t the real founder of Russian
aesthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism was BELINSKY
(1811-1847).

Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction and almost entirely
self-educated. He lived in want and poverty and ill-health. His life
was a long battle against every kind of difficulty and obstacle; his
literary production was more than hampered by the Censorship, but his
influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and
after passing through several phases--a German phase of Hegelian
philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for
objective art, a French phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in
France, ended finally in a didactic phase of which the watchword was
that Life was more important than Art.

The first blossoms of the new generation of writers, Goncharov,
Dostoyevsky, Herzen, and others, grew up under his encouragement. He
expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the
writers of the past. His judgments have remained authoritative; but
some of his final judgments, which were unshaken for generations, such
as for instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermontov, were much
biassed and coloured by his didacticism. He burnt what he had adored
in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became for him too much of an
artist, and not enough of a social reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky
went through, he was passionate, impulsive, and violent, incapable of
being objective, or of doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two
sides to a question. He was a polemical and fanatical knight errant,
the prophet and propagandist of Western influence, the bitter enemy of
the Slavophiles.

The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian aesthetic and literary
criticism has remained on it ever since, and differentiates it from
the literary and aesthetic criticism of the rest of Europe, not only
from that school of criticism which wrote and writes exclusively under
the banner of "Art for Art's Sake," but from those Western critics who
championed the importance of moral ideas in literature, just as
ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated the theory of Art for
Art's sake just as strongly. Thus it is that, from the beginning of
Russian criticism down to the present day, a truly objective criticism
scarcely exists in Russian literature. AEsthetic criticism becomes a
political weapon. "Are you in my camp?" if so, you are a good writer.
"Are you in my opponent's camp?