unsympathetic towards the philosophy of Marx, despite the latter's atheism and materialism.
Bělinskii's study of Hegel had not led him to the objectivist historism adopted by Marx and Engels. He expressly declared that the freedom of the idea must not be sacrificed to the fetters of the time and to deadening fact, and he refused to offer up ethics to history, as the Marxists and positivists had done.
There was doubtless a positivist element in Bělinskii. Like Marx and Engels, he first became acquainted with positivism in a German form, in the teaching of Feuerbach and Hegel—for the historism of Hegel and Feuerbach is to a large extent positivist. Moreover, from 1846 onward Bělinskii was acquainted with the work of Comte and Littré, and was thus familiar with the more precise formulations of French positivism. To the Russians in general as well as to Bělinskii this French and German positivism was a welcome elucidation and reinforcement of their native realism.
But it is important to note that Bělinskii did not regard the realism and positivism of time and fact as the real and true reality. He was, as he said, unwilling to abandon the capacity for freedom of movement in the moral sphere.
Continually, and at every opportunity, Bělinskii fought scepticism and especially the "hectic" scepticism of Russia. From 1840 onwards Bělinskii condemned scepticism just as had Stankevič or Odoevskii, and had indeed expressed his opposition at an earlier date. Scepticism seemed to him an abnormal mental state, one apt to be widely diffused during periods of transition, when the old has been abandoned whilst the new has not yet come into being. In scepticism, too, there existed degrees and differences. In a sense scepticism seemed to Bělinskii a necessary condition of progress, but this form of scepticism was not a cold negation. None but the petty and the base fall prey to such negation; men of great and vigorous nature, suffering under their scepticism, react against it by creating new and higher things. This dissertation conveys an excellent psychological analysis of Bělinskii's own Letter to Gogol, and indeed explains his literary activities in general, his literary work of opposition and revolution.
This revolution had, properly speaking, but one opponent, theocracy and its ecclesiastical religion. The enthusiasm of Bělinskii's campaign was directed against the superstition and mysticism of the Russian church. Hegel, Feuerbach,
