Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/398

372 thought-content, he insisted, must derive from society viewed as a whole.

Literature, in particular, is to Bělinskii the consciousness, or the growth into consciousness, of the people. He adopts the theory which is referable to Schelling that the poet is the orator, the instrument, of his nation. But it was not Schelling's authority alone which led him to form this estimate of poetic art. It is generally held that at that epoch in poetry alone had the Russians produced original work, whilst further, and before all, it is necessary to remember that before the revolution of 1848 (for here I am not thinking of Russia alone) poetry and literature in general had to function as a parliamentary forum. Bělinskii never failed to advocate the view that the poet's gifts must be such as to enable him to sympathise directly with the ideas and the Spirit of his age, for Bělinskii regarded the poet as the instrument, not of party or sect, but of the hidden ideas of society as a whole. In accordance with Hegel's teaching, he declares it to be the poet's mission to give expression, not to the individual and fortuitous, but to the universal and necessary.

It was beyond Belinskii's powers to analyse more precisely the nature of nationality, but here the slavophils and other Russian writers of the day failed no less. He was content with casual references to certain physiological peculiarities which might have been brought about by the influence of climate and soil, and some of which might manifest themselves in the mental sphere. He advanced beyond Hegel in his distinction between nationality and state, but as far as the Russians were concerned it sufficed him to note that they possessed well—marked national lineaments. He demanded, therefore, that the ideas created by the foreign world should be independently elaborated by the Russians in the spirit of their own nationality. Russia, he said, possessed the energy to complete this task and to say "her word" to the world.

In contradistinction to the slavophils and the romanticists Bělinskii's conception of nationality was not mystical, and in individualistic fashion he attached more importance to individual poets, this determining his critical outlook towards folk-poetry. All he could see in Russian folk-poetry was childish lispings, sound without sense; and for the like reason he considered prepetrine literature practically valueless because