Vissarion Belinsky
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (Russian: Виссарио́н Григо́рьевич Бели́нский) (May 30, 1811 OS (June 11 NS) — May 26, 1848 OS (June 7 NS)) 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 members of the Russian intelligentsia.
Life and Ideas
Vissarion Belinsky was unlike most of the other Russian radicals of his time, the 1830s and 1840s. He was not a wealthy son of the gentry, but the son of a country doctor. Coming from a relatively underprivileged background, Belinsky was less well educated than Alexander Herzen or Mikhail Bakunin, in part because he was 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 the Romantic ideal, to the belief that real understanding comes not from mere thinking (reason), but 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 of Westernizer intelligentsia: the notion of the individual 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, Belinsky constructed an extensive critique of the world around him (especially the Russian one). He bitterly criticized autocracy and serfdom (as “trampling upon everything that is even remotely human and noble”) but also poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, bureaucratic coldness, 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 of Nicholas I was 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, 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 [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 human dignity, trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.”
Inspired by these ideas, which led to thinking about radical changes in society’s organization, Belinsky began to call himself a socialist starting in 1841.
His last great effort was his Literary Review for the Year 1847. He died of consumption on the eve of his arrest by the police on account of his radical views. In 1910, Russia celebrated the centenary of his birth with enthusiasm and appreciation.
His surname has variously been spelled Belinskii 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 is supplied with profuse notes.
Belinsky was an early supporter of the work of Ivan Turgenev. The two became close friends and Turgenev fondly recalls Belinsky in his book Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments. The British writer Isaiah Berlin has a chapter on Belinsky on his 1978 book Russian Thinkers. Berlin's book introduced Belinsky to playwright Tom Stoppard, who included Belinsky 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)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, London, 1978
- 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
External links
- Longer biography
- Letter to Gogol
- [1] The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center]
- Lincoln Center Theatre Review, Fall 2006
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