“A Foggy Youth”: Faith, Reason, and Social Thought in the Young Vladimir Segeevich

Solov’ev, 1853-1881

by

Sean Michael James Gillen

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(History)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

2012

Date of final oral examination: 2 May 2012

The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: David MacLaren McDonald, Professor of History Francine Hirsch, Professor of History Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Rudy Koshar, Professor of History Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Professor of History

© Copyright by Sean Michael James Gillen 2012 All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents i

Abstract

Table of Contents i-ii

Acknowledgments iii-iv

Abreviations v

Introduction: Vladimir Solov’ev in Historiography—The Problem of the “Symbolist Conceit” 1-43

Chapter 1: Solov’ev’s Moscow: Social Science, Civic Culture, and the Problem of Education, 1835-1873 44-83

Chapter 2: The Genesis of Solov’ev’s “Conscious Faith Founded on Reason:” History, Religion, and the Future of Mankind, 1873-1874 84-134

Chapter 3: Practical Philosophy and Solov’ev Abroad: Socialism, Ethics, and Foreign Policy—London and Cairo, 1875-1876 135-167

Chapter 4: The Russo-Turkish War and the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee: Statehood, Society, and Religion—June 1876-February 1877 168-214

Chapter 5: Chteniia o bogochelovechestve—Christian Epic in a Theistic Mode: Theism, Morality, and Society, 1877-1878 215-256

Conclusion: 257-266

Bibliography

267-305 ii

Acknowledgments iii

This dissertation has been supported by both individuals and institutions. Above all, my advisor, David McDonald, provided intellectual guidance while also allowing me the freedom to explore connections that were sometimes tangential. Although Laurence Dickey may not agree with the way that I have set out my argument, he taught me the history and methods of European intellectual history. Fran Hirsch taught me Soviet History and how to discipline my writing and argument. Rudy Koshar taught me European and German social history. Judith Kornblatt’s seminar on Vladimir Solov’ev was the germ, to borrow a metaphor from Herzen’s repertoire, of the argument of this dissertation, even though that may be hard to see and she may not agree with much of my argument. Marina Iur’evna Sorokina introduced me to archival research in

Russia and has always supported my work, though she did not always agree with my methods or conclusions. While conducting research in Moscow in 2007-2008, Elena Arkad’evna Takho-

Godi—of the Library of the history of Russian Philosophy and Culture, the A.F. Losev House— graciously arranged for me to discuss my dissertation project with N.V. Kotrelev. At an early stage in writing, Laura Engelstein posed some tough questions that helped me sharpen my argument at a colloquium organized and administered by David and Fran. The Intellectual

History Group founded and administered by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen also provided a venue to present parts of my dissertation at several points in my writing process. I have tried to follow their examples of scholarship. As always, any mistakes are my own.

Friends and family also supported this dissertation in many ways. Patrick Michelson,

Martha Michelson, and Peter Michelson provided boundless support, intellectual, moral, and even financial. I am lucky to be able to call them friends. My grandparents provided financial support in my first years as a graduate student in Madison, Wisconsin. They also provided help

at latter stages during research and writing. Greg Bond provided diversions from my first daysiv in Madison—sometimes at the right time, sometimes not. Colleen Lucey provided free lodging in Moscow and helped split the rent in Madison. She was and is a good friend.

Research for this dissertation was supported by several grants. Research in Russia and

France was supported above all by the Alice D. Mortenson-Michael B. Petrovich Research

Fellowship. A Vilas Research and Travel Grant and research grants from the Department of

History at the University of Wisconsin also supported that research. The Mortenson-Michael B.

Petrovich Research Fellowship also supported research at the Bakhmeteff Archives of the Butler

Library at Columbia University. While an associate at the Summer Research Laboratory of

Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia Center at University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign Illinois-

Urbana-Champaign, a grant offered by the center defrayed the costs of room and board while I browsed the Libraries extensive collection of Russian periodicals. I would also like to thank the librarians at that institution for their help in locating items. Finally, the George L. Mosse

Exchange Fellowship, directed by John Tortorice, allowed me to begin writing in Jerusalem,

Israel and conduct additional research trips to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Paris.

Abreviations v

Archives: Moscow GARF: Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii RGALI: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Isskustva RGVIA: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv TsIAM: Tsentral’nyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy

Saint Petersburg OR RNB: Otdel Rukopisei Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka DP RNB: Dom Plekhanova Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka

Paris BN: Bibliothèque nationale de France AN: Les Archives nationales de France APP: Archive de la Préfecture de Police de Paris BDIC: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine AD: Archive de la Défense au Château de Vincennes MAE: Ministère des Affaires étrangéres

United States BAR: Bakhmeteff Archive, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY UIUC: University Archives, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Works: SS: S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds. Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 2nd ed., vols. 1-10. Saint Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911-1914.

Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vols. 11-12. Saint Petersburg: “Prosveshchenie,” n.d. Reprint, Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1966-1970.

PSS: A.A. Nosov, ed. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh, 3 vols. Moscow: “Nauka,” 2000-2001.

Pis’ma: E.L. Radlov and S.M. Solov’ev, ed. Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 3 vols. Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1908-1911.

Pis’ma, vol. 4: E.L. Radlov, ed. Pis’ma i materialy. Petersburg: Izd-vo Z.I. Grzhebina, 1922.

1 INTRODUCTION: Vladimir Solov’ev in Historiography—The Problem of the “Symbolist Conceit”

With the exception of Nikolai Chernyshevskii, there is perhaps no more misunderstood thinker in the pantheon of Russian intellectual history than Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev (1853-

1900). The standard accounts of Solov’ev’s life and work—a narrative I call the “Symbolist

Conceit”—present the thinker as Russia’s first professional philosopher whose entire oeuvre is the product of mystical visions of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God. What Solov’ev read, thought, and did disappear behind the shadow of this mystical vision. The source of this misunderstanding lies in the inordinately important role ascribed to a mystical being called

Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God, in explanations of the source and motive of Solov’ev’s entire intellectual endeavor. While it is impossible to deny the fact that Solov’ev had mystical experiences, as he himself reported in private correspondence, the overwhelming importance assigned to this experience alone has diverted scholars’ attention away from the historically specific problems Solov’ev thought he was answering and the equally historically specific resources on which he could draw to develop such answers. Looking back from 1892 on his formative years, Solov’ev acknowledged his own ambivalence about his complex intellectual endeavor when he wrote about “the dawn of his foggy youth.”4 This dissertation aims to recover both the complexity of Solov’ev’s intellectual work and the ambiguity of his heritage.

The original authors of what I call the “Symbolist Conceit” constructed a very selective image of Solov’ev legacy as they developed cultural and political critiques of the late-Imperial and early-Soviet orders. As I will argue in the conclusion, scholars should be skeptical of such a

Solov’ev, for scholarly and socio-political reasons. For more purely historical reasons, this

4 Vl. Solov’ev, “Na zare tumannoi iunosti … (razskaz),” Russkaia mysl’ 13, no. 5 (1892): 184-198 and Ernst Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1911), 283-298. 2 dissertation argues that Solov’ev’s early career was motivated by the attempt to moralize socialism by depicting the development of justice and social equity within a theistic schema of history in which mankind realized these values as freely accepted duties that God called on mankind to realize. The fundamental feature of Solov’ev’s thought in the 1870s and 1880s was the treatment of social and political problems as religious and moral problems. This approach to social and political problems as intrinsically religious in nature places Solov’ev and his contemporaries firmly within European as well as Russian intellectual history. The parameters of the “Symbolist Conceit,” however, have often obscured this aspect of the intersection of

Solov’ev’s career with the Russia of his time.

THE PROBLEM—THE “SYMBOLIST CONCEIT”

For more than a century, the study of Vladimir Solov’ev and his work has drawn on an incomplete source base. In 1902, such prominent friends and acquaintances of Solov’ev’s as

A.N. Pypin and Prince S.N. Trubetskoi complained about the omission of humorous poems and incomplete works in the first editions of Solov’ev’s collected works.5 The philosopher’s brother,

Mikhail Sergeevich, had prepared this incomplete edition of the collected works shortly after

Solov’ev’s death, and Solov’ev’s nephew, Sergei Mikhailovich, reissued the collection almost unchanged in a second edition of 1911.6 Only with the publication of the Russian Academy of

Science’s first installment of Solov’ev’s Complete Works and Letters in Twenty Volumes in 2000 has this source problem been addressed. As their editor, the late A.A. Nosov, hoped, scholars

5 “Ot redaktsii,” in A.A. Nosov, ed., V.S. Solov’ev: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 5-8. An important review omitted from the editor’s footnotes is A.F. Koni, “Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev,” Vestnik Evropy (February 1903): 651-689, esp. 652. 6 Mikhail Solov’ev “Predislovie k pervomu izdaniiu,” in S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladmir Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: “Prosveschenie,” 1911; reprint, Brussels: Izd-vo Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1966), n.p and Sergei Solov’ev, “Predislovie ko vtoromu izdaniiu,” in ibid.

3 could now evaluate “the philosopher’s entire legacy [nasledie]” of published and unpublished works and personal ephemera “that have, up to the present, been found” in archives and rare published sources.7

Nosov had two ambitious plans for this substantial piece of scholarship. With these materials—including the extensive commentaries based on archival evidence that were prepared by Nosov and other members of the editorial committee—Nosov argued that scholars should now illuminate “the broad context of Russian philosophical and cultural life from the 70s to the

90s of the nineteenth century” and introduce on firm empirical ground “serious changes in well- established representations of the philosopher’s historical role” in the culture and politics of the late empire.8

In the eleven years that have passed since the publication of the first three volumes of

Solov’ev’s complete works, by contrast, not much has changed in our understanding of

Solov’ev’s relationship to his context and his historical role. The persistence of an unhistorical understanding of Solov’ev is connected to the importance that scholars ascribe to three mystical visions that Solov’ev is supposed to have experienced as a child and young man in the 1860s and

1870s. Following an interpretive tradition of Solov’ev’s life and work that originated in the

Russian fin de siècle in the early twentieth century and was codified by K.V. Mochul’skii in the emigration, scholars have interpreted these mystical experiences as encounters with a divine and feminine being called Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God because Solov’ev did discuss this

7 “Ot redaktsii,” in PSS, vol. 1, 8. 8 Ibid., 12, 13. On Solov’ev as a political thinker, see Aleksandr Gavrilov’s interview of Nosov in “V poiskakh novogo Vladimira Solov’eva: Aleksandr Nosov,” NG. Ex Libris, no. 9 (132) (10 March 2000). On A.A. Nosov, see M.A. Kolerov, “In Memoriam: umer Aleksandr Nosov,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 1 (21) (2002): and N.V. Kotrelev, “Pamiati Aleksandra Alekseevicha Nosova,” in M.A. Kolerov, ed., Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli: ezhegodnik 2001/2002 (Moscow: “Tri Kvadrat,” 2002), 864-870.

