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Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky is by general agreement the greatest Russian literary critic and the father of the radical intelligentsia. His career spans the years 1834 to 1848 and coincides with the middle period of the repressive reign of Nicholas I, with the flowering of Russian literature in the early part of its golden age and with the intense debate about the relationship of Russia to the West. Criticism is molded by Belinsky into a tool not merely for the discussion of literature and aesthetics but also for the expression of opinions on many other subjects, notably morality, history, and society. His essays are not so much appraisals of works of art, although they do include that element, as free-ranging enquiries apropos of those works. Belinsky's career is commonly divided into three broad phases: an early infatuation with the thought of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, which lasted from 1834 to 1836 and which was associated with the search for a national character reflected in culture; an equally unrestrained enthusiasm for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which was associated in the period from 1838 to 1840 with exaltation of art for its own sake and with a notorious political conservatism and glorification of the status quo; and a final period beginning in 1840 and eventually associated more with radical French influences than with German philosophical ones, in which Belinsky stresses the need for art to mirror society and expresses sympathy for the downtrodden.
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