The Russian critic whose angry letter nearly got Dostoevsky executed
In 1849 Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, later commuted to four years in Siberian prison camps, partly for reading aloud a letter by someone else. Its author, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, had attacked Gogol and demanded an end to serfdom. Belinsky himself had already died of consumption, just before the Tsar's police could arrest him.
Belinsky stood apart from the aristocratic intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s. A rural doctor's son, born in Sveaborg near Helsinki and raised in Chembar and Penza, he was expelled from Moscow University for political activity and largely taught himself. Admirers valued him less for philosophical rigour than for sheer fervour. To think, to feel, to understand and to suffer were for him a single act, a thoroughly Romantic creed.
He chose literary criticism because the censors watched it less closely than political pamphlets, and in the repressive reign of Nicholas I he saw the written word as the only space of freedom. His guiding value was the dignity of the individual person. The fate of one human being, he insisted, mattered more than the fate of the whole world, and from there he attacked autocracy, serfdom, the Orthodox Church as a backward force, poverty, drunkenness and cruelty toward the weak, women included. From 1841 he called himself a socialist. What he demanded of books was truth: honest pictures of real life joined to the right moral stance. He told Gogol the public would forgive a badly written book but never a harmful one.
In St Petersburg from 1839 he edited Notes of the Fatherland and later The Contemporary alongside the younger Nikolay Nekrasov, making the magazine a literary centre. He championed the early Turgenev, who became a close friend, and hailed Dostoevsky's first novel, although Dostoevsky soon broke with him.
Isaiah Berlin judged him wildly erratic, a man who could deny Dante was a poet and rank Fenimore Cooper with Shakespeare, yet credited him with permanently changing the moral outlook of Russia's younger writers. Berlin's essay led Tom Stoppard to make Belinsky a lead character in The Coast of Utopia in 2002. A Moscow street near Red Square bore his name from 1920 to 1994.
Source: Vissarion Belinsky
