INTELLIGENTSIA
591
turning him into a renegade. He was forced to join the Carbonari
or at least the Free Masons. In order to marry in a way contrary to
Papa's orders. he had to become a materialist and a Darwinist; and
along with that came the realization, reached not without tough-minded–
ness, that man is descended from the apes, to which Papa, in the rising
ladder of evolution, seemed to stand closer than his son.
If
he con–
cerned himself with the Roman Law or the surgeon's lancet, he was
in principle compelled to read forbidden literature and brought to the
conviction that without political freedom the lancet will tum out to be
a dull and rusty hunk of iron. In its struggle for a constitution the
intelligentsia needed the ideal of socialism. Finally they had to renounce
all "fleeting" political values before the supreme tribunal of "Duty" and
"Truth," only for the purpose of making it easier to compromise them–
selves with the regime imposed by Nicholas II after the suppression of
the revolutionary outbreaks of 1905.
Thus we encounter the fatal discrepancy between ideology and
practical, living social reality. The intelligentsia, however, has been
taking this glaring evidence of its own poverty of thought as justification
of its unabashed haughtiness.
"Look," they say, "at the kind of people we are: special, chosen,
anti-philistine, seeking the City of the Future.
If
we are to speak
frankly and tell the whole truth, we must admit that the Russian people
are savages; they don't wash their hands and don't rinse their water–
dippers. The intelligentsia, however, has suffered crucifixion for the
people's welfare. It has taken all the anguish of the truth upon itself.
For a century and a half it has never hesitated to offer its very life
for the passion that consumes it." In fact, the intelligentsia substituted
itself for political parties, classes and the people themselves. It has
lived through entire cultural epochs - for the sake of the people.
It
has marked out the roads of development - again for the people. Where
has all this titanic work taken place? In the imagination of this same
intelligentsia.
III
The culture of the classes from which the old Russian intelligentsia
severed itself was primitive and incapable of absorbing the growing
forces of individual consciousness. The
intelligent
liberated himself from
his old class background almost without any struggle, under the influ–
ence of ideas engendered in a higher culture of greater value. Tom
from his old roots, this class-splinter, turning into an apostate, came
to consider himself absolutely frec in his choice of paths and methods.
He was finished with the past and envisioned the future as a large, blank