4 figure briefly in a few of his works and, as a very young man, composed a dialogue entitled La

Sophia in 1876. As Solov’ev noted in these works, the figure of Sophia had textual precedents in canonical and apocryphal scripture, especially Proverbs and The Song of Solomon. Although it is impossible to deny that Solov’ev had mystical experiences, the way the Sophia is used in the canonical narrative of Solov’ev’s life and work obscures the complex nature of Solov’ev’s understanding of religion.

Not much has changed in our historical understanding of Solov’ev’s religion because of the over-arching importance assigned to Sophia in explaning his life and work.

Indeed, historians and critics still agree that Sophia the Divine Wisdom of God occupies a central role in the thought of Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev (1853-1900) in general, and his poetry— especially Tri svidaniia (1898)—and Chteniia o bogochelovechestve (1878) in particular. Even the post-1878 works in which Sophia almost never appears, this mystical being is said somehow to be the motive behind all of Solov’ev’s utterances.9 There are those, for example, who consider Sophia—either as experience or representation—“one of the basic keys to Solov’ev’s heritage.”10 For others, whether as liberal in religion or politics, Slavophile conservative, quasi- populist, forerunner of Silver Age artistic movements, or the so-called Russian religious

9 For a concise catalogue of the instances in which the word “Sophia” appears in Solov’ev’s works, see Greg Gaut, “Christian Politics: Vladimir Solov’ev’s Social Gospel Theology,” Modern Greek Studies Year Book 10/11 (1994- 1995): 670-671n.11. Given the alleged importance of this figure in Solov’ev’s work, the rareness of its appearance in Solov’ev’s works is notable. For early and quite brief cautions against overstating the importance of Sophia in Solov’ev’s work, see V.V. Zen’kovskii, Review of Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, by K.V. Mochul’skii, Put’, no. 52 (Nov. 1936-March 1937): 79 and Dmitrij Tschizewskij, Review of W. S. Solowjews Geschichtsphilosophie, by Georg Sacke and Die Geschichtsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjews, by Alexander Koschewnikoff, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, Band 8 (1931): 270-275. 10 N.V. Kotrelev, “‘Blagonamerenost’ ne spasaet ot zabluzhdenii…’: neizdannye avtografy Vladimira Solov’eva,” Nashe nasledie, no. 55 (2000), 66n.7. I thank Kotrelev for bringing this article to my attention. The most detailed study in this vein is now Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,” in Kornblatt, ed. and trans., Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1-97. See also Viktoria Kravchenko, Vladimir Solov’ev i Sofiia: monografiia (Moscow: AGRAF, 2006) and Samuel D. Cioran, Vladimir Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, Can.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977).

5 renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century, Sophia is said to occupy the center of gravity in all of his work.11 Even studies that focus on his social and political criticism implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, acknowledge the centrality of Sophia by studying only works written after the lectures.12

Amidst all these more or less clear analyses reflecting an ambiguous legacy, however,

Vladimir Sergeevich himself still remains shrouded in mist.13 Solov’ev’s own conception of the intellectual, social, and political dilemmas facing him and his intended answers to them, in so far as we can know this, remain hidden. Whatever their particular emphases, historians and critics

11 Andrzej Walicki treated him in almost all of these guises before 1991 in The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), 78-79; The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 559-579; Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986), 165-212. On Solov’ev’s populist affinities, see James H. Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956), 134-138. More recently, on liberalism in theology, Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 109-224; on liberalism in politics, see Randall A. Poole, “Editor’s Introduction: Philosophy and Politics in the Russian Liberation Movement: The Moscow Psychological Society and Its Symposium, Problems of Idealism,” in idem., ed. and trans., Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1-78, and V.M. Khevrolina, “Vneshnepoliticheskie kontseptsii rossiiskogo liberalizma v kontse XIX veka,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1997): 34-50; on Russian religious thought, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 27-87; on the Silver Age, Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 57-88; A.A. Takho-Godi and E.A. Takho-Godi, eds., Vladimir Solov’ev i kul’tura Serebrianogo veka: k 150-letiu Vl. Solov’eva i 110-letiu A.F. Loseva (Moscow: Nauka, 2005); and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 33-50; and James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 464-472. 12 Manon de Courten, History, Sophia, and the Russian Nation: A Reassessment of Vladimir Solov’ev’s Views on History and His Social Commitment (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004); David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). 13 The place of Sophia in Solov’ev’s work is analogous to the “ambiguous legacy” of the theory of consent as interpreted in John Locke’s Two Treatises before John Dunn. See Dunn’s, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), esp. 6, 9. For a précis of this argument, see also idem., “Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke,” Historical Journal 10, no. 2 (1967): 153-182, esp. 153-157. Dunn’s interpretation depended on the textual criticism of his teacher, Peter Laslett in his “Introduction,” in John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1960]), 3-126. On the historiographical contribution of the Cambridge school, see Anthony Grafton, “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 1 (2006): 2, 25-26. Dramatizing the ambiguous legacy, see Jonathan Sutton, “Vladimir Solov’ëv as Reconciler and Polemicist,” in Wil vad den Bercken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zwede, eds., Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist (Leuven, Paris, and Sterling, Virginina: Peeters, 2000), 1-11.

6 continue to follow the interpretive paradigm set out by Dimitri Strémooukhoff and especially

K.V. Mochul’skii.14 Mochul’skii’s study went through two editions (one before, the other after

World War II) and can be regarded as a classic text.15 As we shall see, behind both of these students of Solov’ev stand Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and a trio of Symbolist poets:

Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Solov’ev’s nephew, Sergei Solov’ev.

An historical Solov’ev has been obscured for so long because of the persistence of an exegetical tradition that I call the “Symbolist Conceit.” It is Symbolist because its primary authors were a trio of Symbolist poets—Belyi, Blok, and Sergei Solov’ev—who constructed an image of Solov’ev as a mystic whose work was guided by visions of a mystical vision called

Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God. Although the figure of Sophia is derived from some of

Solov’ev’s texts, the Symbolists interpreted the figure in ways that Solov’ev did not originally intend. It is a conceit because the Russian Symbolists’ poetic apprehension of the world in general, and Solov’ev in particular, was self-consciously premised on the development of certain of Solov’ev’s themes, above all Sophia, as a complex extended metaphor. I do not mean to discredit poetic apprehension of the world in general, only that it is different from a historical apprehension of the past. I do mean, however, to argue that the poetic and the historical

14 K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951 [1936]) and Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Solov’ev and His Messianic Work, Elizabeth Meyendorff, trans., Phillip Guilbeau and Heather Elise MacGregor, eds. (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing, 1980). On Mochul’skii, see Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), quote on 102, 127. Mochul’skii had been the tutor of Raeff and Nikita Struve in Paris. Eventually, Mochul’skii took holy orders. See Michael A. Minihan, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), xiii-xiv. The author of that introduction claims to have relied on personal conversations with Helen Iswolsky for information on Mochul’skii. In a letter to Wladimir Weidlé, Gleb Petrovich Struve wrote: “I knew Mochul’skii well. My brother, Aleksei, was once friends with him. I have his letters. I didn’t have the opportunity and occasion to note that sensitivity of his, about which You write, since I sometimes ‘teased’ [draznil] him, and, in general, I knew him far less well than You.” In BAR, Wladimir Weidlé Papers, Box 3, letter dated 26 March 1977. 15 On how “classic” should be construed here, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 4-5.

7 apprehension of the past are two essentially incommensurable ways of understanding the past— the former relies purely on subjective feeling, while the latter strives to verify one’s impressions through rigorous research and source criticism.16 The Symbolists’ “mythopoeic method” of assimilating all of Solov’ev’s utterances into Three Encounters has obscured the historically specific texts and contexts that provoked Solov’ev’s utterances and gave them specific meanings at particular moments in time.17 Ultimately, the Symbolists made Solov’ev accidental to

Imperial Russia and enlisted him in their criticism of politics and society in fin-de-siècle

Moscow.

The difference between the Symbolists’ Solov’ev and an historical Solov’ev can be seen in their reactions to enlightened religion and theism. As students of religion in Europe have shown, a fundamental problematic of enlightened religion was the “problem of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in general.”18 Scholars have developed several conceptual distinctions to explain this relationship: as already indicated, between the natural and the supernatural; between axiology and teleology; between the secularization of a transcendent

Providence into an immanent idea of progress; between faith and reason; or “the organicist strategy of explanation.”19 All of these strategies for dealing with the issue of secularization

16 On this distinction, see R.G. Collingwood, The Idea o History, Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 17 I borrow “mythopoeic method” from David Sorkin, “The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method,” New German Critique, no. 77 (1999): 7-28. On the way “assimilated” should be understood here, see Laurence Dickey, “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’: Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues,” Journal of Modern History 58, no. 3 (1986): 584-585. 18 Rudolf Otto, “Darwinism and Religion,” in Religious Essays: A Supplement to The Idea of the Holy, Brian Lunn, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 128 and also 134, 136-137. 19 On the natural/supernatural distinction, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), esp. 65-70. On the axialogical/teleological distinction, see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, Michael Bullock, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1- 4; and Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 120-121. Hans Urs von Balthasar links the distinction to Ernst Troeltsch in his Prometheus: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealismus (Heidelberg: F.H. Kerle, 1947), 12 and n.1. On immanence/transcendence as

8 assume an apocalyptic or eschatological schema of history.20 As biblical scholars have shown, however, the doctrine of last things was not homogenous. Rather, it was heterogeneous depending on the nearness or farness in time in which a particular author envisioned the eschaton to occur. A variety of eschatological visions for the Church could emerge after the death and resurrection of Christ. For the early Christian Church, as revealed in the Gospels, the ministry, crucifixion, and ascension of Jesus Christ for the early Church meant that the decisive and unrepeatable moment of the eschaton had “entered history.”21 Since Christ’s coming and resurrection were the eschaton for the primitive Church, nothing meaningful could happen within history. C.H. Dodd has referred to this eschatological vision as “realized eschatology” or

“realized apocalypse.”22 Since Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion were regarded as the end of history, the Second Coming was thought to be imminent. When the Second Coming did not occur and “the longer the Church had a history in this world,” as Rudolf Bultmann put it, “the

secularization, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 145-159, 243-246; Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1957), 56-73; and C.H. Dodd, The Bible To-Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 120; and John E. Toews, “The Immanent Genesis and Transcendent Goal of Law: Savigny, Stahl, and the Ideology of the Christian German State,” American Journal of Comparative Law 37, no. 1 (1989): esp. 149-150, 158-159. On faith and reason, see Löwith, Meaning in History, 198; and Georges Florovsky, “Reason and Faith in the Philosophy of Soloviëv,” in Ernst J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 283-297. On the “organicist strategy,” see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 16. White links this strategy with Herder and Romanticism in general at pp. 79-80. 20 M.H. Abrams has show this brilliantly with respect to English and German romantic poetry and idealistic philosophy in Natural Supernaturalism, esp. 57-65 and p. 490n.82 where he links Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel to a tradition of representing Biblical eschatology as versions of human progress in terms of rationalized theology, or what Kant called “philosophical chiliasm.” Löwith also connects these German thinkers to Joachim of Fiore in Meaning in History, 159, 208-212. See also Bultmann, History and Eschatology, 56-73. For a detailed account of the movement of eschatological thought in German territories from the Reformation to the early 19th century, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 40-76. 21 C.H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments: Three Lectures (New York: Harper & Row, 1964 [1936]), 85. 22 Ibid., 85, 86, 93-94. See also C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 7 and 447n.1 where Dodd credits Georges Florovsky with the phrase “inaugurated eschatology.”

