Vissarion Grigor'evich BelinskiI (Belinsky), the Russian literary critic, was an early leader of the Russian intelligentsia and a major representative of German Absolute Idealism, as well as of the subsequent reaction against it, in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy.

Belinskii was born in Sveaborg, Russia (now Finland), the son of a provincial physician. He entered the University of Moscow in 1829 but was expelled after three years, perhaps for the radical criticism of serfdom in a romantic drama he wrote; his subsequent education was self-acquired. He began a journalistic career in 1833 and soon became the chief critic for a succession of literary journals in Moscow and (after 1839) in St. Petersburg, principally Otechestvennyye Zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland). His brilliant, philosophically oriented critical essays, including perceptive early appreciations of Nikolay Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and Feödor Dostoevsky, won him great renown but...