He was the son of an obscure army-surgeon, and spent his childhood in a remote province of Russia. Well prepared by his father, who knew the value of knowledge, he entered the university of St. Petersburg, but was excluded from it in 1832 for a tragedy which he wrote, in the style of Schiller’s _Robbers_, and which was an energetic protest against serfdom. Already he had joined the circle of Hérzen, Ogaryóff, Stankévitch, etc., and in 1834 he began his literary career by a critical review of literature which at once attracted notice. From that time till his death he wrote critical articles and bibliographical notes for some of the leading reviews, and he worked so extremely hard that at the age of thirty-eight he died from consumption. He did not die too soon. The revolution had broken out in Western Europe, and when Byelínskiy was on his deathbed an agent of the State-police would call from time to time to ascertain whether he was still alive. The order was given to arrest him, if he should recover, and his fate certainly would have been the fortress and at the best--exile. When Byelínskiy first began to write he was entirely under the influence of the idealistic German philosophy. He was inclined to maintain that Art is something too great and too pure to have anything to do with the questions of the day. It was a reproduction of “the general idea of the life of nature.” Its problems were those of the Universe--not of poor men and their petty events. It was from this idealistic point of view of Beauty and Truth that he exposed the main principles of Art, and explained the process of artistic creation. In a series of articles on Púshkin he wrote, in fact, a history of Russian literature down to Púshkin, from that point of view. Holding such abstract views, Byelínskiy even came, during his stay at Moscow, to consider, with Hegel, that “all that which exists is reasonable,” and to preach “reconciliation” with the despotism of Nicholas I. However, under the influence of Hérzen and Bakúnin he soon shook off the fogs of German metaphysics, and, removing to St. Petersburg, opened a new page of his activity.