6 - Belinsky the journalist and Russian literature

Summary

In no other major literature has a critic whose entire literary life was essentially that of a hack journalist had even remotely the influence which V. G. Belinsky (1811–48) has had and still has in Russia. This is true both in a vertical and in a horizontal sense. Belinsky became an authority in his lifetime and was a living force, who elicited active response pro and con, throughout the nineteenth century. His ideas were revived, successively, in the Marxist aesthetics of G. V. Plekhanov and his followers, such as A. V. Lunacharsky and V V. Vorovsky, in the criticism of the Pereval group of the 1920s, and in the liberal practices of the post-Thaw period. Also, Belinsky has been since the beginning of the Soviet period, and still is, the most often quoted authority on nineteenth-century literature as well as on questions of aesthetics and literary theory. Even more remarkable is the fact that Belinsky would be a living antagonist to such diverse twentieth-century figures as A. A.Blok, V B. Shklovsky, D. S. Mirsky, and D. I. Chizhevsky. In a horizontal plane, the Russian literary traditions of the Left, Center, and Right with almost equal emphasis have claimed as well as practiced a faithful adherence to Belinsky's principles.

Actually, the Left, represented by N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobroliubov, D. I. Pisarev, and a host of others, who all claimed discipleship most vociferously, was farthest removed from Belinsky, as Plekhanov was to show.