The Russian literary critic Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811-1848) was a major force in the intellectual and literary life of his country, and his writings form the foundation of Russian literary criticism.

Vissarion Belinsky was born on May 30, 1811, in Suomenlinna (Sveaborg), Finland, the son of a naval doctor. His youth was spent in Chembar, Penza Province, Russia, where his father was district physician. Vissarion attended the local grammar school and the Penza Gymnasium. In 1829 he entered Moscow University as a student of literature; his record was not brilliant because he was already weakened by tuberculosis and furthermore was concentrating all his energy (he is remembered by his contemporaries as "furious Vissarion") on literary projects outside the university. In 1831 he published some reviews and poems in Listok. The following year he was expelled from the university because his play Dmitry Kalinin attacked serfdom.

In 1834 Belinsky published a series of critical articles, "Literary Reveries, " in Molva, the literary supplement of the newspaper Teleskop. They reflected the ideas of the German philosopher F. W. J. von Schelling. Written in a pungent, if somewhat repetitive, style, this "elegy in prose" brought Belinsky instant fame. His claim that "we have no literature" was a healthy antidote to the many inflated claims then being made for Russian literature by hyperpatriotic critics and historians.

In 1836 the government suppressed Teleskop. In 1838 Belinsky worked on the Moscow Observer, but it too was closed a year later. Belinsky moved to St. Petersburg, where he became chief literary critic for the magazine Fatherland Notes. During this period his thinking was greatly influenced by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and German idealism. In certain articles of 1839 and 1840 Belinsky, under Hegel's influence, even defended the institution of autocracy.

Belinsky experienced a moral crisis in 1841 and abandoned Hegelianism. His Works of Alexander Pushkin (1843-1846) is as much a history of Russian literature as it is a study of Pushkin. From 1841 until his death Belinsky published an annual survey of Russian literature, the last two of which (1846 and 1847) are among his most important theoretical statements. In 1843 he married his childhood friend M. V. Orlova.

In 1846 Belinsky joined the journal Contemporary and served as its chief literary critic until his death. In July 1847 Belinsky wrote what is probably his best-known work, Letter to Gogol. Not published until 1905, it was widely circulated in manuscript and became an important document among later revolutionaries. He died on May 26, 1848.

Belinsky was an important influence on later critics. He is regarded by contemporary Russian critics as the father of many tendencies which have became associated with socialist realism.

Further Reading

There is little material on Belinsky in English. The only full-length study is Herbert E. Bowman, Vissarion Belinski, 1811-1848 (1954), which is devoted chiefly to Belinsky's intellectual development and is not always reliable. Richard Hare, Pioneers of Russian Social Thought (1951; rev. ed. 1964), contains a chapter on Belinsky that is short but sound. There is a useful section on Belinsky in Evgenii Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (1957). For general background Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830-1840 (1966), is excellent.

Additional Sources

Jakovenko, Boris V. (Boris Valentinovich), Vissarion Grigorievich Belinski: a monograph, Melbourne: D. Jakovenko, 1986.

Randall, Francis B. (Francis Ballard), Vissarion Belinskii, Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1987.

For more information on Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, visit Britannica.com.

(1811 - 1848), Russian literary critic whose framework of aesthetic judgment influenced Russian and Soviet critical standards for almost two centuries; he established a symbiotic relationship between the writer and the critic whose creative interaction he considered a tool of societal self-exploration.

Belinsky's father was a navy physician, his mother a sailor's daughter, making the future critic a raznochinets (person of mixed class background). He was born in the fortress of Sveaborg (today Suomenlinna, Finland) and spent his childhood in the town of Chembar (Penza region), where his father worked as a district doctor. Belinsky enrolled at Moscow University in 1829 but was expelled in 1832 due to frail health and a reputation as a troublemaker. Often on the verge of poverty and dependent on the support of devoted friends, Belinsky became a critic for Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin's journals, Telescope and Molva, in 1834. His extensive debut, Literaturnye mechtaniya: Elegiya v proze (Literary Daydreams: An Elegy in Prose), consisted of ten chapters. At this stage, Belinsky's understanding of literature featured a lofty idealism inspired by Friedrich Schiller, as well as the notion of popular spirit (narodnost), which signified the necessity of the "idea of the people" in any work of art. This concept was adopted from the German Volkstuemlichkeit that was developed by Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling.

