such as
the absence of intellectual interests, routine, narrowness, and egotism
in the middle-class merchants; self-satisfied philistinism; the
patriarchal laxity of provincial morals; the lack of humanity and the
Asiatic ferocity towards inferiors; the slavery of women and children
under the weight of family despotism. His volume of articles on Pushkin
constitutes a complete critical history of Russian literature, beginning
with Lomonosoff and ending with Pushkin. By these Byelinsky's standing
as an important factor in literature was thoroughly established, and all
the young writers of the succeeding epoch, that of the '50's, gathered
around him. Grigorovitch, Turgeneff, Gontcharoff, Nekrasoff, Apollon
Maikoff, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the rest, may be said to have been
reared on Byelinsky's criticism, inspired by it to creative activity,
and indebted to it for much of their fame. Byelinsky, moreover, educated
the minds of that whole generation, and prepared men for the social
movement of the '60's, which was characterized by many reforms.

After 1846 Byelinsky was connected with the journal, "The Contemporary,"
published by the poet Nekrasoff, and I. I. Panaeff, to which the best
writers of the day contributed. Here, during the brief period when his
health permitted him to work, he expressed even bolder and more
practical ideas, and became the advocate of the "natural school," of
which he regarded Gogol as the founder, wherein poetry was treated as
an integral part of every-day life. Turgeneff has declared, that
Byelinsky indisputably possessed all the chief qualities of a great
critic, and that no one before him, or better than he, ever expressed a
correct judgment and an authoritative verdict, and that he was,
emphatically, "the right man in the right place."

One author who deserves to be better known outside of Russia produced
the really original and indescribably fascinating works on which his
fame rests during the last ten or twelve years of his long life, late in
the '40's and '50's, although he was much older than the authors we have
recently studied, and began to write much earlier than many of them. His
early writing, however, was in the classical style, and does not count
in comparison with his original descriptions of nature, and of the life
of the (comparatively) distant past. Sergyei Timofeevitch Aksakoff
(1791-1859), the descendant of a very ancient noble family, was born in
far-away eastern Russia, i