Belinskii, Vissarion Grigorievich

« reasonably well read in the major authors of the West and regularly responded to recent works of French, English and German literature as they were translated into Russian (Hugo, Janin, Sue, George Sand, Hoffmann, Heine, Walter Scott, Dickens, J.F.

Cooper and many others). 2 Evolution of Belinskii's aesthetics Belinskii's philosophy of art developed under the influence of a series of Western authors, yet always in direct connection with Russian life and the development of Russian literature.

Specifically, he experienced, in succession, the stimulating influence of Romantic theories of art and poetry (Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers); Hegel (after 1837); and the Left Hegelians and French Utopian Socialists (in the 1840s) (see Romanticism, German §§1-3 ; Hegel, G.W.F ; Hegelianism §§1-3 ). Belinskii's conception of the organic nature of the work of art (its idea being to its form as soul to body); his notion of the symbolic nature of all true art (along with a dismissal of allegory and schematism as 'nonart' ); and his belief in the cognitive power of art and the prophetic powers of genius were derived from Schelling's System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism) (1800).

Given in 'The Idea of Art' (1841), Belinskii's famous definition of art as 'the immediate contemplation of truth, or thinking in images ' (1952-9: 584; original emphases ), squares with Schelling's : 'Art may be defined as the real representation of the forms of things as they are in themselves - their proper, native forms, then' .

Even more closely, it tallies with A.W.

Schlegel's definition of poetry as 'expression of thought in sense images' . In 1837, Belinskii, along with Stankevich and Bakunin (later his collaborator on The Moscow Observer ), were converted to a Hegelian philosophy of art and history (see Hegelianism, Russian §§2-3 ).

Specifically, Belinskii used a conspectus of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, which M.N.

Katkov had translated for him.

The list of Belinskii's positions that may be derived from Hegel is a long one.

As early as 1838, in a major essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet , Belinskii wrote of works of art as 'a manifestation of the Spirit, [as] a given stage of its consciousness' .

Soon enough he developed a thoroughly historicist approach to literature, following the evolution of the Spirit in concrete historical developments.

Concretely, Pushkin's verse epic 'Poltava' (1828) he considered anachronistic and hence a failure, because the age of epic poetry belongs to the past.

Also quite concretely, Belinskii observed progress in literature, as Lermontov's Pechorin (in A Hero of Our Time (1841)) is perceived as an advance from Pushkin's Onegin (in Evgenii Onegin (1830)), while Gogol''s prose represents an advance from the poetry of his predecessors. During his Schellingian period, Belinskii had been inclined towards Romantic ideas.

Under Hegel's influence, his critical thought took a decisive turn to realism.

(He called it 'poetry of reality' .) Belinskii's Hegelian historicism caused him to place Russia in the position of an emerging nation, which actually caused him to downgrade the achievement of his contemporaries Pushkin and Gogol' , crediting the former with having created the formal tools. »