Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European
intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian
intelligentsia after Stalin. Young Soviet veterans had returned from
the heroic struggle to defeat Hitler only to confront the repression
of Stalinist society. The world of the intelligentsia exerted an
attraction for them, as it did for many recent university graduates.
In its moral fervor and its rejection of authoritarianism, this new
generation of intellectuals resembled the nineteenth-century Russian
intelligentsia that had been crushed by revolutionary terror and
Stalinist purges. The last representatives of the Russian
intelligentsia, heartened by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism
in 1956, took their inspiration from the visionary aims of their
nineteenth-century predecessors and from the revolutionary aspirations
of 1917. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic socialist
society, such idealists contributed to the political disintegration of
the communist regime. Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into
a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. The highly educated
elite—those who became artists, poets, writers, historians,
scientists, and teachers—played a unique role in galvanizing their
country to strive toward a greater freedom. Like their contemporaries
in the United States, France, and Germany, members of the Russian
intelligentsia had a profound effect during the 1960s, in sounding a
call for reform, equality, and human rights that echoed beyond their
time and place. Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris
Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an
intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural,
and moral mission.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780674054837
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
Belknap Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter