Advot’ia Smirnova\u2019s Two Days<\/em> (Dva dnia<\/em>, 2011) juxtaposes two very different representatives of the present-day intelligentsia. Masha is a curator at a provincial literary museum; Petr is a businessman from Moscow. For Masha, Petr\u2019s pressed suits and carefully manicured facial hair cannot possibly represent Russian cultural values; for Petr, Masha snobbism-in-poverty only reinforces the stereotype that \u201ca member of the intelligentsia must be dirty, ragged, and poor, living in filth and eating filth.\u201d Here, class tensions within the intelligentsia draw out the extent to which the intelligentsia, like narod<\/em>, is not itself a class but a social \u201cmode\u201d: it transcends traditional economic divisions, in that it can include high-earning actors, middle-class university professors, and low-paid librarians. As Rossen Djagalov has pointed out, perhaps the most striking contemporary example of the intelligentsia\u2019s classless dimension was the 2010 trial of Mikhail Khodorkovskii, where protestors from nearly every level of the pay scale\u2014from teachers to celebrities\u2014defended a man who was once the wealthiest in Russia.[2]<\/p>\n The conflict between two historically opposed modes, the narod<\/em> and the intelligentsia, drives the narrative of Smirnova\u2019s next film, Kokoko<\/em> (2012). Liza is the daughter of a St. Petersburg artist: she is educated, works in the Kuntskamera, and surrounds herself with art and intellectuals. When Vika, a laborer from Ekaterinburg who sings folk songs and speaks with a strong provincial accent, enters her life, Liza sets out to teach her the ways of the intelligentsia. She reads to her from art history books, corrects her speech, and introduces her to her friends\u2014all in preparation for a job at the museum that will never materialize. Liza\u2019s world is made accessible to Vika and she is able to perform intelligentnost’<\/em>, but only to a certain point; her lapses into vulgarity (speech, clothes, behavior) always give her away. The title of the film comes from one such lapse: Vika\u2019s mispronunciation of the artistic movement Rococo as Kokoko.<\/p>\n Kokoko<\/em> also hints at the loss of the political dimension of the intelligentsia, which had been so integral to its identity during the prerevolutionary and the early Soviet periods. We watch as Liza and her friends superficially stage a protest, a gesture that seems more like entertainment than politically motivated. More direct references to the past political vanguardism of the intelligentsia are present in Roman Prygunov\u2019s Soulless<\/em> (Dukhless<\/em>, 2012), where a group of student-dissidents, in the style of street-art group Voina, actively protest the greed and glamur<\/em> of Moscow in the 2000s. Ultimately, Dukhless<\/em> takes a moderate position: capitalism and socialism come together in a dialectical love affair, which softens the positions of both sides. Nonetheless, we are given at least a glimpse of a former intelligentsia that took up class issues while being classless itself, and perhaps of a new intelligentsia to come.<\/p>\n December\u00a02013<\/p>\n [1] See Bulgakov, \u201cGeroizm i podvizhnichestvo,\u201d Vekhi<\/em> (M: N.p., 1910), 25.<\/p>\n [2] Comment at roundtable discussion (May 4, 2013), 15th<\/sup> Annual Russian Film Symposium, \u201cRe-Imagining Class: Recent Russian Cinema,\u201d University of Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alyssa DeBlasio, Dickinson College The present-day intelligentsia can be broadly understood as a romanticized collection of educated and disaffected workers of the \u201cmental\u201d professions, defined by cultural literacy, a retreat from the public and political spheres, and stereotypically \u201cintellectual\u201d behaviors ranging from reading literary journals to (in the twenty-first century) blogging about culture and current … Continue reading Intelligentsia<\/span> ![\"DeBlasio](\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitaldomostroi\/files\/2014\/11\/DeBlasio-Kokoko-still3.jpg\")
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