Russia under the Old regime

THE INTELLIGENTSIA

exaltation he and his friends experienced on being first exposed to these heady concepts:

What solemn, luminous, and joyful feeling permeated life once it had been shown that it was possible to explain the phenomena of nature by the very same laws to which the human spirit is subject in its evolution, seemingly to close forever the gap separating the two realms, and fashion them into a single receptacle containing the eternal idea and eternal reason. With what youthful and noble pride did we at that time envisage the share which had been allotted man in this universal existence! By virtue of the quality and right of thought, man transposed visible nature within himself and analyzed it in the innermost recesses of his own consciousness: in short, he became nature's focal point, judge and interpreter. He absorbed nature and in him it revived for rational and inspired existence... The more radiantly the eternal spirit, the eternal idea reflected themselves in man, the more fully did he understand their presence in all the other realms of life. The culmination of the whole [Idealist] outlook were moral obligations, and one of the indispensable obligations was to emancipate within oneself the divine share of the world idea from everything accidental, impure, and false in order to acquire the right to the blessings of a genuine, rational existence.11

Of course, not all Russian intellectuals succumbed to such ecstasy. Idealism had also more sober followers, as, for example, among academic historians who took from Hegel little more than a general scheme of development of human societies. But in some degree, in the reign of Nicholas 1 (1825-55) Idealism was an all-pervading philosophy of the Russian intelligentsia, and its influence persisted well into the second half of the nineteenth century, after its principal tenets had been repudiated and replaced by materialism. The first, 'Idealist', generation of the Russian intelligentsia was recruited almost exclusively from the ranks of dvoriane, especially the comfortably situated 'gentry'. But the social preponderance of dvoriane was a historic accident caused by the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century they alone had the leisure and wherewithal for intellectual interests, especially of such an esoteric kind as demanded by Idealism. Even then, however, intellectuals from other estates were welcomed into the group whenever they chanced to appear, among them Belinskii, the son of a commoner, and V.P.Botkin, the son of a merchant. After the accession of Alexander 11, as the country's estate structure began to dissolve, there was a steady inflow of non-dvoriane youths into the ranks of the intelligentsia. In the 1860s much was made of the sudden emergence as an intellectual force olraznochintsy, i.e. persons not attached to any of the standard legal categories, such as sons of priests who did not follow their fathers' footsteps (e.g. Nicholas Strakhov and Nicholas Ghernyshevskii), children of lower rank, non-hereditary civil servants and officers, and so