Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (Russian: Виссарион Григорьевич Белинский[note 1], romanized: Vissarión Grigórʹjevič Belínskij, IPA: [vʲɪsərʲɪˈon ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲjɪvʲɪdʑ bʲɪˈlʲinskʲɪj]; June 11 [O.S.

[4] In 1839 Belinsky went to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he became a respected critic and editor of two major literary magazines: Otechestvennye Zapiski ("Notes of the Fatherland"), and Sovremennik ("The Contemporary").

The fact that Belinsky was relatively underprivileged meant, among other effects, that he was mainly self-educated; this was partly due to being expelled from Moscow University for political activity.

Ideologically, Belinsky shared, but with exceptional intellectual and moral passion, the central value of most of Westernizer intelligentsia: the notion of the individual self, a person (lichnost’(личность)), that which makes people human, and gives them dignity and rights.

He bitterly criticized autocracy and serfdom (as “trampling upon everything that is even remotely human and noble”) but also poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, bureaucratic coldness, and cruelty toward the less powerful (including women).

What Belinsky required most of a work of literature was “truth.” This meant not only a probing portrayal of real life (he hated works of mere fantasy, or escape, or aestheticism), but also commitment to “true” ideas — the correct moral stance (above all this meant a concern for the dignity of individual people): As he told Nikolai Gogol (in a famous letter[5]) the public “is always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book [i.e. aesthetically bad], but never for a pernicious one [ideologically and morally bad].” Belinsky viewed Gogol's recent book, Correspondence with Friends, as pernicious because it renounced the need to “awaken in the people a sense of their human dignity, trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.” Fyodor Dostoevsky read aloud at several public events Belinsky's letter, which called for the end of serfdom.

Among his last great efforts were his move to join Nikolay Nekrasov in the popular magazine The Contemporary (Sovremennik), where the two critics established the new literary center of St. Petersburg and Russia.

In 1848, shortly before his death, Belinsky granted full rights to Nikolay Nekrasov and his magazine, The Contemporary (Sovremennik), to publish various articles and other material originally planned for an almanac, to be called the Leviathan.

He declared that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age...But further on in the same essay, Berlin remarks: Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling in his native country.

He altered the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic.