On Belinsky and realism that never was

Abstract

The article is concerned with the reception of V. Belinsky’s writings and his role in Russian literature. Formally it is written in response to A. Lyubzhin’s article ‘To bury Belinsky’ [‘Pokhoronit Belinskogo’], published on the website gorky.media on 1 February 2021. The subject is not new, and the dispute about the significance of Belinsky’s legacy for Russian literature is likely to continue. The purpose of this dialogue is neither to canonise nor dismiss (‘throw off the steamboat of modernity,’ in Mayakovsky’s words) Belinsky but rather to rethink our own ideas about literary history and in doing so to actualise its contemporary theory. It is for this reason that the status of the term ‘realism’ is examined here in depth. Following V. Tolmachyov’s lead, the author of the article proposes to revise existing views of the relationship between realism and naturalism — two principal movements defining literature in the mid to late 19th c. — in order to discard the realistic paradigm founded on artificial construct at odds with artistic principles.