Among the teachers of modern languages I encountered during all my years in provincial colleges, I only once met a true intellectual, a woman called Marta from Chernovitsy. She once asked me in a great surprise why all those students who thirst after truth and righteousness are always so keen on poetry. This is so, and it is peculiar in Russia. M. once asked me (or himself, rather) what it was that made someone a member of the intelligentsia. He did not use the word itself—this was at a time when it was still a term of abuse, [when “the real intelligentsia was mocked at, and its name was appropriated by those who surrendered”]—but that was what he meant. Was it a university education, he wondered, or attendance in a pre-revolutionary grammar school? No, it was not this. Could it be you attitude toward literature? This he thought was closer, but not quite it. Finally he decided that what really mattered was a person’s feelings about poetry. Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before—it is the golden treasury in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it is a fact.
. . . The new awakening is accompanied by the copying out and reading of poetry, which thus plays its part in setting things in motion again and reviving thought. The keepers of the flame hid in darkened corners, but the flame did not go out. It is there for al to see.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 1970