9 more an interest in history developed.”23 After Jesus’ ministry and Christ’s Ascension, speculations about the future proliferated, eventually culminating in Joachim of Fiore’s influential speculations about the Second Coming in the 11th and 12th centuries.24 This sort of speculation could lead to revolutionary visions of the immediate imminence of the Second

Coming, or push the Second Coming so far into the future that revolutionary implications were neutralized, or focus on the intermediate realm between Christ’s Ascension and the Second

Coming in order to focus on moderate religious activism in the interim.

One complex strategy for maintaining a position between the immanent and the transcendent realms that had begun to be used self-consciously in France, England, and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was theism.25 In this religious schema of the history of mankind acting between immanent and transcendent realms, theism offered a spectrum of positions explaining mankind’s position between the two realms as well as God’s relationship to mankind. As we shall see, Russia had begun to develop its own tradition of theism at the turn of the nineteenth century, if not sooner, that fundamentally shaped Solov’ev’s attitude to religion.26

23 Bultmann, Eschatology and History, 56. 24 See Abrams and Löwith noted above as well as Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 111-113 and Bultmann, Eschatology and History, 62-63. 25 A.E. Taylor, “Theism,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958 [1921]), 261. Taylor connects Solov’ev’s Opravdanie dobra with theism at p. 281. Löwith does the same in Meaning in History, 239n.23. Alasdair MacIntyre connects theism with the problem of teleology in After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 50-52. 26 The representatives of Russian theism were also promoters of Platonizing Christianity through the translation of the Early Church Fathers. For history of this translation project, see Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007), 29-92. On the importance of Plato’s religion to the Early Church Fathers, especially Clement and Origen, see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 44-47, 64-67. The interaction between Russian Orthodox laymen and clerics with various Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements from the late-sixteenth century through the end of the Russian Empire is poorly understood. For exceptions, see Pierre Pascal, Avvakum et les débuts du raskol: le crise religeiuse au XVII siècle en Russie (Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1938), 14-25, especially 16-17 who documents Calvinism and Socinianism in the Western border regions of Muscovy. There is evidence for rationalist and anti- trinitarian Socinian doctrines in Muscovy’s western borderlands in the first pages of Avvakum’s Life where the supernatural character of the Cross and the centrality of the Trinity are asserted relying on the authority of pseudo-

10 Indeed, some of Solov’ev’s more perceptive contemporaries characterized his religious thought this way.27 The Symbolists, by contrast, rejected this explanation of the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent by rejecting the role of God or a divinity in religion.

For them, the transcendent could be experienced immediately and ecstatically without any

Divine mediation or guidance. Solov’ev understood religion in a significantly different way than the Symbolist poets.

In an important collection of essays published in 1911, Nikolai Berdiaev conceptualized the religious problem to which theism was an answer, but conceptualized the relationship between the immanent and transcendent in religion in terms identical to the Symbolist poets.

Berdiaev claimed somewhat disingenuously that Solov’ev’s “unique character [litso] … still remains a riddle for us” because of an apparently bifurcated personality: a rational “day-time” philosopher and social critic and a mystical “night-time” visionary, poet, and prophet of Sophia

Dionysius. See A.N. Robinson, ed., Zhitie Avvakuma i drugie ego sochineniia (Moscow: Sovestskaia Rossiia, 1991), 27-28. It has recently been shown that the work attributed to Avvakum is the product of a group of Old Believers. See Gabriela Scheidegger, Endzeit: Russland am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1999). For an early criticism of Pascal’s unsympathetic characterization of Nikon, see see Dimitry Strémooukhoff, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie religieus 20 (1940): 169-171. On the importance of Latin Humanism in the Russian Empire’s western borderlands, and its insignificance in the Muscovite heartland, see Max J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia: Pagan Authors, Ukrainians, and the Resiliency of Muscovy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Orthodox clerics trained in the western regions of the empire reveal a certain amount of embarrassment at what they regarded as Muscovy’s complacent and self-important piety. See, for example, Ieromonakh Makarii (Bulgakov), Isotriia kievskoi Akademii (Saint Petersburg: V Tip. Konstantina Zhernakova, 1843) and Arkhiepiskop Makarii Litovvskogo i Vielenskogo (Bulgakov), Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, vol. 9 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. R. Golike, 1879), 304, 316, 318, 324-329. These sentiments were expressed by Paul of Aleppo, the seventeenth-century visitor to Aleksei Mikhailovich’s Moscow, in The Travels of Maccarius, Patriarch of Antioch, vol. 2, part 5, F.C. Belfour, trans. (London: A.J. Valpy, 1836), 41. For a recent consideration of Lutheranism and Orthodoxy, see Gregory L. Freeze, “Lutheranism and Orthodoxy,” in Luther zwischen Kulturen, Hans Medick, ed. (Göttingen: Vanderhoek Verlag, 2004), 197-317. 27 Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli: individualizm i meshchanstvo v russkoi literature i zhizni XIX v., 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1911), 486; Ossip-Lourié, La philosophie Russe contemporaine (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1902), 33; S. Kedrov, “Studenty-Platoniki v Akademii,” in U Troitsy v Akademii, 1814-1914 (Tipografiia Tovarishcha I.D. Sytina, 1914), 224; and A.A. Nikol’skii, Russkii Origen XIX veka: Vl.S. Solov’ev (Saint Petersburg: Nauka, 2000), 25, 34, 309. Nikol’skii’s work was originally published serially in the Kievan journal Vera i razum in 1902.

11 the Wisdom of God.28 Having posed the question of understanding Solov’ev’s thought as a choice between either the “day-time” or the “night-time” Solov’ev, subsequent students of

Solov’ev’s thought have followed him for nearly the last 100 years. When one looks at

Solov’ev’s religion from the perspective of theism, however, the day-time and night-time work together as discrete moments in a broad process of religious enlightenment.

One important, but problematic, exception to the Symbolist Conceit is Sergei Khoruzhii.

In the lead essay to a collection commemorating the centenary of Solov’ev’s death, Khoruzhii appreciated that much of “the canonical image of Solov’ev” and his “legacy” is the product of the “Russian symbolists” who “almost wholly shaped Solov’ev’s image in Russian culture.”29

Khoruzhii had in mind three of the Symbolists’ main stereotypes about Solov’ev: as Knight of

Sophia and prophet; as a proponent of Christian unity and the reunification of the Church; and as a Christian humanist.30 Despite the radical implications of this suggestion, Khoruzhii recoils from the revisionist implications of his identification of Sophia as a myth. He draws from

Solov’ev’s works “a solid kernel of a series of major, interconnected conceptions of great productivity”: Godmanhood, All-Unity, and Sophia, the latter of which he understands in part as a “mythologem.”31 Khoruzhii draws inspiration from his reading of Vladimir Nabokov, though his reading is suspect. According to Khoruzhii, in Nabokov’s the Gift, there is a certain metaphor, as if recapitulating [everything], that the author gives there with the image of Nikolai

28 N.A. Berdiaev, “Problema vostok i zapad v religioznom soznanii Vl. Solov’eva,” in Sbornik pervyi o Vladimire Solov’eve (Moscow: Put’, 1911), 104-128, quotations 104. See the same formulation in his The Russian Idea, R.M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles-The Centenary Press, 1947), 230. This formulation was the way Solov’ev was taught at Harvard University from 1930s-1950s. See Martin E. Malia, “Michael Karpovich, 1888-1959,” Russian Review 19, no. 1 (1960), 67. 29 S.S. Khoruzhii, “Nasledie Vladimira Solov’eva sto let spustia,” in I.V. Borisova and A.P. Kozyrev, eds., Solov’evskii sbornik: materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii ‘V.S. Solov’ev i ego filosofskoe nasledie’ 28-30 avgusta 2000 g. (Moscow: Fenomenologiia-Germenevtika, 2000), 1, 4-5. 30 Ibid., 4. 31 Ibid.

12 Chernyshevskii. During abrupt change—poverty, moving, rebuilding—people take off with themselves the needful of their possessions.”32

Khoruzhii’s interpretation of the intention of Nabokov’s image, however, is misleading and belongs to a tradition of commemorating a particular interpretation of the Silver Age that has only recently begun to be studied as commemoration.33 The passage Khoruzhii reproduced is part of a review by the fictional critic Koncheyev, who has no first name or patronymic in the novel, on the biography of N.G. Chernyshevskii by the novel’s protagonist, Fedor

Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Nabokov’s depiction of “someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long-forgotten relative” reflects a skepticism of the present’s need for its past. Koncheyev’s parallel between this image and the way the Russian intelligentsia picked up “‘the image of Chernyshevskii, which was spontaneously but accidentally carried away abroad with the émigrés, together with other, more useful things,’” suggests the unimportance of any engagements with a past, whatsoever.34 Second, based on

Nabokov’s narrative, there is every reason to believe that, if not necessarily a complete figment of the protagonist’s imagination, the Koncheyev that appears in the narrative is the work of

Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s imagination. During their first discussion while leaving a gathering,

Godunov-Cherdyntsev suddenly realizes that he as “been reciting a fictitious dialogue with

[himself] as supplied by a self-teaching handbook of literary inspiration” after he and Koncheyev

32 Ibid., 6. 33 Galina Rylkova, The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). On the commemoration of October 1917 by the Soviet government, see Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). See also, Philip Swoboda “The Philosophical Thought of S.L. Frank, 1902-1915: A Study of the Metaphysical Impulse in Early Twentieth-Century Russia” (Ph.D. diss.: Columbia University, 1992), 7-12. 34 Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov, trans. (New York: Random House, 1991), 308.

13 are supposed to have parted company some ways back.35 At the second encounter, Godunov-

Cherdyntsev awakens from his imaginary conversation with Koncheyev when “the young

German who was sitting beside Fyodor on the bench and who had seemed to him to resemble

Koncheyev” yells at him in German.36 The episode dramatizes and criticizes a tradition of

Russian culture in which one constructed an image of an individual entirely on one’s own perceptions and with no connection to reality.

