Vissarion belinsky biography

Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky achieved renown and influence both as Russia's first literary critic and as a founding member of the Russian intelligentsia. He became known as "Furious Vissarion" neistovyi Vissarion for his strongly held convictions and passion in expressing them, a reputation that in the Soviet period under Joseph Stalin , whose patronymic Vissarionovich reflected Belinsky's forename, was used to justify some of the more rigid orthodoxies of socialist realism.

He was labeled a revolutionary democrat and treated as a socialist cultural icon.

Vissarion belinsky biography: Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian

More recently, serious attempts have been made to free his reputation of these adulterations and to give a more positive assessment of his place in Russia's cultural history. Born on 11 June 30 May, old style into an unprivileged background as the son of a provincial doctor in Penza, Belinsky succeeded in achieving his ambition of gaining entrance to Moscow University.

Incipient tuberculosis, poverty, and uninspired teaching left him largely self-taught, although he hoped to alleviate his poverty by composing a wordy, melodramatic play, Dmitry Kalinin, which had the aim of exposing the evil of serfdom. It was immediately rejected by the authorities, and he was expelled from the university. This setback made him all the more determined to oppose serfdom and the semifeudal system that promoted it.

At the heart of all his endeavors, however, was Russian literature. In , within a couple of years of his expulsion from Moscow University, Belinsky published a highly personal but influential review "Literaturnye mechtaniya" [Literary reveries] that made exalted claims for the role of literature in terms of German Romantic idealism, particularly Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling , but could not as yet identify a specifically Russian literature.

Throughout the s, partly under the influence of Mikhail Bakunin , he looked to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for a guiding philosophical ideal that he could apply to Russian literature.