{"title":"The Intelligentsia is Dead, Long Live the Intelligentsia! Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Soviet Dissidence and a New Spiritual Elite","authors":"Frances Nethercott","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.03.002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article explores the peculiar intermeshing of continuity and discontinuity in Russian culture through the prism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay, ‘Obrazovanshchina’ (‘The Smatterers’). Written in 1974 for the collective volume <em>Iz-pod glyb</em> (<em>From under the Rubble</em>), Solzhenitsyn drew on arguments advanced by contributors to the famous pre-revolutionary work <em>Vekhi</em> (<em>Landmarks</em>, 1909), both as a polemical tool to distance himself from his immediate contemporary rivals and as a template in his bid to establish a new spiritual elite in Brezhnev’s Soviet Russia. This article suggests that if one intention of Solzhenitsyn’s essay was to declare an irrevocable break with the culture of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia tradition, the discursive tools he used to do this (intertextual devices, ad hominem polemics, selective historical and ideological narratives) remained firmly anchored within that tradition.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922000291/pdfft?md5=6319867b4fee43410b214ced36f6e9a4&pid=1-s2.0-S0304347922000291-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922000291","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article explores the peculiar intermeshing of continuity and discontinuity in Russian culture through the prism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay, ‘Obrazovanshchina’ (‘The Smatterers’). Written in 1974 for the collective volume Iz-pod glyb (From under the Rubble), Solzhenitsyn drew on arguments advanced by contributors to the famous pre-revolutionary work Vekhi (Landmarks, 1909), both as a polemical tool to distance himself from his immediate contemporary rivals and as a template in his bid to establish a new spiritual elite in Brezhnev’s Soviet Russia. This article suggests that if one intention of Solzhenitsyn’s essay was to declare an irrevocable break with the culture of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia tradition, the discursive tools he used to do this (intertextual devices, ad hominem polemics, selective historical and ideological narratives) remained firmly anchored within that tradition.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.