The subject of the book is the specificity of social, national-cultural and historical self-consciousness of the "educated class" of the former Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union. The phenomenon of "intelligentsia" is considered in the spirit of Viktor Shklovsky - in sociological, national/imperial and historiographical defamiliarization. The main feature of the book is a comparative analysis, comparing Russian/Ukrainian "professors" ideological-historical plots with the "Mandarin worldview" in Germany, according to Fritz Ringer.