Vasily Petrovich Botkin (; – ) was a Russian essayist, literary, art and music critic, translator and publicist.
Early life
Vasily was born in Moscow, the son of Alexandra Antonovna (Baranova) and Petr Kononovich Botkin,
a wealthy tea merchant. His brothers were
Sergey Botkin, a well-known physician, and
Mikhail Botkin, a painter and art collector.
Vasily was a moderate liberal in the 1830s and 40s, associating with members of the circle of Nikolai Stankevich, and with the
, including
Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky and
Alexander Herzen.
Vasily was a man of expensive tastes, a connoisseur of art and music, and a polyglot. He travelled widely in Europe, meeting well known figures such as
Karl Marx,
Louis Blanc and
Victor Hugo.
Career
Vasily was the first Russian publicist to acquaint Russian readers with the works of
Friedrich Engels (he wrote a summary of Engels's pamphlet
Schelling and Revelation, part of his series
German Literature, published in 1843 in the magazine
Notes of the Fatherland).
He published articles on art exhibitions as well as on William Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffmann and
George Sand. In the field of music he wrote
Italian and German Music (1839),
On the Aesthetic Significance of the New School of Piano (1850), and works on
Italian opera.
Between 1847 and 1849 he published the essays
Letters on Spain in
Sovremennik, which have remained his most popular works.
He translated
Thomas Carlyle's
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) into Russian.
His extensive correspondence with Belinsky, Leo Tolstoy, and others is of great social interest.
The Revolutions of 1848 scared Vasily, and he broke with his liberal associates, becoming more politically conservative as time went by.
English translations
-
A. A. Fet, from Russian Literature Triquarterly #17, Ardis Publishers, 1982.
