Vissarion Belinsky is a Russian thinker, writer, literary critic, essayist, philosopher-westerner, lived bright but short life. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, according to which "all that is real - it is reasonable," he fervently believed in this postulate. However, gradually learning the reality around him, he became an outspoken critic of its stupidity. Arguing that Russian literature did not exist before the works of Gogol, he, nevertheless, wrote a number of articles about Russian writers in the "Notes of the Fatherland", constituting a whole volume and in fact, it became the history of Russian literature from Lomonosov to Pushkin.