Vasily Petrovich Botkin was a Russian essayist, literary, art and music critic, translator and publicist.

Early life

Vasily was the son of a wealthy merchant and the brother of the well known physician Sergey Botkin. Vasily was a moderate liberal in the 1830s and 40s, associating with members of the circle of Nikolai Stankevich

Nikolai Stankevich

Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich was a Russian public figure, philosopher, and poet.In 1834, Nikolay Stankevich graduated from the Moscow State University, where he was influenced by Professor Mikhail Kachenovsky and followers of the so-called "skeptical school" in historiography...

, and with the Westernizer

Westernizer

Westernizers were a group of 19th century intellectuals who believed that Russia's development depended upon the adoption of Western European technology and liberal government. In their view, western ideas such as industrialisation needed to be implemented throughout Russia in order to make it a...

s, including Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...

, Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin , and other critical intellectuals...

 and Alexander Herzen

Alexander Herzen

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...

. Vasily was a man of expensive tastes, a connoisseur of art and music, and a polyglot

Polyglot (person)

A polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. A bilingual person can speak two languages fluently, whereas a trilingual three; above that the term multilingual may be used.-Hyperpolyglot:...

. He travelled widely in Europe, meeting well known figures such as Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, Louis Blanc

Louis Blanc

Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French politician and historian. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor....

 and Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

.

Career

Vasily was the first Russian publicist to acquaint Russian readers with the works of Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...

 (he wrote a summary of Engels's pamphlet Schelling and Revelation, part of his series German Literature, published in 1843 in the magazine Notes of the Fatherland

Otechestvennye Zapiski

Otechestvennye Zapiski was a Russian literary magazine published in St Petersburg on a monthly basis between 1818 and 1884. The journal served liberal-minded readers, known as the intelligentsia...

). He published articles on art exhibitions as well as on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, E. T. A. Hoffmann and George Sand

George Sand

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...

. In the field of music he wrote Italian and German Music (1839), On the Aesthetic Significance of the New School of Piano (1850), and works on Italian opera

Italian opera

Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...

. Between 1847 and 1849 he published the essays Letters on Spain in The Contemporary

Sovremennik

Sovremennik was a Russian literary, social and political magazine, published in St. Petersburg in 1836-1866. It came out four times a year in 1836-1843 and once a month after that...

, which have remained his most popular works.

His extensive correspondence with Belinsky, Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, and others is of great social interest. Much of his aesthetic and literary theory can be found in his letters, especially those he wrote to Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

, and in his essay The Poetry of A. A. Fet

Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet , was a Russian poet regarded as one of the finest lyricists in Russian literature.-Origins:...

, published in 1857 in The Contemporary. Vasily's sister was married to Fet.

The Revolutions of 1848

Revolutions of 1848

The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...

 scared Vasily, and he broke with his liberal associates, becoming more politically conservative as time went by. He also became a more conservative critic, espousing the theory of "art for art's sake" along with Alexander Druzhinin

Alexander Druzhinin

Alexander Vasilyevich Druzhinin , , was a Russian writer, translator, and magazine editor.-Biography:...

 and Pavel Annenkov

Pavel Annenkov

Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov was a significant Russian literary critic and memoirist.-Biography:Annenkov was born into a wealthy landowning family in Moscow. He attended the philological faculty of St Petersburg University...

.

English translations

• A. A. Fet, from Russian Literature Triquarterly #17, Ardis Publishers, 1982.