20 Facts About Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Belinsky was the most influential of the Westernizers, especially among the younger generation.

Vissarion Belinsky worked primarily as a literary critic, because that area was less heavily censored than political pamphlets.

Vissarion Belinsky agreed with Slavophiles that society had precedence over individualism, but he insisted the society had to allow the expression of individual ideas and rights.

Vissarion Belinsky strongly opposed Slavophiles on the role of Orthodoxy, which he considered a retrograde force.

Vissarion Belinsky emphasized reason and knowledge, and attacked autocracy and theocracy.

Vissarion Belinsky was unlike most of the other Russian intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s.

The fact that Vissarion Belinsky was relatively underprivileged meant, among other effects, that he was mainly self-educated; this was partly due to being expelled from Moscow University for political activity.

Ideologically, Vissarion Belinsky shared, but with exceptional intellectual and moral passion, the central value of most of Westernizer intelligentsia: the notion of the individual self, a person, that which makes people human, and gives them dignity and rights.

Vissarion Belinsky took on much conventional philosophical thinking among educated Russians, including the dry and abstract philosophizing of the German idealists and their Russian followers although maintaining the perspective of literary realism in his critical writings.

Vissarion Belinsky bitterly criticized autocracy and serfdom but poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, bureaucratic coldness, and cruelty toward the less powerful.

Vissarion Belinsky worked most of his short life as a literary critic.

Vissarion Belinsky believed that the only realm of freedom in the repressive reign of Nicholas I was through the written word.

Vissarion Belinsky hailed Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel, Poor Folk ; however, Dostoevsky soon thereafter broke with Belinsky.

At that time Vissarion Belinsky published his Literary Review for the Year 1847.

In 1848, shortly before his death, Vissarion Belinsky granted full rights to Nikolay Nekrasov and his magazine, The Contemporary, to publish various articles and other material originally planned for an almanac, to be called the Leviathan.

Vissarion Belinsky died of consumption on the eve of his arrest by the Tsar's police on account of his political views.

Vissarion Belinsky's surname has variously been spelled Belinsky or Byelinski.

Vissarion Belinsky was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power.

Vissarion Belinsky declared that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age.

Vissarion Belinsky 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.