political views, but because he is filled with a vague but bitter hostility
towards the government of his country, the grey, brutish soldiers, the
dull, dishonest, and frightened officials, the illiterate, superstitious, and
sycophantic priests; with a deep distaste for the peculiar mixture
compounded of fear, greed, and a dislike of everything new or connected with the forces of life, which formed the prevailing Russian atmosphere. He is in full reaction against the queer variety of cynical
resignation which accepted the starved and semi-barbarous condition
of the serfs and the deathly stagnation of provincial Russian society as
something not merely natural, but possessing a deep, traditional value,
almost a kind of spiritual beauty, the object of a peculiar, nationalist,
quasi-religious mystique of its own. Rudin is the life and soul of the
house-party, and the young tu�or is completely taken in by his specious
liberal rhetoric, worships the ground Rudin treads on, and fills his
easy generalisations with all his own moral enthusiasm and faith in
truth and material progress. When Rudin, still gay and charming and
irresistible, still overflowing with empty liberal platitudes, refuses to
face a moral crisis, makes feeble excuses, behaves like a craven and a
fool, and gets himself out of an awkward predicament by a squalid
piece of minor treachery, his follower, the simple seeker after truth,
is left dazed, helpless, and outraged, not knowing what to believe or
which way to turn, in a typical Turgenev situation in which everyone
ends by behaving with weakness and irresponsibility that is human,
disarming, and disastrous. The tutor Basistov is a very minor figure,
but he is a direct if humble descendant of the foil-and sometimes the
dupe-ofthe or.iginal 'superfluous man' of Russian society, of Pushkin's
Lensky (as opposed to Onegin); he is of the same stock as Pierre
Bezukhov (as against Prince Andrey) in War and Peact, as Levin in
Anna Kartnina and all the Karamazovs, as Krutsifersky in Herzen's
novel Who is to hlame?, as the student in The Cherry Orc.�ard, as
Colonel Vershinin and the Baron in The Three Sisters. He is, in the
context of the 1 84os, the figure that came to be thought of as one of
the characteristic figures in the Russian social novel, the perplexed
idealist, the touchingly naive, over-enthusiastic, pure-hearted man,
the victim of misfortunes which could be averted but in fact never
R U SSIAN TH I NK E R S
are. Sometimes comial, sometimes tragical, often confused, blundering,
and inefficient, he is incapable of any falseness, or, at least, of irremediable falseness, of anything in any degree sordid or treacherous; sometimes weak and self-pitying, like Chekhov's heroes-sometimes strong and furious like Bazarov in Fathers and Children-he never loses an
inner dignity and an indestructible moral personality in contrast with
which the ordinary philistines who form the vast majority of normal
society appear at once pathetic and repulsive.
The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other
times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs
in the cause of the humiliated and the defeated-the actual, historical
embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual
heroism- is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky. His name became the
greatest Russian myth in the nineteenth century,, detestable to the
supporters of autocracy, the Orthodox Church, and fervid nationalism,
disturbing to elegant and fastidious lovers of western classicism, and
for the same reasons the idealised ancestor of both the reformers and
the revolutionaries of the second half of the century. In a very real
sense he was one of the founders of the movement which culminated
in I 9 I 7 in the overthrow of the social order which towards the end
of his life he increasingly denounced. There is scarcely a radical
Russian writer-and few liberals-who did not at some stage claim to
be descended from him. Even such timid and half-hearted members
of the opposition as Annenkov and Turgenev worshipped his memory,
even the conservative government censor, Goncharov, spoke of him
as the best man he had ever known. As for the true left-wing authors
of the 1 86os-the revolutionary propagandists Dobrolyubov and
Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, and the
socialists who followed them, Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and his
followers-they �ormally recognised him as one of the earliest, and,
with Herzen, the greatest of the heroes of the heroic 40s, when the
organised struggle for full social as well as political freedom, economic
as well as civil equality, was held to have begun in the Russian Empire.
Clearly, then, he was, to say the least, an arresting figure in the
history of Russian social thought. Those who have read the memoirs
of his friends, Herzen, Turgenev, and of course Annenkov, will
discover for themselves the reason for this. But in the west Belinsky
is even now relatively unknown. Yet, as anyone knows who has read
at all widely in his works, he is the father of the social criticism of
literature, not only in Russia but perhaps even in Europe, the most
I 52.
V I S SARION BELINSKY
gifted and formidable enemy of the aesthetic and religious and mystical
attitudes to life. Throughout the nineteenth century his views were
the great battlefield between Russian critics, that is, between two
incompatible views of art and indeed of life. He was always very poor,
and he wrote to keep alive, and, therefore, too much. Much of his
writing was composed in fearful haste, and a great deal is uninspired
hackwork. But in spite of all the hostile criticism to which he has
been exposed from his earliest beginnings as a critic (and let me add
that Belinsky is to this day the subject of heated controversy-no other
figure dead for over a century has excited so much devotion and so
much odium among Russians), his best work is in Russia regarded as
classical and immortal. In the Soviet Union his place is all too secure,
for (despite his lifelong war against dogma and conformism) he has
there long been canonised as a founding father of the new form of
life. But the moral and political issue with which he was concerned is,
in the west, open still. This alone makes him a figure of interest at
the present time.
His life was outwardly uneventful. He was born in poverty in I 8 I o
or I 8 1 1 , at Sveaborg in Finland, and brought up in the remote city
of Chembar in the province of Penza. His father was a retired naval
doctor who settled down to a small practice and to drink. He grew up
a thin, consumptive, over-serious, pinched little boy, prematurely old,
unsmiling and always in deadly earnest, who soon attrac!ed the
attention of his schoolmasters by his single-minded devotion to
literature, and his grim, unseasonable, and apparently devouring
passion for the truth. He went to Moscow as a poor scholar with a
government stipend, and after the normal troubles and misfortunes
of impoverished students of humble birth in what was still the home