Annenkov's contribution to Russian intellectual life

Annenkov's original contribution to Russian letters, like Botkin's, was small, and yet he too played a role in the intellectual life of the 1840s and 1850s that can scarcely be ignored. He is now generally remembered first and foremost as a memoirist and biographer whose account of the intellectual life of the period 1838–48, under the title The Marvellous Decade, and whose writings on the life of N. V. Stankevich, Gogol and Turgenev remain invaluable sources for the student of mid–nineteenth–century Russian culture. (And it is indeed in these fields that Annenkov's creative talents found their freest expression.) But he was also the author of much literary criticism which, though frankly poor in quality and marred by a convoluted literary style, clearly reflected the intellectual currents of the time and indicated the hardening of opposition among the older members of the intelligentsia to the utilitarian view of art encouraged by Chernyshevsky. He wrote a much acclaimed biography of Pushkin which precipitated the controversy of the mid 1850s over the respective merits of Pushkin and Gogol. Furthermore, Annenkov was a gregarious man who by virtue of the breadth of his circle of acquaintances – he met, among other people, Heine and Herwegh, George Sand, Pierre Leroux, Proudhon and the young Marx and Engels – served as an important source of information for his contemporaries on the latest ideas circulating in Western Europe in the 1840s.