There was a time when membership of the Russian intelligentsia carried priestly responsibilities. It demanded a high moral seriousness and the absolute conviction that literature, art, science and music represented the best Russia was capable of. Culture was the hope for the intelligentsia's future salvation, and so they tended its flames, thinking of themselves as the keeper, too, of the nation's conscience.


This thought is occasioned by a visit paid to my rented dacha the other day by a well-known critic; a fully paid-up member, I have to assume, of the intelligentsia, post-perestroika style. Now the truth is -- and I may as well confess this straight up -- that if I'd known this man was coming, I would probably have stopped him dead in his tracks. He once viciously criticized one of my wife's translations, though at the time he hadn't actually read it. Still, there he was, arriving with good friends, and so I was prepared to like him. I even gave him dinner, which was mostly taken up with talk about past and future projects.


At first it all went smoothly enough. But then I began to notice, somewhere after the roasted peppers, that every time a new topic, a new idea came up, he was awesomely quick to pooh-pooh it. It was as if he were only in the room by droit de seigneur, to examine our intellectual credentials, and to find them wanting. He was lordly, etiolated and utterly self-involved. And as I began to pay attention to him, I also started to question in my mind the inherited idea of the intelligentsia as an incorruptible sect, the providers of seals of approval on what is truly Russian and authentic.


I mean, let's face it. In pre-revolutionary times the role of the intelligentsia -- which was mostly to do, as time went on, with assassination and the politics of the irrevocable act -- doesn't bear much thinking about. And in Soviet times, well, its maintenance of the nation's-conscience routine actually required an astonishing amount of double-think and self-delusion, since membership in it was one of the few games in town to show an appreciable profit. Almost all of the intelligentsia's members were in fact handsomely cared-for servants of the state: They belonged to government-sponsored unions or institutes of one kind or another where the duties were few and the privileges many. Still, even during those days, I thought, there were enough talented, independent-minded -- even the odd dissident -- intelligenti to make for a general caste pride. There were, of course, few directors or poets as courageous and innovative as Yuri Lyubimov or Yevgeny Yevtushenko in their prime, and few filmmakers to rank beside Andrei Tarkovsky. But there was just enough talent and bravery, just enough pushing against the barriers set by the authorities, to permit every intelligent, especially retrospectively, to take some sort of credit. Because of this, the Russian intelligentsia was able to enter the first years of perestroika with its identity unembattled, its ego intact, and its high seriousness brandished as ardently as any sword of justice.


After a time, I thought as I brought on Yelena's chicken livers, that first fine fury ebbed away, of course. Many of the Russian intelligentsia learned soon enough -- to their cost -- that they were actually the creations of the barriers the authorities had put up to hem them in. They simply had no idea how to behave or what to do, now that there were no more barriers, now that everything was theoretically open to them. Worse, they could do no more than look on impotently while many of the old privileges, which had made the barriers palatable, were one by one taken away. Now that the economy had become a cash one, they made little difference in any case. Soon enough their table conversation was milled down to the essentials of banal everyday life: where to get a decent piece of cheap meat, for example, and what on earth to do about the dacha.


Some of them did well, of course, out of the new dispensation, using their contacts in the apparat to become entrepreneurs or advisers or committee men. Others got by on the sheer quality of their talent. But all that remains in most of them these days, I thought finally as I brought on coffee, is resentment mixed with pride: a resentment that they are no longer central to the preoccupations of the nation, and a pride that is unearned -- except historically, and by other, braver people.


So when our guest finally left, I said to my wife that if Solzhenitsyn -- who really is the conscience of the nation -- came back to make common cause with any sort of intelligentsia of which our guest remains a member -- then better, by and large, that he had stayed in Vermont with his dreams.