A Sketch of the History of Ideas (1993, 1994)

"The creation of the myth of the intelligentsia is nineteenth-century Russian literature’s greatest contribution. With it, a new moral category arose, entering life on an equal footing: intellectualness (‘intelliguentsianess’—GT). In the ideal, the intellectual (the ‘intelliguent’) is Christ without his halo, that is, Christ from the inside, unappreciated, unsanctified, “humble”, the way a man can be only to himself. The intellectual (the ‘intelliguent’) is the secularized idea of Christ, Christ as a phenomenon of cultural and spiritual life, but not a religious phenomenon."

In 1993 Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan published an essay in the Russian "Nezavisimaya Gazeta". The essay was in fact written in 1987, and only the policies of glasnost allowed it to be published at least a few years later. This essay, among some other authors' work, was selected by an American translator Marian Schwartz for an issue of Russian studies in literature, the Winter 1994-1995 issue.

Please see the essay's English translation in pdf. The Russian original is here.

Russian studies in literature, Winter 1994-1995, pp. 49-56

Translated by Marian Schwartz

Gevork Ter-Gabrielian

A Sketch of the History of Ideas[1]

News readers, nothing chewers…

M. Tsvetaeva

The creation of the myth of the intelligentsia is nineteenth-century Russian literature’s greatest contribution. With it, a new moral category arose, entering life on an equal footing: intellectualness (‘intelliguentsianess’—GT). In the ideal, the intellectual (the ‘intelliguent’) is Christ without his halo, that is, Christ from the inside, unappreciated, unsanctified, “humble”, the way a man can be only to himself. The intellectual (the ‘intelliguent’) is the secularized idea of Christ, Christ as a phenomenon of cultural and spiritual life, but not a religious phenomenon.

The myth of the intelligentsia became a bulwark, the meaning of life, the hope of all the absurd, ridiculous, awkward, stifled, “superfluous men”, who suddenly recognized themselves as a fellowship and felt the right to express their views in the name of an “us”. Moreover, like the myth of the proletariat, the myth of intelligentsia was applicable to any nationality. Both Russian literature and this myth stood at the head of the moral searchings of Christian society, just as a younger brother in the family will become stronger and for a while handsomer and more powerful than his brothers.

In order to present the catastrophe that ensued later on in its correct proportions, we must not forget this great contribution (not its mission, which always lies ahead, but its contribution, which already exists) of Russian literature: the creation of ideal of the intellectual (the ‘intelliguent’).

The myth of the intelligentsia engendered hope. It also engendered moral catastrophe.

The Russian intelligentsia engendered this myth. It also engendered its “grave digger” -- Russian journalism.

Camouflaged as the intelligentsia, Russian journalism splintered the people’s unified sense of self, creating its own god, its own fetish, its own idol: the “people”. The “people”, which had to be enlightened, on the one hand (that is, raised to journalism’s own level), and, on the other, had to be scooped out of the bottomless mine of its purity and moral wisdom. The “populists” (“narodniks”) began trying to ingratiate themselves with this myth, with the idea of the people, which had suddenly become estranged from and unfamiliar to them, even though they were talking not about other peoples but about their own – about themselves. A kind of self-alienation occurred: an alienation of the intelligentsia’s sense of self from its sense of the people, much as man became alienated from the means of production at one point. The people – that’s you, your brother, your father… A small people senses this unambiguously; they do not have this age-old duality between the basic mass of people and a “handful” of intellectuals (‘intelliguentsia’) who have been torn away from their roots. A numerous people, however, will not maintain the original purity of this sensation, this self-identification. The part reflecting it – the intelligentsia – will become alienated from the “suffering” part – the people, having allied themselves with the myth of the “exploiting classes”. The intelligentsia recognizes itself as not the people. I am not the people. They are the people. What is good for me is not the same as what is good for them. They are many, I am one, and their many are preferable to my one. I must live not in the name of my children but in the name of them, those who are alien to me but who are children of the people, who need me, and thus in their name. Not for the sake of my neighbor but for the sake of someone far away. Morality divided up into mine and theirs, just as property did at one time. Private morality arose (after all, morality is the property of the soul); it is all right for me to be dissolute and slovenly in life for I am not a criterion: I am a rough draft.

