But even as the figure of the modern intellectual was taking shape, there was a tension pulling at the seams. Turgenev identified two kinds of writer. One, who we might call the poet, is perceptive and incandescently creative but operates at a remove from politics and communal life. The other, the critic, dives right into the scene, seeking to reflect the feeling and consciousness of the people at that moment in time. Turgenev, despite himself, belonged to the first type. Belinsky, his friend and the consummate “committed intellectual,” was the latter.

More than half a century later, Belinsky’s moral vision and rhetorical fire would make him a hero of the radicals who led the revolution. From him they learned that literature was to be taken very seriously, for in books were messages that had the power not just to change minds, but to forge them from raw material. When Trotsky defined revolutionary art as works “colored by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution,” he was speaking as a follower of Belinsky.

[...] Gessen is a great fan of Brodsky the poet, but wishes he would be more of a critic. In a New Yorker essay from 2011, he condemned Brodsky for allowing himself to become a “propagandist for poetry.” Gessen searched Brodsky’s oeuvre in vain for an example that might undercut the unapologetic aestheticism that had “hardened into dogma.” Not unlike the judge, Gessen seemed to demand of Brodsky, How were you useful to the motherland? How could someone of Brodsky’s intelligence actually believe that aesthetics governs ethics and not the other way around?

As if cautious not to repeat the mistakes of Brodsky’s generation, Gessen has embraced his public role in his own career as an intellectual. He co-founded n+1 in 2004 with some fellow Harvard grads in New York City, and, in 2011, when a thousand protesters set up camp in Zuccotti Park, they eagerly joined the movement. Being academic types, they were less experienced than some of the other Occupiers when it came to practical matters of governance or logistics, so they contributed the way they knew how: they wrote and theorized. They published blog posts and put together a broadsheet called the Occupy! Gazette. In Occupy!, the anthology of reflections from these heady months that he co-edited with Astra Taylor and the other editors of n+1, Gessen acknowledged the split within the park between those “highly educated” organizers and intellectuals like himself, who were “mostly in their late twenties and thirties, and mostly not living in the park,” and the “kids who actually do live in the park.” This division, he suggested, is not as bad as it might seem. Some dismissed the twenty-year-olds in the camp as crust punks or anarchists, but he admired their youthful idealism. At least they were doing something. “They actually think that coming to a faraway city and living in a concrete park could lead to political change,” he marveled. “And they may be right!”

Every generation of intellectuals finds a way of coming to terms with the limits of their agency. Brodsky’s chose poetry; mine and Gessen’s took the train downtown. It’s not a strict binary, of course: these two tendencies can coexist in the same individual and express themselves in different ways. But we might consider that switching off, for Brodsky, was a way of performing his social responsibility, not shirking it. In Brodsky’s view, politics was one level of human existence, but it was a low rung. The business of poetry, he thought, is to “indicate something more … the size of the whole ladder.” He held that “art is not a better, but an alternative existence … not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it.” What compels a poet to write is less “a concern for one’s perishable flesh” than “the urge to spare certain things of one’s world—of one’s personal civilization—one’s own non-semantic continuum.”

I think this was his answer to Gessen’s challenge. When there is scarce room for political maneuvering, when the prevailing cultural values are sucked of all significance, making art that rejects tired tropes and social themes may not be simply an expression of personal freedom, the luxury of the secure and uninvested. It can model independent thought and attentiveness, preserving not just the integrity of the self but also that of the culture one sees being degraded before one’s eyes.

This is not art for art’s sake; it needn’t be quietist or resigned. We can believe in the power of art and defend it vigorously without indulging in fantasies of its social utility. In times like these, we need critics. But we also need poets, who can transmute experience into art and sniff out platitudes. Those who search for possibilities in foregone conclusions and hearts in fiery motors.