Belinsky's Famous Letter to Gogol by Orlando Bartro
“Don’t hate me because I’m wrong about something.”—Angela Rose.
It seems to me that everyone is looking for the truth, whether obscurely or diligently—but everyone wants the truth. No one wants to believe a lie, or to live for a lie.
Dante proposed in his Convivio that the universal desire for truth was a proof for the existence of God, the uncreated, necessary, foundational being whose nature is love.
“Sì come dice Filosofo nel principio de la Prima Filosofia, tutti li uomini naturalmente desiderano di sapere. Le ragione di che puote essere ed è che ciascuna cosa, da providenze di prima natura impinta, è inclinabile a la sua propria perfezione.” Dante, Convivio
“As says the Philosopher [Aristotle] in his First Philosophy, all naturally desire to know. The reason for this can only be and is that each person, due to the providence of imprinted nature, inclines to his proper perfection.”
Vissarion Belinsky, who died in 1848, was a prominent Russian literary critic. He fervently believed that the aim of literature wasn’t beauty or expression, but the improvement of society. And he carried this view into his reading. Often, he found his own ideas in the books that he admired. For example, he claimed that Gogol’s magnificent Dead Souls was the “first realistic novel of Russia”—a view that Nabokov called “incomprehensible!”— and considered it a call to action against serfdom. For these reasons, he advanced the novel as vigorously as he could, always having to tiptoe around the restrictions of the Tsarist censors.
But Belinsky couldn’t always read his own views into the writings of others, and when Gogol subsequently wrote Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Belinsky responded with fury.
He despised Selected Passages for its support of Orthodox Christianity and for its pro-Tsarist and pro-feudalist leanings, and for these reasons, he attacked the book in the press, always going up to the line of what the Tsarist censors would permit.
When Gogol read these attacks, he was perplexed about the reasons for “his friend’s evident anger.”
So, Gogol wrote Belinsky a letter to inquire why Selected Passages had offended him, and Belinsky responded with a famous and furious screed (that would later lead to Dostoevsky’s arrest and near execution).
Belinsky’s famous “Letter to Gogol”—a witheringly vicious, four-page attack—wasn’t only delivered privately to the perplexed author. It was also spread illegally in myriads of copies throughout the intelligentsia.
The Tsarist authorities believed they had good reason to censor Belinsky (he had encouraged the killing with gun “or shovel” of any enemy of the coming revolution). But the letter—due to its banning—ironically became famous throughout Russia. It was even said to have been “memorized by every schoolboy.”
And there was another irony, too.
Belinsky argues in the letter that Gogol’s book should be banned.
“But perhaps you [Gogol] will say: “Assuming that I have erred and that all my ideas are false, but why should I be denied the right to err and why should people doubt the sincerity of my errors?” Because, I would say in reply . . .”
And Belinsky proceeds to argue why Gogol should not be permitted to spread his errors throughout Russia. . . .
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.