아버지와 아들, 아들과 아들 - 1860년대 러시아의 세대 갈등과 세대 내 갈등

Abstract

Conceptualized by Karl Mannheim as a meaningful factor of social change, generational conflict is a modern phenomenon. It presupposes the rise of a generational group with specific generational (self-) consciousness searching for its due location in a rapidly changing society. Such a group runs into conflicts with other (mainly parental) generation(s). Specific social and historical experiences are decisive in the formation of a historically meaningful generation. Russian young radical intellectuals of the 1860s - as whose representatives were concretely shaped in the persons of Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and of Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? - were a self-conscious generation group par excellence. Witnessing the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War, the process of the abolition of serfdom and the following explosion of discontents of the peasantry, they became convinced of the changeability of an age-long social structure and the weakness of a rigid and oppressive regime. Hence their revolt against their father generation. The class difference of the intellectuals of the respective generation was not the main but a subsidiary factor in the formation of the inter-generational division line. The radical intelligentsia of the 1860s also experienced an intra-generational conflict. They were divided at least into two opinion groups - the group of more peasantry-oriented populists and the group of more urban-oriented individualists. The Sovremennik - Russkoe Slovo dispute during the first half of the 1860s is an evidence of the intra-generational conflict. Such division occurred due to more subtle sub-differences of experience within the same generation group.