ABSTRACT
The shift in the social habitat of the men of letters from the court and office to the salon and fashionable society went hand in hand, as has been pointed out, with their emancipation from subservience to the official ordo and with the reassertion of the autonomy of culture. This development reached a climax in the emergence of the tiny stratum of freelance literati still lodged in the beau monde and its institution-the salon. The generation of the “remarkable decade” marked the crowning point of the manorial culture in Russia. More specifically, it ended the aristocratic period in the history of Russian letters and also heralded the rise, in the person of Belinsky, of a déraciné intelligent: on the one hand, unassimilated to the aristocratic milieu that hitherto provided the fertile soil on which Russian literature thrived, and, on the other, pried loose from the social environment from which he had come. It was far from fortuitous that the intelligenty of the 1860s drew both a sharp line between themselves and the generation of the “remarkable decade” and also searched hard for spiritual begetters among the people of the same generation. There is no difficulty, of course, in identifying the individual whose personality and writings evoked an eager response among them. This individual, as Aksakov’s candid observations testify, was Belinsky-the Pied Piper of the Russian intelligentsia.
