In the first decades after the emergence of the term “intelligentsia” at the end of the nineteenth century, almost everybody assumed that those who deserved to be members of this group should be highly educated and have a deep interest in culture, literature and the arts. It was also believed that these people were supposed to be modest and tactful; they should have an instinctive repulsion for bourgeois chic, vanity and careerism. Of no less importance was the belief that the intelligentsia is the single strata of the population whose members have strong compassion for the suffering of “others” and who are ready to make a sacrifice for a noble cause, up to going to the barricades. However, since the 1930s, the idealization of the intelligentsia gradually began to vanish and was replaced by the formal definition of the intelligentsia as a stratum of people with high educations, like “professionals” in the USA. The February (2008) survey in Russia showed that the majority of the Russians perceived the intelligentsia indeed in this way and only a minority mentioned those qualities of /“intelligent”/ (a member of the intelligentsia in this text) which made a Russian educated individual a unique phenomenon in the world.

Of course, even in its golden age, the intelligentsia sung by Chekhov, not all educated people were perceived by society as satisfying the ideal model of /intelligent/. In pre-revolutionary times, without speaking about the first decade of the Soviet regime, the term /intelligent/ was even used in a pejorative way.

And still the ideal model of the /intelligent/ was not an empty abstraction. Many people tried to emulate it and the compliment “you are a true /intelligent/” was one of the best. An accusation such as “/intelligent/ people do not behave in this way” was the most insulting. The “ideal /intelligents/” are indeed mostly gone and today in Russia you will find very few people who will praise or condemn others by using the image of “the true /intelligent./” The lust for money turned out to be more fatal to the fate of the Russian intelligentsia than the fear of the KGB. It is enough to say that Russians, according to the survey mentioned above, answering a question about who was the most “intelligent person” in the country, put Putin in first place, a guy who uses criminal jargon in his big speeches, inside the motherland and abroad. Still, the true Russian /intelligent/ is not a completely extinct specimen. In the last two decades, I met some of them during my trips to Russia, mostly in the province. These people reminded me about the highest pleasure in my life in the past ­ to attend the gatherings of the Russian /intelligents/ ­ the seminars, the birthday parties, audiences in lecture halls, or even casual encounters on a train. I could not bring with me to the USA the Russian intelligentsia and during my three decades of emigration I always had the feeling that I was missing an important ingredient that was necessary for a happy life.

My bitterness would have been much stronger if fate had not provided me in Michigan with the ideal representative of the Russian intelligentsia, in blood and flesh. When I met him I always had the fleeting impression that a time machine had brought me for a few hours back to my beloved Russia in the sixties. It was Felix Alexandrovich Raskolnikov, professor of Russian literature at Michigan State University, who recently died in Lansing at the age of 77. I was far from being alone in understanding that Felix, in this respect, was a somewhat unique personality. He left the same impression on many people who crossed Felix’s life as his friends, colleagues and students. I met some of them in Michigan and Moscow. With a few of them, who live in Russia, Germany and America, I talked on the phone as I prepared these notes about my dear friend. I also read many materials on the Internet which talked about Felix. Almost none of them forgot to use the word “/intelligent/” as a noun or adjective when they wanted to say something essential about Felix. (In addition to my sources I also have access to some autobiographical notes written by Felix).

I would like to explain to the reader what it means to me to be an ideal Russian /intelligent/ using Felix as an example.

/Absorbed with ideas/

Let us start with the assertion that, between the two worlds ­ that of abstract ideas and that of concrete material things ­ Felix preferred, as a true /intelligent/, the first one. Most people do not like abstract concepts. Listen to the conversations of most people in America and you will fast find out that they cannot tolerate (whatever is the reason for the gatherings) a chat if it does not relate to concrete things, concrete names, concrete events. During my trips to Russia in the last 15 years, I discovered, with bitterness, that small talk became dominant at all types of gatherings there too. Dmitry Furman, a political scientist of my generation, encapsulated this change in Russia in this way: in the past, those who tried to talk about business started the conversation with lofty matters moving to practical ones only later; today the tactic is opposite: if somebody yearns for cordial dialogue on some abstract issue, in order not to look as a maverick, he or she begins with a chat on some business matter. Felix became quite sad when I told this story to him. He deeply loved Russian culture and the Russian intelligentsia and the disappearance of the private intellectual interaction in the country, which was glorified by Herzen in /End and Beginnings/ (“/Byloye i Dumy/”) (which Felix, by the way, reread in his last year) brought sadness to him.

