Vasily Botkin
Born	Vasily Petrovich Botkin 8 January 1812 [O.S. 27 December 1811] Moscow,Russian Empire
Died	22 October [O.S. 10 October] 1869 (aged 57) St Petersburg, Russian Empire

Vasily Petrovich Botkin (Russian:Васи́лий Петро́вич Бо́ткин; 8 January 1812 [O.S. 27 December 1811] – 22 October [O.S. 10 October] 1869) was a Russian essayist, literary, art and music critic, translator and publicist.

Vasily was born in Moscow, the son of Alexandra Antonovna (Baranova) and Petr Kononovich Botkin,^[1][2][3] a wealthy tea merchant. His brothers wereSergey Botkin, a well-known physician, andMikhail Botkin, a painter and art collector.^[4][5] Vasily was a moderate liberal in the 1830s and 40s, associating with members of the circle ofNikolai Stankevich, and with theWesternizers, includingMikhail Bakunin,Vissarion Belinsky andAlexander Herzen.^[4] Vasily was a man of expensive tastes, a connoisseur of art and music, and apolyglot. He travelled widely in Europe, meeting well known figures such asKarl Marx,Louis Blanc andVictor Hugo.^[4][5]

Vasily was the first Russian publicist to acquaint Russian readers with the works ofFriedrich Engels (he wrote a summary of Engels's pamphletSchelling and Revelation, part of his seriesGerman Literature, published in 1843 in the magazineNotes of the Fatherland).^[4][5] He published articles on art exhibitions as well as onWilliam Shakespeare,E. T. A. Hoffmann andGeorge Sand. In the field of music he wroteItalian and German Music (1839),On the Aesthetic Significance of the New School of Piano (1850), and works onItalian opera.^[5] Between 1847 and 1849 he published the essaysLetters on Spain inThe Contemporary, which have remained his most popular works.^[4] He translatedThomas Carlyle'sOn Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) into Russian.^[6]

His extensive correspondence with Belinsky,Tolstoy, and others is of great social interest.^[5] Much of his aesthetic and literary theory can be found in his letters, especially those he wrote toIvan Turgenev, and in his essayThe Poetry ofA. A. Fet, published in 1857 inThe Contemporary. Vasily's sister was married to Fet.^[4]

TheRevolutions of 1848 scared Vasily, and he broke with his liberal associates, becoming more politically conservative as time went by.^[5] He also became a more conservative critic, espousing the theory of "art for art's sake" along withAlexander Druzhinin andPavel Annenkov.^[4][7]

• A. A. Fet, fromRussian Literature Triquarterly #17, Ardis Publishers, 1982.

• 1812 births
• 1869 deaths
• Critics from the Russian Empire
• Essayists from the Russian Empire
• Russian male essayists
• Writers from Moscow
• 19th-century journalists from the Russian Empire
• Russian male journalists
• 19th-century translators from the Russian Empire
• 19th-century male writers from the Russian Empire
• 19th-century essayists
• 20th-century Russian essayists
• 20th-century Russian male writers
• Westernizers

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