The myth of Sophia is just such a tradition—it had its own historical moment that had little to do with the young Vladimir Solov’ev’s intellectual endeavors. This moment occurred among two groups of Muscovite thinkers and centered around Imperial Moscow University. The first consisted of V.I. Briusov, Andrei Belyi, A.A. Blok, and S.M. Solov’ev who privileged the

“night-time,” mystical Solov’ev. The second consisted of N.A. Berdiaev and S.N. Bulgakov who at first privileged the “day-time” Solov’ev interested in religion and ethics as a means of ethicizing politics, but later began to emphasize the “night-time” Solov’ev in response to their growing disenchantment with the course of politics after 1909. Berdiaev and Bulgakov began to privilege the “night-time” Solov’ev through their contact with Belyi during social and publishing meetings patronized by Margerita Kirillovna Morozova beginning in 1910. Berdiaev and

Bulgakov established their interpretation of Solov’ev as a norm during their exile in Paris.

Alongside these appropriations of Solov’ev’s legacy, another debate loosely connected to

Morozova took place between two of Solov’ev’s friends: L. M. Lopatin, the chair of the

35 Ibid., 62-76, 307-308, 341, quotation 76. Koncheyev is depicted interacting with other characters only once and only from Godunov-Cherdyntev’s perspective, p. 65. Also, it is not clear whether “old Stupishin” addresses Koncheyev or Godunov-Cherdyntsev, p. 70. 36 Ibid., 337-344, quotation 343.

14 philosophy department at Moscow University, and Prince E.N. Trubetskoi.37 Their polemic concerned Trubetskoi’s method of “immanent critique separating the supra-temporal from the temporal” in coming to terms with Solov’ev’s legacy in his two-volume Mirosozertsaniia Vl.S.

Solov’eva that raised questions of historical interpretation that have yet to be resolved.38 In

1913, Lopatin referred to a “legend” that had begun to take shape around Solov’ev’s legacy that he thought prevented historical understanding.39

The history of the Symbolist conceit begins in the household of S.M. Solov’ev’s parents,

Vladimir’s brother Mikhail and sister-in-law Ol’ga M. Solov’eva in 1899. a. The Symbolists’ Ecstatic Solov’ev: Briusov, Belyi, Blok, and Sergei Solov’ev as Authors of the Conceit

The reduction of Solov’ev’s bipolar vision of mankind’s relationship to the immanent and the transcendent began in the Moscow apartment of Vladimir’s brother, Mikhail Sergeevich, around 1892 and 1893. In that household, Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (who received his nom de plume, Andrei Belyi, from M.S. Solov’ev), Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir’s nephew Sergei privileged Vladimir’s poetic works and read his other works through them.40 Looking back at the turn of the twentieth century from the 1930s, Andre Belyi presented his early life as regular

37 L.M. Lopatin, “Vl.S. Solov’ev i kniaz’ E.N. Trubetskoi,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii [VFP] 24, no. 4 (119) (1913): 339-374; 24, no. 5 (120) (1913): 375-419; 25, no. 3 (123) (1914): 477-526. kn. E.N. Trubetskoi, “K voprosu o mirovozrenii V.S. Solov’eva. (Po povodu stat’i L.M. Lopatina),” VFP 24, no. 5 (120) (1913): 439-457. Trubetskoi’s book provoked reviews from others as well: Ossip-Lourié, “Vladimir Soloviev (A propos d’un livre),” Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger (February 1914): 189-193 and Aleksandr Gizetti, “O mirosozertsanii Vladimira Solov’eva,” Zavety, no. 2 (1914): 1-21. 38 kn. E.N. Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsaniia Vl.S. Solov’eva, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izd-vo Avtora, 1913), iii. Recently, Randall A. Poole has begun to rehabilitate Trubetskoi. See his “Religion, War, and Revolution: E.N. Trubetskoi’s Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912-20,” Krtika 7, no. 2 (2006): 195-240, esp. 196 and “The Greatness of Solov’ev: A Review Essay,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 50, no. 1-2 (2008): 201-223, esp. 202n.7. 39 Lopatin, “Vl.S. Solov’ev i kn. E.N. Trubetskoi,” VFP 24, no. 4 (119) (1913): 345. For a brief account of the character of Solov’ev’s relationship with the Trubetskois and a depiction of Bulgakov, see N.A. Tsiriukov, Proshloe (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006), 342-349, esp. 343. 40 Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, A.V. Lavrov, ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1989), 339, 346, 361.

15 attempts to assert his own identity in a milieu dominated by Imperial Moscow University in general, where his father taught mathematics, and the Moscow Psychological Society in particular. In Carlylean language, Belyi and his generation’s great “no” said to the nineteenth was more specifically uttered mainly against the founding and active members of the

Psychological Society: his father Nikolai Bugaev, V.A. Gol’tsev, N.I. Kareev, Storozhenko,

M.M. Kovalevskii, I.I. Ianzhul, Skabichevskii, and Aleksei Veselovskii, Anuchin, and Usov. In

Belyi’s memory, which his letters from the time verify, it was what he various called the positivism, Neo-Kantianism, and constitutionalism shaping the “academic intelligentsia’s way of life” that he felt suffocated creativity of the “sons and sonnies [synki].”41

In his memoirs, Belyi dramatized what he regarded as the suffocating rationalism of

Moscow University by describing its effects on his domestic life in the “small professorial apartment” of his mother and father. He also illustrated the University’s role in his life through an incident with S.N. Trubetskoi. Trubetskoi refused to preside over the reading of a paper Belyi eventually published as “Formy iskusstva” in Mir Iskusstva in 1902.42 Belyi found refuge from this rationalism in the household of M.S. Solov’ev and O.M. Solov’eva, Vladimir’s brother and sister-in-law, and their son S.M. Solov’ev, whom Belyi often referred to as Serezha. They moved into an apartment under the Ianzhuls’.43 Elsewhere, Belyi privileged their “small country

41 Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 35-48, 55-59, 106-108, 125-128, 144, quotation 40, 53. For Belyi’s correspondence with A.A. Blok between 1903 and 1904, see A.V. Lavrov, ed., Andrei Belyi i Aleksandr Blok: perepiska, 1903-1919 (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2001), 15-158-160. 42 Belyi, Na rubezhe, 45, 82-83 and compare 97, 98, 123 and idem., Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, A.V. Lavrov, ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1990), 271-273. See also Belyi’s “commentary” (composed in 1926) to Blok’s first letter to him, dated 3 January 1903 in A.V. Lavrov, ed., Andrei Belyi i Aleksandr Blok: perepiska, 1903- 1919) (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2001), 17. S.M. Solov’ev remembered their households in similar terms in his, Vospominaniia, S.M. Misochnik, ed. (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003), 169-172. F.A. Shtepun appreciated some of Belyi’s criticisms of this environment in his Byvshee i Nebyvsheesia, vol. 1 (New York: Izd-vo imeni Chekhova, 1956), 265-266. 43 Belyi, Na rubezhe, 339-368.

16 estate” [imen’itse], Dedovo, where Belyi, Blok, and Sergei experienced what Belyi described as Vladimir’s posthumous presence in the family and, projecting future events on to the past,

Blok’s alcoholism and crude sensualism.44 S.M. Solov’ev recalled the events similarly, though he emphasized that at this time, they read his uncle as more of a romantic, individual expressivist than Sergei thought he actually was.45

With the arrival of Blok into their group in 1902, Belyi’s and Sergei’s interest in the works of Vladimir Solov’ev grew in intensity. According to Sergei, their friendship in Solov’ev reached a climax Christmas 1903 when Blok brought his new wife, Liubov’ Dmitrievna

Mendeeleva, to Sergei’s apartment in Moscow.46 In Belyi’s recollection, the climax occurred for him in 1904 at his family’s country house when he sensed that he and his friends had turned away from Vladimir.47 In his memoirs, Belyi no doubt linked his “brief vacation before the long storm” to 1904 so that he could portray his intellectual transformation to the 1905 revolution instead of his indiscretions with Blok’s new wife.48 Already in 1901, though, Belyi had begun an anonymous correspondence with the merchant magnate M.K. Morozova whom he vaguely associated with Sophia.49 None of them was interested in understanding what Vladimir had intended in any of his work. Even Vladimir’s nephew could only present his “uncle Volodia” as

44 Andrei Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, A.V. Lavrov, ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1990), 13-17, 34; and also idem., Arabeski (Moscow, 1911; reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 387-394. 45 S.M. Solov’ev, “Biografiia,” in V.S. Solov’ev, Stikhotvoreniia, 7th ed. (Moscow: Izd-vo Russkii Knizhnik, 1921), 45. Compare S.M. Solov’ev’s similar remarks regarding the distinction between his uncle and Blok in S.M. Solov’ev, Vospominaniia, 384-385 and his “Vopsominaiia o Bloke,” in ibid., 398, 406-407. For Solov’ev’s state of mind while composing his memoirs, see his response letter to Belyi dated 2 September 1921, who had told him of Blok’s death in RGALI, f. 53 (Andrei Belyi), o. 1, ed. khr. 274, 4 ll. Part of this letter was published in N.V. Kotrelev and A.V. Lavrov, “Perepiska Bloka s S.M. Solov’evym (1896-1915): vstupitel’naia stat’ia, publikatsiia i komentariia,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 92, kn. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 319 and 323n.64. 46 S.M. Solov’ev, Vospominaiia, 389. 47 Belyi, Mezdhu dvukh revoliutsii, 13. 48 Ibid. For Belyi’s indiscretions, see Lavrov, ed., Belyi and Blok: perepiska, 280-334. This correspondence covers the end of 1905 to about the middle of 1907. 49 A.V. Lavrov and John Malmstadt, eds., Andrei Belyi: Pis’ma k M.K. Morozovoi, 1901-1928 (Moscow: Progress- Pleiada, 2006), esp. 39-40. The letter is dated early to mid-February 1902.

17 an incomprehensible mixture of “a confused [smeshannyi] odor of incense, the Vatican, and

Vestnik Evropy.”50

They all read Vladimir for whatever inspiration could be conjured up in themselves. As

Belyi put it, they took Solov’evianism in general as “a hypothesis of design and not a dogma.”51

Since the occult and mysticism interested them most, according to Belyi, they assimilated

Solov’ev’s ideas into their own scheme of interests.52 As Belyi put it in 1903, “I know only that your poems are extraordinarily pleasing to me from the purely aesthetic side. You positively see continuity in them. You are indeed ordained by Lermontov, Fet, Solov’ev; You continue their path, illuminate, disclose their thoughts.”53 With respect to Vladimir Solov’ev’s work, they considered in particular his aesthetic piece, Smysl’ liubvi (1892-1894), the fullest explanation of

“the quest to realize ‘Solov’evianism’ as a living path and to illuminate the divine principle of

Divinity.”54 In this circle, moreover, Mikhail Sergeevich, who had been charged with organizing his brother’s works for publication, introduced Belyi to Vladimir Sergeevich’s private papers.

