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close to the Easter season, local leaflets brought
up the usual anti-Semitic canard of Jewish ritual
murders of Christian boys. The rightist, anti-
Semitic national press, concerned with discus-
sions in the State
DUMA
about easing legal and
residential restrictions against Jews, dissemi-
nated the charges and exacerbated anti-Semitic
feelings. Rightist forces in Kiev contributed to
the mood by calling for a
POGROM
and the expul-
sion of all Jews from the city. Although Kiev
detectives soon concluded that fellow gang
members had probably murdered Iushchinsky,
the Ministry of Justice opened proceedings in
July 1911 against Menachem Mendel Beilis, a
Jewish dispatcher at a Kiev brickworks owned
by a wealthy Jewish businessman. To the gov-
ernment's credit, the frequent calls for a pogrom
against Kiev's Jewish community were averted,
thanks to the efforts of the prime minister, V. M.
Kokovtsev. Nevertheless, prosecution of the
Beilis case took more than two years, attracting
worldwide attention and exposing the govern-
ment's almost desperate drive to establish Beilis's
guilt, despite evidence to the contrary. The
bureaucracy's desire to have Beilis found guilty
was demonstrated by the pressure applied to
lawyers and judges, harassment of newspapers
reporting the case, and the Ministry of Justice's
frantic search for an “expert” to testify that Jews
did use Christian blood in certain rituals around
Passover. In October 1913, after a trial and
retrial, Beilis was finally acquitted, although in
its verdict the court still did not rule out the pos-
sibility that unknown Jews were guilty of the
murder. Beilis subsequently emigrated to the
United States, where he died in 1934. Like the
Dreyfus affair in France, the Beilis affair exposed
the depth of anti-Semitic feeling in Russian offi-
cial and rightist political circles.
erature in the next half century through his
belief that literature needed to convey a social
purpose. An ardent Westernizer in the intellec-
tual debates with the Slavophiles, Belinsky was
born in Sveaborg, Finland, the son of a medical
army officer, and grew up in the province of
Penza, to the southeast of Moscow. In 1829 he
entered the University of Moscow and two
years later began publishing poetry and literary
reviews. Authorship of
Dmitrii Kalinin,
a play
that criticized
SERFDOM
, led to his expulsion from
the university in 1832. Belinsky turned to jour-
nalism, publishing in some of the leading jour-
nals of the day such as
Moscow Observer, Notes of
the Fatherland,
and
The Contemporary.
After recov-
ering from poor health in the Caucasus, he
returned to Moscow and edited
Moscow Observer
from 1838 to 1839. In 1839 he moved to St.
Petersburg to become editor of the influential
journal
Notes of the Fatherland,
a position he held
until 1846. During these years Belinsky consoli-
dated his reputation as a leading representative
of the radical intelligentsia and strong defender
of the “Westernizer” position in the seminal
intellectual debates of the 1840s with the Slavo-
philes. Approaching art and literature from a
utilitarian perspective influenced by Hegel and
German romanticism, Belinsky argued that they
should aim for the transformation of society
rather than emphasize purely aesthetic princi-
ples. For the next half century after his death,
Belinsky's views provided the foundation for the
dominant strain of Russian art and literature. As
a critic and editor, Belinsky's voice was instru-
mental in consolidating the reputations of
Alexander
PUSHKIN
and Mikhail
LERMONTOV
and
in advancing the careers of future literary giants
such as Ivan
TURGENEV
, Fyodor
DOSTOEVSKY
, and
Nikolai
GOGOL
. His correspondence with the lat-
ter was an important milestone in Russian intel-
lectual history, particularly the famous “Letter to
Gogol” of July 2, 1847, in which he attacked
Gogol's defense of religion, the church, and state
authorities as a betrayal of the common good.
Published by Gogol soon after, czarist authorities
quickly moved to ban its circulation. Neverthe-
Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorievich
(1811-1848)
literary critic
The foremost literary critic of the 1830s and
1840s, Belinsky shaped the course of Russian lit-
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