Module RUSS3391: THE MAKING OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA (1762-1917)

Department: Modern Language and Cultures (Russian)

RUSS3391: THE MAKING OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA (1762-1917)

Prerequisites

• Russian Language 2A (RUSS2191) OR Russian Language 2B (RUSS2012) OR an equivalent qualification to the satisfaction of the Chairman/Chairwoman of the Board of Studies in MLAC or his/her representative.

Corequisites

• Modern Languages, Combined Honours and all Joint and 'with' programmes: Russian Language 4 (RUSS3031) OR Russian Language 4 following Year Abroad (RUSS3211). Others: see Chairman/Chairwoman of the Board of Studies in MLAC or his/her representative.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• Late Tsarist Russia, 1855-1917 (HIST3843)

Aims

• To impart an understanding of the complex range of circumstances – social, political, ideological, and cultural – that informed the development of the Russian intelligentsia from the late 18th century to the 1917 revolutions.
• To examine specific domains of Russian social life and cultural production, namely literature and criticism, journalism and publishing, the arts, education and science, thought and religion, etc. in the above context.

Content

• Isaiah Berlin famously argued that Russia’s greatest single contribution to social change in the world was its intelligentsia. This module will explore the historical development of the Russian intelligentsia as a unique and controversial social and cultural phenomenon. It will provide the socio-historical context of the evolution of the intelligentsia in Imperial Russia and a general introduction to the most important ideological and cultural concerns that preoccupied Russian thinkers and cultural producers from the late 18th to the early 20th century. In particular, it will focus on the ways in which the Russian intelligentsia constructed itself through cultural representations and social practices. The module will also enable a wider exploration of Russian social and cultural history in this period.
• The module will start off by discussing the cultural and historical specificity of the Russian intelligentsia as a social phenomenon in a general and comparative way. It will then explore the conditions of the emergence of the intelligentsia among the Westernised Russian gentry in the late 18th and early 19th century. Next, it will chart the intelligentsia’s eventual embodiment in an expanding social class – the raznochintsy (‘people of various ranks’) – which grew in influence with the dismantling of the system of estates and with the expansion of education and print-culture between the 1830s and the 1870s. Here the module will look at the 19th-century intelligentsia’s key institutional supports (salons, thick journals, universities) and major ideological splits (Slavophiles vs. Westernisers, Radicals vs. Liberals, Populists vs. Marxists). It will assess its classical functions in Russian society – as civic middle, critical opposition to autocracy, bearer of culture and civilization, articulator of the national idea, messianic voice of the people, etc. Particular attention will be paid to debates about the intelligentsia and its social functions in literary and polemical writings.
• The module will then assess the crisis of the intelligentsia’s social role from the 1880s onwards, as the expansion of literacy and industrialisation increased the social impact of other groups (the labouring classes, entrepreneurs, and narrowly specialised professionals), and as the autocratic imperial state itself took on greater initiative in defining and institutionalising Russia’s national culture. The fin de siècle crisis of the intelligentsia will be examined from the perspective of both its cultural projects (for instance, the successes and failures of literary jubilees, esp. those of Pushkin & Gogol’, as major forms of public celebration in this era) and its socio-political functions (for instance, controversies surrounding the intelligentsia’s moral responsibility for the revolution of 1905). Finally, the module will conclude with an assessment of the role of the Russian intelligentsia in the build-up to the 1917 revolution, the collapse of tsarism, and the triumph of the Bolsheviks.
• Themes to be addressed in the module would include: the intelligentsia’s social background, upbringing, education and social positioning; the intelligentsia’s interactions with state and society (the relationship between ‘culture and power’); the intelligentsia as a field of cultural production; the professionalisation of intellectual labour; cultural production (e.g. literature and literary criticism) as a tool of political and ideological struggle; the cycles of generational clashes among the intelligentsia (the battles of ‘fathers and sons’); the mid-19th-century clash of ‘science’ and ‘literature’; the religious and the secular in Russian intellectual life; the Russian intelligentsia’s propensity towards polemical self-criticism; the significance of exile and emigration for the intelligentsia’s self-identity; the ‘women’s question’ and the evolution of the female intelligentsia; etc.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will acquire a thorough and sophisticated knowledge of the factors that drove the development of the Russian intelligentsia from the late 18th century to the 1917 revolutions, and an understanding of the ways in which the relationship between cultural production, state and society changed through the period.
• Students will also acquire detailed knowledge of the main agents of cultural development across the full artistic, social and political spectrum.

• Students will acquire the ability to evaluate a range of texts – including literary, critical, philosophical and historical – in the original Russian, and to identify and utilise appropriate primary and secondary sources for that purpose.
• Students will also develop their ability to deal with the discursive specificity of different kinds of text, and to assess them in terms of their inter-related social, ideological and aesthetic functions.

• Students will further develop their ability to work independently within a prescribed framework, with considerable emphasis being placed on the rudiments of the research process. On completion of the course, students will be able to present a cogent and structured argument in both oral and written form.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures are designed to set the historical and conceptual framework, and to introduce key concepts specific to the module.
• Seminars provide a forum for the presentation of results of independent study, and are designed to stimulate and facilitate detailed engagement with particular aspects of concrete topics.
• The assessment gives equal weight to the two essays and the examination (which takes the form of a single essay, written under exam conditions).

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

In the seminars students will be expected to produce brief reports as relatively informal oral presentations of around 10 minutes, based on specially set seminar questions and reading materials. These oral reports might also be accompanied by written handouts and/or PowerPoint presentations. Presentation questions will be set on a weekly basis. While these will be compulsory assignments, they will not be formally assessed or awarded marks, although oral feedback and comments will be provided regularly in the course of the seminar discussion.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University