7I8 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 volumes suggestotheravenueswhich mightbe profitablyexplored,both in the field of Pushkin studies (for example the relationship between Viazemskii's Peterburg. Otyvok. i8i8 godaand The Bronze Horseman), orinfieldsofstudyopened up by Pushkinstudies (forexample how it is that Sedakova,like Brodskiiand Pasternak,'writespoetry that is dense with the logic of philosophy even as it is infused with the beauty of song' [vol.i, p. i88] ). A third volume, Pus/kin's Legacy, is in preparationwhich, tojudge by the firsttwo volumes, promises to be, in thewordsof Stephanie Sandler,'asourceof surpriseandpleasure'. Maidenhead D. M. PURSGLOVE Freeborn, Richard. FuriousVissarion. Belinskii'sStruggle for Literature, Loveand Ideas. SSEES Occasional Papers, 58. School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, 2003. x + 204 pp. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography .Index. i6.oo (paperback). VISSARIONBELINSKII presided over the development of classical Russian literature as it entered its golden age. He began the task of establishing a canon, and hisjudgements have proved durable.He moulded literarytastein Russia and helped to form a reading public there. He raised imaginative literatureto a position of paramount importance in Russian cultural,moral and even politicallife. He made a majorcontributionto theprocessof shaping his nation's sense of its identity.His own position in the debate about national identitywas Westernistin the terminologyof the day, althoughhe was in truth no less of a fervent,patrioticnationalistthan the Slavophiles,whose nostalgia for a supposedlyutopian pre-Petrinepast he scorned.As an engage intellectual for whom ideas and literary culture were imbued with social and political significance he was a founding member of Russia's distinctive intelligentsia and a prototype of the uncompromising rebel of the post-Crimean period whom Turgenev depicted in Bazarov, the hero of the masterpiece that was dedicated to Belinskii'smemory. However, it is not easy for readers of Belinskii'soften inflated, rhetorical, prolix or digressiveliterary criticism to account convincingly for the impact that the critic had on his contemporaries or for his importance in the larger historyof Russianliteratureand thought. One may become lost in the thickets ofthealienaesthetictheories(especiallySchellingianorHegelian)thatBelinskii attemptedat one time oranotherto cultivatein Russiaorone maybe confused by the diversityof the moral and political standpointswhich Belinskiiadopted andwhich he changed radicallyandwithbewilderingfrequency. It is a virtue of Richard Freeborn'smonograph -a virtue not invariably present in previous scholarship on the subject that it restores unity to Belinskii's oeuvreand illuminates its meaning by firmly placing in the foreground the passionate personality which earned Belinskii the sobriquet neistovyi, 'furious'.(The sobriquetis highlightedin the title of the monograph.) Freeborndwells on the role of passion in Belinskii'slife, as exemplifiedby his early infatuation with two of Bakunin's sisters (and indeed with Bakunin himself,who, it is suggested,may have been sexuallyattractedto him) and by his courtship,in I843, of Marie Orlova,whom Belinskiimarriedin November REVIEWS 719 of thatyear. The views that Belinskiiheld of the role of literature,it is argued, were as much influenced by such moments in his personal life as by such doctrinalmattersas 'his rejection of Hegel or his adoption of the basic tenets of Utopian Socialism'(p. I83). A case in point ishis sympatheticre-evaluation of Romanticism, at the time when he was wooing Marie, as an expression of the '"inner world of man, the innermostlife of his heart"' (p. 83). Belinskii'svision, in Freeborn'sjudgement, may also have been coloured to a greater extent than previous biographers have tended to allow by the tuberculosisthat affectedhim from childhood. The illnessmight account not only for the urgency and moral intensityof Belinskii'swritingsbut also for the prominence in them of motifs of sacrificeand atonement, Freebornsuggests, drawingon recent historicalwritingon the disease.At any rate Belinskii'slife represented an unremitting personal struggle against this illness. It also represented a struggle that began in childhood against an unloving family milieu and the philistine, serf-owning social environment in a provincial backwater. In adulthood these personal struggles were transmuted, in Freeborn'sinterpretation,into a crusade on behalf of the oppressed against the moral and social sicknessof the nation. In seeking to reveal Belinskii'sdeeply spiritualpersonality and essentially romantic nature, Freeborndevotes proportionatelymore space than most of the critic's previous Western biographers to sources other than Belinskii's literary criticism. He discusses, for example, Belinskii's dramatic writings, which are little-knownand usually...