Culture as the Spiritual Ecology of Humanity Culture is the spiritual environment that humanity creates to live and endure. It consists of ideas, representations, and emotions rather than things, apparatuses, and machines. While it is human-made and thus opposed to untouched nature, not everything humans make belongs to culture. It functions like the ecology of society, an atmosphere necessary for survival.
Progress Can Coincide With Cultural Regress Scientific and technical revolutions have often unfolded alongside cultural backslides. The twentieth century united unprecedented advances in every science and technology with monstrous reversals in morals and taste. Earlier, Europe’s Renaissance—Leonardo and Shakespeare’s era—coexisted with mass witch-burnings. Even refined legal and philosophical treatises could demand that defenders of the accused be burned along with them.
Do Not Confuse Technology’s Pace With Culture’s Worth Fears of modern technique easily turn into panic and lead to calls for an impossible return to archaic life. Such reactions arise from conflating material success with spiritual progress. Culture must be judged in its own, spiritual dimension, not as an appendage of machines. Keeping this distinction clear allows a sober inquiry into culture’s relation to the human being.
Intelligentsia Is a Group; Intelligentnost Is a Quality Intelligentsia names a social-professional stratum engaged in mental labor and endowed with formal education. One can accurately say "technical intelligentsia" or "rural intelligentsia", but not "technical intelligentnost". Intelligentnost is not derivative of that group; it is a psychological, moral trait. It can belong to anyone, regardless of class, occupation, or diploma.
Intelligentnost Appears Beyond Professions Intelligentnost does not coincide with a title or a field of work. It can characterize a manual laborer as readily as a scholar, and a person without prestige more readily than many "intellectuals". The concern here is a cultural-psychological and ethical type, not a sociological category. The measure is inner formation, not social status.
Understanding Through the Opposite: Khamstvo Because intelligentnost is hard to define directly, its opposite clarifies it. Khamstvo shows itself as rudeness, hooliganism, inability to behave, and the urge to insult. These are surface symptoms of a deeper psychology. The phenomenon is not about profession or estate, but about a warped inner stance. It feeds on the conviction that "everyone offends me," turning attack into supposed self-defense.
Humiliation Breeds a Servile Desire to Humiliate The core of khamstvo is the psyche of a person repeatedly humiliated, who ceases to respect himself and compensates by degrading others. Literature captured this type: the perverse pleasure of answering rudely to a polite greeting and making the courteous wait. "Kholopstvo"—slavishness—can live in consciousness even where there is no legal slavery. Social ascent does not cure it; it merely arms the same disdain with power.
Boredom, Talentlessness, and the Lust to Destroy Hooliganism often grows from boredom, lack of talent, and social abandonment. A gray, joyless life seeks relief in senseless destruction. The urge to vandalize—snapping off newly restored cast-iron ornaments just because hands itch—springs from this inner emptiness. Such acts express a desire to annihilate what one cannot create.
The Occupier Complex: Culture Discarded on Foreign Soil An occupier often feels "freed" from the cultural restraints that bind him at home. On alien territory he crosses out his own culture, rejects the local one, and revels in being "free from culture". Even otherwise decent people, placed in that role, slide into humiliation and obscenity. Colonial and wartime settings cultivate precisely this permission to be without culture.
Culture Begins With Taboos; Freedom Requires Inner Bans Historically, culture starts with prohibitions: incest is forbidden, certain foods are taboo, simple natural acts are hedged by "don’t". From these renunciations grow refined feelings and intelligent behavior. When "freedom" is misread as total release from human limits, the result is khamstvo. True freedom replaces external bans with internal cultural restraints—"I could lie or offend, but I will not."
Militarism and Colonialism Bring Khamstvo Home The nineteenth century, seemingly idyllic, was the age of colonialism and militarism building vast armies and paving the way to world war. These forces shaped public spirit, normalizing the occupier’s habits. In the twentieth century, the occupier complex migrated from colonies back into the metropole. Societies learned, painfully, that militarization aimed "outside" inevitably poisons life "inside".
Bureaucracy as Institutionalized Boorishness Khamstvo is not just lack of polish; it is a social-psychological illness. Bureaucracy embodies it: answering rudeness to politeness, making people wait, and asserting power through petty humiliation. This happens not because officials are uniquely evil, but because the institution’s logic breeds such behavior. The result is a normalized form of contempt.
The Antidote: Chekhov’s Portrait of Intelligentnost Chekhov described the educated person as one who respects human dignity, is unfailingly courteous and forgiving, and is compassionate beyond pets and sentimentality. He honors others’ property, pays debts, avoids lies even in trifles, and does not cleanse himself publicly to provoke sympathy. In love he values the woman as a mother rather than a mere "baba", and he cultivates everyday aesthetics—cleanliness, fresh air, an unspat floor. The ideal is to squeeze the slave out of oneself and become inwardly free: only one who respects himself can respect another.