and this was thought materialistic.
His life and personality became a myth. He lived as an idealised,
severe, and morally immaculate figure in the hearts of so many of
his contemporaries that, after mention of his name was once again
tolerated by the authorities, they vied with each other in composing
glowing epitaphs to his memory. He established the relation of literature to life in a manner which even writers not at all sympathetic to his point of view, such as Leskov and Goncharov and Turgenev, all
of whom in some sense pursued the ideal of pure art, were forced to
recognise ; they might reject his doctrine, but they were forced by
the power of his invisible presence into having to settle accounts with
him-if they did not, like Dostoevsky or Gogo!, follow him, they at
least felt it necessary to explain themselves on this matter. No one felt
this need more acutely than Turgenev. Pulled one way by Flaubert,
another by the awful apparition of his dead friend which perpetually
arose before him, Turgenev vainly tried to placate both, and so spent
much of his life in persuading himself and his Russian public that his
position was not morally indefensible, and involved no betrayals or
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evasions. This search for one's proper place in the moral and the
social universe continued as a central tradition in Russian literature
virtually until the revolt in the 1 89os of the neo-classicist aesthetes
and the symbolists under Ivanov and Balmont, Annensky and Blok.
But these movements, splendid as their fruit was, did not last long as
an effective force. And the Soviet revolution returned, albeit in a
crude and distorted utilitarian form, to the canons of Belinsky and the
social criteria of art.
Many things have been said against Belinsky, particularly by the
opponents of naturalism, and some of them it is difficult to deny. He
was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity
do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared
that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of
Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age; that
Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila was 'infantile', that his Tales
of Belkin and Fairy Tales were worthless, and Tatyana in Evgeny
One gin 'a moral embryo'. There are equally wild remarks about
Racine and Corneille and Balzac and Hugo. Some of these are due
to irritation caused by the pseudo-medievalism of the Slavophils,
some to an over-sharp reaction against his old master Nadezhdin and
his school, which laid down that it was inartistic to deal with what
is dark or ugly or monstrous, when life and nature contain so much
that is beautiful and harmonious; but it is mostly due to sheer critical
blindness. He did damn the magnificent poet Baratynsky _out of hand,
and erased a gifted minor contemporary of Pushkin-the lyrical poet
Benediktov-out of men's minds for half a century, for no better
reason than that he disliked mere delicacy without moral fervour. And
he began to think that he was mistaken in proclaiming the genius
of Dostoevsky, who was perhaps no more than an exasperating
religious neurotic with persecution mania. His criticism is very uneven.
His essays in artistic theory, despite good pages, seem arid and artificial
and conceived under the inAuence of Procrustean German systems,
alien to his concrete, impulsive, and direct sense of life and art. He
wrote and talked a very great deal, and said far too much about too
many unrelated things, and too often spoke incoherently and naively,
with the uncritical exaggeration and half-baked dogmatism of an
autodidact-'always in a dither of excitement, always frantic, always
hurrying', falling and rising and stumbling on, sometimes pathetically
ill-equipped, hurrying desperately wherever the battle between truth
and falsehood, life and death, seemed most critical. He was the more
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R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
erratic because h e took pride i n what seemed to him freedom from
petty qualities, from neatness and tidiness and scholarly accuracy, from
careful judgement and knowing how far to go. He could not bear
the cautious, the morally timid, the intellectually genteel, the avoiders
of crises, the bien pensant seekers of compromise, and attacked them
in long and clumsy periods full of fury and contempt. Perhaps he was
too intolerant, and morally lop-sided, and overplayed his own feelings.
He need not, perhaps, have hated Goethe quite so much for his, to
him, maddening serenity, or the whole of Polish literature for being
Polish and in love with itself. And these are not accidental blemishes,
they are the defects inherent in everything that he is and stands for.
To dislike them overmuch is ultimately to condemn his positive
attitude too. The value and influence of his position reside precisely
in his lack of, and conscious opposition to, artistic detachment: for he
saw in literature the expression of everything that men have felt and
thought and have had to say about life and society, their central
attitude to man's situation and to the world, the justification of their
whole life and activity, and consequently looked on it with the deepest
possible concern. He abandoned no view, however eccentric, until he
had tried it out on himself as it were, until he had 'lived himself'
through it, and paid the price in nervous waste and a sense of inadequacy, and sometimes total failure. He put truth, however fitfully glimpsed, however dull or bleak it might turn out to be, so far above
other aims that he communicated a sense of its sanctity to others and
thereby transformed the standards of criticism in Russia.
Because his consuming passion was confined to literature and books,
he attached immense importance to the appearance of new ideas, new
literary methods, above all new concepts of the relation of literature
and life. Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was
living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling
in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering,
and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook
of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered
the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression
of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant
social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic. Every
age has its official preachers and prophets who castigate its vices and
call to a better life. Yet it is not by them that ia; deepest malaise is
revealed, but in the artists and thinkers dedicated to the more painful
and difficult task of creation, description and analysis-it is they, the
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poets, the novelists, the critics, who live through the moral agony
of their society in their own personal experience; and it is they, their
victories and their defeats, that affect the fate of their generation and
leave the most authentic testimony of the battle itself for the benefit