even true, he would fly into ecstasies of enthusiasm and proclaim his
discovery to the world in hurrying, ill-written, impassioned sentences,
as if to wait might be fatal because the attention of the vacillating
public might be distracted. Moreover one must herald the truth
tumultuously, for to speak in an even voice would perhaps not indicate
its crucial importance. And in this way Belinsky, in his exuberance,
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did discover and over-praise a handful of comparatively unknown and
worthless writers and critics whose names are today justly forgotten.
But he also revealed, and for the first time, the full glory of the great
sun of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, and he discovered and
assessed at their true worth Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and
Dostoevsky, not to· mention such writers of the second rank as
Goncharov, or Grigorovich, or Koltsov. Of course Pushkin had been
recognised as a writer of genius before Belinsky had begun writing,
but it was Belinsky's eleven famous essays that established his importance, not merely as a poet of magnificent genius, but as being, in the literal sense, the creator of Russian literature, of its language, its
direction, and its place in the national life. Belinsky created the image
of Pushkin, which henceforth dominated Russian writing, as a man
who stood to literature as Peter the Great to the Russian state, the
radical reformer, the breaker of the old, the creator of the new; the
implacable enemy and the faithful child of the national tradition, as
at once the invader of hitherto remote foreign territory, and the
integrator of the deepest and most national elements of the Russian
past. With consistency and passionate conviction, Belinsky paints the
portrait of a poet who justly saw himself as a herald and a prophet,
because by his art he had made Russian society aware of itself as a
spiritual and political entity, with its appalling inner conflicts, its
anachronisms, its anomalous position among other nations, its huge
untried strength and dark and tantalising future. With a multitude
of examples he demonstrates that this was Pushkin's achievement,
and not that of his predecessors-the official trumpeters of Russia's
spirit and Russia's might- even of the most civilised and talented,
such as the epic poet Derzhavin, the admired historian Karamzin, or
his own mentor, the generous, romantic, mellifluous, always delightful
Zhukovsky.
This unique domination of literature over life, and of one man
over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a
fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied
in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer
or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever
may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognised, the work of
Belinsky and his disciples; who first saw in Pushkin the central planet,
the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling
grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and,
in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful and whimsical man, thought
..
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this embarrassing and spoke o f the angular and unfashionable Belinsky
as 'a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to
adore me'. He was a little frightened of him, half suspected that he
had something to say, thought of asking him to contribute to the
journal which he edited, recollected that his friends thought him
unpresentable, and successfully avoided a personal meeting.
Pushkin's snobbery, his intermittent attempts to pretend that he
was an aristocratic dilettante and not a professional man of letters at
all, touched the socially sensitive Belinsky on the raw, just as the
mask of worldly cynicism which Lermontov adopted had offended
him at their first meeting. Nevertheless, in the presence of genius
Belinsky forgot everything. He forgot Pushkin's coldness, he realised
that behind Lermontov's Byronic mask, his insulting cynicism and
desire to wound and be wounded, there was a great lyrical poet, a
serious and penetrating critic, and a tormented human being_gf great
tenderness and depth. The genius of these men had bound its spell
upon him, and it is really in terms o_0beiE;and in particular Push kin's,
art and personality that Belinsky, -whether he was aware of it or not,
tried to define his own ideas of what a creative artist is and should be.
As a critic he remained, all his life, a disciple of the great German
romantics. He sharply rejected the didactic and utilitarian doctrines of
the function of art, then enjoying a vogue among the French socialists:
'Poetry has no purpose beyond itself. It is its own end, as truth is of
knowledge, and the good of action.' Earlier in the same article he says:
The whole world, its . . . colours and sounds, all the forms of nature
and of life, can be poetical phenomena; but its essence is that which
is concealed in these appearances . • . that in them which enchants
and fascinates by the play oflife . . . [The poet] is an impressionable,
irritable organism, always active, which at the lightest touch gives
off electric sparks, suffers more painfully, savours pleasures more
fiercely than others, loves more violently, hates with more passion . . .
And again :
[Literature is] the fruit of free inspiration, of the united though not
the organised efforts of men . . . who fully express . . . the spirit of
the people . . . whose inward life they manifest . • . in its most
hidden depths and pulsations.
He rejected with passion the notion of art as a social weapon then
preached by George Sand and Pierre Leroux:
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Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet,
your works will contain them without your knowledge-they will
be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
This is an echo of August Wilhelm Schlegel and his allies. And
from this early view Belinsky never retreated. Annenkov says that
he looked in art for an 'integral' answer to all human needs-to repair
the gaps left by other, less adequate forms of experience; that he felt
that perpetual return to the great classical works would regenerate
and ennoble the reader, that they alone would resolve-by transforming
his vision until the true relations of things were revealed -all moral
and political problems; provided always that they remained spontaneous
and self-subsistent works of art: worlds in themselves, and not the sham
structures of moral or social propaganda. Belinsky altered his opinions
often and painfully; but to the end of his days he believed that artand in particular literature-gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse-the more purely artistic the workthe clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but