Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/396

370 we forget that Bělinskii's friends and BěIinskii's opponents, the slavophils and many of the westernisers, likewise failed to produce systematic works.

S critic and æstheticist Bělinskii was able to appraise rightly the individual poets and other writers whose works comprise Russian literature, and was at the same time competent to give an accurate characterisation of the development of that literature. He had a notable influence upon contemporary poets. In his very first writings he gave due recognition to Puškin's talent, whilst Gončarov, Turgenev, Grigorovič, Nekrasov, Dostoevskii, Kolcov, and Poležaev, learned much from Bělinskii.

Bělinskii showed his contemporaries that the thoughts of great poets, such men as Griboedov (whom Bělinskii did not understand before 1840), Puškin, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoevskii, and Gončarov constitute a positive national treasure, one of supreme, nay of vital importance. Benediktov, who was then much overvalued, was appraised at his proper worth. Homjakov's didactic partisan verse was estimated at its just value. Bělinskii may be reproached for having failed to understand the character of Tatiana in Puškin's Onegin, and for other failures of insight, but it is important to note that he thoroughly recognised the positive Russism of Puškin's and Gogol's work, and that as far as Gogol, in particular, was concerned he recognised that this writer's realism (which he spoke of as belonging to the "natural" school, as contrasted with the "rhetorical") was a Russian way of regarding life.

Great was Bělinskii's influence upon the literary circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was shown by his relationships with the slavophils and the westernisers, and in particular by his relationships with the literary critics Nadeždin and Annenkov, and with many other connoisseurs of literature, who already abounded in Russia.

Despite the derivation of much of his thought from German philosophy, in æsthetics Bělinskii was an empiricist. Art, he declared, existed before æsthetics, and æsthetics therefore must be guided by art, and not conversely. Bělinskii had no theory of æsthetics worked out in all its details; he was concerned almost exclusively with poesy and the written word,