Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev
Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev (1822-1864) was a prominent Russian literary critic and poet known for his passionate and innovative contributions to 19th-century Russian literature. Born in Moscow as the illegitimate son of Tat'iana Andreevna and Aleksandr Ivanovich Grigor'ev, he spent his early years in a merchant district, receiving a tutored education. Grigor'ev attended Moscow University, where he began publishing poetry and developed his critical voice under the influence of idealist philosophy.
He relocated to St. Petersburg in 1844, assuming roles as a civil servant and journalist, and gained recognition as a theater critic upon returning to Moscow. His critical approach, termed "organic criticism," emphasized the interplay between art and life, and he published significant essays on national identity and artistic morality. Grigor'ev's personal struggles, including issues with alcoholism, led him to Italy for a period of study. He later coedited the journal "Russkoe slovo," where he championed the works of notable Russian authors like Pushkin and Turgenev.
In the final years of his life, Grigor'ev taught and wrote extensively, leaving behind memoirs and letters that articulated his critical ideals. Although he was largely forgotten after his death, his works experienced a revival in the late 20th century, highlighting his lasting influence on Russian literary criticism.
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Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev
Poet
- Born: July 1, 1822
- Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
- Died: September 25, 1864
Biography
One of nineteenth century Russia’s foremost literary critics, Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor’ev was born in Moscow in July of 1822, the illegitimate son of Tat’iana Andreevna and Aleksandr Ivanovich Grigor’ev (the couple married soon after Grigor’ev’s birth). Grigor’ev’s formative years were spent in Zamoskvorech’e, Moscow’s merchant and clerk district, with a series of tutors. From 1838 to 1842 he studied in the Juridical Faculty of Moscow University, where he met Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, the editor of Moskvitianin (the Muscovite), which published Grigor’ev’s early poetry. Grigor’ev relocated to St. Petersburg in 1844, where he worked as a civil servant and a journalist. More important than his first collection of verse, Stikhotvoreniia (poems, 1846), were his reviews and articles, which were passionate and unconventionally structured pieces rooted in the idealist philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.
Upon Grigor’ev’s return to Moscow in 1847, he began his career as a theater critic, publishing reviews and articles in Otechestvennye zapiski (notes of the fatherland). He became the primary critic in a group of journalists centered around Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky called the Molodaia Redaksiia (young editors). During this time Grigor’ev published his esteemed translation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596), and wrote important essays on the concept of narodnost’ (national identity), national types, and the “organic” relationship of art to life, which laid the foundations for a method he later called organicheskaia kritika (organic criticism). When his personal life, marked as it was until his death by excessive drinking and brief stints in debtors’ prison, grew intolerable, Grigor’ev spent fourteen months in Italy studying Western art and aesthetics.
In 1858 he became the coeditor of a new journal, Russkoe slovo (the Russian word), based in St. Petersburg. Grigor’ev lauded Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin’s poetry as the absolute manifestation of Russian national character and argued that Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev’s works embodied this character. Grigor’ev’s 1861 essays for Svetoch (the torch), including “Iskusstvo i nravstvennost’” (art and morality), contended that art was autonomous and should dispute conventional morality. The same year, in order to escape the disarray of his life in St. Petersburg, Grigor’ev decided to teach Russian language and literature in Orenberg, a Cossack station in the east. There he composed a theoretical statement that would form the basis of the pochvennichestvo (native soil) movement of Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevski and Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov.
In 1862 Grigor’ev returned to St. Petersburg, where he continued to establish himself as an important theatrical critic, partially by way of the weekly Iakor’ (anchor), a short-lived journal he founded and edited. Grigor’ev’s contributions to Mikhail Dostoevski’s journal Epokha (epoch) in 1864, the final year of his life, include installments of his memoir, Moi literaturnye i nravstvennye skital’chestva (my literary and moral wanderings), and two significant open letters to Fyodor Dostoevski, which provide a concise and vigorous elucidation of his critical ideology. Though he was quickly forgotten by his contemporaries, Grigor’ev’s poetry and criticism were republished in the latter half of the twentieth century.