The article concerns not «objectively» existing, but imagined society of liberal intellectuals (from the 1840s westerners to the cadets and Octobrists of the beginning of the XXth century), which shaped the understanding of the collective identity of this society and Russian society as well. Russian intellectuals instrumentalized the concepts «progress» and «backwardness», «civility» and «ignorance», resulting in hierarchy development, where «shapers» of the collective identities placed themselves as intermediaries between the state and the society. Russian liberally-minded historians played an important role in this process, as far as it was these historians who possessed an overwhelming power in Europe in the XIXth century the power to tell the state and the societies about their past, present and future and became the professional creators of (national) identities. And here their expertise and ideological clichés were intricately combined. The key questions of the article are to what extent and where reality shaping of Russian intellectuals (members of intelligentsia) was close to that of the intellectuals in other European regions and what specific features of their discourse work are.

Речь идет о воображаемом сообществе либеральных интеллектуалов (от западников 1840-х гг. до кадетов и октябристов начала ХХ в.), которое конструировало представления о коллективной идентичности собственной группы и российского общества. Центральный вопрос статьи состоит в том, насколько и в чем конструирование реальности российскими интеллектуалами (интеллигентами) совпадало с действиями интеллектуалов других европейских регионов, а в чем их дискурсивная работа имела специфические черты.