One ordinary afternoon, as Mikhail hunched on his sofa mulling over his next manuscript, the maid Nastasia suddenly knocked at his door.
"Mikhail, a gentleman is here to see you—he looks rather urgent."
At the old maid Nastasia's voice, Mikhail's face darkened.
Though Nastasia swore her mouth was tighter than the door of some village widow's house, word of Mikhail's writing had still slipped out; within days half the apartment block seemed to know.
Whenever they met him, their expressions were hard to read. Versilov, a small trader in Saint Petersburg, aired his opinion over breakfast:
"Oh, a university student! You know how youngsters love these newfangled things—what they write is completely incomprehensible! The other night in the tavern at the end of the street I listened to someone read a piece—hey, I couldn't understand a word!"
In the end I had to focus on my drink!"
Tsenbach, a Little Landowner visiting relatives in the city, remarked: "Heh-heh, a student! Better to plant two more mu of land—seeds in soil will sprout, but ink on paper is usually wasted."
Smirnov, a grade-fourteen junior clerk in some office, chose to encourage Mikhail:
"The down-and-out student—I know him. May his stories be eye-catching; best if they're a joke collection. He should read them to me first—I love a good laugh."
The Landlady Pafvlovna said: "Instead of writing he'd better figure out how to pay the rent. Writing? That's a game for noblemen. A mere student who barely knows characters dreams of matching the gentry?"
...Mikhail, hearing all this: "..."
The student had provoked no one... Though Nastasia swore she had never breathed a word, news doesn't sprout from the ground—Mikhail had learned a lesson.
As for the neighbors' gossip, Mikhail didn't take it too seriously.
In Russia today the literacy rate is barely ten percent; as they say, literature is mostly the nobility's pastime.
With these thoughts he opened the door—and at once saw the travel-stained Nekrasov.
Without ceremony Nekrasov seized his hand and said excitedly:
"Mikhail, Visarion Grigoryevich wants to see you—right now. He's waiting in a café. Are you free?"
Belinsky?
Slightly stunned, Mikhail nodded with a spark of excitement. "I'm free. Let me grab my coat and we'll go."
"Excellent, excellent!"
To onlookers, Nekrasov seemed far more excited than Mikhail himself.
Part of that excitement was for Mikhail, but much of it came from the chance to introduce him to Belinsky.
In short, presenting his idol to another.
Mikhail understood; knowing this era, he realized how Russian intellectuals revered Belinsky.
After all, in these years the status of intellectuals—and the respect accorded them—far exceeded that of later times.
This traced back to the Enlightenment, idealism, and other movements—a complex story best left for another time.
In short, intellectuals believed they could change the world through thought—and were already trying to turn thought into reality.
This is clear from Belinsky's 1847 Letter to Gogol:
"As I understand it, you do not know the Russian masses well; their character is shaped by Russian society—a society that harbors and imprisons certain seething forces ready to erupt."
But these forces were crushed—so heavily crushed that one could neither breathe nor escape—giving rise to depression, bitterness, despair, and apathy. Only in literature, under our Tartar-style censorship, was there any life or forward movement. Hence the lofty dignity of the writer's profession; hence even the thinnest talent could win success.
Hence, no matter how poor a Russian writer's natural gifts, if he merely echoed the so-called liberal current he would seize the public gaze, for the people saw in writers their only leaders, defenders, and saviors who could deliver them from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and national custom.
Of course, Belinsky later wrote this letter to mock Gogol, accusing him of using his heaven-sent genius as the tsar's lap-dog, yet the letter still reveals his own conception of the writer's calling and his conviction of what a true writer ought to do.
Incidentally, in 1849 Dostoyevsky publicly read this very letter, hoping to rouse his fellow writers to furious keyboard politics!
He was then sentenced to death… ahem. Fortunately he survived, or Russian literature would have lost one of its great peaks.
Meanwhile, these lines expose a truth of the age: if you're a writer and you don't furiously keyboard-politic, are you even a writer?!
Frankly, from Mikhail's vantage in a later century, this view of writers reeks of intellectual self-importance.
Count yourself lucky if you're not beaten with a copper-buckled belt—yet you still dare to keyboard-politic? Still claim you can lead the masses out of Russia's darkness?
But in the present age the nobles pray their empire lasts forever, while the lower classes can't even read; staying alive is struggle enough. Unless driven to revolt, who would cross those lords?
And even if they rebelled, without organization, discipline, or ideas it would merely begin another cycle.
So if you won't keyboard-politic and I won't, what becomes of the country?
Belinsky believed intellectuals and writers must shoulder their duty and keyboard-politic fiercely!
Of course, reality is tangled beyond solution by mere keyboard politics from writers and thinkers.
Yet it remains a kind of martyred striving.
In later times, hammering the keyboard earns at worst a banned account—barely a hiccup.
Thus the keyboard-warrior flourishes: ox or horse, man or ghost, educated or not, understanding society or not—if life disappoints, if anger stirs, idle hands will type away; nothing happens to them.
No logic required, no heed paid to complexity; emotions rule. Type whatever you please, as though the nation, society, even gender relations would mend the instant your rant ends.
Admittedly, today's keyboard politics differ, in some ways, from those of later eras.
In this age, every keystroke follows meticulous, painstaking reflection—truly hard thought before the clatter.
Meanwhile, swathes of writers, intellectuals, and ardent youths not only dare to type but march at revolution's forefront; many live perpetually under threat of persecution or exile.
Yet their blood was long ago buried by Siberia's winds and snows, leaving no trace behind.
The man who opened this era in Russia—Visarion Grigoryevich Belinsky—was penniless, tubercular, barely schooled.
Yet he was also a brawler, a theorist, a practitioner of ideals, a zealot determined to merge literature with life itself.
His fervor, his recklessness, his honesty made the youth a leader among youths.
Passionate and unswerving, his pursuit of justice and truth endured until his early death
finally ended.
This was the man Mikhail was about to meet.
The man who forcibly turned Russia's literary circles into a keyboard politics arena.