Belyi recalled most clearly in his memoirs “manuscripts dotted with notes in the margins,” a piece of automatic writing signed “Sophie,” “a mediumistic letter with the signature ‘S’ and

‘Sophie’” which, in Belyi’s recollection, “looked like a love letter.”55 Belyi also recalled that his interest in these mediumistic writings distinguished his group of “Solov’evians. “who concretely

50 S.M. Solov’ev, Vospominaiia, 171. 51 Letter from Belyi to Blok dated Moscow, 4 January 1903 in Lavrov, ed., Belyi i Blok: perepiska, 22. See also the letter Belyi wrote to Blok dated Moscow, 6 January 1903, p. 25, and the later “commentary” on p. 26 and the “commentary” for a letter dated 24 or 25 February 1903, p. 44, 51. 52 On how “assimilate” should be construed here, see George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State From William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 5-6, 15-33 and Löwith, Meaning in History, 185. 53 Letter from Belyi to Blok dated Moscow, 4 January 1903 in Lavrov, ed., Belyi i Blok: perepiska, 22. 54 Belyi, O Bloke, 33. 55 Ibid., 34. There are documents at RGALI that match Belyi’s description. On my reading, however, they could just as easily be doodles, mostly in French, made in the process of taking notes or composition. See RGALI, f. 446, op. 1, ed. khr. 20, 40. For a facsimilie of some of the leaves from ed. khr. 40, see Kotrelev, “‘Blagonamerenost’ ne spasaet,’” 66-67.

18 interpreted symbols,” from the “philosophers (Radlov, Tsertelev, Lopatin, Luk’ianov, and

Prince [Evgenii] Trubetskoi).” In contrast to the Solov’evians’ completely imaginative engagement with Solov’ev and his work, the philosophers looked “very little into the disturbing meaning of Solov’ev’s appearance before the world.”56

Parallel to this milieu, V.Ia. Briusov had begun to privilege Vladimir’s poetry as the source for the true meanings and intentions of all of Solov’ev’s works based on a special theory of poetry and its forms. According to Briusov, “poetry is always a confession” in which the poet

“explains to himself his own thoughts and transports [dumi i volneniia]” just like hypothetical

“primitive man, when the creative work of his tongue [tvorchesvo iazyka] was still alive, constructed a word to understand a new subject.” “For that reason,” Briusov asserted, “true poetry cannot but be authentic” as an expression of the poet’s true, inner self whether conscious of it or not. Having thus defined poetry as the primeval genre disclosing the truth of the self,

Briusov articulated a hermeneutical principle for interpreting all of Solov’ev’s work by privileging poetry over his prose as the “motivating” center of all of Vladimir’s creative work so that the latter had to be assimilated back into the former.57 As he put it:

In his poetry, Vl. Solov’ev appears such as he was for himself. His prose sometimes lacks warmth of feeling, [but] in his poetry he grows closer to the reader. Everything accidental and only obtained by thought has passed away [otoshel]: only what he experienced, what he felt deeply, what was realized in a part of his soul remained.58

D.S. Merezhkovskii had read Solov’ev’s poetry in similar terms in 1892 when he regarded it as an example of, and source for, ecstasy and self-expression that engendered faith in higher

56 Ibid. 57 Valerii Briusov, “Poeziia Vladimira Solov’eva,” Russkii arkhiv 38, no. 8 (1900): 546-554, quotations 546. For how “motivating center” should be construed, see Laurence Dickey, “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’: Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues,” Journal of Modern History 58, no. 3 (1986): 585n.45. 58 Briusov, “Poezia Vladimira Solov’eva,” 546.

19 things.59 Having privileged Solov’ev’s poetry over his prose, Briusov then asserted a binary opposition between two types of poetry which he associated with Russian poets: epic and drama exemplified by Pushkin, A.K. Tolstoi, and A. Maikov and lyric exemplified by Tiutchev, Fet, and Solov’ev.60 K.V. Mochul’skii described Briusov’s conception of poetry as an instance of his

“aesthetic individualism.”61

While there is nothing inherently wrong with conceptualizing the relationship between

Solov’ev’s poetry and prose in this way, it commits the critic to resolving difficulties in his prose by appeal to his poetry. In order to know this with certainty, however, we would need to know much more about Solov’ev’s biography and his own attitude to his poetry than Briusov offered here. It is just as possible that Solov’ev could have understood his prose and poetry as having vastly different purposes. Briusov’s claim is based on a very speculative theory of poetry that begs more questions than it really answers. As we shall see below, it seems Solov’ev himself was able to compartmentalize his intellectual activities in such a way that they did not necessarily bleed together.

There are also biographical reason to consider in regard to Briusov’s formulation of the relationship between Solov’ev’s poetry and his prose. Briusov had no personal relationship with

Solov’ev, and his relationship with the Solov’ev family was cold. In 1894 and 1895, Solov’ev published dismissive—underlined by their brevity—and sarcastic reviews of Briusov’s poetry.62

In the preface to the third edition of his own poetry, Solov’ev condescendingly complimented

59 D.S. Merezhkovskii, “‘O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18 (Moscow: Tip. T-va D. Sytina, 1914), 272-273. 60 Ibid., 546-547. 61 V.K. Mochul’skii, Valerii Briusov, with an introduction by V. Weidlé (Paris: YMCA Press, 1962), 49-54, quotation 49. 62 V.S. Solov’ev, “Khronika—literaturnoe obozrenie,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 8 (1894): 890-892; idem., no. 1 (1895): 421-424; idem., “Eshche o simvolistakh,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 8 (1895): 847-851. They can be found in V.S. Solov’ev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, E.L. Radlov, ed. (Brussels: Zhizn’ s bogom, 1966), 159-170.

20 Briusov’s poetry for giving “certain moments of quiet joy” but rejected the way that he had been associated with the image of “Das Ewig weibliche” and what he considered misreadings of his Three Encounters both of which had given “rise to accusations of false doctrine against him.”63 In his diary, Briusov indicated that he had a very cold and distant relationship with the

Solov’ev family. He addressed both Vladimir’s sarcasm and his family’s coldness in a footnote to his article on Solov’ev poetry, where he disingenuously claimed that “a beautiful custom doesn’t allow speeches with a cold and comprehensive appraisal of the deceased appearing immediately after funereal canticles.” Supporting his claim that Solov’ev had been so unexpectedly taken from the world that he still seemed to be alive, Briusov remarked that “the third edition of his Poems is still a new item in the books stores.”64 Moreover, the article on

Solov’ev’s poetry, according to Briusov’s diary, was solicited for Russkii arkhiv by P.I. Bartenev at Vladimir’s funeral.65

The views of these symbolist poets on Vladimir Solov’ev’s legacy converged in the early years of the twentieth century. They took up his texts as a basis for what Belyi called the “music of the future.”66 Reading Solov’ev’s works through their own understanding of the meaning and purpose of poetry in expressivist terms, they attached meanings to Solov’ev’s poetry based on their own experience of reading it. Belyi, in particular, attached great significance to the figure of Sophia the Divine Wisdom of God. Without emphasizing the poetic and ecstatic, several contributors to the famous symposium Vekhi shared the Symbolist understanding of religion as

63 Vladimir Solov’ev, “Predislovie,” in idem., Stikhotvorenie, 7th ed., ed. and with a foreword by S.M. Solov’ev (Moscow: Izd-vo Russkii Knizhnik, 1921), xi, xii. The third edition was not available to me. For an ambiguous description of Solov’ev’s mysticism and the response to Solov’ev’s parody of the Symbolists, see Sergei Makovskii, Portrety sovremennikov, (New York: Izd-vo imeni Chekhova, 1955), 122-125, 138. 64 Briusov, “Poeziia Vladimira Solov’eva,” 546n. 65 Briusov, Dnevniki, 89-90. 66 Boris Bugaev [Andrei Belyi], “Formy iskusstva,” Mir Iskusstva, no. 12 (1902), 356.

21 subjective and ecstatic, and of Solov’ev and his work as an expression of this sort of religion, but they would turn that toward social criticism. b. From Marxism to the Vekhovtsy: Bulgakov’s Solov’ev

Alongside the Symbolist poets, S.N. Bulgakov wrestled with his own version of Vladimir

Solov’ev. In his move from Marxism to Idealism, Bulgakov made Solov’ev’s texts do a great deal of work. Beginning with his contribution to Problemy idealizma in 1902, Bulgakov began to use Solov’ev as a resource for language that could present a convincing ethical and national vocation for individuals and groups within Russian society to intervene in history.67 In particular, Solov’ev gave him language for goals that human beings ought to pursue in history.

What Bulgakov thought those goals were, however, changed over time: from what he regarded as the day-time Solov’ev’s “Christian politics” as “religious participation in society” to the nigh- time Sophia.68

In highly speculative terms, Bulgakov developed his answer to meaning in history with his contribution to Problemy idealizma, entitled “Osnovnyia problemy teorii progressa.” In this pamphlet, Bulgakov associated several philosophers, from Socrates to Kant, Hegel, Lotze, and

Solov’ev, with the problem of the relationship between causality and teleology.69 To explain how order and purpose could be discerned in what he regarded as morally blind causality,

Bulgakov inserted religion as ecstatic faith through the example of St. Paul’s vision of Christ on

67 S.N. Bulgakov, “Osnovnye problemy teorii progressa,” in Ot Marksizma k idealizmy: sbornik statei (1896-1903) (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1903), 113-160. Randall A. Poole, “Philosophy and Politics in the Russian Liberation Movement: The Moscow Psychological Society and Its Symposium, Problems of Idealism,” in Poole, ed. and trans., Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 28-35. 68 From two letters to A.S. Glinka, dated 27 October 1905 from Kiev and 10 June 1906 from Koreiz, Simbirsk, in V.I. Keiden, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada: khronika chastnoi zhizni russkikh religioznykh filosofov v pis’makh i dnevnikakh (Moscow: Iazyk Russkoi Kul’tury, 1997), 85, 101. M.A. Kolerov, Ne mir, no mech: russkaia religozno- filosofskaia pechat’ ot ‘Problem idealizma’ do ‘Vekh’, 1902-1909 (Saint Petersburg: Aleteia, 1996), 282. 69 Bulgakov, “Osnovnyia problemy teorii progressa,” 120.