Thus the Russian intelligentsia, that semi-mythic community that exists half in the world of substance (tangible) and half in the world of ideas and that has set itself the (unconscious?) goal of creating and spreading itself, that is, the self-obliging (self-obligated) intelligentsia, engendered a contradiction that it was capable of resolving on the level of ideas but not on the level of action.

This is just one of the contradictions of a great nation, a consequence of the basic contradiction in the development of an entire Christian community, which can be described in the following manner: this community emerged from the “syncretic” world of antiquity into the “analytic” world that led to modern civilization and technological progress and to the birth of incomparable Christian imagery, but it was unable to complete the triad – to come up with an integrated synthetic public and/or national worldview.

The roots of the contradiction were distinctly realized and defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, who noted that the ancient Greeks had no terms – that is, words – that were valued for having a single unambiguous meaning independent of context. The Greek logos had dozens of different meanings. Faust’s problem – to determine which came first, word, the thought, or the deed – did not exist for the ancient Greek. Even today the Armenian language retains this quality. When translating the Bible, European peoples, beginning with the Romans, were forced to make choices and translate one of the numerous meanings of the logos, preferring it to another. Herein lies the root of abstract rationalism and technocracy, which have sunk the world of modern “calculating” civilization: in the attempt to determine exhaustive meaning for what were originally ambiguous words-concepts; in the appearance of terms of foreign origin whose existence is not motivated within the framework of the etymological psychology of the native language; in the alienation-separation of form and concept, essence and phenomenon, ratio and irratio, subject and object, idea and matter, and the entire world edifice into two halves, black and white.

In this there was no difference between Russia and the West: alienation in the West appeared exactly as it did in Russia, and moreover quite a bit earlier. The textbook example: Rousseau gave his children up to an orphanage and himself wrote a treatise “On Childrearing”.

The distinction was in degree of the defeat by the virus, in the degree of development of the disease’s latent tendencies. In Russia, due to its later development, many elements of the antique-medieval, syncretic attitude, which had already been outlived in the purely analytical tendency of Europe, were retained. One of the causes of the disease in Russia proved to be the hypertrophied belief in the word. The attitude toward the word of absolute authority and its priests inherent to the “dark” medieval unpartitioned consciousness profoundly influenced the attitude of the “bright”, enlightened intelligentsia of the nineteenth century toward the authoritative poetic word.

On the one hand, syncretism of worldview predetermined the fact that the meanings of the sacred and poetic word turned out to be somewhat confused – both Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s word came to occupy a sacred place. On the other hand, a wave of journalism rolled in from the West along with capitalism, and after all, not every journal is Pushkin’s Sovremennik. The era of journalism thundered in, and on a par with Pushkin’s word, there was the ‘sacred’ journalistic word, the journalistic word in general, any word serving to inform in the name of society, that is, the act of any ‘sacralized’ adultery by the word, torn away from the “sole unity” (M. Bakhtin) of the moral act of its author. A false overlay occurred, and the word, alienated from the deed, came thundering and ringing in, drowning out anything and everything. In Europe it was already a nearly independent, irresponsible, private, personal, secular word, from which the law could protect in principle; in Russia it was illuminated by the halo of the great oracles, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy…

If the myth of the intelligentsia and its duty before the people, but not before itself as a part of the people, could be created by the greatest authors, then it was snatched up and multiplied in a running assembly line fashion and vulgarized by bustling journalism a thousand times faster.

