Intellectuals as missionaries

the liberal opposition in Russia and their notion of culture

Igor Narskij

pp. 331-352

in: Andrea Zink, Rosalinde Sartorti, Annett Jubara (eds), Crossing boundaries, Studies in East European Thought 62, 2010.

Abstract

The present article is primarily concerned with the imagined community of liberal intellectuals (starting with the Westernizers, in the 1840s, and ending with the Kadets and the participants of the October Revolution in the early twentieth century), rather than the community that "objectively" existed. This imaginary community constructed notions of the collective identity of their own group as well as that of Russian society. For this purpose, they instrumentalized the notions of "progress," "backwardness," "culturedness" (kul'turnost') and "benightedness" (temnota), thereby creating hierarchies in which the "constructors" of collective identities granted themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and society. Special attention is paid to the prominent role Russia's liberal historians played in this process insofar as historians possessed great power in nineteenth-century Europe—the power to tell their states and societies about their past, present, and future—and this transformed them into professional producers of (national) identities. Their work combined expert knowledge and ideological clichés in a highly complex manner. The central question posed is to what extent and in what respect the reality constructed by Russian intellectuals coincided with the actions of intellectuals in other European regions or, on the contrary, to what extent their discursive activities had a specifically local character.