A Remarkable Decade: Vissarion Belinsky Summary and Analysis

In 1856, a Slavophil writer who toured European Russia to gauge the extent of "corrupt" Western ideas was disappointed to find that virtually every educated Russian, even in "the reeking bog of provincial life," knew the name and most important writings of Vissarion Belinsky, eight years after his death. Memoirs by leading radicals of the 1830's and '40's, including Turgenev and Dostoevesky, all agree that Belinsky was the conscience of the Russian intelligentsia. Belinsky was the living embodiment of a familiar figure in Russian novels, who appears as the student tutor Basistov in Turgenev's Rudin; as Pierre Besukhov in War and Peace; as Levin in Anna Karenina; as Krusifersky in Herzen's Who is to Blame? and in many other novels. This figure is touchingly eager, often awkward, naïve, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic...