The Why of Us
By Elizabeth Stice, Editor-in-Chief
This website is a review, so it is meant to be almost entirely book reviews. We have promised to spare you op-eds. But, occasionally, it is appropriate to explain why we consider a review valuable. It very well may not be obvious to everyone.
A good place to begin would be to look at Vissarion Belinsky. We might consider him our “patron saint.” He was a hero of the 1840s in Russia and he was considered by his peers the “conscience” of the intelligentsia. His example and his understanding of books and ideas demonstrate the value of criticism and reviews.
Who was Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky? He began his life in poverty, around 1810. He was a serious and sickly boy who went to study at the University of Moscow and was expelled, for vague political reasons—as was common at the time. After his expulsion, he began to write reviews. As Isaiah Berlin describes in his chapter on Belinsky in Russian Thinkers, from 1835 until he died in 1848, he “poured out a steady stream of articles, critical notices, and reviews in various journals” (153-154). Largely unknown in the West—then or now—Berlin says “there is scarcely a radical Russian writer—and few liberals—who did not at some stage claim to be descended from him. Even such timid and half-hearted members of the opposition as Annenkov and Turgenev worshipped his memory, even the conservative government censor, Goncharov, spoke of him as the best man he had ever known” (152).
How could a critic, a reviewer, be a hero to a generation and respected even by his opponents? Claimed by people of all political stripes after his death? He was not a physically or financially impressive person. He was shy with strangers and unhappily married. He spent his adult life dying of consumption. His writing was of somewhat uneven quality. But Belinsky was intensely passionate about ideas and he understood the importance of books, which he took very seriously. Berlin writes that: “Books and ideas for Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with the most devastating violence” (157).
Books are inhabited by ideas. Every book presents to us a representation of the world we live in, the ways that human beings are, and the nature of reality. Belinsky observed style and plot and character and genre, but he judged books by whether their ideas were true or false. Belinsky became the “conscience” of the generation of 1848 because he insisted on the truth. A book was not a bad book because it was fiction or had an overextended plot, but if it lied about social reality, if it proposed false ideas, or operated insincerely.
Belinsky’s most famous piece of writing is his 1847 “Letter to Gogol.” Belinsky had loved the work and person of Nikolai Gogol, but he despised Gogol’s book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Gogol was surprised and hurt. Belinsky hated Selected Passages because it was dishonest about Russia. It portrayed a country where serfs were happy enough and serfdom was not harmful, a country where literacy was not useful and perhaps harmful, a country that would find its salvation in mysticism and religion. Selected Passages lied about the social conditions in Russia. Belinsky could not support any book that suggested the knout was not bad.
Belinsky wrote:
“Such are the problems that prey on the mind of Russia in her apathetic slumber! And at such a time a great writer, whose astonishingly artistic and deeply truthful works have so powerfully contributed toward Russia’s awareness of herself, enabling her as they did to take a look at herself as though in a mirror – publishes a book in which he teaches the barbarian landowner to make still greater profits out of the peasants and to abuse them still more in the name of Christ and Church....And would you expect me not to become indignant?... Why, if you had made an attempt on my life I could not have hated you more than I do for these disgraceful lines.... And after this, you expect people to believe the sincerity of your book’s intent! No! Had you really been inspired by the truth of Christ and not by the teaching of the devil you would certainly have written something entirely different in your new book. You would have told the landowner that since his peasants are his brethren in Christ, and since a brother cannot be a slave to his brother, he should either give them their freedom or, at least, allow them to enjoy the fruits of their own labor to their greatest possible benefit, realizing, as he does, in the depths of his own conscience, the false relationship in which he stands toward them.”
Belinsky took books incredibly seriously. He was not always unhappy with what he read. He helped make certain Russian authors more iconic. He elevated Pushkin, for example. He believed that James Fenimore Cooper was a powerful writer. But he was uncompromising about the truth.
Belinsky concluded his letter to Gogol very strongly: “I cannot express myself by halves, I cannot prevaricate; it is not in my nature. Let you or time itself prove to me that I am mistaken in my conclusions. I shall be the first to rejoice in it, but I shall not repent what I have told you. This is not a question of your or my personality; it concerns a matter that is of greater importance than myself or even you; it is a matter that concerns the truth, Russian society, Russia. And this is my last concluding word: If you have had the misfortune of disowning with proud humility your truly great works, you should now disown with sincere humility your last book, and atone for the dire sin of its publication by new creations that would be reminiscent of your old ones.”
This letter became so famous that it was memorized and recited all over Russia. Nearly ten years later, in 1856, Ivan Aksakov noted that everywhere he went, people knew who Belinsky was and “if you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of a fight, you will find them among Belinsky’s followers” (150).
In what world does the letter of a book reviewer become worthy of memorization? And that reviewer a paragon of honest living? A world in which books and ideas matter. A world which recognizes that books make moral arguments and contain ideas. It is a world which realizes that ideas are more important than opinions. That is the world that Orange Blossom Ordinary believes in and wants to see flourish. Yes, we want to talk about new books and share what’s good, but we think books tell us about more than themselves and reviews tell us about more than books. Orange Blossom Ordinary seeks to familiarize readers with the new ideas and information and narratives that reflect and shape our world. We believe books and ideas matter.
