Vissarion Belinsky
Alright. So, you can join me once
again in my continuous and forced effort to write some words on paper, or the
internet, or whatever this is.
Today I am going to expound about Belinsky,
a cool guy that most people don’t know too much about. He comes from the far off land of vodka and
commies, Russia. It’s the turbulent 19th century and intellectualism
is all the craze, especially in the world of Russian literature. He is best known
as the father of Russian (arguably all of European) social literary criticism
and for being the granddaddy of the radical Russian intelligentsia.
Alright, so he’s some old critic
that nobody cares about anymore. Wrong, he’s a badass.
He was born poor, in the provinces
and was sick with consumption (TB) his whole life. He was self-educated, got
himself into university and then got himself expelled for a very badly written,
overly political play. Did that get him down? Fuck no. He was described as
being in a constant state of frenzy; the man was passionately obsessed with
figuring out the Truth and fixing Russia. This overzealous nature literally
destroyed him, and eventually worked himself to death. He compensated being poorly educated by being insanely
well read. So he started separating the literary bad shit from the good shit
and old shit from the new shit and pretty much drew the battle lines of the
Russian intellectual scene. He did this intuitively and concisely by writing
tons of literary reviews and criticisms in a variety of journals. In doing so
he discovered or solidified some of Russia’s greatest writers including: Gogol,
Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Herzen and Turgenev.
Alright I know I’m losing your
attention. Its history class all over…. so let’s get into it in list form.
Why This Dude Is a Badass-
1.
Total outsider- He rose from an
obscure backwater beginning to interact and scare the shit out of the leading
thinkers, politicians, writers and nobles of the time. He was generally seen as
quiet and sullen in social situations. He never tried to learn the social
nuances of the dandy nobles’ and was seen as unclothe, awkward and
inarticulate. Unlike the well-educated nobility that made up the rest of the
intellectual community, Belinksy only knew Russian. He actually had to be
taught Hegel by a friend, because he couldn’t read that shit himself. In a
society dominated by a feudal power structure, this guy not only rose to the
level of all the most influential people, he actually became their moral
authority.
"If a man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted to his own vanity rather than the truth. " -VB
2.
Brutally honest- Belinsky was
OBSEESSED with the capital T-truth. He
saw that in Russia the only way that any moral discourse could be done under
the oppressive regime was in the form of art. While he was a writer himself,
most of his work was mediocre at best. His greatest strength was to see the
truth or falsehood of the matter in others works and to point it out, even when
it was especially dangerous to do so. He was criticized for being “wishy-washy”
because his opinion’s changed so drastically over his life. His response? Laugh
in your face and tell you how much he’s bled for his convictions. Belinsky
would go to extreme lengths to understand any position, to discover the truth.
He would put himself in another’s writer’s shoes to such extremes that if he
was convinced of something, he would tear down all of his previous pre-conceptions
and rebuild with only the truth. This type of massive conscience based overhaul
would make him sick for years at a time, and also earned him the title (from
both sides of the aisle) as the “Conscience of the Russian Intelligentsia.” The
man was so authentically obsessed with finding the moral truth even the great
conservative Russian censor Goncharov (who censored tons of his writing) “spoke
of him as the best man he had ever known.”
"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."
3.
He Kept it Real- Alright so you know
how I said he was inarticulate and unclothe and shit? This was true and under
most circumstances an understatement. He was often prey to the 19th
century noble dandy’s sharp tongue, and often was cut to pieces by witticisms. Since
he wasn’t a member of the aristocracy he didn’t have their social graces and
never bothered to learn the rules of high society. Normally this guy couldn’t argue
himself out of a wet paper bag; that is
unless you offended his conscience. His friends would see this happening
and take an “Oh Fuck,” step back. Herzen (a pretty important dude), said “when
his dearest convictions were touched ... he would fling himself at his victim
like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him ridiculous, make him
pitiful.” But seriously, you didn’t want to try and defend serfdom or religious
corporal punishment or wife rape in front of this guy, because he would scream
at you until his throat bleed, and then keep screaming, probably until you had
wet yourself and contracted TB. Again highlighting that I am serious, he actually
did this, several times. While this kind of behavior might be a social faux pas today, in the 19th
century it was the equivalent of tearing off your clothes shitting in your hand
and screaming “COME AT ME BRO!”
4.
Fearless- Alright when I say he was
fearless I don’t mean he was incapable of feeling fear. I mean he was probably afraid
of spiders or people with unnaturally large foreheads (that’s normal right?) or
urinating in public or whatever. But
when it came down to telling the truth, this guy was ballsy. I mean normally
you can get around the whole truth thing by just not responding to falsehood or
by omitting a bit of information. Not Belinsky, he spoke the truth (as he saw
it) all the time. It got him expelled, it lost him jobs, it made him no friends
and it would have got him executed, if he wasn’t a baller. The guy died at 37
the night before his arrest. He could have fled the country and published
abroad like most of the critics of his time, but he decided to that would take too
much time and would detract from his fixing his home country. So he decided to
just work himself to death rather than run like the rest of those pansy
aristocrats. Belinsky was ready to tell anybody they were wrong, it didn’t matter
if you were his friend, his family, the Tsar, God, or his greatest hero. Nikolai
Gogol was one such hero. Belinsky helped make the guys career and declared him
the “head of Russian Literature,” emphasizing his critical realist view that
showed the gritty truth of Russian society. So when Gogol published a book that
essentially said: ignore that other shit I said and instead fall in line with
the church and the tsar cause that’s what good pious Russian’s have always
done, Belinsky had a shit fit. “Letter to Gogol” is a personal letter that is
not only what Belinsky is most remembered for, but also one of the most widely
read documents in Russia in the 19th century. The way I see Belinsky
writing the letter follows, he screamed at a piece of paper and then used the
blood splatter to transcribe said rant. The
letter itself is not only a scathing criticism of Gogol’s hypocrisy but also
points out in a concise angry voice Russia’s greatest ills. Seriously though it
was joked about that every school teacher in Russia had a copy of the letter
and it became a bible for the revolutionary. Fun fact, the reason Dostoevsky
was exiled to Siberia was for reading aloud in the Petrashevsky Circle
(essentially a revolutionary book club) the “Letter to Gogol.”
"Proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and Stygian darkness, panegyrist of Tartar morals – what are you about!"- Letter to Gogol
Alright I have probably bored you to death. But you have to
admit Belinsky was a pretty badass guy. Not because he was particularly brilliant
or a literary genius, not because he developed new ideas or masterminded
political action. In fact he really didn’t/wasn’t any of these things.
The guy was just honest and committed. Instead of his conscience being the background
noise of his life like it is for most people, it was his life. Instead of
shying away from ugly truth and utter personal failure he stared it straight in
the face. All he wanted was to do the right thing according to the undiluted
ugly truth of the world.
And it Killed him.
Read the Letter if your interested-
Citations-
Isaiah Berlin, Russian
thinkers, (170-211)