In the 18 years of our acquaintance, I attended with Felix probably no less than 150 parties. I cannot remember Felix initiating an issue related to cars, medical insurance, prices, salary, the weather, the intrigues at the department or university and similar issues that are the typical topics of the notorious “small talk” in America. Felix, generally very reserved and not a talkative person, could be involved in the conversation only if the subject was “an idea,” “a generalization,” no matter about what ­ literature, politics, movies, the economy or history.

/Intellectual curiosity/

/ /Felix’s immersion in abstract ideas was closely intertwined with insatiable curiosity. You have to expect it from a true /intelligent/ for which knowledge is the highest value. Many people suppose that this quality is as spread as the skill to talk. It is not so. In fact, only a minority of people are curious about the things and events which have no practical importance for them, direct or indirect. Since my arrival to this country, I was amazed about how much my colleagues knew about the issues related to their professional interests and how they were indifferent to “useless facts” not relevant to their current work. What is more, I made another sad discovery ­ curiosity belonged to the qualities that declined with age, like one’s health. Felix belongs to a very tiny minority of people who can be animated almost instantly by any interesting event or development. He was eager to know everything about the external world. It demanded no effort to involve him in the dialogue on the latest developments in America, Russia, Israel or Europe. He followed with the greatest interest the presidential elections in America and Russia on the eve of his death.

Felix was not a great lover of technology. He made the exception only for the car: from my own experience, I know that he was an excellent driver and evidently enjoyed long-distance trips, mostly to Canada, the first country of his immigration (1979), where several of his and wife Lena’s friends now live. Feeling confident with cars, Felix definitely was not a fan of computers and showed no interest in improving his computer skills. However, his curiosity was so strong that he turned on his computer not only to read his e-mail but mostly for reading the written texts of the radio “/Ekho Moskvy/” (The echo of Moscow), an oasis of freedom in Putin’s Russia. We regularly, by phone or during our regular bi-weakly meetings, discussed each detail of the political developments in Moscow.

/The immersion in culture/

It is only natural that with his love of ideas Felix was deeply captivated by highbrow culture. Felix could not live even one day without reading a good piece of literature and without conversing about the novel or poem with somebody who was ready to share with him his impressions. The aesthetical quality of any piece of literature or art was of primordial importance to him as well as for “any true /intelligent/” who dismisses vulgar preaching even of good ideas.

Most of my friends in Russia when I lived there (until my emigration in 1979) always left on the bed stand a decent novel to read. It took time for me to understand how bad-mannered it was to ask my American colleagues about the novel they were currently reading, because most of them do not have such a habit. (I was amazed when, in a witty essay on attitudes toward good literature in America in the April (2008) issue of /The New York Review of Books, /I read about a young woman who broke up with her boyfriend when she found out that he did not know the name of Pushkin). Many emigrants, who brought with them tons of books, also stopped observing the rule for the /intelligents/ to read something good “non stop.” American professionals, as well as emigrants or many educated people in today’s Russia explain their aloofness from literature, old or new, by “the lack of time.” Felix behaved in Michigan exactly as in Moscow in the 1960s, when the /intelligents/ stayed over night in a line to buy a small volume by Akhmatova, when they regarded it as absolutely obligatory to read prominent works, Russian or foreign. In the last years of Felix’s life, we met regularly at a campus cafe and unswervingly started our meeting with the discussion of books that Felix was reading.

Felix was very critical about his record as a reader and in the last years he read novels that he had not read in the past, such as Feuchtwanger’s /The Judean War/. He followed closely contemporary Russian literature and no one more or less important name in Russian literature escaped his attention. He read, for instance, both Kantors ­ Vladimir who wrote “Fortress” (“/Krepost”/) and Maxim who wrote “The textbook of painting” (“Uchebnik risovaniia”). He liked the novels of Ludmila Ulitskaia, Dmitry Bykov, particularly the book on Pasternak, but was stupefied by Bykov’s last novel “/ZhD/” with its crazy war between /Varangians/ and the Jews for control over Russia. We argued about Akunin’s novels which attracted Felix with nice plots and good style. I told him that this author does not deserve the praise of such a sophisticated reader as he. Felix felt that it was his cultural duty to have a good picture of American literature. He tried to fill his lacunas in this literature with outstanding authors such as Faulkner as well as secondary ones like Arthur Hailey. Felix liked serious movies and enjoyed very detailed discussions on the ideas of the film, its ideological message and first of all its aesthetical merits. I am sure that there are a lot of people who are as absorbed in culture as Felix, probably particularly on the East and West coasts. Unfortunately, I rarely met them.

