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“Intelligentsia” from the German “Intelligenz”? A Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Pipes
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Extract

The word "intelligentsia," according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, entered the English vocabulary in 1920. Its source was undoubtedly Russian, where it first became current in the early 1860s and a decade later acquired the status of a household word. The Russian etymology of "intelligentsia" has long been a subject of controversy. The question recently acquired additional interest when a young American scholar, Mr. Alan Pollard, demonstrated that the novelist P. D. Boborykin, who liked to take credit for introducing the word into Russian, had no right to the claim. Without going into this complicated matter, I should like to call attention to evidence indicating that the German word Intelligenz was used as early as 1849 to describe the same phenomenon as "intelligentsia," namely, a group distinguished from the rest of society by its education and "progressive" attitude. The fact that this usage antedates the Russian by more than a decade suggests that die Intelligenz may have been the direct inspiration for the Russian concept.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 615 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1971

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References

1. Alan P., Pollard, “The Russian Intelligentsia: The Mind of Russia,” California Slavic Studies, 3 (1964): 1–32Google Scholar.

2. Namier, L. B., 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (London, 1944), p. 22 Google Scholar

3. Anton, Springer, ed., Protokolle des Verfassungs-Ausschusses im Osterreichischen Reichstage, 1848-1849 (Leipzig, 1885), p. 178 Google Scholar.

4. Franz, Wigard, ed., Stenographischer Bericht tiber die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituirenden Nationalversammlung su Frankfurt am Main, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main, 1849), fasc. 172, p. 5221Google Scholar.

5. Ibid., pp. 5256-57. Unless otherwise noted, the words here translated, according to their meaning, as “intelligence” and “intelligentsia” appear in the German text as die Intelligenz.