Still Alive: The Russian Intelligentsia in a Predicament

Andrei Sinyavsky. The Russian Intelligentsia. (The Harriman Lectures). Translated by Lynn Visson. Foreword by Mark von Hagen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xiv, 98 pp. Notes. Index. $19.95, cloth. Masha Gessen. Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. London and New York: Verso, 1997. xii, 211 pp. Selected Bibliography. Index. $18.60, paper. The role of the Russian intelligentsia has been constantly debated during every crisis in Russia's stormy history over the last century. As many as seventy years ago, the philosopher G.P. Fedotov used the word "fateful" to describe the subject because he believed that an understanding of the Russian intelligentsia was key to an understanding of the country and of its future.' Depending on one's point of view, this small fragment of Russia's population has been cast in a kaleidoscope of roles that range from "demon" to "prophet" to "victim." Even among those who believe themselves to be members of the Russian intelligentsia, there are no two individuals who would agree on what the intelligentsia is. The two books under review provide no exception to this rule. Serious, sincere and even passionate, both describe the Russian intelligentsia's current predicament and both offer an excellent opportunity for comparison. The two books present two divergent views of the core of the intelligentsia phenomenon and of its role in the swiftly-changing Russian reality after the disintegration of the Soviet system. The disparities in their views arise not only from the authors' dissimilar ages, experiences and backgrounds, but also from the different perspectives they bring to their work. Sinyavsky searches the past to shed light on the present, while Gessen's standpoint is that of the new generation looking into the future. Sinyavsky's style is accusatory, whereas Gessen uses ridicule to make her case. Sinyavsky's reasoning is generalized and based on published material, while Gessen pieces together encounters and interviews with a variety of her contemporaries. Both authors deem the intelligentsia's role to be crucial to the transition from the Soviet system to freedom and democracy. They also share a propensity to blame the intelligentsia for society's failure to avoid the many political and economic pitfalls along this difficult path. Before going further into a discussion of the contents of each of the books, it is worth paying some attention to their cover designs, which appear to be expressive of the authors' ideas. The cover jacket of Sinyavsky's book features the contours of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, one of the best known masterpieces of Russian architecture and a symbol of unattainable perfection of the distant past. The dominant colour is red, redolent of blood and symbolic of Communist ideas. In the title, also red, the letter R in the word RUSSIAN is reversed so that it turns into X (the pronoun I in Russian) symbolizing the egocentric inclinations of the Russian intelligentsia. The colour of the title of Gessen's book is also red. A kitchen knife pierces a book that has been put on top of a glass jar, typical of the jars one sees in a kitchen. Blood drips into the jar from the cut in the book. The kitchen is the place where, according to the tradition, the intelligentsia "speak speeches," so these objects are closely related to the subject. But the full meaning of the design becomes clear when one manages to decipher the title of the bleeding book, L'homme qui assassina by Claude Farrere. This conveys the scene of the intelligentsia's violent death, whether by murder or suicide. The cover seems to suggest: You realize now that the victim himself was a murderer,2 so read on and there shall be no pity in you. The personality of Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) is inseparable from the history of the Russian intelligentsia. His life and work contributed to the emergence of a very special part of the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union-the dissident, or human rights, movement born as the opposition to his and Yuli Daniel's arrest in 1965 and to their joint trial the next year. …