The Role of V. G. Belinsky in Determining the Objectivity of Humanistic Values in the Context of the Crisis of Aristocratic Humanitarian Discourse

Abstract

The article examines the role of Belinsky as a figure both transitional and key in the process of philosophical and literary search for new content of the concepts of “man”, “personality”, “dignity”. Historically, this process unfolded in a situation of continued strengthening of state pressure on society, the axiological devaluation of noble culture, as well as the rapid spread of a new European nationalist discourse. It is shown that, despite Belinsky’s well-known ideological changeability, his basic intuitions and main narrative did not fundamentally change. Conceptually identifying with the humanism of the “aristocratic writers,” he sought new modernist forms of its understanding and implementation. His demand for realism is revealed simultaneously as a social expansion of the objectivity of humanistic concepts and the transcendence of the human from the inner world of the individual and its self-contained dignity to dignity based on an active social position, reflecting the dialectical unity of the individual and the nation in conditions of growing national self-awareness. At the same time, both the simplifying side of the methodology of realism and its incompleteness are also indicated, namely its open nature, which made Belinsky not only a transitional, but also the last significant figure of humanistic universalism, after which the concepts proposed, including by Belinsky, became vectors narrowly focused anthropology, which quickly formed irreconcilably warring ideological camps.