Journalism says the same thing as great literature. It seems to derive from the same principles. However, it does not have moral right to that. Journalism is degenerate writing about great purity and about how dirty our society’s morals have become. Using the word, journalism bases itself on its private, emancipated, one-sided, bloodless meaning, stripped of all connections and associations. Their entire profound, personal meaning thus is cut off by journalism – out of ignorance, out of worthlessness, or else out of an inability to express that meaning. Journalism encourages the totalitarian, leveling, schematic, chameleon approach to everything and at the same time takes on the role of fighter against totalitarianism, the role of champion of sacred ideas. Mediocrity multiplied in the name of talent fights mediocrity. But it never admits that it is fighting itself. On the contrary, it tries to pretend that it has nothing in common with totalitarianism, that it itself has suffered from it more than anyone, and it attempts to sanctify itself and its right to demean the lofty. The literary principle of lofty equality, which brings together a historical event and the blowing of a breeze, the slightest movement of the soul, and the universe, through comprehension extolling every event in life. Journalism perceives this as the right to use words irresponsibly, the right to set incomparable, incomprehensible concepts side by side and pretend that it does not notice the evil it has created. The right to speak about the sacred but to act and live like swine. Freedom of the word for journalism is freedom of depravity by the word, and the right to defend the oppressed is transformed into the right to offend the defenseless without punishment.

Journalism’s triumph was ensured by the force of totality, the globality of its onslaught. In Russia this victory merged into slavery due to the already noted specifics of Russian conditions: the youth had fallen, cut down by the disease that his older brothers had fought with only intermittent success. We see how Russian authors of the period between 1860 and 1950 fought journalism. Quintessence of this struggle in literature was the personal struggle against socialist realism inside such authors as Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Olesha, Platonov, Babel, Pil’niak, Zamiatin, Panteieimon Romanov… Brodsky wrote that Platonov exposed the absurd in the very grammar of his language – a universal problem. The roots of this process of alienation, disintegration, collapse, and schism in the integrity of being lie in the centrifugal impulses of the European languages; in the aspiration of predicates to escape attention and skate rings around the noun, to reduce, to feign with attributes (the genocide carried out by the Ottoman empire against the Armenians, but “the genocide of the Armenians” – which means what? Genocide in the name of the Armenians, “belonging” to the Armenians, carried out by Armenians against themselves?!); in the tendency toward abstract objectivism, toward speculative construction, toward theorizing; in all the constantly accelerating self-improvement of technology that has long since become confused in its purpose, that has lost its roots in moral, sensible logic; in the very division of soul and reason, mind and heart, art and science, creativity and technology, the material and the spiritual.

At one time the myth of the intelligentsia was an attempt to tie together a world that was falling apart. For the Russian Silver Age the myth of revolution became an attempt to self-immolation, “cleansing by death”, a ridding of journalism in itself by means of killing itself, accompanied by a sense of fairness of the vengeance bursting out in response to the remorse of the intellectual conscience.

The internal struggle, its own sentence[2], the struggle of the sentence against socialist realism inside itself, so desperate in Platonov, remaining in him a tragic, unresolved antinomy (why there is no plot in his prose, only endless syntagma chains, for a plot requires that sentences receive permission not to be an arena for endless and fruitless fits of the divine personal word with idols, that sentences be slightly more naïve, slightly more monosemantic optimists) – this struggle, vivid too in Pil’niak’s attempts to depose Lermontov, to expose Lermontov the murderer; and in Bulgakov’s aspiration to find a compromise with the appearance of Stalin, who had outlived his image, changed it, dissolved it in the image of Satan, who avenges only those worthy of it, which means everyone, and for whom (Bulgakov) evil is good; and in the magnificent honesty of Nabokov,  who on the brink  of perversion, in a brotherly embrace with the world, with his age… spent his whole life devotedly and unstintingly forcing the slave out of himself, daring to utter words that horrified the hypocrites and Pharisees, trying to overcome the neurosis from his own displaced pathology, his own specific genealogy.

This struggle has manifested  itself earlier, much earlier, in the sensational long poems of Blok, in the prose born in the civil war (for example, in the stories of Gaito Gazdanov), and even earlier, in the works of Lenin the writer, in the prose of Gorky, Serafimovich, and others of that ilk… This struggle found its culmination in A. Tolstoy, Leonov, Fadeev, Fedin, Erenburg, Simonov. Waves of it rolled up, dying down, up until Bondarev, Aitmatov, and Rasputin. The struggle merged into the basic moral collision of socialist realism: the ‘intelliguent’s pangs of conscience over his powerlessness, his pangs over the absence of pangs of conscience in the ‘intelliguent’ in a situation “historically justifying” savagery.

