Abstract
Solov’ëv’s health deteriorated rapidly in the summer of 1900, and his premature death surprised his friends. The many obituaries in the press that stemmed from extra-philosophical communities were full of praise for the departed. Of particular interest was the attention that came from the Symbolist community, which, now recognizing the notoriety accorded Solov’ëv, sought to assimilate key elements of his thought, shorn of any rational underpinning. Russia’s philosophical community failed to rise and defend the Enlightenment commitment to reason. Instead, many of its members yielded to a robust nationalism and along with it saw in Solov’ëv a figure who had expressed a distinctively Russian outlook that departed from Western models. The political environment that ensued for decades, in effect, insured that rational criticism of Solov’ëv’s philosophy would be sidelined, letting the image of Solov’ëv, as a pioneering, religious mystic, go unchallenged.
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Notes
- 1.
We are indebted to Sergej Trubeckoj for this, the fullest account of Solov’ëv’s last days. See Trubeckoj 1900.
- 2.
We take up here a survey of only some representative positions expressed after Solov’ëv’s death. Losev, in his Vladimir Solov’ëv and His Era, has surveyed some of the reactions to Solov’ëv’s writings, notably by those centered around the Khar’kov theological journal Vera i razum, that appeared already during Solov’ëv’s lifetime. See Losev 2000: 348–361.
- 3.
Mirtov 1900: 620.
- 4.
Tareev 1908: 336.
- 5.
Tareev 1908: 382.
- 6.
Another who employed the image of Solov’ëv – but for a quite different purpose – was the one-time Bolshevik Vladimir Bazarov (pseud. of Vladimir Rudnev) (1874–1939), who in 1910 wrote, “Solov’ëv’s conception is one of the most sensible and consistent attempts to justify absolute truth and the absolute good.” Bazarov 1910: viii.
- 7.
See his “Prevoskhodstvo pravoslavija nad ucheniem papizma v ego izlozhenii Vl. Solov’ëvym” [“The Superiority of Orthodoxy over the Doctrine of Papism in Solov’ëv’s Exposition”] originally published in the house organ of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and reprinted in his “Collected Works.” See Antonij 1900: 5–42. For a short exposition of his actually interesting approach to Kant, see Nemeth 2017: 196–199.
- 8.
Antonij 1908: 54.
- 9.
Antonij 1908: 57.
- 10.
Ivanov 1911: 778.
- 11.
Dmitrij made Solov’ëv’s acquaintance no later than September 1891, and based on private correspondence from that decade the first impression was negative. The early reviews of Solov’ëv by Zinaida were extremely unfriendly. See Korostelev 2018: 75–76.
- 12.
Korostelev 2018: 83.
- 13.
Bazarov testified to the rapid spread of Solov’ëv’s idea of divine humanity, writing in 1910 that it had “acquired recently a rather broad dissemination among the Russian public, but not in the form in which Solov’ëv himself developed it but in a significantly simplified and, so to speak, bare formulation, given to it by Merezhkovskij, Filosofov, and in part Berdjaev and other contemporary mystics and mystifiers from the intellectual sphere.” Bazarov 1910: viii.
- 14.
Berdjaev recognized this in 1909, writing that the Symbolists “are distinguished by an anti-philosophical spirit, an anarchistic denial of philosophical reason.” Berdiaev 1994: 14.
- 15.
Blok 1983: 67. Blok was referring here to Solov’ëv’s numerous published poems and to the eventual nine-volume set of Solov’ëv’s prose writings, the first volume of which was assembled by his brother Mikhail in 1901.
- 16.
Pyman 1994: 227.
- 17.
Pyman 1994: 228.
- 18.
For a longer and more detailed, but quite fascinating, disquisition on the mystical side of Solov’ëv and its importance for the Symbolists, see Cioran 1977: 39–69, 89–104. For a more “intimate” account, albeit in Russian, of the Symbolists, their relation to Solov’ëv, and intriguing scattered remarks about Solov’ëv himself, including his mental health, see Valentinov 1969. The reader is invited to draw one’s own conclusions. For specimens of Solov’ëv’s writings while in a trance, see Chulkov 1992. Chulkov (1879–1939) presented these specimens at a meeting of the State Academy for the Study of the Arts (GAKhN), of which he was a member, in 1927. Thus, not all of Solov’ëv’s unpublished writings were destroyed upon his death by his brother Mikhail. Since Solov’ëv had no settled residence, his surviving mother and a sister, in addition to his brother, kept some of his papers. Chulkov obtained his specimens from the library of Saratov University, which obtained them in a bequest from I. A. Shlapkin (1858–1918), a professor at St. Petersburg University. Indeed, Sergey Solovyov had intended at the beginning of the 1920s to publish previously unpublished letters as well as some of the “automatic writings” of his uncle in connection with the preparation of his biography. In a preface to the planned collection, he expressed his hesitation, writing “I consider it my duty to stipulate that the publication of these documents proceeds against my wish. … I consider it my duty always to protect the secrets of the deceased from prying eyes. … But such is the tragic lot of every great man that sooner or later his intimate life enters the public domain.” Quoted in Kozyrev 2018: 137. Nothing came of Solovyov’s intention. Additional specimens of Solov’ëv’s “automatic writings” can be found as an appendix to Kozyrev’s article. See Kozyrev 2018: 144–156.
