Intelligentsia narratives

The chapter explores how narratives about the intelligentsia and its cultural identity unfold the experience and ideology of this significant group in parallel with catastrophic narratives about revolution, terror and war. Central texts include major Russian novels of the twentieth century, such as Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin, Olesha’s Envy, Bulgakov’s The White Guard and The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Also important are the genres of autobiography, memoir, and oral history, and a case study of a single lyric poem, by Osip Mandelstam, further demonstrate the capacity of poetry to engage with the theme of the responsibility of the intelligentsia in a time of terror. The chapter shows how literary texts captured the conflicted and far from passive role of the intelligentsia as a beleaguered moral authority in a state organized around a central political idea.