Belinsky's participation, since 1833, in Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich's Moscow Hegelian circle, as well as his close friendship with Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, had by 1837 caused him to make a radical move toward an unconditional acceptance of all reality as reasonable. However, Belinsky's habitual tendency toward extremes turned his interpretation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic rationalism into a passive acceptance of everything that exists, even serfdom and the tsarist system. Such fatalism became evident in Belinsky's surveys and reviews for Andrei Alexandrovich Kraevsky's journal Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the fatherland), the criticism department of which he headed since 1839. Subsequently, in the early 1840s, a more balanced synthesis of utopian aspirations and realistic norms emerged in Belinsky's views, as evidenced by his contributions for Nikolai Alexeyevich Nekrasov's and Ivan Ivanovich Panaev's Sovremennik (Contemporary), a journal that had hired him in 1846.

Belinsky met all leading Russian authors of his day, from Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov to Ivan Andreyevich Krylov and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, befriending and deeply influencing many of them. In 1846, he coined the critical term Natural School, thereby providing a group of writers with direction and a platform for self-identification. Even those who did not share his strong liberal persuasions were in awe of his personal integrity, honesty, and selflessness. Belinsky's passionate, uncompromising nature caused clashes that gave rise to major intellectual debates. For example, in his famous letter to Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, written on July 15, 1847, the critic took this once so admired writer to task for his mysticism and conservatism; the letter then circulated widely, in hundreds of illegal copies.

In his last years, Belinsky attempted to create a theory of literary genres and general philosophical definitions of the essence and function of art. After his early death from tuberculosis, his name became synonymous with dogmatism and anti-aesthetic utilitarianism. Yet this reputation is largely undeserved; for it resulted from the critic's canonization by liberal and Marxist ideologues. Still, from his earliest works Belinsky did betray a certain disposition toward simplification and systematization at any cost, often reducing complex entities to binary concepts (e.g., the classic opposition of form versus content). Indeed, Belinsky devoted little time to matters of literary language, rarely engaging in detailed textual analysis. However, his theories and their evolution, too, were simplified, both by his Soviet epigones and their Western antagonists.

Belinsky has undoubtedly shaped many views of Russian literature that remain prevalent, including a canon of authors and masterpieces. For example, it was he who defended Lermontov's 1840 novel, Geroi nashego vremeni (Hero of Our Time), as a daringly innovative work and who recognized Fyodor Dostoyevsky's supreme talent. (At the same time, he ranked Walter Scott and George Sand higher than Pushkin). Belinsky, the first major professional Russian literary critic, stood at the cradle of Russia's literary-centric culture, with its supreme social and ethical demands. His ascetic persona and quest for martyrdom became archetypal for the Russian intelligentsia's sense of mission. Lastly, Belinsky defined the ideal image of the Russian writer as secular prophet, whose duty is to respond to the people's aspirations and point them toward a better future.

Bibliography

Bowman, Herbert. (1969). Vissarion Belinski: A Study in the Origins of Social Criticism in Russia. New York: Russell and Russell.

Terras, Victor. (1974). Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

—PETER ROLLBERG

(vĭsəryôn' grĭgôr'yəvĭch byĭlyĭn'skē) , 1811–48, Russian writer and critic. He was prominent in the group that believed Russia's hope to lie in following European patterns. Under Hegel's influence he condoned czarism and reaction for a time but returned in the 1840s to his early liberalism and repudiated the doctrine of art for art's sake. As critic for four major reviews he became the principal champion of the realistic and socially responsible new Russian literature. His emphasis on the use of literature to express social and political ideas is the basis of Soviet literary criticism. Among the authors whose talents he recognized and encouraged were Gogol, Lermontov, and Dostoyevsky. A selection of his philosophical and sociological works was published in English in 1948. It includes Letter to Gogol (1847), a summation of his beliefs. Belinksy lived in poverty and died at 37 of tuberculosis.

Bibliography

See studies by H. Bowman (1954, repr. 1969) and V. Terras (1973).

Quotes:

"Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely."

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