Everything about Vissarion Belinsky totally explained
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (– ) was a
Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of
Alexander Herzen,
Mikhail Bakunin (he at one time courted one of his sisters), and other critical intellectuals. Belinsky played one of the key roles in the career of poet and publisher
Nikolay Nekrasov and his popular magazine
The Contemporary (also known as "Sovremennik").
Life and Ideas
Although born in
Sveaborg, Vissarion Belinskii was based in
St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was a respected critic and editor of two major literary magazines:
Отечественные Записки (
Notes of the Fatherland), and
The Contemporary (also known as "Sovremennik"). In both magazines Belinskii worked with his
apprentice Nikolay Nekrasov.
He was unlike most of the other Russian intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s. The son of a rural medical doctor, he wasn't a wealthy aristocrat. The fact that Belinskii was relatively underprivileged meant, among other effects, that he was mainly self-educated, unlike Alexander Herzen or Mikhail Bakunin, this was partly due to being expelled from Moscow University for political activity. But it was less for his philosophical skill that Belinskii was admired and more for emotional commitment and fervor. “For me, to think, to feel, to understand and to suffer are one and the same thing,” he liked to say. This was, of course, true to the
Romantic ideal, to the belief that real understanding comes not only from mere thinking (
reason), but also from intuitive insight. This combination of thinking and feeling pervaded Belinskii’s life.
Ideologically, Belinskii shared, but with exceptional intellectual and moral passion, the central value of most of
Westernizer intelligentsia: the notion of the individual self, a person (
lichnost’), that which makes people human, and gives them dignity and rights. With this idea in hand (which he arrived at through a complex intellectual struggle) faced the world around him armed to do battle. He took on much conventional philosophical thinking among educated Russians, including the dry and abstract philosophizing of the German
idealists and their Russian followers. In his words, “What is it to me that the Universal exists when the individual personality [lichnost’] is suffering.” Or: “The fate of the individual, of the person, is more important than the fate of the whole world.” Also upon this principle, Belinskii constructed an extensive critique of the world around him (especially the Russian one). He bitterly criticized autocracy and serfdom (as “trampling upon everything that's even remotely human and noble”) but also poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, bureaucratic coldness, and cruelty toward the less powerful (including women).
Belinskii worked most of his short life as a literary critic. His writings on literature were inseparable from these moral judgments. Belinskii believed that the only realm of freedom in the repressive reign of
Nicholas I was through the written word. What Belinskii required most of a work of literature was “truth.” This meant not only a probing portrayal of real life (he hated works of mere fantasy, or escape, or aestheticism), but also commitment to “true” ideas--the correct moral stance (above all this meant a concern for the dignity of individual people): As he told
Gogol (in a famous letter) the public “is always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book [for exampleaesthetically bad], but never for a pernicious one [ideologicallyand morally bad].” Belinskii viewed Gogol’s recent book,
Correspondence with Friends, as pernicious because it renounced the need to “awaken in the people a sense of their human dignity, trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.”
In his role as perhaps the most influential liberal critic and ideologist of his day, Belinsky advocated literature that was socially conscious. He hailed
Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel,
Poor Folk (1845), however, Dostoevsky soon thereafter broke with Belinsky.
Inspired by these ideas, which led to thinking about radical changes in society’s organization, Belinskii began to call himself a
socialist starting in 1841.
Among his last great efforts were his move to join
Nikolay Nekrasov in the popular magazine
The Contemporary (also known as "Sovremennik"), where the two critics established the new literary center of
St. Petersburg and Russia. At that time Belinskii published his
Literary Review for the Year 1847.
In 1848, shortly before his death, Belinskii granted full rights to Nikolay Nekrasov and his magazine,
The Contemporary ("Sovremennik"), to publish various articles and other material originally planned for an almanac, to be called the Leviathan.
Belinskii died of
consumption on the eve of his arrest by the
Tsar's police on account of his political views. In
1910, Russia celebrated the centenary of his birth with enthusiasm and appreciation.
His surname has variously been spelled
Belinsky or Byelinski'. His works, in twelve volumes, were first published in
1859–
1862. Following the expiration of the copyright in
1898, several new editions appeared. The best of these is by S. Vengerov; it's supplied with profuse notes.
Belinskii was an early supporter of the work of
Ivan Turgenev. The two became close friends and Turgenev fondly recalls Belinskii in his book
Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments. The British writer
Isaiah Berlin has a chapter on Belinskii on his 1978 book
Russian Thinkers. Berlin's book introduced Belinskii to playwright
Tom Stoppard, who included Belinskii as one of the principal characters (along with
Alexander Herzen,
Mikhail Bakunin and
Turgenev) in his trilogy of plays about Russian writers and activists:
The Coast of Utopia (2002)
Further Information
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