ABSTRACT
When, in 1846, Belínsky left Krayévsky’s review for Nekrásov’s Sovreménnik, his part of chief critic in the former was taken by a young man of unusual promise, Valérian Nikoláyevich Máykov (1823-47), brother of the poet Apollón Máykov. He possessed an amount of common sense, a breadth of understanding, and a sense of literary values that it would be vain to look for in any other Russian critic of the “intelligentsia” age. His early death was a real calamity: like Venevitinov before him and Pomyalóvsky after him, he was one of those who, had they been granted a longer life, might have turned the course of Russian civilization into more creative and less Chekhovian ways. Máykov was a civic critic and a socialist. But he was a critic, one of the small number of genuine critics in Russian literature. His criticism of Dostbyévsky’s early work can even now be accepted almost without qualifications, and he was the first to give public appreciation to the poetry of Tyútchev.
