of the gentry and nobility-the University of Moscow- was expelled
for reasons which are still obscure, but probably connected with lack
of solid knowledge, and the writing of a play denouncing serfdom.
The play, which survives, is very badly written, rhetorical, mildly
subversive, and worthless as a work of literature, but the moral was
plain enough for the intimidated university censors, and the author
was poor and lacked protectors. Nadezhdin, then a liberal young
professor of European literature at the university, who edited an ovantgarde periodical, was impressed by Belinsky's obvious seriousness and passion for literature, thought that he detected a spark of inspiration,
and engaged him to write reviews. From I 835 until his death thirteen
years later, Belinsky poured out a steady stream of articles, critical
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notices, and reviews i n various journals. They split educated Russian
opinion into rival camps, and became the gospel of the progressive
young men in every corner of the Empire, particularly of the university
students who became his most devoted and fanatical followers.
In appearance Belinsky was of middle height, thin, bony, and slightly
stooped; his face was pale, slightly mottled, and flushed easily when he
was excited. He was asthmatic, tired easily, and usually looked worn
out, haggard, and rather grim. His movements were awkward, like a
peasant's, nervous and abrupt, and before strangers he tended to be
shy, brusque and sullen. With his intimates, the young radicals,
Turgenev, Botkin, Bakunin, Granovsky, 'he was full of life and
irrepressible gusto. In the heat of a literary or philosophical discussion
his eyes would shine, his pupils dilate, he would walk from corner
to corner talking loudly, rapidly, and with violent intensity, coughing
and waving his arms. In society he was clumsy and uncomfortable
and tended to be silent, but if he heard what he regarded as wicked
or unctuous sentiments he intervened on principle, and Herzen
testifies that on such occasions no opponent could stand before the
force of his terrible moral fury. He was at his best when excited by
argument. Let me quote Herzen's words:
Without controversy, unless he was irritated, he did not talk well;
but when he felt wounded, when his dearest convictions were
touched, and the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice
broke-one should have seen him then: he would fling himself at
his victim like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him
ridiculous, make him pitiful, and in the course of it would develop
his own thought with astonishing power and poetry. The argument would often end in blood which poured from the sick man's throat; pale, choking, with eyes fixed on whoever he was addressing,
he would, with a trembling hand, lift the handkerchief to his
mouth, and stop-terribly upset, undone by his lack of physical
strength. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments !
At dinner with some decayed and respectable official who had
survived from the reign of the Empress Catherine, Belinsky went out
of his way to praise the execution of Louis XVI. Someone ventured
to say in front of him that Chaadaev (a Russian sympathiser with
Roman Catholicism, who had denounced the barbarism of his country)
had, in a civilised country, been very properly declared insane by the
tsar for insulting the dearest convictions of his people. Belinsky, after
vainly tugging at Herzen's sleeve and whispering to him to intervene,
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VI SSARION B E L I N SKY
finally broke in himself, and said in a dead, dull voice that in still
more civilised countries the guillotine was invented for people who
advanced that kind of opinion. The victim was crushed, the host was
alarmed, and the party quickly broke up. Turgenev, who disliked
extremes, and detested scenes, loved and respected Belinsky for
precisely this social fearlessness that he himself conspicuously lacked.
With his friends Belinsky played cards, cracked commonplace
jokes, talked through the night, and charmed and exhausted them all.
He could not bear solitude. He was married unsuitably, from sheer
misery and loneliness. He died of consumption in the early summer
of 1 848. The head of the gendarmerie later expressed fierce regret
that Belinsky had died, adding: 'We would have rotted him in a
fortress.' He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his death,
and at the height of his powers.
For all the external monotony of his days, Belinsky lived a life of
abnormal intensity, punctuated by acute crises, intellectual and moral,
which helped to destroy him physically. The subject which he had
chosen, the subject from which he cannot be separated even in thought,
was literature, and although he was, despite his detractors' charges of
lack of authentic capacity, acutely sensitive to pure literary quality, to
the sounds and rhythms and nuances of words, to images and poetical
symbolism and the purely sensuous emotions directed towards them,
yet that was not the central factor of his life. This centre was the
influence of ideas; not merely in the intellectual or rational sense in
which ideas are judgements or theories, but in that sense which is
perhaps even more familiar, but more difficult to express, in which
ideas embody emotions as well as thoughts, inarticulate as well as
explicit attitudes to the inner and to the outer worlds. This is the
sense in which ideas are something wider and more intrinsic to the
human beings who hold them than opinions or even principles, the
sense in which ideas constitute, and indeed are, the central complex
of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world, and
may be shallow or deep, false or true, closed or open, blind or endowed
with the power of insight. This is something which is discovered in
behaviour, conscious and unconscious, in style, in gestures and actions
and minute mannerisms at least as much as in any explicit doctrine or
professions of faith. It is ideas and beliefs in this sense, as they are
manifested in the lives and works of human beings-what is sometimes
vaguely called ideology-that perpetually excited Belinsky to enthusiasm
or anxiety or loathing, and kept him in a state sometimes amounting
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to a kind of moral frenzy. He believed what he believed very passionately, and sacrificed his entire nature to it. When he doubted he doubted no less passionately, and was prepared to pay any price for
the answers to the questions which tormented him. These questions
were, as might be supposed, about the proper relation of the individual
to himself and to other individuals, to society, about the springs of
human action and feeling, about the ends of life, but in panicular
about the imaginative work of the anist, and his moral purpose.
All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral
questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing
for its own sake. To him this meant the question of what is alone
wonh knowing, saying, doing, and, of course, fighting for-if need be,