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VISSARION BELINSKY
Especially noteworthy is the repudiation of Hegel's absolute ideal–
ism in the name of the actual individual, a repudiation that closely
parallels Kierkegaard's existential attack on the German philoso–
pher; the clear anticipation of Dostoevsky's thought in
The Brothers
Karamazov
(like I van, Belinsky refuses to pay the price in present
degradation and suffering for the promise of future harmony and
universal reconciliation) ; and, lastly, the truly eschatological vision
of a social Utopia, of a human world fully pledged to love and jus–
tice, which, inconsistenty enough however, is not be gained without
violent upheavals and bloodshed ("men are so witless that they
must be forcibly brought to happiness"). On that side of him Belin–
sky is indeed, as a number of commentators have pointed out, the
direct precursor of the L eninist moralit-y of revolution.
These letters, written in
1841,
mark Belinsky's extreme turn in
renouncing with characteristic vehemence the
conservat~ve
Hegel–
ianism of his so-called middle period, the period when in spite of
his innermost inclinations he accepted the identification of the real
with the rational and the primacy of the historical process as a
whole over the claims of the person, the individual, the subject
immersed in his unique and inescapable temporality. It
is
in this
last period that Belinsky wholly came into his own, becoming the
indisputable leader of the Westernizing and socialist tendency in
the ideology of the Russian intellectuals.-P.R.
I
St. Petersburg, March 1, 1841
I have long suspected that Hegel's philosophy is no more
than a moment, though a great one, that its absolute results are
not worth a-, that it were better to die than to be reconciled to
them. Fools lie when they say that Hegel turned life into dead
schemes; but it is true that he turned its phenomena into spooks
clasping bony hands and twirling in the air over a cemetery. For
him the subject is not an end in itself but only a means for the
momentary expression of the Universal, and in relation to the sub–
ject this Universal becomes a Moloch; when the subject's day is
over it is cast off by this Moloch like an old pair of trousers. I
have especially important reasons for being incensed with Hegel,
for in remaining faithful to him I managed to reconcile myself to
