Status Updates From Russian Thinkers

“German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow”
Contributions included creating literature with ideological content (censorship helped), emancipated the followers and students from oversimplified view of men and things as good or bad and predictable in terms of clear and mechanical causal chains. Turgenev stands out in this essay as a balanced writer and thinker

Group of essays “A Remarkable Decade” referencing the period circa 1838-1848, after the essay with the same name by a lit historian P. Annenkov. “The Birth of the Russian Inteligentsia” is the first essay giving an interesting though brief context of the people and historical and cultural background. Point of interest - Berlin’s view of Russian vs French attitude to literature.

I need to read so much, but one piece of writing I need to return to after reading this, is chap 4 of Nabokov’s The Gift, the so called biography of Chernyshevsky, which is so dense and indecipherable — maybe it’ll make more sense now. This is a great book, Berlin was a vivid writer

This is a fascinating book. Berlin’s style (I believe these were all lectures later transcribed and published) is easier to absorb that you might think, given that he’s talking about Russian writers and philosophers and critics. I’m currently in the sections where he’s talking about Vissarion Belinsky, who wrote a famous “Letter to Gogol,” which was read aloud at the Petrashevsky Circle and got Dostoevsky arrested…