The intelligentsia and the common people in F. M.Dostoevsky's "The ideological novel" and in novel "Peter and Alexey" by D.S.Merezhkovsky
In his historiosophycal novel "Petr and Alexej" (1905) D.S. Merezhkovsky poses one of the most important questions of the Russian history which was no less urgent for F.M. Dostoevsky. It is the relations between the common people and the intelligentsia. If for the latter intelligentsia means a socio-cultural community within the educated strata torn off the soil, which has been formed by 1860, then Merezhkovsky took for intelligentia the whole Europeized higher class in Russia of the XVIII-XX centuries. Though he does not accept Dostoevsky's determining idea of "narod-bogonosets", their common ideal is "God in the world". For Dostoevsky it is in the renewed Orthodox hearsay (predanie) of the Russian people. According to Merezhkovsky, "The Third Testament" will be established only as a result of a catastrophy.