22 the road to Damascus. Explaining his understanding of progress in history, which he had already associated with Solov’ev, he claimed that “our theory of progress, our religion of humanity is the altar to the ‘unseen God.’”70 Remarkably, though, at this point in his encounter with Solov’ev’s texts, Bulgakov saw Solov’ev’s work as a “Christian theism” that formed the basis for a theory of progress.71

As he moved toward his contribution in Vekhi, Bulgakov’s Solov’ev became a great systematic philosopher. Although Bulgakov still argued that religion provided Solov’ev with his firm and all-embracing convictions, he began to laud Solov’ev’s ability to develop a systematic philosophy that had a place for everything without being “eclectic” and “mechanical” as the philosopher’s lasting legacy.72 As Bulgakov’s footnotes indicate, however, he was beginning to differ with Solov’ev on the relationship between faith and reason.73 In 1905, Bulgakov moved closer to religion and religious politics while still claiming the banner of Solov’ev by interpreting some of Solov’ev’s biographical facts creatively.74 In a letter to A.S. Glinka, Bulgakov explained away Solov’ev’s interest in politics:

You go too far in your question about liberalism and Solov’ev, and, it seems to me, won’t maintain perspective [ne sobliuliu perspektivy]. I think that Solov’ev’s relationship to VE [Vestnik Evropy] is explained just like mine to Osvobozhdenie: the one and the other are religiously neutral and tolerant. This isn’t, of course, a virtue [dostoinstvo] from the religious point of view, but there isn’t the hatred for religion here that was and is always in revolutionary parties (although [the hatred of religion] there is joined with a distinctive religiosity).

70 Ibid., 121. 71 Ibid., 148. He had Solov’ev’s Opravdanie dobra in mind, 143. 72 Bulgakov, “Chto daet sovremennomu soznaniiu filosofii Vladimira Solov’eva?,” 196. 73 Ibid., 239-240n.2. 74 For a different view, see Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross & the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 137-138.

23 For Solov’ev, VE, like the U of L [Union of Liberation] for me, is only a temporary political room, without which, however, you still can’t do without. I’ll confine myself to this.75

If he decided to limit his discussion to speculations on an esoteric Solov’ev’s views on nationalism and Russia’s national mission, then these appeared in print in Vekhi. There,

Bulgakov spoke only briefly of Solov’ev as one of “the most prominent expressers of [Russian] national self-consciousness” with his understanding of nationalism as “connected to the world problem of the Russian church or Russian culture.”76 Bulgakov’s tone had not changed from the time he had heard of the granting of the Duma: “And so, a constitution! Therefore, we will go in open struggle with the dragon, and may God fortify our weak forces!”77

By 1909, Bulgakov had come to regard Solov’ev as a religious thinker whose considerations on historical teleology could be linked to justifications of a Russian national vocation. Indeed, religious questions superseded political ones after his disillusionment in Duma politics. At this stage in Bulgakov’s appropriation of Solov’ev, there is no hint of the importance of Sophia, though Bulgakov exhibited a distressing willingness to bend facts to fit his own ideas of Solov’ev’s meaning, which became more prominent when Bulgakov began to participate in

M.K. Morozova’s publishing venture, Put’. In that environment, Bulgakov met Belyi. c. “A Modern Princess Elagina”: Margarita Morozova’s Patronage of Put’ and a Misunderstanding between Belyi and Bulgakov

The symbolist conceit was codified by K.V. Mochul’skii in his works on Belyi, Briusov,

Blok, and Solov’ev, the germs of which lay in the salon and publishing enterprise that M.K.

75 Letter from S.N. Bulgakov to A.S. Glinka, dated 7 October 1905, Kiev-Simbirsk, in V.I. Keiden, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 80. 76 S.N. Bulgakov, “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo,” in Vekhi: sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, no ed., 4th ed. (Moscow: I.N. Kushnerev, 1909), 61. 77 Letter from S.N. Bulgakov to A.S. Glinka, dated 27 October 1905, Kiev, in Keidan, Vzyskuiushchie grada, 84.

24 Morozova patronized in pre-war and pre-revolutionary Moscow. She provided an institutional and social context for Belyi and Bulgakov to meet. It was in this environment that Bulgakov began to appropriate Belyi’s expressivist reading of Solov’ev and Sophia into his “Christian politics” or “religious participation in society.”78

As scholars have begun to argue in the last few decades, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century Muscovite merchants had stopped imitating gentry patterns of conspicuous consumption that served as markers of social distinction regulating Imperial

Russia’s social hierarchy. Whether these cultural practices indicate the existence of a nascent

Russian bourgeoisie, and by implication an alternative to October 1917, is unclear, but the manner in which these new tastes were enjoyed among some of the most powerful merchants suggest that gentry modes of consumption and social reproduction were appropriated rather than undermined and transformed.79 Testimony to this fact is given in the memoirs of Fedor Shtepun, an elegist for Muscovite cultural life centered around Imperial Moscow University and the

“Maecean Merchantry” of Moscow.80 Recalling that Muscovite culture “on the eve” of World

78 From two letters to A.S. Glinka, dated 27 October 1905 from Kiev and 10 June 1906 from Koreiz, Simbirsk, in Keidan, Vzyskuiushchie grada, 85, 101. 79 Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); relevant articles in Edith W.Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); James L. West and Iurii A. Petrov, eds., Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 80 F.A. Shtepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, vol. 1 (New York: Izd-vo imeni Chekhova, 1956), 316. Along with his memoirs, his unpublished letters to various émigrés provide eloquent and nostalgic testimony on a particular life in a particular pre-War Moscow. They are held at BAR in a variety of collections: Zernov papers, boxes 1 and 9; Weidlé papers, box 3; Boris Zaitsev papers, box 2; and Berdiaev papers. Reviewing Shtepun’s memoirs, M.M. Karpovich regarded their eloquence as “sylistic surfeit” [stilisticheskaia preizbytochnost’] that vitiated what he regarded as Shtepun’s otherwise inciteful analysis of pre-revolutionary Moscow and Saint Petersburg culture and politics. See M.M. Karpovich, “Kommentarii: O vospominaniiakh F.A. Stepuna,” Novyi Zhurnal, no. 46 (1956): 220-237, quotation 222. For a less circumspect recollection of Saint Petersburg, see Sergei Makovskii, Na Parnasus ‘Serebrianogo veka’ (Munich: Izd-vo Tsentral’nogo Ob”edineniia Politicheskikh Emigrantov SSSR (TsOPE), 1962) and F. Stepun, Mystische Weltschau: Fünf Gestalten des russischen Symbolismus (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1964), 11-

25 War I from German in 1940, Shtepun underlined the social and cultural ambiguity when he called the widow of a merchant magnate and social lion Margarita Kirillovna Morozova (1873-

1958) “the Princess Elagina of the 20th century.”81 Remembering this world “not without emotion,” Shtepun asked himself whether he “overvalue[d] the significance of our culture ‘on the eve,’” namely the repudiation of politics advanced by Belyi and Blok and supported by M.K.

Morozova’s Put’.82

In the intellectual environment of M.K. Morozova’s Put’, two members had an intense interest in Solov’ev’s writings on Sophia: Pavel Florenskii and Andrei Belyi.83 According to a great deal of testimony, however, Belyi had begun to become overwhelmingly interested in

Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophical work, while Bulgakov became disillusioned with philosophy and criticism in general and moved toward the church. In a letter written to A.A. Blok in 1912,

Belyi reported that Bulgakov had told him “this is what Neo-Kantianism is: a real abyss is already approaching: Steiner.”84 Belyi and Bulgakov had met some five years before Put’ was organized, and Belyi had some affinity with him, though Belyi’s never clearly stated his attitude

12, 13-92. In a letter to M.N. Zernov, Shtepun communicated some of his biography. See BAR, Zerno Papers Box 1, Folder Shtepun, FA/Munich, 29 January 1956/to N.M. Zernov. 81 Shtepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, vol. 1, 258. On Morozova’s role as patron of publishing houses in Moscow between 1910-1919, see E.A. Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu: religiozno-filosofskaia gruppa “Put’” (1910-1919) v poiskhakh novoi russkoi identichnosti (Saint Petersburg: Izd-vo “Aleteia, 2000), 66-75. 82 Stepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, vol. 1, 262-263. Shtepun had been elected an active member in the Moscow Psychological society by a vote of 10 to 4 at the same time as Ossip-Lourié 6 April 1913. See Moskovskoe Psikhologicheskoe Obshchestvo, “CCLXXIX. Protokol zakrytogo (s gostiami) zasedaniia 6-go Aprelia 1913 goda,” VFP 25, no. 1 (121) (1914): 166-167. Morozova was also a member of the Society at this time. Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu, 22. 83 Ibid., 110-114, 127-134. 84 Quoted in ibid., 129-130. On the Belyi-Steiner connection, see also: Shtepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, vol. 1, 279; Lavrov, ed., Blok i Belyi: perepiksa, pp. 53-56, 74-75, 452-463; A.V. Lavrov and John Malmstadt, eds., Andrei Belyi i Ivanov-Razumnnik: perepiska (Saint Petersburg: Atheneum-Feniks, 1998), 452-463, esp. p. 454; and BAR, B.K. Zaitsev papers, box 3, “Andrei Belyi. Vstrechi,” ll. 33-34. On anthroposophy, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 214-215.

26 toward Bulgakoc.85 Elsewhere, Belyi had remembered joining “a sort of philosophical club” presided over by Morozova that included M.O. Gershenzon, E.N. Trubetskoi, and L.M. Loptain.

He especially fondly remembered Gershenzon as “less a teacher than an elder brother” whose

“home among the ice was a shanty where a fire burned.”86 Significantly, Belyi recollected that

Berdiaev and Bulgakov often argued with Lopatin.87

If Bulgakov’s interest in Sophia may not necessarily be connected with Belyi, then

Florenskii is another possible source. Though it is apparently universally recognized that

Florenskii had had a tremendous “influence” on Bulgakov, the latter was prone to rewrite his own intellectual development in a way that covered over how often he changed his mind.88

Florenskii shared Bulgakov’s lack of interest in the facts of Solov’ev’s life and the evidence of his texts. At this time, Florenskii was intensely interested in the role of Sophia in Vladimir

Solov’ev’s intellectual formation.89

Whatever the personal differences between Bulgakov, Belyi, and Florenskii, Bulgakov’s texts indicated a new interest in the role of Sophia in Solov’ev’s life and thought. Though

Bulgakov’s interest in Sophia was new, he linked it with his commitment to a Russian national idea.90 He also continued his cavalier attitude to Solov’ev’s texts. Nowhere is this more evident

85 Lavrov, ed., Blok i Belyi: perepiska, letter 288 from Belyi to Blok dated 8/21 or 9/22 March 1912. See also Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu, 128. 86 Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 266, 265. 87 Ibid., 271-273. 88 Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu, 112, but compare 148. On the problems of the concept of “influence” in historical explanation, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 25-27. 89 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 344n.662. Cited as evidence of Sophia’s importance in Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,” 14 and n.25. 90 Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu, 148-150. E.N. Trubetskoi differed with Bulgakov on this point.

