian novel, Zamyatin’s We, the ruler explains to the hero D-503 that society has taken humanity’s dream of happiness
to the logical end. I ask: what was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is, and then would chain him to it. What are we doing now? The ancient dream of paradise.
To choose anything but happiness would be insane, D-503 has himself asserted, to which the heroine I-330 replies: “Yes, yes, precisely. All must become insane” in that way.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Mustapha Mond advances much the same argument as the ruler in We. “I don’t want comfort,” the Savage tells him. .
I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin. . . . I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
Mustpaha Mond replies that in so doing you are claiming “ ‘the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow. . . .’ There was a long silence. ‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.
Is it possible that to achieve real happiness, happiness cannot be the goal? Perhaps, as Sergei Bulgakov observed, it should be “incidental to, not an intended concomitant of moral activity and service to the good”?
So understood, real happiness must be a byproduct accompanying the achievement of some higher purpose, for which happiness itself may be sacrificed.