By Gaither Stewart
“Things as they are don’t seem to me satisfactory….The world as it is, is unbearable.” (Albert Camus, Caligula, act 1, scene IV)
 |
|
|
 |
| The Intelligentsia and its revolutionary mission |
|
|
|
|
 BREAKING NEWS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
“What is so bewildering is the conviction—and it is becoming more and more general—that in all the perils that confront us the direction of affairs is given over to a way of thinking that no longer has any understanding of itself. It is like being in a carriage, descending an increasingly precipitous slope, and suddenly realizing there is no coachman on the box.”
(The Russian diplomat- poet Fyodor Tyuchev (1803-1873) in a letter to his wife about the dangerous road ahead toward revolution)
(Rome) I am not an intellectual. But I am an artist and part of the intelligentsia.
WHAT? Not an intellectual! Intelligentsia? What is the difference?
Though most people are vaguely familiar with the word intelligentsia, many confuse it with intellectuals and might be surprised at my claim that I am not of the first but belong to the latter. That distinction is the subject of discussion here—the distinction between uncommitted, if not compromised, intellectuals and the socially committed intelligentsia. That difference is an accusation against the ambivalent situations of many intellectuals in the USA today. That difference can also clarify the positions of educated people in general in all of contemporary Western society.
Since intelligentsia comes to us from the Russian, in research for my recent essays, “Stalin, The Poet, And Life’s Choices” and “The Return of the Proletariat” (www.bestcyrano.org and elsewhere) I studied also the emergence of the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia and its contribution to the greatest revolution of our times. Most curious are its instructive analogies with and disconcerting divergences from the educated classes in the USA today. The Russian revolutionary example, like Russia itself, is not as distant and exotic as westerners might believe, the Russia that America has propagandized as just another despotic Eastern power.
We should recall that Russia is also the West. It is part of us.
For the great Dostoevsky, Russia is even a far better West, even a better Christendom, for that matter.
Discuss this article with others on Pravda.ru forum
N.Korea Test-Fires Seven Ballistic Missiles
Forum
Source: 
