it altered the style and content of the great political and artistic controversies of the hundred years and more since his death.
In the polite, elegant, spirited, gay, socially accomplished society
of the intellectuals of Moscow and Petersburg he continued to speak,
indeed at times to shout, in his own dissonant idiom, and remained
independent, violent, maladjusted, and, indeed, what later came to be
called 'class-conscious', to the end of his days; and he was felt to be
a profoundly disturbing figure for precisely this reason, an unassimilable outsider, a dervish, a moral fanatic, a man whose unbridled behaviour threatened the accepted conventions upon which a civilised
literary and artistic world rested. He secured this independence at a
cost; he over-developed the harsher side of his nature, and sometimes
ftung off needlessly crude judgments, he was too intolerant of refinement and fastidiousness as such, too suspicious of the merely beautiful, and was sometimes artistically and morally blinded by the violence of
his own moral dogmatism. But his individuality was so strong, the
power of his words so great, his motives so pure and so intense, that
(as I said before) the very roughness and clumsiness of his style created
its own tradition of literary sincerity. This tradition of protest and
revolt is of a quality wholly different from that of the well-born and
well-bred radicals of the 1 84os who shook and in the end destroyed
the classical aristocratic fa�e of the 'Augustan age' of Russian
literature. The circle-or the two overlapping circles-in which he
moved, in his day still consisted principally of the sons of land-owning
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squires. But i n due course this aristocratic opposition gave way to
more violent figures drawn from the middle class and the proletariat.
Of these latter Belinsky is the greatest and most direct ancestor.
Those left-wing writers of a later day inevitably tended to imitate
the defects of his qualities, and in particular the brutal directness and
carelessness of his diction as a measure of their own contempt for the
careful and often exquisite taste of the polite belles lettres against which
they were in such hot rebellion. But whereas the literary crudities of
such radical critics of the 6os as Chernyshevsky or Pisarev were
deliberate-a conscious weapon in the war for ;naterialism and the
natural sciences, and against the ideals of pure art, refinement, and the
cultivation of aesthetic, non-utilitarian attitudes to personal and social
questions- Belinsky's case is more painful and more interesting. He
was not a crude materialist, and certainly not a utilitarian. He believed
in his critical calling as an end valuable in itself. He wrote as he spokein shapeless, over-long, awkward, hurrying, tangled sentences-only because he possessed no better means of expression; because that was
the natural medium in which he felt and thought.
Let me remind you once again that Russian writing for several
decades, before and after Push kin, practised, as it was, almost exclusively
by the 'awakened' members of the upper and upper middle class, drew
on foreign, principally French and later German, sources, and was
marked with an altogether exceptional sensibility to style and subtlety
of feeling. Belinsky's preoccupations, for all his insight into the process
of artistic creation, were predominantly social and moral. He was a
preacher, he preached with fervour, and could not always control the
tone and accent of his utterance. He wrote, as he spoke, with a grating,
occasionally shrill intonation, and Pushkin's friends-aesthetes and
mandarins- instinctively recoiled from this noisy, frantically excited,
half-educated vulgarian. Belinsky, whose admiration of their magnificent achievement was wholehearted and boundless, felt (as so often) wounded and socially humiliated. But he could not alter his
nature, nor could he alter or modify or pass over the truth as he saw_
it, painfully, but, from time to time, with overwhelming clearness.
His pride was great, and he was dedicated to a cause; the cause was
that of the unadorned truth, and in her service he would live and die.
The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, the Arz.amas group as
they were called, despite radical ideas acquired abroad in the victorious
war against Napoleon, despite the Decembrist interlude, was on the
whole conservative, if not always politically, yet in social habits and
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temper; it was connected with the Court and the Army and deeply
patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, a sin
against the light of science and education, was convinced that Russia
had more to learn from the technologically progressive west than to
teach it, that the Slavophil movement was a romantic illusion, and,
in its extreme form, blind nationalistic megalomania, that western arts
and sciences and forms of civilised life offered the first and only hope
of lifting Russia from her backward state. Herzen, Bakunin, Granovsky believed this too, of course. But then they had had a semi-western education, and found it both easy and agreeable to travel and live
abroad and to enter into social and personal relations with civilised
Frenchmen or Germans. Even the Slavophils who spoke of the west
as worthless and decadent were delighted by their visits to Berlin or
Baden-Baden or Oxford or even Paris itself.
Belinsky, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was
emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecutionridden abroad. He found western culture worthy of respect and emulation, but western habits of life were to him personally quite
insufferable. He began to sigh bitterly for home as soon as he had
left his native shore on a sea voyage to Germany; the Sistine Madonna
and the wonders of Paris did not comfort him; after a month abroad he
was almost insane with nostalgia. In a very real sense he embodied
the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life
to a sharper degree than his friends and contemporaries-whether like
Turgenev they felt contented in Germany and Paris and unhappy in
Russia, or, like the Slavophils, wore traditional Russian dress and
secretly preferred a poem by Goethe or a tragedy by Schiller to any
number of ancit:nt Russian ballads or Slav chronicles. T:1is deep inner
conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost
physical, needs, is a characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth
century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became
sharper and more articulate, the contradiction, which tormented
Belinsky, emerged more clearly. The Marxists or agrarian socialists
or anarchists, when they are not noblemen or university professors,
that is to say, to some degree professionally members of an international society, make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the west in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all
its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when