dying for. The ideas which he found in books or in conversation were
not for him, in the first place, intrinsically interesting or delightful
or even intellectually imponant, to be examined, analysed, reflected
about in some detached and impartial fashion. Ideas were, above all,
true or false. If false, then like evil spirits to be exorcised. All books
embody ideas, even when least appearing to do so; and it is for these
that, before anything else, the critic must probe. To illustrate this I
shall give you a curious, indeed a grotesque, but nevertheless, it seems
to me, illuminating example of his method. His critics and biographers
do not mention it, since it is a trivial piece of writing. In the course
of his day-to-day journalism Belinsky pul>lished a shon review of a
Russian version of some nineteenth-century French translation of
The Yicar of Walujield. The review starts conventionally enough, but
gradually assumes an irritated and hostile tone: Belinsky does not like
Goldsmith's masterpiece because he thinks it falsifies the moral facts.
He complains that in the character of the Vicar, Goldsmith represents
apathy, placid stupidity, and incompetence as being ultimately superior
to the qualities of the fighter, the reformer, the aggressive champion of
ideas. The Vicar is represented as a simple soul, full of Christian
resignation, unpractical, and constantly deceived; and this natural
goodness and innocence, it is implied, is somehow both incompatible
with, and superior to, cleverness, intellect, action. This to Belinsky
is a deep and damnable heresy. All books embody points of view, rest
on underlying assumptions, social, psychological, and aesthetic, and
the basis on which the Yicar rests is, according to Belinsky, philistine
and false. It is a glorification of persons who are not engaged in the
struggle of life, who stand on the edge uncommitted, dlgagls, and
enter only to be bamboozled and compromised by the active and the
1 56
V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y
crooked; which leads them to material defeat but moral victory. But
this, he exclaims, is to pander to irrationalism-to the faith in 'muddling
through' clung to by the average bourgeois everywhere�and to that
extent it is a dishonest representation of cowardice as a deeper wisdom,
of failure, temporising, appeasement, as a profound understanding of
life. One may reply that this is an absurd exaggeration; and places a
ludicrously heavy burden on the shoulders of the poor Vicar. But it
illustrates the beginning of a new kind of social criticism, which
searches in literature neither for ideal 'types' of men or situations (as
the earlier German romantics had taught), nor for an ethical instrument for the direct improvement of life; but for the attitude to life of an individual author, of his milieu, or age or class. This attitude
then requires to be judged as it would be in life in the first place for
its degree of genuineness, its adequacy to its subject-matter, its depth,
its truthfulness, its ultimate motives.
'I am a litterateur,' he wrote. 'I say this with a painful and yet
proud and happy feeling. Russian literature is my life and my blood.'
And this is intended as a declaration of moral status. When the radical
writer, Vladimir Korolenko, at the beginning of this century said 'My
country is not Russia, my country is Russian literature', it is this
position that was being so demonstratively defended. Korolenko was
speaking in the name of a movement which, quite correctly, claimed
Belinsky as its founder, of a creed for which literature alone was
free from the betrayals of everyday Russian life, and alone offered a
hope of justice, freedom, truth.
Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and
death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with
the most devastating violence. He was by temperament not religious,
nor a naturalist, nor an aesthete, nor a scholar. He was a moralist,
secular and anti-clerical through and through. Religion was to him a
detestable insult to reason, theologians were charlatans, the Church a
conspiracy. He believed that objective truth was discoverable in
nature, in society, and in the hearts of men. He was not an impressionist, he was not prepared to confine himself to ethically neutral analysis, or meticulous description without bias or comment, of the
tex�ure of life or of art. This he would have thought, like Tolstoy, or
Henen, shallow, self-indulgent or frivolous, or else (if you knew the
moral truth but preferred the outer texture) deliberate and odious
cynicism. The texture was an outer integument, and if you wanted to
understand what life was really like (and therefore what it could
..
1 57
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
become), you had to distinguish what is eternal and desperately
important from the the ephemeral, however attractive. It was not
enough to look at or even re-create what Virginia Woolf called the
'semi-transparent envelope' which encloses our existence from life to
death; you had to sink beneath the mere flow of life, and examine
the structure of the ocean bed, and how the winds blow and how the
tides flow, not as an end in itself (for no man may be indifferent to
his own fate), but in order to master the elements and to steer your
craft, it may be with unending suffering and heroism, it may be against
infinitely great odds, towards the goal of truth and social justice which
you in fact know to be (because this cannot be doubted) the only goal
worth seeking for its own sake. To linger on the surface, to spend
yourself in increasingly elaborate descriptions of its properties and of
your own sensations, was either moral idiocy or calculated immoral ism,
either blindness or a craven lie which would in the end destroy the
man who told it. The truth alone was beautiful and it was always
beautiful, it could never be hideous or destructive or bleak or trivial,
and it did not live in the outer appearance. It lay 'beneath' (as Schelling,
Plato, Hegel taught) and was revealed only to those who cared for
the truth alone, and was therefore not for the neutral, the detached,
the cautious, but for the morally committed, for those who were
prepared to sacrifice all they had in order to discover and vindicate the
truth, and liberate themselves and others from the illusions, conventions, and self-deceptions which blinded men about the world and their duty in it. This creed was the creed, then enunciated for the first
time, of the Russian intelligentsia, of the moral and political opposition
to autocracy, to the Orthodox Church, and to nationalism, the triple
slogan of the supporters of the regime.
Naturally, with a temperament of a Lucretius or a Beethoven,
Belinsky as a critic was, unlike his western contemporaries, neither a
classically pure connoisseur of Platonic forms like Landor, nor a
sharp, pessimistic, disillusioned observer of genius like Sainte-Beuve;
he was a moralist, painfully and hopefully sifting the chaff from the
grain. If anything seemed to him new or valuable or important or