177 years ago today, on June 7, 1848 (May 7, 1848 in the lunar calendar), the Russian literary critic Belinsky died. This is a portrait of Belinsky. Belinsky was born in the city of Sveabag, and his father was a military doctor. In 1829, he entered the Department of Languages of Moscow University. In 1831, he was expelled from the school for writing a play "Dmitry Kalinin" that exposed serfdom. In 1833, he began to write articles for "Telescope" and "Zetan". In 1834, he published his first literary paper "Literary Fantasy". In 1838, he became the editor of the magazine "Moscow Observer". The following year, the magazine ceased operation and moved to Petersburg to chair the literary criticism column of the "Motherland Chronicle" magazine. In a few short years, he did a lot of work and commented on many important phenomena in Russian cultural life. After arriving in Petersburg, he experienced the transition from idealism to materialism, from Enlightenment to revolutionary democracy, and took a negative attitude towards serfdom. In many treatises such as "The Concept of Art" (1841), "Speech on Criticism" (1842), and "Collection of Works of Alexander Pushkin" (1843), the previous idealist artistic viewpoint was abandoned, and it was proposed that the essence of literature and art "lies in the representation of reality". "Art is the reproduction of reality, so that the task of art is not to modify and beautify life, but to show the actual existence of life" and "typification is a basic law of creation". These literary viewpoints became the founders of Russian realist literary theory and literary criticism. In 1846, he left the "Homeland Chronicle" to chair the literary criticism column in the magazine "Modern Man", making the magazine the most advanced ideological position in Russia at that time. He went abroad for medical treatment in 1847 and wrote the famous "A Letter to Gogol". He returned to Petersburg in the autumn of the same year to continue his literary work and died on June 7, 1848.