Byelinsky, moreover, educated the minds of that whole generation, and prepared men for the social movement of the '60's, which was characterized by many reforms.
After 1846 Byelinsky was connected with the journal, "The Contemporary," published by the poet Nekrasoff, and I.I.Panaeff, to which the best writers of the day contributed.

Here, during the brief period when his health permitted him to work, he expressed even bolder and more practical ideas, and became the advocate of the "natural school," of which he regarded Gogol as the founder, wherein poetry was treated as an integral part of every-day life.

Turgeneff has declared, that Byelinsky indisputably possessed all the chief qualities of a great critic, and that no one before him, or better than he, ever expressed a correct judgment and an authoritative verdict, and that he was, emphatically, "the right man in the right place." One author who deserves to be better known outside of Russia produced the really original and indescribably fascinating works on which his fame rests during the last ten or twelve years of his long life, late in the '40's and '50's, although he was much older than the authors we have recently studied, and began to write much earlier than many of them.

His early writing, however, was in the classical style, and does not count in comparison with his original descriptions of nature, and of the life of the (comparatively) distant past.

Sergyei Timofeevitch Aksakoff (1791-1859), the descendant of a very ancient noble family, was born in far-away eastern Russia, in Ufa, and was very well educated by his mother, at schools, and at Kazan University.