An Unnecessary Man: The Life of Apollon Grigor'ev

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

At no other time and place have literary critics enjoyed the influence
they had in 19th-century Russia. Critics were more than arbiters of
taste. They were the chief purveyors of ideas—artistic, philosophical,
social, and political—in an era that lived by them. The most
influential of these commanders of public opinion was the radical
Belinsky. He and the school of left-wing critics who followed him did
much to mold the aesthetic views that have dominated Russia for most of
the 20th century. Yet the conservatives were not without their share of
influential literary critics, the best of these being Apollon
Grigor’ev (1822–64).

This is the first biography in English of Grigor’ev. Wayne Dowler
uses his skills as a historian of ideas to pilot the reader through a
welter of opposing doctrines and tendencies that form the background for
Grigor’ev’s own intellectual strivings. Like Dostoevsky, with whom
he engaged in fruitful collaboration, Grigor’ev sought a middle way
between the extremes of right and left. He rejected both the
utilitarianism of the radicals and the liberal bias toward art for
art’s sake. Although he found himself in sympathy with many of the
views of the Slavophiles, he found them as much the slaves of sterile
theory as were their opponents in the camp of the Westernizers. His own
“organic” criticism always favors life over theory, the concrete
over the abstract. For Grigor’ev, beauty is equivalent to morality,
and the function of literature is to mediate between the ideal and the
real, expressing the national essence through the creation of types.

Although Grigor’ev has many personal failings, he is to be admired
for the independence of his thought, and he suffered much for his
opposition to the fashions of the day. It is the author’s contention
that the current resurgence of Russian conservative nationalism has made
the long-neglected Grigor’ev a very attractive figure. While this may
be the case, Dowler fails to give evidence of any post-Soviet upsurge in
interest. Furthermore, the difficult, kaleidoscopic nature of
Grigor’ev’s thought, along with his reluctance to reduce his organic
conceptions to an easily graspable theory, makes one wonder whether
Russia, with its harsh new realities, has time for a thinker like
him—even if it does have the need.