/Intellectual honesty/

Felix’ remarkable traits always competed in my mind for the priority. Probably the contest was won by intellectual honesty which, in my opinion, based on my experience in two big countries, is a quality in the highest shortage, and even among those who fit the model of the /intelligent/ in general quite well. I know many people who are addicted to ideas and culture like Felix, but I know very, very few who are as honest as Felix. To be intellectually honest it is necessary to have the skill of self-reflection, as well as the ability to see one’s self from outside. Felix, as I observed him for many years, possessed these skills and was permanently concerned with not being false, not adjusting to the people around him in order to please them or to the dominant ideology.

/Invisible courage /

Intellectual honesty lies at the bottom of many of Felix’s deeds. The Russian /intelligent/, for better or worse, is not supposed to be aggressive, even for a noble cause, and demonstrate his bravery publicly. Those who did it were associated in the Russian mind with Dostoyevsky’s /Demons/ (/Besy/). Usually these people demanded others to follow their own pattern, whatever were the circumstances. Felix was a different person. Felix evidently was in great sympathy with the dissidents. One of his best friends ­ Anatolii Yakobson ­ was one of the most prominent dissidents in Moscow in the 1960s. When Yakobson was forced to quit the Moscow Cchool No. 2, he was ostracized by the Soviet system and contacts with him were dangerous. Only bold people would do it. Felix, among a few others, kept constant contact with Anatolii and tried to help him as much as possible, for instance, providing him with private lessons. Felix was always calm, whatever the political troubles in the school, with its liberal reputation in Moscow and did not show any sign of anxiety. Forty years later, the director of the school Vladimir Ovchinnikov even mentioned this quality in Felix as the first among his merits. However, in my opinion ­ and I claim to be an expert on fear in totalitarian society (see my memoir /Fear and friendship in our totalitarian society/) ­ the greatest example of courage we can find in Felix’s youth. It was 1948, the year of the merciless repressions, when it was very easy to find oneself in the Gulag. Each awkward step could be very costly. When, during a symphonic concert in 1947, I happened to sit close to the American consul and talked with him, I was not sure that this episode would have no consequences. Even in the 1970s, when the political reaction was progressing very quickly ­ but still mildly in comparison with Stalin’s times ­ I invited guests from America to my home and I was considered almost a hero among my colleagues and friends. Against this background, consider what Felix did in 1948. By chance he met at a famous Moscow cemetery people from the Indian embassy. He offered his service as a guide (he already knew English a little) and even invited his new acquaintances to the Pedagogical Institute where he was a student. India became an independent country exactly in this year but Stalin continued to see it as a stooge of British imperialism. Even today, 40 years later, one of Felix’s friends, himself not a coward at all, recounted this story with agitation. What Felix did, in his opinion, was close to “adventurism,” he said. Indeed, it was a crazy act to go into contact with “the agents” of a country that was part of the imperialist camp. Many people ­ and his parents in particular ­ castigated Felix for his dangerous behavior but Felix did not repent and defended his dignity and self-respect. I am not surprised that Felix was fired from the institute and the /Komsomol/ for, as he recounted, his “lack of vigilance toward Soviet enemies and cosmopolitism.” These accusations were quite sufficient to be sent to /Lubianka/, the notorious headquarters of the KGB. His case, which represented a grave violation of the Soviet rule that banned communication with foreigners, was discussed at Moscow party committees. As told to me by the same very reliable source, Felix did not show any great concern about his future. He found a manual job as an electrician and managed to finish the institute by correspondence, even with the distinction.

/Purity and transparency of the soul/

Felix’s intellectual honesty was deeply intertwined with his purity and high concern about his self-respect. As one of his colleagues remarked, he was innocent in his vision of the world as a child. It was impossible to even imagine Felix as a participant of any intrigue or even to do something not morally perfect for survival.

I was involved in his tenure process. Even for a scholar with a Harvard degree and even if he or she looks for a permanent job in a mediocre college, this process is nerve racking. Often the whole future of a scholar is at stake. But figure out what it was like for an aged person with a profession as a Russian literary expert ­ a commodity with an extremely bad market ­ for whom being refused tenure meant being fired from the job. Felix’s process of getting tenure ­ a permanent job at the University ­ was full of tribulations. Through this process, with calmness and dignity, he refused to undertake any action besides the routine process. I know a few young scholars who, in order to get tenure, did many indecent things. Felix got his tenure without sacrificing even a modicum of his self image, which supposed an extremely high standard of behavior.

