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The Circle of Stankevich
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2019
Extract
Within a small circle of student friends at Moscow University in the 1830's—a group of young men immersed in German literature and philosophy—one can find the early beginnings of nearly all the trends, movements and schools which developed in Russian intellectual life of the nineteenth century. The roster of those who were in regular contact with one another as members of the circle or who directly felt its influence includes Belinskij, Bakunin, and Granovskij, Ja. M. Neverov, who became active in the field of education, V. P. Botkin, remembered for his magnificent correspondence with Belinskij, the "peasant" poet A. V. Kol'cov, whom Stankevich brought into Russian literature, Konstantin Aksakov, later the most extravagant of the Slavophiles, M. N. Katkov, and for a brief period at the end of the decade, the novelist Turgenev.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1957
References
1 Herzen, , Byloe i dumy, (Leningrad, 1946), Part 4, p. 216Google Scholar, ff.
2 Isaiah Berlin, “A Marvellous Decade,” Encounter, No. 21 (1955), 27-28. This excellent piece of work came to the writer's attention while the present article was in preparation. See also P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominanija
3 Stankevich, M. V., Perepiska, Aleksei Stankevich, ed. (Moscow, 1914)Google Scholar. This book will be referred to hereafter as Perepiska.
4 V. G. Belinsky, Pis'ma, E. A. Ljatskij, ed. (3 vols., St. Petersburg, 1914), II, 161.
5 Stankevich, A., T. N. Granovskij i ego perepiska, 2 vols., I, 172 Google Scholar.
6 Letter to Bakunin dated September 8, 1840, in Russkaja mysl', December, 1912.
7 K. S. Aksakov, Vospominanija studentchestva, 1832-1835godov (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 9-13.
8 M. Poljakov, “Studentcheskije gody Belinskogo,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, No. 56 (1950), 304-436. This article reveals much of interest, but fails to demonstrate its thesis that Belinskij in his university days was involved in oppositionist political activity.
9 K. S. Aksakov, op. cit., p. 13. The memoirists are in general in agreement as to the low quality of the instruction and intellectual guidance at Moscow University in those days.
10 The members of the circle thus assisted Belinskij when for a time in 1835 he edited The Telescope. Perepiska, p. 321. See below for further details.
11 A. A. Kornilov, Molodyje gody Mikhaila Bakunina (Moscow, 1915), p. 296.
120 p. cit., Part IV, p. 272.
13 Herzen, loc. cit., p. 226.
14 K. S. Aksakov, op. cit.
15 I. Kireevskij, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij (2 vols., Moscow, 1911), 86-95. First published in Evropeec, No. 1 (1832).
16 M. K. Lemke, Nikolaevskie zhandarmy i literatura, 1826-1855 gg. p. 423.
17 The most recent evidence of this is Heinrich Stammler's article “Dostoevsky's Aesthetics and Schelling's Philosophy of Art,” Comparative Literature, Fall, 1955, pp. 313-24.
18 Percpiska, p. 509.
19 Quoted in M. Gershenzon, Istorija molodqj Rossii (Moscow, 1923), p. 191. The system of ideas of Schelling was introduced in the university as early as 1807 by the German professor Buhle, and those doctrines continued to be propagated during the 1820's by a number of professors and by the circle of the ljubomudry (“wisdom-lovers“) which formed around Prince V. F. Odoevskij, Kjukhelbekher, and other “young men of the archives,” as Pushkin called the group which found light employment in the Moscow archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Schelling's ideas had by the 1830's penetrated deeply into the life of the university, and though the chair of philosophy had been abolished in 1826 because of the danger that that very thing would happen, Schelling's ideas were taught by Pavlov from the chair of Physics, by Nadezhdin from the chair of literature, and by the Professor of History, Pogodin. See V. Setschkareff, Schelling's Einfluss in der russischen Lileratur der 20er and 30er Jahre des XIX Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1939).
20 F. W. von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, tr. Benjamin Rand in Modern Classical Philosophers (New York, 1908), p. 544.
21 V. G. Belinskij, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), pp. 16, 17, 19. 22One can only agree with this contention of Rene Wellek in “Social and Aesthetic Values in Russian Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, E. J . Simmons, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 382 ff.
23 Belinskij, Selected Philosophical Works, p. 19.
24 Perepiska, p. 472.
25 P. V. Annenkov, “Zamechatel'noe desjatiletie,” in Literaturnye vospominanija (Leningrad, 1928), p. 170.
26 Perepiska, loc. cit.
27 Belinskij, “Literary Musings,” Selected Philosophical Works, p. 63.
28 Perepiska, p. 296.
29 “Literary Musings,” loc. cit.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Perepiska, p. 268.
33 Ibid., p. 745.
34 “ O zhizni i sochinenijakh Kol'cova,” in S. A. Vengerov, Polnoe sobranie Sochinenij Belinskogo (12 vols., St, Petersburg, 1900), III, 135.
35 Vengerov, II, 308-9.
36 Perepiska, pp. 286, 227. The “higher meaning” of love in the circle is treated in P. M. Miljukov, “Ljubov’ u idealistov tridcatykh godov,” in Iz istorii russkoj intelligencii (St. Petersburg, 1903).
37 Vengerov, II, 289, 577.
38 Perepiska, p. 339.
39 Ibid., p. 368.
40 Vengerov, II, 290, 279.
41 Ibid., p. 280.
42 See, among other things, M. Gorlin, N. V. Gogol’ und E. Th. A. Hoffman (Berlin, 1933); Stender-Petersen, “Gogol und die Deutsche Romantik,” Euphorion, 1922.
43 Perepiska, p. 583.
44 Annenkov, op. cit., p. 188.
45 Perepiska, p. 270.
46 Biblioteka dlja chtenija, XV (1836), 3.
47 V. G. Belinskij, “O russkoj povesti i povestjakh Gogolja,” Vengerov, II, 235.
48 Perepiska, p. 258.
49 Aksakov, op. cit., p. 28.
50 Annenkov, op. cit., p. 68.
51 Perepiska, p. 335.
52 Vengerov, II, 189 ff.
53 ibid., p. 194.
54 Ibid., p. 217.
55 Ibid., p. 215.
56 Annenkov, op. cit., p. 241.
57 Vengerov, II, 227-8.
58 Ibid., p. 218.
59 Perepiska, p. 236.