In search of an answer to the question of who such an intelligent person is, one does not need to be likened to Vasisual Lokhankin, the hero of the famous novel created by a duet of Soviet classics. The novel says that he never served anywhere, because work would make it difficult for him to think about what the true purpose of the Russian intelligentsia is. To this stratum of society the night "gourmet" - a lover of other people's borscht and cutlets - included himself.
What does it mean to be an intelligent person? Each period of development of society formulated its definition of this concept. An outstanding Russian scientist and intelligent person Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev, in his letter published in 1993 in the New World, wrote that an intellectual should have intellectual freedom as the main moral category, limited only by his conscience and thought.
If you look into history, then for the second half of the 19th century, an intelligent person is a simple commoner who got an education and sought to break out into people only due to his abilities and craving for science, for knowledge. Its very origin implied a struggle, both with social inequality and with social inequality. Representatives of such an intelligentsia were the intellectual idols of the youth of the 1860s - Pisarev, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.
In addition to the "raznochinsky", at the same time appeared an intelligent man of the "Chekhov" type, who sought to reorganize the moral rather than the political. Representatives of this group created works of art that sow the rational and the good, opened schools and hospitals for the poor, taught peasant children. We find a striking correspondence to this type in the character of the hero of the famous work of Flaubert, the astute doctor Larivier, who despised the ranks and showed generosity and cordiality towards the poor patients. This and other similar images prove the interethnic character of this type of intellectual, somewhat diluting the often mentioned Russian monopoly.
Before the revolution, the writer Leonid Andreev, a friend of Maxim Gorky, defined an intelligent person as such, who could not tolerate humiliation from the “powerful of this world”, had a debilitating sharpened conscience, and, no matter how drunk he was, he still remained cultured and educated.
It was always difficult for an intelligent person with the above set of qualities to live. But after the Soviet authorities proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat, he generally had to survive. According to the definition of an outstanding Soviet figure, Lunacharsky, in order to recognize himself as a genuine intellectual, three university diplomas are needed: the first is grandfather's, the second is paternal, the third is his own. However, the presence of three documents on education in the family does not guarantee anything - neither developed intelligence, nor the presence of external and internal culture. The mentioned definition is also untenable for the reason that it is unlikely that even such formally intelligent families remained in Soviet Russia after revolutionary executions, emigration waves, repressions, exiles and the Gulag . But this place was not empty for long, the Soviet intellectual was simply appointed the one who professionally engaged in not physical, but mental work.
Of course, in some places still in the country there remained a real educated and cultured people, not reconciled to the authorities and cherishing elevated feelings in the soul. Its prototypes are often found on the pages of the works of Fedin, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko and others, but in the midst of the victorious boor such people were doomed to extinction.
True, the twentieth century (in its second half) showed the world its worthy and intelligent representatives, nurtured by a dissident and artistic-literary bohemian environment. All of them have passed the path of spiritual transformation, based on inner freedom and the best domestic examples of literature, music and painting of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet period.
The definitions given in this article are, of course, not exhaustive. Look, inquisitive readers, using your intellectual freedom and guided by thought and conscience.