This standard of the intelligentsia also included a total absence of envy toward his colleagues. Over my long life, I saw many seemingly decent people in Russia and America who were devoured by envy of those who were more successful ­ and, of course, “unfairly” so. Envy raged with particular frenzy among those immigrants who lost their social standing that they had in “the old country.” These people really hated their countrymen, especially if they belonged to the same professional group, who were able to “confirm” their old status. Communicating with Felix and discussing with him the fate of various people I never could discover even a trace of envy of people who published more than him in America or who were more popular than him in his beloved school No. 2 in Moscow. Felix was a thousand light years from the envy of other people’s incomes. As a true /intelligent/, Felix was indeed a rather ascetic man.

He was always extremely kind and, of course, tactful to everybody he met. This quality was appreciated very much by his students who recollected on the Internet their contacts with him. As a noble from Marcel Proust, he was particularly forthcoming and kind to people who were below him in social standing and his readiness to argue grew with the rise of the status of his interlocutor.

/Modesty and tolerance/

From what I already said, it is evident that Felix was extremely modest and highly tolerant, two intertwined features of the true Russian /intelligent/. Of course, as a normal person, he was glad when his articles or books came out. He was happy when he found that students remembered him and called to talk “about life,” which they did quite frequently. But he was diametrically different from vain people. He never talked about how much students adored him and he never talked about the deeds which credited him in one way or another. Felix always tried to keep a low profile at any party. He was never in a hurry to express his views first and usually did so only under the pressure of others.

Felix was a deeply tolerant person. He accepted other’s views and deeds as “normal.” Tolerance was as prominent as a feature of Felix as his intellectual honesty. For this reason, Felix fitted very well into the intellectual climate of America in the 1980s and 1990s, with its cult of diversity.

Felix was far from agreeing with me on many issues even if our relationship was extremely cordial and I dare to say that we both loved each other tenderly. Quite often in our face to face meetings, without the presence of a third person who usually radically changed the dynamic of the conversation, Felix persistently opposed my views when he thought they were wrong and did not attempt to adjust to my arguments. But another indication of intellectual honesty: never, even if we took the opposite positions, did even a shade of personal animosity emerge in the aftermath of the conversation.

/Optimist and idealist/

The purity of Felix’s soul sometimes bordered on naïve perceptions of the world. He had a natural tendency to avoid conflicts, in the mind as in real life, and preferred rosy scenarios for the future. As a matter of fact, the typical accusation of the intelligentsia has been that they are naïve people who are involved in utopian dreams of progress in society and ignore the real conflicts raging around them. Felix was definitely a good illustration for the detractors of the intelligentsia. Indeed, with his serene belief in mankind and the noble motives of people, Felix literally never said, in 18 years, one bad word about any of our common acquaintances. He was even reserved about politicians, American and Russian. For a very long time, he tried to persuade me to change my rather negative view on Putin for a much more positive image. Such an inclination to see the world and people through rosy lenses explains why Felix was “an ideal man of the sixties.” Even some students in the 1960s understood that Felix was full of illusions about what made him different from other teachers, such as Viktor Kamianov, who, with their cynicism, which was deeply alien to Felix, looked more realistic. The bitterest developments in his life, such as an unpleasant divorce with his wife , or his seven years tedious work as a manual operator in Canada after his immigration, could not shake his optimistic vision of the world. Even his very painful illness in the last months of his life, which chained him to home, could not do it. In our last conversation, literally a few hours after a very complicated surgery ­ he died three days later ­ he was in a quite good mood and did not spare words to hail the hospital where he finished his days.

Felix fit the image of the ideal /intelligent/ also in his attitudes toward religion. Many members of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia were hostile toward religion. After the revolution this hostility could only increase. However,the active aggressive policy of the Soviet state against the church and the rude atheistic propaganda pushed people like Felix in the opposite direction, toward softening their attitudes toward church and religion. But the real cause of the total success of atheism among the Soviet intelligentsia was the effective cult of science which was promoted by the Soviet system. A sort of recrudescence of religion among Russian intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s did not affect Felix. To the last days, he considered himself a non-religious person. The single change that occurred in his mind was the replacement of the label of atheism, which sounds so bad in America and Russia today, with the term “agnosticism.”

This limpid and rather naïve vision of the world, the yearning for avoiding conflicts, along with a few other circumstances (the connection of his parents with the Bolsheviks and the revolution) explains why the Jewish issue did not play an important role in Felix’s mind. Felix considered himself a pure Russian /intelligent/ who was indeed totally absorbed by Russian culture, by Russian history and by Russia’s future. Clearly the Jewish issue as well as Israel ­ he never visited this country ­ was not central in his spiritual agenda. I never noticed his interest in Jewish culture and religion. At the same time, he never forgot that he is Jewish and that anti-Semitism should be taken seriously. Felix had his own experience of being the victim of anti-Semitism. In 1953, during the notorious “case of the doctors’ plot,” Felix was fired from his first school. It was ironic that he was fired by the same director who hired him as a teacher in 1951 despite rampant anti-Semitism. However, in 1953, he was forced to oust him because, as Felix himself said, he was given an oral instruction stating that the Russian language and literature should only be taught only by Russians. He recommended that Felix should change professions. But this episode and several others did not change Felix’s very positive attitudes toward Russia and its people.

