"Cultural capital", "city of intellectuals", "the Petersburg intellectual" — these widely spread notions are so familiar that they are taken for granted, but where did the concept of the "intelligentsia" come from and why is its place specifically in the city on the Neva? To answer these and other questions, let us turn to history. In the Middle Ages the word "intelligentsia" had a theological meaning — the "Mind of God", the supreme Reason. In its modern meaning the term "intelligentsia", in the context of culture, was first introduced by V. A. Zhukovsky in 1836.
Its essence consists in combining a high level of education with moral and political attitudes, convictions and ideals that overcome personal selfishness. The special way of thinking of the intelligentsia lies in searching for the interrelation of each specific fact to the general problems of existence and to fundamental questions.
Until the beginning of the 18th century Russian culture was shared by all social strata — whether serf peasants or boyars, and even the tsar himself — they had common holidays, a single faith and traditions. But with Peter I's accession to the throne, everything changed.
As Pyotr Chaadaev wrote in “The Apology of a Madman”: “Our enormous development is only the realization of this magnificent program. <...> The high mind of this extraordinary man unerringly guessed what our starting point should be on the path of civilization and the worldwide intellectual movement.”
Peter I decisively rejected the culture of Muscovy, which for him was synonymous with all things Old Russian, and generally regarded the past as something harmful, ridiculous, awkward and primitive. This radical rejection led to many cultural traditions and initiatives that constituted the essence of Russian culture and were inherited from ancestors being forgotten.
But Peter's orientation toward the West was by no means blind; he deliberately selected what, in his opinion, suited Russia. Peter did a lot to transfer the cultural and intellectual values Russia needed into the country, inviting many foreign masters and scholars to Russia. Saint Petersburg, as Peter's creation, played an important role in acquainting Russia with culture and was originally built as a Western city. And its status as an administrative, military and naval capital made it an inevitable concentration of various educated specialists with ties to the West, with high cultural needs and extensive knowledge.
The listed factors caused an important tectonic split in the culture and mentality of the Russian people. The gulf grew even wider because Peter effectively made the Russian state secular. In pre-Petrine times Russian culture, revered by all social strata, had been common to everyone, but now the elite, having absorbed Western culture, customs and fashion, increasingly drifted away from the people. The strange and provocative thinking of the intelligentsia became a kind of fashion, even though they fit neither into the circle of the noble-aristocracy nor into peasant society.
The intelligentsia is a person not only of thought but of action, whose activity was aimed at raising his personal status and striving to remake society in his own image. Among the reflective part of the elite, who understood the people's problems, a socio-psychological complex emerged — guilt before their people who suffer and live in filth while they were educated and their standard of living was higher. From this arose the need to return to the roots of popular existence, attempts to bring the broad masses closer to their level of knowledge. Later, the "cult" books Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? contributed to the creation of the behavioral types and models they idealized.
The poems of Nekrasov also played a significant role: they were a kind of chronicle of the harsh fate of the Russian people and embodied the high ideals of the revolutionary youth of the 1860s. It is no wonder he was called the singer of revenge and sorrow. At that time they were a powerful instrument of revolutionary propaganda, as all progressive people read them eagerly.
Although Russia as a whole suffered greatly from the changes introduced by Peter, some of them did not take root, some adapted to the context of the Russian mentality with modifications, but very much became part of our life and is perceived as Russian culture.
