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Strange: the word “intelligentsia” sounds so often, means so much in our culture, and if you ask who it is, in fact, few people can answer.
This concept is strange – the intelligentsia. I looked on the Internet: a sea of articles, a sea of definitions. At the same time, a survey of random passers-by on the streets is shown on TV – and it turns out that no one knows what it is. Well, except perhaps “bespectacled” and “literate”. There is no understanding, there is – perhaps seeming – indifference, sometimes contempt. Seemingly – because in a heated crowd, “intellectual” sounds about the same force as once “crucify Him.”
Are people not interested? Then why wag an unnecessary, obsolete word, let it remain in its XNUMXth century? And why does the combination “intelligentsia – the fifth column” suddenly appear? This is, in fact, an accusation of betrayal. And who are the traitors? Weaklings with books under their arms, uninteresting intellectuals with glasses, outcasts? But exactly the same “weaklings” survived in the inhuman conditions of the camps and took out books and scientific ideas from there. The “rotten intelligentsia” inscribes in the history of the country the most courageous pages of resistance to cruelty and absurdity.
I also heard the following opinion: the intelligentsia is the property of history, it is high time to forget this coined term, which does not express anything special. But then why is the word “intelligentsia” so often used together with the word “freedom”? This happens suddenly, at certain moments in history, when the notorious stability begins to bother. It is an accident? Why are “bespectacled men” becoming so dangerous to the state that they are exterminated for a word, for an idea, for a half-thought?
Herzen, Pushkin, Lermontov, Chernyshevsky, I’m not talking about the Decembrists… why did they need all this? Why did they leave this to us: “And our names will be written on the ruins of autocracy!” Who needs to read your names?
Read more:
- The peasant and the intellectual: the problem of communication
Unless they, these strange people, who are either heroes, or traitors, or weaklings, or outcasts, or the hope and conscience of the nation.
Who are they? People of intellectual labor, white-collar workers, representatives of creative specialties? No, it doesn’t work, because Hitler was an artist too.
Dmitry Likhachev: “An intellectual is a representative of a profession associated with mental labor (engineer, doctor, scientist, artist, writer), and a person with mental decency. I am personally confused by the widespread expression “creative intelligentsia” – as if some part of the intelligentsia in general can be “uncreative”. All intellectuals “create” to some extent, but on the other hand, a person who writes, teaches, creates works of art, but does it on order, on assignment in the spirit of the requirements of the party, state or some customer with an “ideological bias”, from my point of view, not an intellectual, but a mercenary.
According to my life experience, only people who are free in their convictions, not dependent on economic, party, state coercion, not subject to ideological obligations belong to the intelligentsia.
The basic principle of intelligence is intellectual freedom, freedom as a moral category. An intelligent person is not free only from his conscience and from his thought.
Here is an old woman, lonely, silent, with a homemade slogan on a cardboard among the demonstrators. Like an old graduate of the Institute of Noble Maidens. He knows it’s not safe! Well, why can’t she sit at home? Intelligentsia.
An indestructible caste, a mystery of nature. They apparently do not know that there is another way to power and prosperity. Stubborn, they are always beaten, they make a career in paddy wagons and prisons. Why take the risk, because the truth still someday triumphs. How? Probably by itself?
Alexander Volodin**: “For some reason, the truth then triumphs. For some reason it’s jubilant. Somehow later. Somehow the truth prevails. True, later. But definitely triumphant. For some reason, people need it … “
Read more:
- What is the feeling of freedom?
“The social duty of a person is to be intelligent. A person must be intelligent ”- these maxims are also from Dmitry Likhachev.
Compare with Nikolai Berdyaev: “Freedom is not a right, but a duty”***. It seems to me that these two statements are inextricably linked.
The question remains: why is it still needed, this marginal stratum, which the “overwhelming majority” either hates fiercely or suddenly calls to the front flank in order to at least explain something? They are always against the authorities, what kind of paranoid?
You can do without intelligence.
Your conscience is also always against your peace of mind, so give it up.
* D. Likhachev “On the Russian intelligentsia” Letter to the editor. New World, 1993, No. 2.
** Alexander Volodin – playwright and poet, scriptwriter for the film “Five Evenings” and “Autumn Marathon”. Other of his poems can be read here: http://www.davar.net/RUSSIAN/POETRY/VOLODIN.HTM
*** In book. N. Berdyaeva “Philosophy of a free spirit” (AST, 2006).