/The devotion to vocation/

Devotion to one’s chosen profession was one of the most important characteristics of the Russian /intelligent/ who saw the performance of his professional duty as service to the society. Many of my American colleagues, when they retired, literally forgot their previous professional lives and started to do something “that they really loved.” I met at my university one professor who started, after retirement, buying and selling antiques in his shop and another who moved to raising cattle. Some of my colleagues, after holding a high position in their science, simply stopped being interested in any development in the area, which seemingly was the meaning of their life. The betrayal of one’s profession was a mass phenomenon in post-Soviet Russia, as well as in its emigrants. Many professionals did this not only for survival, but simply because of greed. It was not the case for Felix. Yes, in the first seven long years of emigration, Felix was forced to work in a factory as an ordinary employee with manual duties, while working on his dissertation on Russian literature at the university. Again, as a true /intelligent,/ with his indifference toward social status and with strong feelings of obligation to family, he, as a manual worker, went through this period of his life with high dignity. (As I mentioned before, Felix also worked as an electrician in 1948, when he was ousted from the institute). As soon as he defended his PhD at Toronto University (1988), Felix not without difficulties, returned to his “normal” professional life. Between 1990 and until his retirement in 2006 he taught at Michigan State University. Knowing him well I am confident that no lucrative opportunity could lure him from his vocation.

/Teacher /

As a creative person, Felix liked research in literature. His beloved subject was Pushkin and several other Russian classics ­ from Lermontov to Sholokhov. In the American part of his life he published several articles in American and Russian journals. His book, /The articles on Russian literature,/ was issued by a prestigious publishing house, “/Vagrius/” in Moscow (2006). However, Felix’s heart was in teaching, not research. People tend to like what they do best. Felix was, as asserted by his colleagues, a “talented pedagogue” and his students and colleagues definitely agreed with this definition.

Felix clearly belonged to the strand of the Russian intelligentsia who preferred the living word to the dead text and who considered teaching a more important type of activity than publications. Russian political traditions, as shaped in a society with censors checking each written word, explain why Russian culture was “oral” in contrast to the American one, which, even before word processing, was mostly “written.” Felix was a child of “oral culture” and felt himself not as comfortable in a society where two colleagues with neighboring offices communicated with messages printed with a typewriter or e-mail.

Whatever the concrete occupation of the Russian /intelligent,/ he always considered himself a teacher, as “the disseminator of eternal truth and kindness,” or in Russian “/seatel’ vechnogo, dobrogo./” All great Russian intellectuals were “great teachers” and the cult of “pupils” was huge in the country. Disciples were the most desirable guests at the home of professors who supervised not only their education, but also their material life and love affairs. Nothing like this I observed in America where the relationship between a professor and a graduate student without speaking about undergraduates are mostly very formal and regulated by office hours. Both partners ­ a professor and a student ­ in America accept the rules of the game and only Russian graduate students who happened to study in an American university lament the coldness and aloofness of their mentors. It was particularly striking that the warm relations in America are not emerging even between a music professor and his students, a big contrast to Russia, where the relations between them were, as a rule, deeply warm and talented students were treated as members of the family.

Felix liked his American students and they liked him. However, only in Russia, with its special cordiality between teachers and students, could Felix actualize his great love of “pupils.” His head was a sort of encyclopedia on his Russian students. He easily operated with their names even if they had been his students 30-40 years ago. It was not easy to discuss with Felix any issues in contemporary Russia and avoid his pupils who invaded literally every area of life in that country. A true love, in my opinion, is almost always reciprocal. An unrequited love is a very rare phenomenon. In any case, this statement is vividly confirmed in Felix’s case. Students adored him. He was, for many of them, a “legendary teacher,” and one of the most important figures in their lives. Some of those whom I interviewed about Felix praised him as a “great teacher.” Some of them, already quite old gentlemen ­ mostly in their early 60s ­ came in March 2008 to the apartment of Lidia Vakhurina , teacher from the school # 2 to commemorate the memory of their beloved teacher. They also placed on the Internet a very touching obituary about Felix.

