(1810-1848)
A talk by Isaiah Berlin on the great Russian critic
Belinsky is one of the most vivid figures in the history of Russian social evolution. He introduced the social criticism of literature and had a great influence not only on the revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century but also on Lenin and his followers. Belinsky was the first of the ' new men ' who destroyed the aristocratic tradition in Russian literature. He, like so many of his contemporaries. though a great admirer of Western civilisation, was hostile and suspicious of it. The Soviet revolution revived Belinsky's fame and, in a different form, his social criterion of art