Williams, Harold Whitmore (1876-1928) Russia of the Russians - London 1914
IV. The Intelligentsia
...Whereas the intellectuals of other countries enter more or less completely into the life of their environment and conform to its rules and customs, the life of the Russian intelligentsia has been hitherto constant protest against the existing order. The distinguishing feature of the intelligentsia was not that its members wrote books and articles or discussed literary and social questions, but that they did this in the name of a higher political and social order that was to replace the existing order. Everything they did was permeated with the desire for liberation, for reform. The nature of the reform required was conceived of differently at different periods and by various groups. Some dreamed of Russia as a land of self-governing communities, of true-hearted Orthodox Christians under the aegis of the autocracy, others wanted to take Russia into a federation of Communes without the autocracy, others proclaimed a reign of science and reason, denounced all tradition, and, on the strength of such manuals of crude materialism as Büchner's Kraft and Stoff, declared poetry, art, and personal beauty to be mere instruments of reaction. Some advocated Agrarian Socialism, a later generation preached Marxian Socialism.
...It is the subordination of all intellectual effort and indeed of personal habits to a supreme interest in social reform that gives the Russian intelligentsia its peculiar colouring, that constitutes its strenght and its weakness.
...Whereas the intellectuals of other countries enter more or less completely into the life of their environment and conform to its rules and customs, the life of the Russian intelligentsia has been hitherto constant protest against the existing order. The distinguishing feature of the intelligentsia was not that its members wrote books and articles or discussed literary and social questions, but that they did this in the name of a higher political and social order that was to replace the existing order. Everything they did was permeated with the desire for liberation, for reform. The nature of the reform required was conceived of differently at different periods and by various groups. Some dreamed of Russia as a land of self-governing communities, of true-hearted Orthodox Christians under the aegis of the autocracy, others wanted to take Russia into a federation of Communes without the autocracy, others proclaimed a reign of science and reason, denounced all tradition, and, on the strength of such manuals of crude materialism as Büchner's Kraft and Stoff, declared poetry, art, and personal beauty to be mere instruments of reaction. Some advocated Agrarian Socialism, a later generation preached Marxian Socialism.
...It is the subordination of all intellectual effort and indeed of personal habits to a supreme interest in social reform that gives the Russian intelligentsia its peculiar colouring, that constitutes its strenght and its weakness.