/The School Number Two and Felix’s colleagues/

Felix’s golden age as a teacher was definitely the years where he worked in the famous Moscow school Number 2. He was invited to teach at the school in 1962. Before that, since 1951, he taught literature in one ordinary Moscow school. At his new job, he had the fabulous opportunity ­ the dream of any creative person ­ to self-actualize in the field that he loved passionately as a teacher of literature. In some ways, the timing was favorable to Felix, because, exactly in the 1960s, the teaching of literature was all but a standard occupation. Indeed, during the gradual defrosting of Soviet society after Stalin’s death, particularly during the “thaw,” Russian classic literature became a battle field between liberals like Felix and his colleagues and the party apparatus with their voluntary assistants among conservative teachers.

The liberal teaching of the humanities in the School No. 2, with its 600 pupils, was possible mostly because this college had official status as a school for children who were gifted in mathematics and physics. It was supposed that these students ­ the future specialists in a science that was important to the military power of the USSR ­ should be treated with more lenience than the pupils in ordinary schools.

The school was founded by Israel Gelfand, a legendary Soviet mathematician which became a sort of oasis for intellectual freedom in Moscow, mostly because its director, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, who was highly regarded by Felix and everybody in the school. It was Ovchinnikov who, with his unwavering devotion to freedom and with his diplomatic skills, was able to sustain his school as a flagship of liberalism in the Soviet educational system over 10 years in a very dangerous political environment. One of the teachers of this school used to start his working day by knocking on the door of the director’s office to find out if Ovchinnikov was still there and was not fired or even arrested. This everyday joke reflected well the climate of those days in the school, despite its mathematical and computer (then cybernetics) protection.

The Academgorodok (Academic City) at Novosibirsk, where I lived at the same time, was an expanded version of the school No. 2, given its network of research institutes, which were also protected against the intervention of local party bodies by the umbrella of mathematics and computers. The intellectual freedom in this place was as high as in Felix’s school. The fact that there were outstanding scholars among the mathematics teachers in the school provided the director of the school with important ammunition against its enemies in the party bodies. It is also remarkable that, for diplomatic reasons, the director chose as the party secretary of the school not a humanitarian but a mathematician. (It was Nina Yurievna Vaisman who again because “the world is small” became the main teacher of my daughter Alexandra in the middle of the 1970s in another mathematical school where Nina Yurievna landed after the dismantling of the school No. 2). Between teachers in mathematics and teachers of literature in the school were, as a memoirist from this school wrote, “tender relationships.” Besides, the role of teachers in bringing to the school their friends with the same views on teaching and life was in general very high. Felix brought to the school Anatolii Yakobson, who became a literary star and Tatiana Oshanina, a much respected teacher. Teachers were the selectors of “cadres,” and not the administration or the school party bureau. It was an unheard of phenomenon in Soviet society!

An ordinary Soviet school accepted all children who lived in the district. However, the composition of the school No. 2 did not depend on the students’ residence and it accepted only students who were able to demonstrate strong mathematical skills, which were often correlated with other talents and particularly with the ability to think critically and logically. As a result, the intellectual level of the students and their critical aptitudes in this elite school, as well as dozens other schools of this sort, was much higher than in the average Soviet school. (I know this from my own experience dealing with the students of the mathematical school in Novosibirsk). Students could not help laughing in class at the ideological stupidities of a few orthodox teachers who were protected by party bodies, which Ovchinnikov was forced to tolerate.

Felix and other teachers realized that they had at their disposal very special “human material” and they were excited with the thought that fate chose them to work with such wonderful children. They were also aware that their school was hated by many teachers and students in other Moscow schools who looked at it as elitist and as a hotbed of opposition. In fact, they were right on both counts. Everyone among the school’s enemies waited for the time when this flower of the thaw would be cut down. It was not amazing that the special commission appointed by the party district committee before its dismantling in 1972 contained among its members the directors of “ordinary” schools who were particularly aggressive against the school.

Felix belonged to a part of the Russian intelligentsia that was far from the sciences. According to the typology offered in the 1960s, the intelligentsia was divided into “lyrics” and “physists.” Felix definitely belonged to the first group. However, of course, even a high respect for mathematics and computers in a society with a strong cult of science could not save the school No. 2, or Akademgorodok, in the aftermath of the Czechoslovakian invasion from an aggressive political reaction. Since Brezhnev’s regime was not as cruel as Stalin’s and did not destroy its enemies instantly, the local party authorities needed three years in order to oust Felix and his comrades-in-arms from the school.

