Vissarion Belinsky
born May 30 [June 11, New Style],
1811, Sveaborg, Fin., Russian Empire
died May 26 [June 7], 1848, St.
Petersburg, Russia
eminent Russian literary critic who is
often called the “father” of the Russian
radical intelligentsia.
The son of a provincial doctor,
Belinsky was expelled from the
University of Moscow (1832) and earned
his living thereafter as a journalist.
His first substantial critical articles
were part of a series that he wrote for
the journal Teleskop (“Telescope”)
beginning in 1834. These were called
“Literaturnye mechtaniya” (“Literary
Reveries”), and they established his
reputation. In them he expounded F.W.J.
Schelling’s Romantic view of national
character, applying it to Russian
culture.
Belinsky was briefly managing editor
of the Moskovsky nablyudatel (“Moscow
Observer”) before obtaining a post in
1839 as chief critic for the journal
Otechestvennyye zapiski (“National
Annals”). The influential essays he
published there on such writers as
Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol
helped shape the literary and social
views of other Russian intellectuals for
decades to come. By 1840 Belinsky had
moved from the idealism of his early
essays to a Hegelian view that art and
the history of a nation are closely
connected. He believed that Russian
literature had to progress in order to
help the still-embryonic Russian nation
develop into a mature, civilized
society. His theory of literature in the
service of society became an article of
faith among Russian liberals and was the
distant progenitor of the Soviets’
doctrine of Socialist Realism.
In 1846 Belinsky joined the review
Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), for
which he wrote most of his last essays.
In 1847 he wrote a famous letter to
Gogol, denouncing the latter’s
Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami
(“Selected Passages from Correspondence
with My Friends”) as a betrayal of the
Russian people because it preached
submission to church and state.
Belinsky’s perceptive praise of such
writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Mikhail
Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan
Turgenev, and Ivan Goncharov helped
establish their early reputations. He
laid the foundation for modern Russian
literary criticism in his belief that
Russian literature should honestly
reflect Russian reality and that art
should be judged for its social as well
as its aesthetic qualities.
