always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and
unconscious, the artist was, a function without which he became
trivial and worthless, and in _the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance. None of this would have been denied by his Slavophil opponents: their disagreements lay elsewhere.
And yet, despite his historicism-common to all romantics- Belinsky
does not belong to those whose main purpose and skill consist in a
careful critical or historical analysis of artistic phenomena, in relating
a work of art or an artist to a precise social background, analysing
specific influences upon his work, examining and describing the
methods which he uses, providing psychological or historical explanations of the success or failure of the particular .effects which he achieves. Belinsky did indeed now and then perform such tasks; and
was, in effect, the first and greatest of Russian literary historians. But
he detested detail and had no bent for scrupulous scholarship; he read
unsystematically and widely; he read and read in a feverish, frantic
way until he could bear it no longer, and then he wrote. This gives
his writing an unceasing vitality, but it is scarcely the stuff of which
balanced scholarship is made. Yet his criticism of the eighteenth century
is not as blind and sweeping as his detractors have maintained. His
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work i n assigning their due place to earlier Russian writers (for
example, Tredyakovsky, Khemnitser, Lomonosov, Fonvizin and
Dmitriev), and in particular his pages on the poet Derzhavin and the
fabulist Krylov, are a model of insight and lucid judgment. And he
did kill the reputations of a number of eighteenth-century mediocrities
and imitators once and for all.
But a capacity for lasting literary verdicts is not where his genius
lay. His unique quality as a literary critic, the quality which he
possessed to a degree scarcely equalled by anyone in the west, is the
astonishing freshness and fuUness with which he reacts to any and
every literary impression, whether of style or of content, and the
passionate devotion and scruple with which he reproduces and paints
in words the vivid original character, the colour and shape, above all
the moral quality of his direct impressions. His life, his whole being,
went into the attempt to seize the essence of the literary experience
which he was at any given moment trying to convey. He had an
exceptional capacity both for understanding and for articulating, but
what distinguished him from other, at least in this respect equally
gifted, critics, Sainte-Beuve for example, or Matthew Arnold, was
that his vision was wholly direct-there is, as it were, nothing between
him and the object. Several of his contemporaries, among them
Turgenev, noted an almost physical likeness to a hawk or a falcon:
and indeed he used to pounce upon a writer like a bird of prey, and
tear him limb from limb until he had said all he had to say. His
expositions were often too prolix, the style is uneven and sometimes
tedious and involved; his education was haphazard, and his words
have little elegance and little intrinsic magic. But when he has found
himself, when he is dealing with an author worthy of him, whether
he is praising or denouncing, speaking of ideas and attitudes to life,
or of prosody and idiom, the vision is so intense, he has so much to
say, and says it in so first-hand a fashion, the experience is so vivid
and conveyed with such uncompromising and uninterrupted force,
that the effect of his words is almost as powerful and unsettling
today as it was upon his own contemporaries. He himself said that
no one could understand a poet or a thinker who did not for a time
become wholly immersed in his world, letting himself be dominated
by his outlook, identified with his emotions; who did not, in short,
try to live through the writer's experiences, beliefs, and convictions.
In this way he did in fact 'live through' the influence of Shakespeare
and Pushkin, Gogo) and George Sand, Schiller and Hegel, and as he
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changed his spiritual domicile he altered his attitude and denounced
what he had previously praised, and praised what he had previously
denounced. Later critics have accused him of being a chameleon, a
sensitive surface which reflected too much and altered too quickly,
an unreliable guide, without a permanent core of inner principle, too
impressionable, too undisciplined, vivid and eloquent, but without a
specific, firm, critical personality, without a definite approach or an
identifiable point of view. But this is unjust, and none of his contemporaries who knew him best would have begun to understand such a judgement. If ever there lived a man of rigorous, indeed overrigorous, and narrow principle, dominated all his life by a remorseless, never-ceasing, fanatical passion for the truth, unable to compromise
or adapt himself, even for a short time and superficially, to anything
which he did not wholly and utterly believe, it was Belinsky. 'If a
man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted
to his own vanity rather than to the truth,' he said. Belinsky radically
altered his opinions twice, each time after a painful crisis. On each
occasion he suffered with an intensity which Russians seem particularly
capable of conveying by the use of words, and he gave a full account
of it, principally in his letters, the most moving in the Russian language.
Those who have read them will know what I mean by the heroic
quality of his grimly undeviating, perpetually self-scrutinising honesty
of mind and feeling.
Belinsky held several intellectual positions in his life, and turned
from one to another and exhausted each to the uttermost until, with
great tormenting effort, he would liberate himself from it, to begin
the struggle over again. He arrived at no final or consistent outlook,
and the efforts by tidy-minded biographers to divide his thought into
three or more distinct 'periods', each neatly self-contained and coherent,
ignore too many facts: Belinsky is always 'relapsing' towards earlier,
'abandoned', positions; his consistency was moral, not intellectual. He
began to philosophise in the mid- I 8 30s, as a young man of twentythree, with that disgust and sense of being asphyxiated by the police state of Nicholas I which all young intellectuals with hearts and
consciences felt, and he adopted the philosophy then preacheJ by the
young Moscow philosophers, Stankevich and Bakunin, to whose
circle he belonged. Idealism was a reaction to the grim suppression
which followed the abortive Decembrist revolt in 1 825. The young
Russian intellectuals, encouraged as they were to go to Germany
rather than to Louis Philippe's dangerously fermenting France,
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returned full of German metaphysics. Life on earth, material existence,