Chapter 10: Meeting with Belinsky

On an ordinary afternoon, when Mikhail was curled up on his sofa, mulling over his next manuscript, the maid Nastasya suddenly knocked on Mikhail's door.

"Mikhail, there's a Mr. here to see you; he looks like he has urgent business."

Hearing the voice of that old maidservant Nastasya, Mikhail's face immediately darkened.

Although Nastasya claims her mouth is tighter than the door of some widow in some village, the news of Mikhail writing articles still spread like wildfire, and in no time at all, many people in the apartment seemed to have learned of it.

And upon seeing Mikhail, the expressions on these people's faces were rather worth pondering; the small-time merchant Versilov, who ran a little business in Saint Petersburg, offered his views at the morning table:

"Oh! A university student! You know, young people nowadays love these trendy novelties; the things they write are completely incomprehensible! Just last time, at the little tavern at the end of the street, I stopped to listen to someone read one aloud, hey! Couldn't understand a word of it!

In the end I turned all my attention to my own wine glass!"

The small landowner Tusenbach, who had come to Saint Petersburg to visit relatives, commented on this: "Hehehe, a university student! With that kind of time you'd do better to plant a couple more mu of land; seeds that fall to the ground often sprout, but ink that falls on paper is usually a waste."

The fourteenth-rank petty official Smirnov, who held a post at his office, chose to encourage Mikhail:

"The down-and-out university student, I know him. I hope the stories he writes are eye-catching enough; preferably a collection of jokes. He should have read it to me in advance — I love hearing jokes."

The landlady Pavlorna, for her part, said: "With that kind of time you'd do better to hurry up and figure out how to pay me the rent. Writing articles? Isn't that a game only the noble lords can take part in? A mere university student who barely knows a few characters, and he already dares to fancy himself the equal of the noble lords?"

………

Mikhail, upon hearing these discussions: "………"

The university student hasn't provoked anyone………

Despite these discussions, although Nastasya repeatedly swore she had never deliberately mentioned it to anyone, it was obvious that the news wouldn't just sprout up out of the ground on its own………

One can only say Mikhail learned a lesson.

As for the gossip from the other residents of the apartment, Mikhail didn't take it too much to heart.

In present-day Russia, the literacy rate is only a little over ten percent, and so-called literature, just as they say, is for the most part a game of the noble lords.

Thinking these thoughts, Mikhail still opened the door, and at once caught sight of Nekrasov, who seemed a bit travel-worn.

And the other man, without wasting words, came straight up and grasped Mikhail's hand, then said excitedly:

"Mikhail, Vissarion Grigoryevich wants to see you, right now. He's waiting for you in a café. I wonder if you have the time?"

Belinsky?

After a brief moment of surprise, Mikhail, with a touch of excitement, nodded crisply: "I'm free. Let me put on my coat, and we'll head over now."

"Good, wonderful!"

In other people's eyes, Nekrasov appeared far more excited than Mikhail.

And Nekrasov's excitement, beyond that caused by Mikhail himself, seemed in large part also to stem from wanting to properly introduce Mikhail to Belinsky.

In short, introducing his idol to someone else.

Mikhail could understand it well enough; he, who knew this period of history fairly clearly, understood very well the feelings that many Russian intellectuals of this era harbored toward Belinsky.

After all, from another angle, the status of intellectuals in this day and age, and the esteem and respect people held them in, naturally far exceeded that of later eras.

The reason for this must be traced back to the influence of the European Enlightenment and various other movements, as well as the prevalence of idealism and so on; discussing it in detail would be somewhat complicated, so let's set it aside for now.

In short, intellectuals believed they could change the world through their own ideas, and even that they were already in the process of turning their ideas into reality.

This can actually be seen from the words Belinsky himself wrote in 1847 in "A Letter to Gogol":

"As far as I know, you do not understand the Russian masses very well. The character of our Russian masses is determined by Russian society; it is only that this society contains and imprisons certain forces that have begun to boil up and are bursting to erupt.

But these forces are suppressed, heavily suppressed, unable to breathe, unable to escape, and so there arise melancholy, bitterness, dejection and indifference. Only in literature, under our Tatar-style censorship, is there some life and forward movement. This is why the dignity of the writer's profession is lofty; this is why even meager literary talent can achieve success.

This is why our writers, however poor their gifts, so long as they display what is called the liberal current, will attract widespread public attention — because the public regards writers as their only leaders, their defenders, and the saviors who will rescue them from the darkness of autocratic monarchy, Orthodoxy, and the national way of life."

Of course, Belinsky's purpose in writing this letter was to satirize Gogol, accusing him of using his God-given talent to serve as the tsar's lackey; but from it one can also discern his understanding of the writer's profession, as well as his affirmation of writers and his hope that true writers would do what they ought to do.

Incidentally, in 1849, Dostoevsky later read this letter aloud in public, intending to awaken the broad masses of writers and urge them to get into some serious keyboard politics!

And then he was sentenced to death………

Ahem, fortunately he didn't die; otherwise Russian literature would indeed be missing one of its peaks.

At the same time, this passage in the letter also reveals Belinsky's truest thoughts: as a writer, if you don't get into serious keyboard politics, are you even a writer?!

To be frank, from Mikhail's perspective as a man of a later age, this understanding of writers certainly carries a whiff of intellectuals' self-importance.

If they don't treat you to a leather belt across the head, that's already something — and you still dare to engage in keyboard politics? You still dare to claim you can lead the masses out of the darkness of Russian society?

But in this day and age, the noble lords would love nothing more than for their empire to remain unchanged for ten thousand years; the lower classes can't even read, and merely staying alive is already hard enough. Unless pushed to the point where they have no choice but to revolt, who would dare to cross those lords?

And even if they did revolt, without organization, without discipline, without ideology, it would in the end just be another cycle.

So if you don't keyboard-politicize and I don't keyboard-politicize, what is to become of this country?

Belinsky believed that intellectuals and writers should shoulder their own responsibility and get into some serious keyboard politics!

Of course, reality is always extraordinarily complicated; it certainly isn't something that can be solved just by intellectuals and writers doing a bit of keyboard politics.

But it was, after all, a kind of martyr-like effort.

People in later eras who do a bit of keyboard politics at most get their account banned — one can almost say it's nothing at all.

This has led to the rampant spread of keyboard warriors. Never mind whether you're an ox or a horse, human or ghost, whether you have any knowledge, whether you've read books, whether you have any real understanding of society — so long as life isn't going well for them, so long as they're dissatisfied, and they've nothing better to do, they can come along and bang out a few keystrokes; after all, there's no real consequence.

When they bang out their keystrokes, they don't need any logic, nor do they need to consider how complicated reality actually is. So long as they have emotions, they can bang away however they like, as if the country, society, and even relations between the sexes could be transformed for the better in an instant just by doing what they say.

Of course, the keyboard politics of this day and age, compared with that of later eras, is in a certain sense a completely different matter.

In this day and age, keyboard politics really did come after careful, meticulous thought and agonizing deliberation.

And at the same time, a considerable number of writers, intellectuals, and hot-blooded youths, besides daring to engage in keyboard politics, truly did march at the front lines of revolution; a great many of them spent their lives on the road of persecution and exile.

But their blood was buried early on by the cold winds and heavy snow of Siberia, never to be seen again.

And the man Mikhail was about to meet next was precisely the originator of this great age of keyboard politics:

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky.

A man who single-handedly turned Russia's literary circle into a keyboard-politics circle.

(End of chapter)