27 than in his article “Vladimir Solov’ev i Anna Shmidt.”91 Bulgakov wrote it between 1916 and

1918, and it is evidence of the trauma experienced in the midst of what one historian has recently called “the common European deluge (1914-1921).”92 This article was ostensibly a review of the sixth edition of Vladimir Solov’ev’s humorous poems that appeared in 1916 and was edited by his nephew, S.M. Solov’ev. Arguing for the “enormous influence” of Vladimir Solov’ev’s poetry on contemporary poets (Blok, Belyi, Viacheslav Ivanov and others), Bulgakov repeated

Briusov’s argument for the preeminence of Solov’ev’s poems over his prose. As Bulgakov put it, “Solov’ev’s poetic influence is more elusive and subtle, but at the same time deeper and firmer than his pure philosophical influence.” Further echoing Briusov, Bulgakov treated

Solov’ev’s poetry as a source for a type of expressive individualism:

… unconditional originality belongs to his poetry so that one may, and even must, verify his philosophy by his poetry. Therefore, whatever is not in his poetry must, in his philosophy, be considered artificial, scholastic, accidental: thus, there is no equivalent in poetry for Solov’ev’s deductions, schemas, and categories (which, to a significant degree, had been borrowed from Germans), there is no biased and somewhat opportunistic polemic with Slavophiles, there’s no multi-storied and rational ‘justification of the good.’93

Having privileged Vladimir’s poetry as the “motivating center” in Solov’ev’s life and work,

Bulgakov placed Sophia at the center of Vladimir’s work. As Bulgakov asserted, “Solov’ev was a mystic with a peculiar, rich, and original mystical experience is more significant, more original,

91 S.N. Bulgakov, “Vladimir Solov’ev i Anna Shmidt,” in Tikhie dumy: iz statei 1911-1915 gg. (Moscow: Izdanie G.A. Lemana i S.I. Sakhatova, 1918; reprint, Paris: YMCA Press, 1976), 71-114. On Bulgakov’s peculiar intellectual interests and attitudes, see Evgeniia Gertsyk, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1996), 174-175. 92 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forgin Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2-3, quotation 2. See also Bulgakov’s response to Stolypin’s 3 June coup in B.V. Anan’ich, R.Sh. Ganelin, B.B. Dubentsov, V.S. Diakin, and S.I. Potolov, Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1895-1917 (Leningrad: Nauka leningradskoe otdelenie, 1984), 323-324. 93 Bulgakov, “Solov’ev i Shmidt,” 72.

28 and more interesting than Solov’ev the philosopher.”94 As evidence of this, Bulgakov presented what he called the “mystical meeting” between Anna Shmidt and Vladimir Solov’ev as evidence of some secret workings of Sophia through two people.

To support this argument, Bulgakov made some mendacious interpretations of Solov’ev’s letters to Shmidt in order to present the alleged mystical encounter as an actual, almost material fact.95 To do so, he assumed before approaching Solov’ev’s texts a “mystical passport” that allowed Solov’ev and Shmidt access to a mystical, noumenal world.96 Solov’ev, so Bulgakov argued, hid the “mystical secret” of this “withdrawn man” [zamknutyi chelovke] that had to be discerned by “reading between the lines.”97 It’s difficult to see how this last characterization could have been taken seriously given how outspoken Solov’ev was throughout his life. The key to all of this, according to Bulgakov, was a group of poems, including Tri svidaniia, that he various called the “Sophianic-Erotic cycle” or Solov’ev’s “poetic diary.”98 All of this presumes a real, yet secret, Solov’ev to be worked up from texts completely divorced from the contexts that shaped them and to which they responded.

This version of the Symbolsit Conceit was codified by K.V. Mochul’skii, who explicitly linked his work with Bulgakov’s when he dedicated his study of Solov’ev to father Sergeius

Bulgakov. Like his mentor, Mochul’skii insisted from the outset that “one cannot penetrate into

94 Ibid., 73. Having placed Sophia at the center of Solov’ev’s life and work, he singled out his Lectures on Godmanhood and La Russie et l’église universelle as the most important prose works because a Sophia appears in them. He also privileged Tri Svidaniia as factual and a key to Solov’ev’s biography in this review. 95 In this connection, A.A. Blok was more honest regarding Solov’ev’s mysticism and his interest in Sophia for he was not interested in Solov’ev’s “intentions,” but in the sorts of inspirations Solov’ev’s texts stirred in him. According to a letter from Belyi, his ideas seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. See A.A. Blok, “Rytsar’-Monakh,” in Sbornik pervyi o Vladimire Solov’eve (Moscow: Put’, 1911), 96-103 and Blok’s letter to Belyi dated 19 December 1910 from Saint Petersburg in Lavrov, Blok i Belyi: perepiska, 381 and n.3. 96 Ibid., 81, 91, 108. 97 Ibid., 103. 98 Ibid., 82.

29 his [Solov’ev’s] ‘secret’ without having believed the authenticity of his mystical experience” or his “visions of the Eternal Helpmate” if one wants to grasp “the meaning of his doctrine of

‘positive all-unity,’ Sophia, Godmanhood.”99 Mochul’skii’s method of interpreting Solov’ev was institutionalized in emigration in Paris through his connections to Nikolai Berdiaev and his connections to the YMCA. But this process had begung in pre-war and pre-revolutionary

Moscow. d. Apotheosis of Sophia: Berdiaev’s Institute at Clamart

In his memoirs, Fedor Shtepun has left us nostalgic but critical accounts of life in

Moscow through the revolutions and of Paris in the emigration. In these memoirs, Shtepun elegized Moscow’s cultural life centered around Imperial Moscow University by making unfavorable comparisons with the way many of the people who were part of it tried perversely to recreate it in the Paris emigration. More charitably, Metropolitan Evlogii took stock of the past fifty odd years of Church life in Imperial Russia, political life in the Duma, and Church life in the Russian emigration. Concluding his recollections about his activities in the Second Duma, he wrote:

O, how many people who, by an improper upbringing, by various prejudices or preconceptions were far from the Church and even inimical to it! But subconsciously, in the depths of their souls, they were also servants [raby] of God, who praised the Lord in their own way. Often, under the influence of some life shock (it would be better to say,

99 Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev, 9-10. Strémooukhoff comes to the same conclusion by a slightly different path in his Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work, 11. For critical remarks on the problems this sort of a priori assumption in historical scholarship raises, see J.G.A Pocock, “Time, History ad Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1971]), 160-162. This methodological problem in Russia intellectual history was noted by two of Karpovich’s students. See Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 441n.16 and Leopold Haimson, Review of A History of Russian Philosophy, by V.V. Zenkovsky, American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1954): 932. Haimson and Malia were arguing for an approach to Russian ideas in terms of ideology or what sociologists have called the “moderate sociology of knowledge.” For the latter, see Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 10.

30 as a consequence of the touch of the right hand of God’s Providence) they became good, believing Christians.100

Even F.A. Shtepun was willing to entertain this conclusion about the religious interests of the intellectuals grouped around Morozova in pre-war and pre-revolutionary Moscow, though only from exile and his relative isolation from Paris.101

Ironically, much of the characteristics of Moscow life among the pre-war and pre- revolutionary intelligentsia were reproduced in Paris. In particular, the same attitude to religion and politics continued to shape social and intellectual relationships. The Institut de Théologie

Orthodoxe Saint-Serge, as part of the official Orthodox Church in exile, fostered and was supported by its faculty in maintaining a separation of the Church from politics and supported an ecclesiastical positivism. This was partly due to Evlogii, Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe, who, as we saw above, maintained the Church as a place for charity.

Looking back on his experiences, he linked his commitment to the separation of the Church from politics and culture to his experiences in the Duma.102 Others who shared Evlogii’s views were

George Florovskii, V.V. Zen’kovskii, and, somewhat ambivalently, Bulgakov.103 Those who continued to argue for a culture founded on a certain conception of Orthodoxy derived, despite all protestations, from an expressivist understanding of religious faith. These individuals grouped around Nikolai Berdidaev’s Academy of Philosophy and Religion at Clamart and the

100 Mitropolit Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni: vospominaniia Mitropolita Evlogiia, izlozhennyia po ego razskazam T. Manukhinoi (Paris: YMCA Press, 1947), 187-188. Evlogii wrote letters to the French authorities on behalf of members of the Russian community in France. They are preserved at Archives nationales de France, F/7/16068. 101 Shtepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, vol. 1 266. 102 Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, 185. 103 See a variety of sources: S.N. Bulgakov, “Pis’ma k G.V. Florovskomu (1923-1938),” Ekaterina Evtukhov, ed., in Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli: ezhegodnik 2001/2002 (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2002), 175-226; BAR, V.V. Zen’kovskii papers, Moe uchastie v Russkoi tserkovnoi zhizni v zapadnoi Evrope (1920-1952); BAR, Berdiaev papers, correspondence with Bulgakov, Florovskii, Frank, Losskii, Mochul’skii, Stepun, Struve, and Vysheslvatsev among others. For published sources, see Florovskii’s well-known works and V.V. Zen’kovskii, ed., Pravoslavie i kul’tura: sbornik religiozno-filosofskikh statei (Berlin: Russkaia Kniga, 1923).

31 publication of Put’.104 In emigration, Berdiaev enjoyed a special relationship with the YMCA and the financing it offered for publications through its main representative in Paris, John B.

Anderson. The latter referred to Berdiaev as the “most outstanding lay-prophet of Russia today.”105 It was at meetings hosted by Berdiaev that Mochul’skii worked out his project for studying Symbolist poets, which surely shaped his study of Solov’ev.106 Moreover, political divisions between monarchists and the Orthodox church in the 1920s (the so-called Karlovtsy in

Serbia) and life in a foreign land caused understandable traumas.107 Personal and intellectual differences also emerged within the Institute and between the Institute and Berdiaev’s

Academy.108 One of the lasting legacies of Berdiaev’s institute at Clamart was Konstantin