- 19.
SS, vol. 6: 291.
- 20.
SS, vol. 6: 396.
- 21.
Carlson 1993: 47.
- 22.
Read writes, “The Solov’ev admired by the philosophers was not the same one as the Solov’ev admired by the poets. … The former were impressed less by his literary work than by his more strictly philosophical writing.” Read 1979: 14. Whereas Read is certainly correct with regard to which works the two groups valued, the philosophers did not pursue the genuine philosophical nuggets in Solov’ëv’s writings.
- 23.
Radlov 1900: 42.
- 24.
Struve 1902: 199–200.
- 25.
Vvedenskij 1901: 12.
- 26.
Vvedenskij 1901: 15.
- 27.
Novgorodcev 1901: 112.
- 28.
Novgorodcev 1901: 120.
- 29.
Novgorodcev 1901: 125. Even Novgorodcev’s qualified sympathy for Solov’ëv’s pronouncements on legal philosophy were too much for his renegade former student Vasilij A. Saval’skij (1873–1915), an unusually outspoken devotee of the Marburg School. Expressing his displeasure with any compromise with Solov’ëv and with Novgorodcev in particular in mind, he wrote, “In their return to Kant, representatives of Russian philosophical thought sided with the Windelband-Rickert School, apparently because the ideas of that direction are congenial to Solov’ëv’s philosophy….” Saval’skij 1907: 11.
- 30.
- 31.
Lopatin 1910: 627.
- 32.
Bulgakov 1903: 52.
- 33.
Bulgakov 2003: 116.
- 34.
Bulgakov 1910: 661.
- 35.
For a general overview of the situation, see Bird 2010.
- 36.
We ourselves need not engage in speculating on the reason for this phenomenon, a reason that cannot be falsified. However, at this time there was a growing sense of Russian national identity among many Russian idealists and toward a distinctive Russian religious identity as well. See Stroop 2014: 200–201. The extensive secondary literature on the Society renders unnecessary here a detailed discussion of it, which in any case is a matter best left to the historian. For more information see, in particular Burchardi 1998 and also Morozova 2008.
- 37.
Trubeckoj 2003: 221.
- 38.
Bulgakov 2003: 225–226. This supposedly ineradicable connection between religion and philosophy, of course, is based on his conception of philosophy, one which few would find tenable today.
- 39.
Bulgakov 2003: 229.
- 40.
Frank 1904: 245.
- 41.
Frank 1996: 423.
- 42.
Frank 1950: 2.
- 43.
Berdjaev 1907: 298.
- 44.
Berdiaev 1994: 12.
- 45.
Berdjaev 1991: 355. Cioran writes that already by this time (1911) Solov’ëv’s dual character “had been firmly established.” Cioran 1977: 39. Belkin correctly remarks that these two images have hardened into two ways of reading Solov’ëv. The mystics have one way, and the scholars another way. But for Solov’ëv there was never an unfathomable chasm. The two images, despite the gap between them, flowed along together and even merged at times. See Belkin 2008: 385.
- 46.
Berdjaev 1991: 372.
- 47.
Berdjaev 1913: 46–47.
- 48.
Berdjaev 2002: 688. This article originally appeared in 1925 under the title “Ideja bogochelovechestva Vl. Solov’ëv.”
- 49.
Ern 1991: 34.
- 50.
Ern 1911b: 135. A reference to Solov’ëv’s supposed “encounters” or hallucinations of this figure at various times in his life.
- 51.
Ern 1911b: 136. Ern offered no substantiation for his claim that the idea of divine humanity is the fundamental idea of Christianity.
- 52.
Trubeckoj 1910: 647.
- 53.
Ern 1911b: 141. It is amazing in long retrospect how the Russian philosophers, writing in ignorance of recent developments in German and British philosophy, consigned philosophy as a whole to the dustbin of history. Despite their interest in the past, they could not conceive that their own conceptions were historical.
- 54.
Ern 1991: 112.
- 55.
Trubeckoj, in the early days of the War, wrote, “Russia is finding its spiritual unity and integrity in a war of liberation. … Forgetting about herself, she serves the common human cause of culture when she liberates others. It is at that time that she stands at the summit of her own power and greatness.” Trubeckoj 2011: 567. Of course, some would see in these very words more than a hint of nationalism and a good bit of hypocrisy given Russian attitudes in the past toward the Empire’s own subject nations.
- 56.
These Religious-Philosophical Societies arose in the first decade after Solov’ëv’s death. For a lengthy discussion see Putnam 1977: 56–92.
- 57.
The editorial statement in the first issue of the journal Logos in 1910 acknowledged that its mission was to combat positivism as firmly as Solov’ëv’s religious metaphysics, both of which would in effect denigrate the autonomy of philosophy. See Ot redakcii 1910: 3–4.
- 58.
Zweerde 2000: 43.
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Nemeth, T. (2019). Death and Legacy. In: The Later Solov’ëv . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20611-6_12
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