Abstract: Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky won the outstanding status for his thoughts taken as “quasi-Marxism-Leninism”, made a great contribution to Russian literary theories, and exerted a prominent influence on Chinese textbooks of contemporary literary theories from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Chinese textbook compilers do not confine themselves to Belinsky's theory, but select and rewrite several theoretical concepts to fit into the academic context of contemporary China, some of which fail to fit into the actual situation of literary creation, and appear contrary to Belinsky's original thoughts. “Writing essence” has become an important theoretical source of stylization and conceptualization in contemporary Chinese literary creation. The essence of the “thinking in images” theory that emerged in China is the imagination being removed of the creative connotation. Belinsky's “national character” focusing on nationhood is transformed into the connotation of social classes and his theory has been illustrated in variation in the Chinese textbooks of contemporary literary theories.

Key words: V.G.Belinsky, textbooks of contemporary literary theories, writing essence, thinking in images, national character, western literary theories, literary theories of Russia and Soviet Union