Vissarion Belinsky

In this name that followsEastern Slavic naming customs,thepatronymicisGrigoryevichand thefamily nameisBelinsky.

Vissarion Belinsky
V. Belinsky, lithograph byKirill Gorbunov
Born	Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (1811-06-11)11 June 1811 Sveaborg,Grand Duchy of Finland,Russian Empire
Died	7 June 1848(1848-06-07)(aged 36) Saint Petersburg,Russian Empire
Occupation	Editor ofSovremennik,andOtechestvennye Zapiski
Nationality	Russian
Period	1830s–1840s
Genre	Criticism
Subject	Literature
Literary movement	Westernizers Russian Schellingianism

A bust of Belinsky

A 1957 Vissarion Belinsky Soviet postage stamp

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky(Russian:Виссарион Григорьевич Белинский,romanized:Vissarión Grigórʹjevič Belínskij,IPA:[vʲɪsərʲɪˈonɡrʲɪˈɡorʲjɪvʲɪdʑbʲɪˈlʲinskʲɪj];June 11 [O.S.May 30] 1811 – June 7 [O.S.May 26] 1848) was a Russian literary critic ofWesternizingtendency.Belinsky played one of the key roles in the career of poet and publisherNikolay Nekrasovand his popular magazineSovremennik.He was the most influential of the Westernizers, especially among the younger generation. He worked primarily as aliterary critic,because that area was less heavily censored than political pamphlets. He agreed with Slavophiles that society had precedence overindividualism,but he insisted the society had to allow the expression of individual ideas andrights.He strongly opposed Slavophiles on the role ofOrthodoxy,which he considered a retrograde force. He emphasized reason and knowledge, and attackedautocracyandtheocracy.

Biography

Born inSveaborg,part ofHelsinki,Vissarion Belinsky lived in the town of Chembar (nowBelinskyinBelinsky DistrictofPenza Oblast) and inPenza,where he studied ingymnazia(1825–1829). In 1829–1832 he was a student ofMoscow University.In Moscow he published his first famous articles.

In 1839 Belinsky went toSt. Petersburg,Russia, where he became a respected critic and editor of two majorliterary magazines:Otechestvennye Zapiski( "Notes of the Fatherland" ), andSovremennik( "The Contemporary" ). In both magazines Belinsky worked with youngerNikolay Nekrasov.

He was unlike most of the other Russian intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s. The son of a rural medical doctor, he was not a wealthy aristocrat. The fact that Belinsky was relatively underprivileged meant, among other effects, that he was mainly self-educated; this was partly due to being expelled from Moscow University for political activity. But it was less for his philosophical skill that Belinsky 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 theRomanticideal, to the beliefs that real understanding comes not only from mere thinking (reason), but also from intuitive insight. This combination of thinking and feeling pervaded Belinsky's life.

Ideologically, Belinsky shared, but with exceptional intellectual and moral passion, the central value of most ofWesternizerintelligentsia:the notion of the individual self, a person (lichnost’(личность)), that which makes people human, and gives themdignityand rights. With this idea in hand (achieved through a complex intellectual struggle), he faced the world around him armed to do battle. He took on much conventional philosophical thinking among educated Russians, including the dry andabstract philosophizingof the Germanidealistsand their Russian followers although maintaining the perspective of literary realism in his critical writings. 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, Belinsky constructed an extensive critique of the world around him (especially the Russian one). He bitterly criticizedautocracyandserfdom(as “trampling upon everything that is even remotely human and noble” ) but alsopoverty,prostitution,drunkenness,bureaucraticcoldness, and cruelty toward the less powerful (including women).

Belinsky worked most of his short life as a literary critic. His writings on literature were inseparable from these moral judgments. Belinsky believed that the only realm of freedom in the repressive reign ofNicholas Iwas through the written word. What Belinsky 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, oraestheticism), but also commitment to “true” ideas — the correct moral stance (above all this meant a concern for the dignity of individual people): As he toldNikolai Gogol(in a famous letter) the public “is always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book [i.e. aesthetically bad], but never for a pernicious one [ideologically and morally bad].” Belinsky viewed Gogol's recent book,Correspondence with Friends,as pernicious because it renounced the need to “awaken in the people a sense of their humandignity,trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.”

Fyodor Dostoevskyread aloud at several public events Belinsky's letter, which called for the end of serfdom. A secret press was assembled to print and distribute Belinsky's letter. For these offenses Dostoevsky was arrested, convicted and condemned to death in 1849, a sentence later commuted to 4 years incarceration in theprison camps of Siberia.

In his role as perhaps the most influential liberal critic and ideologist of his day, Belinsky advocated literature that was socially conscious. He hailedFyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel,Poor Folk(1845); however, Dostoevsky soon thereafter broke with Belinsky.

Inspired by these ideas, which led to thinking about radicalchangesin society's organization, Belinsky began to call himself asocialiststarting in 1841. Among his last great efforts were his move to joinNikolay Nekrasovin the popular magazineThe Contemporary(Sovremennik), where the two critics established the new literary center ofSt. Petersburgand Russia. At that time Belinsky published hisLiterary Review for the Year 1847.

In 1848, shortly before his death, Belinsky 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.

Belinsky died ofconsumptionon the eve of his arrest by theTsar'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 spelledBelinskyorByelinski.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 is supplied with profuse notes.

Belinsky early supported the work ofIvan Turgenev.The two became close friends and Turgenev fondly recalls Belinsky in his bookLiterary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments.The British writerIsaiah Berlinhas a chapter on Belinsky on his 1978 bookRussian Thinkers.Here he points out some deficiencies of Belinsky's critical insight:

He was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared that Dante was not a poet; thatFenimore Cooperwas the equal of Shakespeare; thatOthellowas the product of a barbarous age...

But further on in the same essay, Berlin remarks:

Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic.

Berlin's book introduced Belinsky to playwrightTom Stoppard,who included Belinsky as one of the principal characters in his trilogy of plays about Russian writers and activists:The Coast of Utopia(2002)

Legacy

Belinsky Street and Belinsky Lane, close to Red Square in Moscow, were named after Belinsky from 1920–1994.

English translations

• Selected Philosophical Works,Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956.
• Belinsky, Chernyshevsky & Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism,Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1976.

Further reading

• Isaiah Berlin,Russian Thinkers,London, 1978
• Neil Cornwell, "Belinsky and V.F. Odoyevsky."Slavonic and East European Review62.1 (1984): 6–24.online
• Alexander Herzen.My Past and Thoughts
• A. Pypin,Belinsky: His Life and Correspondence,Saint Petersburg, 1876
• Ivan Turgenev,Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments,New York, 1958
• Wahba, Magdi(1978),Vissarion Belinsky and the Dilemma of Nationality,Cairo, Egypt: Cairo Studies in English, vol. XXXII.

External links

• Petri Liukkonen."Vissarion Belinsky".Books and Writers.
• Letter to Gogol
• The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center
• Lincoln Center Theater Review, Fall 2006