Naturally the students in their department--the philological faculty--came under their influence, and under this influence was reared the famous Russian critic, Vissarion Grigorievitch Byelinsky (1811-1848).

His name is chiefly identified with the journal "The Annals of the Fatherland" (of St.Petersburg), where he published his brilliant critical articles on Griboyedoff, Gogol's "The Inspector," on Lermontoff's works, and on those of other writers; on French contemporary literature, and on current topics at home and abroad, among them articles condemning many characteristics of Russian society, both intellectual and moral, such as the absence of intellectual interests, routine, narrowness, and egotism in the middle-class merchants; self-satisfied philistinism; the patriarchal laxity of provincial morals; the lack of humanity and the Asiatic ferocity towards inferiors; the slavery of women and children under the weight of family despotism.

His volume of articles on Pushkin constitutes a complete critical history of Russian literature, beginning with Lomonosoff and ending with Pushkin.

By these Byelinsky's standing as an important factor in literature was thoroughly established, and all the young writers of the succeeding epoch, that of the '50's, gathered around him.

Grigorovitch, Turgeneff, Gontcharoff, Nekrasoff, Apollon Maikoff, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the rest, may be said to have been reared on Byelinsky's criticism, inspired by it to creative activity, and indebted to it for much of their fame.