Vasily Petrovich Botkin was a Russian essayist, critic, and translator. Most of his literary work consists of numerous letters to his friends and acquaintances.
Background
Vasily Petrovich Botkin was born on December 27, 1811 (January 8, 1812) in Moscow City, Russian Federation. He was the son of Alexandra Antonovna (Baranova) and Petr Kononovich Botkin, a wealthy tea merchant. His brothers were Sergey Botkin, a well-known physician, and Mikhail Botkin, a painter and art collector.
Education
Vasily Petrovich was educated in the private boarding school of V.S. Kryazhev.
Career
After graduating from the boarding school, Vasily Petrovich went in for self-education. In the 1830s he became interested in Saint-Simonianism, as well as in left Hegelianism. Since 1835, he entered the circle of S. Selivanovsky, where he became close to V. Belinsky. At the invitation of Belinsky, he began to review the magazine Telescope and write essays for it. Also, some of his travel notes, written in 1838-1839, were published in the magazine of Belinsky and M. Bakunin Moscow Observer.
Under the influence of Bakunin and Stankevich, Vasily Petrovich became interested in Hegel, combining his dialectical methods with the principles of romanticism. The romantic pathos, reinforced by Left-Hegelian ideas, led Vasily Petrovich to rebellious schillerism, the ideas of which he expressed in a letter to Bakunin called Enmity against the Existing Order.
Since 1839, Vasily Petrovich collaborated with Patriotic Notes, where he published articles on music (Italian and German Music (1839)), painting, a series of articles on Shakespeare (Shakespeare as a Man and Lyricist (1842)), where he romantically interpreted author's works as a reflection of subjectivity and eternal beginnings.
In the first half of the 1840s, Botkin's views continued to be radical. In the article German Literature (1843), he outlined the beginning of the brochure by F. Engels Schelling and Revelation. In letters, he agreed with new views that undermined the modern fundamental foundations of human society: state, religion, church marriage, and also sympathized with writers and poets who rebelled for the subjective self against the patriarchy and authority of Rousseau, Byron, Lermontov. In letters, Botkin praised the French Revolution and was ironic about Slavophilism.
Between 1843-1846 Vasily Petrovich traveled extensively throughout Europe, in 1844 he met K. Marx and the French socialists (P. Leroux, L. Blanc, etc.). Imbued with socialist thoughts and atheism, he wrote in letters about the greatness and beauty of freedom, fraternity, and equality, as well as about the complete denial of the so-called god. Vasily Petrovich was greatly influenced by O. Comte's lectures, thanks to which he began to share positivistic views, and also drew attention to the physiological aspects of aesthetic perception. At the same time, he denied Comte's idea of subordinating human aspirations to exact sciences.
After traveling through Spain and Morocco, Botkin wrote a series of essays the Letters about Spain (1847-1848), which described nature, women, life, architecture, as well as the political and social situation of the country. In these letters, Botkin’s radical tendencies weakened significantly, giving way to liberal ones. Belinsky, after these letters, criticized Botkin’s new views, blaming him for calls for tolerance.
In articles after 1848 (On the aesthetic significance of the new piano school, Russian minor poets: N. P. Ogarev), Vasily Petrovich foreshadowed the author's evolution from social ideals to the aimlessness and artistry of art; he also paid special attention to music, lyricism and extolled romanticism.
In the early 1850s, Vasily Petrovich became interested in the national originality of art. Being close with Nikolay Nekrasov in 1855, he became an employee of the Sovremennik magazine, and in 1885-1857 published together with its editor Notes about Magazines for the Month of July, where he put forward the thesis that there was no art for science and science for art since both exist for society. But he was disturbed by the revolutionary-democratic mood of the Sovremennik magazine: he believed that political ideas were the grave of art. Also in 1855, Vasily Petrovich published a translation of the works of T. Carlyle, an English conservative and Schelling follower, entitled The Heroic Significance of the Poet: Dante, Shakespeare. In the article Poems by A. Fet, published in 1857, he defended the theory of free creativity, according to which the creator expresses his elemental feelings and emotions in works of art.
In the last 20 years of his life, Vasily Petrovich was constantly treated in Russia and abroad from numerous diseases. After 1857, he constantly traveled throughout Europe, occasionally publishing travel essays. The Polish uprising of 1863 changed Vasily’s civic position: he turned from a Western-liberal to a conservative monarchist. Vasily Petrovich planned to write a book about the history of world painting, and in letters to friends, he analyzed the novels of I. Turgenev and L. Tolstoy.
Politics
Vasily Petrovich was a moderate liberal in the 1830s and 40s, associating with members of the circle of Nikolai Stankevich, and with the Westernizers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Alexander Herzen.
Membership
Vasily was a moderate liberal in the 1830s and 40s, associating with members of the circle of Nikolai Stankevich, and with the Westernizers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen.
Personality
Vasily Petrovich was a man of expensive tastes, a connoisseur of art and music, and a polyglot. He traveled widely in Europe, meeting well-known figures such as Karl Marx, Louis Blanc, and Victor Hugo.
Connections
In 1843, Vasily Petrovich married the French modist Arman Rouillard, but three months later they divorced.