The struggle with the socialist realism in one’s own blood merged into a dream, a slogan, a credo for the system: “Transform the ‘savagery in yourself’ into ‘savagery for yourself’!” At least use it for something. If only to call yourself a pot, if only to crawl into the oven. The authors' powerlessness to separate themselves from their heroes to pity, to condemn.  The absence of excessive authorial emotion. The author “understands” the savagery. How can he get away from it. They’re killing, after all, but just try to protest! The writer’s soul is fine stuff, though. Having sullied itself in debauchery, it suffers over agreeing with itself. The writer searches for internal justification for the savageries, self-vindication. And … sincerely or not—a ‘dark forest’[3]—vindicates the child’s tears in the name of future happiness. A forest and its splinters[4].

Savagery was depicted in an understanding, almost relishing language, using the whole arsenal, the entire nomenclature of psychological and stylistic means (particularly, of self-flagellation fashionable in the earlier Dostoevsky times) worked out by the great literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Letters sanctifying savagery arose. It is horrible, but it seems it was the literature of Dostoevsky that determined the psychological possibility of successfully implementing the public trials of the 1930s.

He raped her because she was beautiful, and the world he lived in is ugly, because he seethed with passions, hidden forces that he did not know where to direct, and here he has all this completely unnecessary pain and might, the strength of his heavy, strong, male body, which he invested in this rape – in payment for his whole unhappy, orphaned orphanage, homeless, hungry childhood, for all his humiliations, for his lawlessness, for his weak will, for the darkness of his instincts. He was getting back for his entire life by raping her, torturing her, cutting her up.

Almost with satisfaction, the intelligentsia let itself squeeze into the absurd trap of moral relativism, against which they turned the intelligentsia’s weapon – self-humiliation. Its anxious touchiness was called “softness”, “spinelessness”; the ability to develop, to change one’s principles, which leads, it is true, to a dangerous tendency to ward ambivalence and forced compromises with the absolutism of the criteria of Christian conscience, was called “mercenaries”; the connection with the past, the burden of its memory, which places its characteristic stamp on every action, and every retreat and concession was called “decay”, “an outmoded streak”. These were unique self-designations that coming from the intelligentsia’s mouth sounded polemically pointed but at the same time competent, like concern about one’s own moral image, and in the mouth of the mutated part of it that was always capable of recognizing in that picture itself – aggressive journalism – like a dangerous accusation, to object to which meant to object to one’s own opinion, to that same sacramental “self-criticism”. This (to object) its principles would not allow.

As the sole true master of the Word, the intelligentsia in a way took on its features, the features of the subject of its own study. It relativized its own principle so much that it freed the meaning of its Word from the meaning of the Silence of Action (for only this silence, which speaks for itself, is essential). By fetishizing the Word, it reduced the word to the level of a Condemnation, and the circle was closed: the act of silencing, which gave birth to silence (as the absence of action), gave birth to the action of being silenced. Execution. Liquidation. Prevention. Purge. Brainwashing.

The ontological acceptance of one’s own rottenness as a truth external to your will and the commission of logical (the most logical!) suicide, for after all, the rottenness of the intelligentsia, the rotten part of intelligentsia, and if it is all rotten, then the whole intelligentsia merits destruction! That is what comes of all this.

The same thing is happening today: “We are shit”, says journalism in the name of the intelligentsia. It says this in one form or another, using one approach or another: “We are shit and unworthy, we have not grown to the point of normal life”; “We are shit, so let us repent, repent, repent in the presence of men”.

But if “we are shit”, then what is there to wonder at? Who is to blame, if they deal with “us” accordingly? Right?

One has to admit: “It’s the truth!”

To escape this circle, one has to deal with journalism – in society and in oneself.

But how can this be done? This is the question that must be resolved today. 

[1] Russian text 1993 by “Nezavisimaya gazeta” “Eskiz istorii idey”, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 march 1993, p.8

[2] This had to be rather: The internal struggle of the sentence with itself, but this version is also strange and funny

[3] Chujaya dusha potiomki ili temnyi les—somebody else’s soul is a dark forest 

[4] Les rubiat—shchepki letiat. The forest is cut—splinters are flying.

05:02 August 13, 2014