Russian Visual Arts Project

Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev (1822-64) was a well-known poet, art critic and literary critic. From 1848 until 1855 he was the leading Neo-Slavophile art critic of the journal Muscovite (Moskvitianin). During the period 1858-61 he criticised the concept of 'pure art' in a number of articles published in Russian Word (Russkoe slovo) and The Torch (Svetoch'). He subsequently shared the ideas of the pochvenniki (the 'Native soil conservatives' - Nikolai Strakhov, Fedor Dostoevskii, Mikhail Dostoevskii), and from 1862 until 1864 he published the journal The Anchor (Iakor'). His major works include 'A Critical View of the Bases, Significance and Devices of Contemporary Art Criticism' ('Kriticheskii vzgliad na osnovy, znachenie i priemy sovremennoi kritiki iskusstva'), 1858; 'A Few Words on the Rules and Terms of Organic Criticism' ('Neskol'ko slov o zakonakh i terminakh organicheskoi kritiki'), 1859; and 'Paradoxes of Organic Criticism' ('Paradoksy organicheskoi kritiki'), 1864. Grigor'ev was an advocate of Ostrovskii's drama, and was criticised for his approach to Ostrovskii by radical critics such as Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov.

In 'A Critical View of the Bases, Significance and Devices of Contemporary Art Criticism', and in other articles on writers such as Griboedov, Lermontov and Tolstoi, he sets forth his views on what he terms 'organic criticism', i.e. criticism that is not linked to a historical interpretation of a work of art but that elucidates the work intuitively. As he writes in 'A Critical View...', 'criticism cannot and should not be blindly historical, but should be, or at least strive to be, just as organic as art itself, and through its analysis, should comprehend the same organic principles of life which are conveyed, synthetically, in the flesh and blood of art'.