Felix and other liberal teachers had ten full years to materialize their ideas about teaching literature. In the school, they had received what could only be seen as a dream for their colleagues in 99 percent of the Soviet colleges of all levels: freedom to choose the program for the class. Felix and his friends knew how to use this unbelievable opportunity. They had a clear agenda of what to do, which included breaking the official conspiracy of silence toward Dostoyevsky and Bunin. They also wanted to show the students how to read Mayakovsky and Gorky (two officially touted writers) by removing the ideological carapace from them. Felix and his friends also tried to tell students something about Solzhenitsyn, Platonov and other fully or partially forbidden authors. Of course, poets such as Pasternak and Mandelshtam, as well as Gumilev, Akhmatova and Tsvetaieva, all victims of official ostracism and ignored in official textbooks, were popular in the lectures of Felix and his friends. They went as far as to read in classes the texts of these poets, which circulated only in Samizdat, such as Korzhavin.

Felix and his friends exploited the wonderful developments of the “thaw.” First of all, the 60s were the golden age for the bards, the people who composed songs, their lyrics and melodies, and performed them publicly. Most songs were critical of the Soviet reality and enjoyed fantastical success among the intelligentsia, while the authorities looked at the bards almost as anti-Soviet individuals. Felix was, of course, an admirer of the bards and with his colleagues talked a lot about them in school. Moreover, they were not afraid to invite some famous bards, such as Bulat Okudzhava, to the school, which delighted the students. Felix was among the organizers of various extra curricular activities, particularly the Literary ­ Theatrical Association, which promoted everything that was suspicious from the point of view of the ideological watchdogs, for instance, Yakobson’s brilliant lectures on poetry, which was full of aspersions against the official literature.

The teaching of literature and history was going on under the permanent supervision of secret KGB and party informers. As told to me by one of Felix’s close friends and colleagues, Tatiana Oshanina, they all knew who reported on them and tried to keep their distance from the informers. Of course, the feeling of being observed on a regular basis in a totalitarian society was highly uncomfortable for the teachers of the school. Each meeting with students was fraught with a possible political scandal. The absolute majority of the students were admirers of their liberal teachers (you can find on the Internet today their declaration of love for their teachers forty years later), but there were some disaffected students who, having received bad grades, could take revenge by reporting to their superiors. It was impossible to dismiss the danger stemming from their parents who usually were more conservative than their children and could denounce the teachers for undermining the correct ideology of their offspring. The “parental” danger increased immensely in the late 1960s, because three big luxury houses were built close to the school. The apartments here were offered to the big shots of the party. Their children attended the school that was closest to their home. They became informers, mostly involuntary, for their party parents about what teachers taught in class. We know that one vigilant parent sent a letter about the unorthodox teaching of history by Liudmila Vakhurina, one of Felix’s friends.

There were also informers among the teachers. Nobody in the Soviet Union knew about the reports that had been sent about him or her to the party committees or the KGB. In one case, the KGB started to “study” Tania Oshanina, who dared to make an unorthodox statement about Maxim Gorky’s novel /Klim Samgin/. However, in spite of the fear of the KGB, which only increased by the end of the 1970s when Felix was immigrating to Canada, most members of “the second school’s collective,” as one of them told me, came to his home to say “fare-well,” which was not an ordinary ritual at that time. I left the country at the same time and remember 30 years ago each person who came to see me before the departure.

The Jewish factor, deeply explosive, played an important but often invisible role in the life of the school and particularly in its relations with the external world. Indeed, it would be incomprehensible inside the school to make some anti-Semitic remarks, so typical for most Soviet schools in this period. However, it is amazing that teachers and students many years later when they analyzed the life in the school almost avoided the subject. I read a lot of the materials on the School No. 2, including the big book /Notes on the School No. 2 /(Moscow, 2006) and found very few observations about “the weird” (in the opinion of the authorities) ethnic composition of the faculty. Among the teachers of Russian literature up to half were Jews. In some classes, there was a similar proportion of Jewish boys and girls. Outside the school, state anti-Semitism raged in the country. While nobody discussed the issue inside the school, the director repelled the permanent attacks from the party bodies, which accused him, usually indirectly, of misunderstanding the party policy. In fact, the labeling of the school as a sort of synagogue (a teacher did this once when he could not control his anger against the too smart students) was a typical way to discredit the institution and stir up opposition toward it in the party and KGB. Since the 1940s, a Jew was regarded as a real or potential enemy of the Soviet system. Data on the ethnic background of the dissidents were a powerful argument for this belief. Finally, the Jewish factor played a role in the destruction of the school.

