Edward J. Brown

So Much Depends... Russian Critics in Search of "Reality"

Belinsky and Pushkin from the Twentieth Century My concern in this essay is to examine, from the vantage point of the modem critical mind (by which I mean primarily the critical viewpoint of Russian formalism and structuralism) certain nineteenth-century Russian writings-texts, if you like-about literature and culture that have definitely not stood the test of time. The critical writings of Belinsky and Chemyshevsky, for the most part, have become almost unreadable to students who were weaned on Anglo-American New Criticism and received nourishment as they matured from formalists and structuralists of various hues, only to have all certitudes deconstructed as they reached adulthood. This is certainly true of students in the West, where Belinsky and Chernyshevsky are assigned in large amounts only as a punishment for something, like trying to get a Ph.D. in Slavic. Regarding the reception of these writers by the present generation in the Soviet Union the evidence is not clear, but I do not see how their experience could be very different from our own. Though Soviet students have been sheltered from Wimsatt, Frye, Barthes, and Derrida, and even to a large extent from