The Intelligentsia
ARTHUR KOESTLER
'I
NTELLIGENTSIA'
is one of those terms difficult to define, but easy
to associate. It is logically blurred but emotionally vivid, surrounded
with a halo, or rather several halos which overlap and vary accord–
ing to period and place. One may list as examples the romantic salon;
the professional middle classes; terroristic organizations of students
and aristocracy in the second half of nineteenth-century Russia;
patriotic University Corps in post-Napoleonic Germany; the Bohe–
mians of Montmartre, and so on. There are also evocative geogra–
phical names like Bloomsbury, Montpamasse, and Cagnes; and cer–
tain typical attitudes to life including clothing, hair-fashion, drink
and food. The aura of the intelligentsia changes
all
the time; its
temporary representatives are subdivided into classes and groups, and
even its limits are blurred by a host of camp followers and hangers–
on: members of the aristocracy, maecenases, tarts, fools, admirers and
Earnest Young Men. Hence we won't get far with impressionistic
judgements, and had better look up the Oxford dictionary for a solid
definition.
There. we find:
'Intelligentzia, -sia, The part of a nation (esp. the Russian)
that aspires to independent thinking.'
Thus the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1934.
By 1936, in the climate of the pink decade and the popular
front, the definition has undergone a significant change:
'The class consisting of the educated portion of the population
regarded as capable of forming public opinion.'
(The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1936).
This second version has since obviously been proved too
optimistic, and we had better fall back on the first which
is
excellent.
Historically, it is indeed the 'aspiration to independent thinking'
which provides the only valid group-characteristic of the intelligentsia.
But how does it happen that an 'aspiration towards indepen–
dent thinking' arises in a part of a nation? In our class-ridden world
this is obviously not a matter of a spontaneous association of the