Now it is almost impossible to restore, even in the imagination, the joy and tension that dominated the classes of Felix and his colleagues. In fact, the school lived its ten happy years under siege, which ended with its dismantling in 1972. The hatred of the school “above” was so intense that the Moscow party committee dismissed the attempts to defend the school by the most prestigious people in the country, including the president of the Academy of Sciences Mstislav Keldysh, the president of Moscow University Ivan Petrovsky, the commander of the Soviet Navy Sergei Gorshkov and many others. As in any other Soviet school, Ovchinnikov was ready, at any time, to put into motion its powerful network of “influential parents,” an institution also known in America. In many cases, it worked, but not this time.

Felix loved his students in the School No. 2 more than any other assignment. It was considered in many Soviet schools as a burden, but for him it was a source of pleasure and even self-actualization. Felix was the editor of the students’ newspaper (or “wall newspaper ” in the Soviet terminology), which was a big text with the proud title “Youth.” It was fixed on the wall in one of the school’s lobbies and renewed each month. As recounted by a student editor of the newspaper, Felix did everything to push her and other editors away from the standards established in a totalitarian society, even for this seemingly petty business. For this reason, Felix could easily come across some problems. Once it happened when the party dame from a local committee of the /Komsomol,/ during a meeting with the editors of the school newspaper in the district severely castigated Felix and the student editors for the impermissible “originality” of their product. Felix, a hard worker, took his obligation as a teacher very seriously. An interesting fact: Felix considered each class a sort of “happening” and was always ready to improvise. If a class was successful in Felix’s opinion, he made a sort of “retrospective” plan of the class to use it later.

Felix kept a tender memory of School No. 2 not only because he was able to realize his best talents, but also because here he was a member of a real intellectual fraternity. With the devotion to one’s professional vocation, the Russian /intelligent/ likes his colleagues passionately. As was the case with many of my Russian acquaintances, close professional cooperation often moved toward a strong friendship. Felix liked, with all his heart, German Fein, Victor Kamianov, Tatiana Oshanina and Isaak Zbarsky. Almost everybody in America and Russia today has a few friends among their colleagues at work. But in Felix’s case, human relations were very different, and it seems to me that not many people in the world had the same lucky experiences.

Close relationships between colleagues were indeed a Soviet phenomenon, which cannot be discovered in a free society. Of course, as I observed in some members of the faculty at American universities, they also create a special group based on a common ideological program or on some other basis (for instance, hostility toward chairperson). However, it is usually only a tiny part of the department and the personal relations among the members of the group do not go beyond a common lunch (no dinners). Felix immensely enjoyed the company of his colleagues, which was cemented by many things, including the permanent threat from the state and its agencies, a common public cause (the liberalization of society), common cultural interests (all of them read the same books and saw the same movies), numerous parties (at some of them Felix even sang solo; any occasion was a good one, from birthdays to the anniversary of the October revolution), regular visits to each other (often without warning), mutual respect, even love, and last but not least by mutual trust, a vital condition for any type of close relations in a totalitarian society. In such a close and extra friendly climate some romances were not avoidable but they were treated by the members of the company with the utmost delicacy and as I was told they never spoiled the relations between them.

All vehemently supporting liberal freedoms and the journal “/Novy Mir/” (“The new world”), the teachers, even in the 1960s, had different views on the role of Russian traditions and on the future of the country. In the 1970s, when the school in its initial form was already dead, the differences between so called /Westernizers/ and /Slavophiles/ became clear in each college and school. Felix, with all his respect for Russian culture, was always a /Westernizer/ or a “true man of the 1960s.”

He was also perceived as such many years later by those who never saw him again after the 1960s. In any case, the ideological differences, even if they existed on a subconscious level, did not undermine the unity of the teachers and their feelings to be “chosen” for the accomplishment of their mission in their beloved School No. 2. The same feeling was widely spread among students who also were convinced that their school was unique and that they had been lucky to have such teachers as Felix and his colleagues. In their apology of the school some teachers and students went in the 1960s so far as to compare it with the famous gymnasium in the Tsarist village (an outskirt of Petersburg) where Pushkin was a pupil in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Everybody in Russia knows Pushkin’s famous poems which glorified this place where strong friendship reigned among young and aspiring men.

Perhaps, if my contacts with Felix were even closer than they were, I would have found some of his negative traits. However, we probably found the optimal distance and Felix in my memory is left as a perfect human being. The same image of Felix is shared by hundreds of his students, colleagues and friends in Russia as well as in America.

Felix’s life was a triumph of the genuine Russian intelligentsia. It was a triumph of highbrow culture, of intellectual curiosity and honesty, of the internal nobility and tolerance, of modesty and tact. Let us hope that Felix will be a paragon not only for his students but even for their children. It would be arrogant to ask more.