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"What Russia needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse".
Letter to N. V. Gogol from V. G. Belinsky (1847)
belinsky replied to your post “caleb and fjord’s relationship is so weird somebody else needs to meta...”
they both want the other to give them permission to go for the power they want to go for, which is evil power, but also don't want to think of themselves as evil and want the other's permission to do evil because they see friendship as an essential good that will check on their desire for power
thank you
al swearengen getting exposed/exposing himself as someone who gives a shit
“Bakunin embodies, but in a manner spectacular in a different way, the very same contradictions. He died on the eve of the terrorist epic, in 1876. Moreover, he rejected in advance individual outrages and denounced 'the Brutuses of the period.' He had a certain respect for them, however, since he reproached Herzen for having openly criticized Karakosov for his abortive attempt to assassinate Alexander II in 1866. This feeling of respect had its reasons. Bakunin influenced the course of events in the same manner as Belinsky and the nihilists and directed them into the channel of individual revolt. But he contributed something more: a germ of political cynicism, which will congeal, with Nechayev, into a doctrine and will drive the revolutionary movement to extremes.” - Albert Camus, on Bakunin in 'The Rebel.'
"...the most arresting Russian social document of this period [prior to 1848], apart from the writings of the émigrés, was Belinsky's open letter to Gogol denouncing his book Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends, and that remained unpublished in Russia in its full version until 1917. And no wonder, for it was an exceptionally eloquent and savage onslaught on the regime, inveighing violently against the Church, the social system and the arbitrary authority of the Emperor and his officials, and accusing Gogol of traducing the cause of liberty and civilisation as well as the character and the needs of his enslaved and helpless countrymen. This celebrated philippic, written in 1847, was secretly circulated in manuscript far beyond the confines of Moscow or St Petersburg. Indeed, it was largely for reading this letter aloud at a private meeting of disaffected persons that Dostoevsky was condemned to death and so nearly executed two years later."
'Russia and 1848', in Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin
belinsky replied to your post: do you think anyone’s bothered to warn caduceus...
i think they’ve wildly underestimated the amount of experience he has not had and assume that he knows the basic things that they know
he doesnt even know what pastries are
belinsky replied to your post: also i CALLED it, re: fjord not realizing that the...
tbh fjord probably thought his own magic was in his sword until he switched it out
oh, DEFINITELY
i’m fairly sure that’s why he was so interested in molly’s rituals. like, i got a magic sword, you got a magic sword, lemme learn your secrets!!! but no, molly can light up literally anything sharp enough to cut
From literary criticism to obscurantism
Belinsky was a gifted literary critic by any standard. He showed profound insight into the greatness of Pushkin and did more than anyone to make him understood by his countrymen. But his obsession with social and political issues led him to the position that a work of literature should be judged by whether it serves the cause of social and political progress. In the 1840's this was a healthy phenomenon, a much-needed reaction against the stifling regime, and an intelligent use of one of the few loopholes still left by the censorship. But in the hands of Belinsky's less talented successors, who had less enthusiasm and far less understanding than he for literature, Belinsky's doctrine became a dogma of revolutionary utilitarianism which inhibited literary appreciation among educated Russians. Later still, it became petrified into an obscurantism which operated parallel with the official obscurantism.
The Russian Empire 1801-1917, by Hugh Seton-Watson
