The label
natural school was coined by
Faddey Bulgarin, who initially used it in a derogatory sense. In an essay of February 26, 1846, in
Severnaya Ptchela, Bulgarin criticized young writers—followers of Gogol—for producing prose that imitated real life but lacked artistry and inspiration. The term was picked up and used in a positive sense by
Vissarion Belinsky, in relation to what he saw as the new social realism movement, pioneered by Gogol and now taking hold among the new generation of authors. Analyzing the trend in his essay "On the Russian novel and novels by Gogol" he traced its roots back to 1835. The natural-school doctrine's general idea, as Belinsky saw it, was that literature should "mirror reality." In this respect it was very much a development of French
Enlightenment ideas. "To take away from Art its right to serve social interests means to debase it, stripping off it live thought, that is, its true power," the critic insisted. Belinsky continued to lay out the theoretical basis for his natural-school doctrine in his essays "Replying to Moskvityanin", "Reviewing the Russian Literature of 1846" and "Reviewing the Russian Literature of 1847". Detractors accused the natural-school authors of negativism, tendentiousness, plagiarizing French authors and lack of patriotism. Dramatist and actor
Pyotr Karatygin ridiculed them in his 1847 play
Natural School. Despite this, in 1848 (according to Belinsky) the natural school became the dominant trend in Russian literature. After Belinsky's death in the same year, the term
natural school was banned by the authorities. In the 1850s it resurfaced under the moniker "the Gogol tradition", as in "Sketches from the Gogol period of Russian Literature" by
Chernyshevsky. ==References==