A Remarkable Decade: German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow Summary and Analysis

Though not all Russian writers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century followed German romanticism, it was nevertheless dominant. The writings of Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hegel made Russia an "intellectual dependency of Germany." The romantic idea that each human group, race or institution had its own "organic" unity that could only be apprehended by an intuitive, inner identification took hold of Russian writers, left and right alike.

Because politics was transposed onto literature in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, Schelling's dictum that poets, painters and novelists capture a time and place better than sociologists and scientists was lived out by Russia's artists of this time. Many of them congregated around a gifted student named Nicholas Stankevich (1813 - 40), who spread German romantic philosophy in study circles...