Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia‪.‬

For remarks delivered at an event touted as a "holiday of the intelligentsia," Fedor Dostoevskii's celebrated oration on Aleksandr Pushkin in the summer of 1880 struck a rather odd note. (1) Slavophiles and Westernizers alike greeted Dostoevskii's evocation of Pushkin's genius with a shower of acclaim. But underlying his unifying message was a challenge to the position of the intelligentsia within the Russian nation, a challenge that Dostoevskii made sharper and more explicit in the printed version of his remarks. (2) Dostoevskii claimed that Pushkin embodied the capacity of an artist to express the spirit of the nation. Pushkin's greatness, Dostoevskii argued, lay in his ability to convey the beauty of the Russian soul through a vivid array of unmistakably Russian characters. Furthermore, Pushkin himself manifested the essence of Russianness in his acute receptiveness to the universal spirit of humanity, a characteristic trait of the entire Russian people. But while Dostoevskii saw Pushkin as intrinsically Russian, both artistically and personally, he did not extend the same recognition to the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. Quite to the contrary, Dostoevskii adamantly insisted that the beauty of the Russian spirit, which Pushkin conveyed with such skill, was derived purely from the common people, the narod: The intelligentsia, in contrast, was cut off from the spirit of the Russian nation. Pushkin's contribution was to portray for the first time its pathology in such vivid characters as Evgenii Onegin and Aleko from "The Gypsies," hapless wanderers whose alienation from the nation and arrogant self-aggrandizement could lead only to tragedy.