104 See University of Illinois Archives, Paul B. Anderson Papers, series no. 15/35/54. For the rifts, see especially “Protokol Ideologicheskago sobraniia pri R.S.Kh.D.” in box 3. BAR, Berdiaev, papers, correspondence; and Vladimir Iantsen, “Pi’sma russkikh mystlitei v bazel’skom archive Fritsa Liba,” in Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli: ezhegodnik 2001/2002 (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2002), 227-563. 105 See “Exhibit VII-1: Record of the six adult leaders for visits to important conferences,” in University of Illinois Archives, Paul B. Anderson Papers, box 3. Zen’kovskii did not enjoy such esteem. See his remarks in BAR, V.V. Zen’kovskii Papers, Moi vstrechi s vydaiushchimisia liu’mi, p. 15. 106 See Mochul’skii’s grateful letters to Berdiaev in BAR, Berdiaev papers, correspondence. 107 On the Karlovtsy, see Evlogii, Put’ moei zhizni, chapter 20. Regarding an invitation to participate in the ecumenical movement offered by Paul Anderson, the Metropolitan of that region, Antonii, declined because of Evlogii’s behavior and the charity Evlogii showed Berdiaev and Bulgakov, whom Antonii considered “sacriligeous” and “almost a ‘khlysty,” in Anderson papers, box 3. In his memoirs, V.V. Zen’kovskii recalled that Antonii was suspicious of the St. Serge Theological Institute in Paris because it allowed Bulgakov to teach there. See BAR V.V. Zen’kovskii Collection, Moe uchastie Russkoi Tserkovnyi zhizni v Zapadnoi Evrope (1920-1952), pp. 20-21. Many of the émigrés were under French police surveillance since a new and unfamiliar refugee population posed a significant security problem for which the Paris police were unprepared. According to one police file entitled “Jean Tereniak” in Archives nationales de France F/7/14750, it took the police about one month to ascertain the identity of this man. At first, they thought he was Polish. Once they purloined a letter he’d received from Ukraine, they thought he was Russian. Finally, they identified him as a Ukrainian communist; the documents in the file often refer to the “Radian’ski Soiuz.” See also Archives de la Préfecture de la Police de Paris, série B, sous-série B/A, dossiers 1708-1710, sous-série B/A 2e série, dossier 2016 (Milioukoff, Paul) and Archives nationales de France, F/7 (Police): F/7/13017, F/7/15953/2, F/7/16068. 108 On these differences, see especially V.V. Zen’kovskii’s memoirs at the Bakhmeteff Archive, BAR, Moe uchastie v Russkoi Tserkovnoi zhizni v Zapadnoi Evrope (1920-1952), pp. 46-48, 97; Moi vstrechi s vydaiushchimisia liud’mi, 10-20, esp. 15 (Berdiaev), 20-36, esp. 32 (Bulgakov), 93-95 (P.B. Struve), and 101-105 (Florovskii). From the perspective of the Paris police, the Russian community was impossibly heterogenous. In the preface to an anonymous, 47-paged report stamped June 1957, the author wrote of the Russian émigré community in France: “The rather disparate character of the mosaic of peoples that constitute the Soviet Federation doesn’t fail to manifest itself in the emigration of ‘Russian’ origin, where the national spirit of different ethnic groups, of which it is composed, is played out [se fait jour] in a very lively fashion,” (p. 1). In Archives nationales de France, F/7/14750 (Surveillance des activités des étrangers: Japon à Ukraine). The report is entitled “La Colonie Russe en France.”

32 Mochul’skii’s body of literature that Berdiaev fostered and ushered into publication at the

YMCA press. Mochul’skii codified the parameters of the Symbolist conceit at the institute and established it as the standard interpretation of Solov’ev through the press.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTRIBUTION

On the basis of a spiritualized past, émigré critics of the Bolsheviks developed a counter- narrative to what scholars of the Soviet Union have begun to regard as the Bolsheviks’ concerted policy to commemorate October 1917 as the foundation myth of the Soviet Union.109 In one very prominent version of this narrative—one that became a foundation myth for what Marc

Raeff has called the imagined community of Russia Abroad—the Symbolists’ Solov’ev became an emblem for a Russian culture that was lost with the Bolshevik coup in October 1917.110

Despite recent attempts to reconsider Russian culture, this narrative shaped and continues to shape the scholarly agenda for studying the Russian intelligentsia, universities, and clerical academies.111 As recent studies have shown, North American and European departments of

Russian literature and history in the middle decade of the twentieth century revolved around

Russian émigrés who set the scholarly agenda for focusing the utmost attention on explanations of October 1917, leading in the former case to the marginalization of Russian literature, and, in the latter case, to the often acrimonious historiographical debates between totalitarian and social

109 Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). See also Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12-21, esp. 20n.25; Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1. 110 Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. 104-106, 118-186. For a helpful review, see Jospehine Woll, “Expecting to Return,” New York Times Book Review (29 April 1990): 21. 111 Laura Engelstein, “Review Essay: Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (1998): 864-877 and idem., “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia Across the 1991 Divide,” Kritika 2, no. 2 (2001): 363-393.

33 history explanations of the meaning of 1917 during the Cold War.112 Indeed, both Gleb

Struve, who once claimed that he “knew Mochul’skii well,” and Marc Raeff grew up in the cultural center of Russia Abroad in Paris as students of K.V. Mochul’skii, whose vision of

Russian culture they commemorated in various ways in their own scholarship.113

Tracing the development and institutionalization of this representation of Solov’ev makes a contribution to the study of the history of the Russian emigration and its role in shaping the study of Russia in North American and European academies. Indeed, the “reception” and

“effect” of Solov’ev’s refraction through the works of Russian émigrés offers a source for the history of Russia abroad.114 The persistence of these refracted images, none of which captures the full complexity of Solov’ev’s endeavor, also suggests that a historical understanding of

Solov’ev, as Nosov noted, is still a scholarly desideratum. The recovery of an historical

Solov’ev could make a contribution to the New Historiography that, since 1991, has attempted to recover laudatory episodes and individuals from Russia’s past in order to overcome what B.N.

Mironov regards as the unduly negative way that historians have described the history of their own country.115 The changing iterations and fortunes of the Symbolist Conceit can also

112 David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 129-152, 153-179. See also idem., Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 273-285. On a similar problem of the way a particular perspective in the history of political economy can obscure the complexity of arguments, see Donald Winch, “Introduction: The Problem—The Liberal Capitalist Perspective,” in Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. 1-7. 113 For Struve’s quotation, see his letter to Vladimir Wiedlé dated 26 March 1977 in Bakhmeteff Archive [hereafter BAR], Wladimir Weidlé Papers, Box 3, folder “Struve, Gleb Petrovich/Berkeley, Calif., & n.p., 1976-1977.” On Mochul’skii as the tutor to Nikita Struve and Marc Raeff, see Raeff, Russia Abroad, 58. Raeff dedicated The Well- Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) to the memory of K.V. Mochul’skii. 114 On how effect and reception should be understood, see Martyn P. Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993): 256. 115 B.N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.). Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskoe obshchestvo i pravovogo gusudarstva, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: D. Bulanin,

34 contribute to the history of Russian national identity, proponents of which have at times have consciously attempted to set themselves apart from European norms.116

This dissertation’s focus on Solov’ev’s career also complicates two other historiographical commonplaces in Imperial Russian history: 1) the so-called “crisis of autocracy” on the cusp of the 1870s and 1880s; and 2) the Orthodox nature of what is usually called Russian Orthodox thought. Much excellent scholarship on the political and social history of the reform era focuses on two “revolutionary” breaks under Alexander II: the abolition of serfdom on 19 February 1861 and the emperor’s assassination by members of the terrorist group

“Land and Freedom” on 1 March 1881. While Soviet historians focused on this brief period to emphasize the role of the revolutionary movement in propelling Russia toward what they called the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, non-Soviet historians have focused on the political problem, as perceived by officialdom, of governing the countryside and an emerging self-styled social identity (obshchestvennost’), in both urban and rural gentry circles, as the moments of change in this period.117 In the field of Russian intellectual history, this period is seen as the

“roots of revolution.”118

Despite the claims of “crisis” or the importance of the revolutionary movement in producing social and political change, state authority and presence in the countryside increased after Alexander II’s assassination and recent work has shown that the terrorists’ spectacles of violence were shocking but had little effect on government or society in any more substantive

1999), 15. For an example of this historiography, see O.R. Airapetov, Zabytaia kar’era “russkogo Mol’tke”: Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev, 1830-1904 (Saint Petersburg: Izd-vo Aleteia, 1998). 116 Boris Grois, “Poisk russkoi natsional’noi identichnosti,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 1 (1992): 52-60. 117 P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870—1880-kh godov (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1964) and Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 118 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1952]).

35 sense.119 A.A. Polovtsov’s diary for 1881 shows that he and many others perceived terrorists as a nuisance and not a systemic threat to state order.120 As my study of Solov’ev’s career shows, the dynamism of the reform period stems from a common appreciation by members of government and society that the end of serfdom had inaugurated “a transformation of the existing state structure”—that is the undermining of the estate principle in social life—that left the nature of “Russian statehood” unresolved even “at the beginning of the twentieth century.”121 Much of

Solov’ev’s intellectual output in the 1870s was meant to determine the essence of a proper

Russian statehood and society’s proper relationship to that form of statehood. To articulate this vision, Solov’ev cast these relationships within a religious framework.

This dissertation’s second contribution complicates the Orthodox nature of what scholars call Russian Orthodox thought. The standard account of Russian Orthodox thought holds that it is an inheritance of Byzantine Christianity, mystical, and also sui generis. Vladimir Solov’ev is usually cast as the cornerstone of this intellectual edifice.122 As my dissertation shows, Solov’ev encountered rationalist forms of Russian Orthodox Christianity within the Russian Empire’s institutions of higher clerical education. Moreover, he creatively appropriated other religious and social discourses from elsewhere in Europe and in Russian as he created his own version of an Orthodox Christian socialism. Such a complex of ideas suggests that historians should speak of Russian Orthodoxies, each with complex and creative relationships to discourses throughout

Europe. From the perspective of intellectual history, this dissertation contributes to the growing

119 Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 120 GARF f. 583, o. 1, ed. khr. 13-15, 18. 121 B.B. Glinskii, Revoliutsionnyi period russkoi istorii (1861-1881 gg.): Istoricheskie ocherki (Saint Petersburg: Tip. T-va A.S. Suvorina, 1913), citations x, xi. 122 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

36 literature that has begun to enrich our understanding of the social and cultural significance of

Orthodoxy.123

To substantiate this argument, I have drawn on some methods that are familiar in other historiographies but relatively unfamiliar in the field of Russian history.

METHODOLOGY

Although this dissertation is, in the most general terms, a biography of Vladimir

Solov’ev, it is not a conventional biography. I do not begin with Solov’ev’s birth in Moscow in

January 1853 and end with his death at the Trubetskoi estate, Uzhskoe, in Moscow in August

1900, filling in the details of Solov’ev’s life in neat, coherent narrative. As critics have compellingly argued, such a traditional approach to biography—to attempt a comprehensive, coherent description of an entire life—requires an “explanatory structure that links and gives depth to the bare recital of dated events” that is ultimately a lie because the biographer is left “to invent connections” that fill in the “gap” between events in a given life that are related only by

“contingency and accident.” As Stanley Fish has trenchantly argued, “the falseness of it all is overwhelming.”124

123 Laura Engelstein, “Holy Russia in Modern Times: The Slavophile Quest for the Lost Faith,” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 99-124; Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); and Scott M. Kenworthy, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007); and idem., “Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830-1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 239-267. 124 Stanley Fish, “Just Published: Minutiae without Meaning.” New York Times (7 September 1999): A19. For fuller criticism, see idem., “Biography and Intention,” in William H. Epstein, ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991), 9-16 and Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 27-42.

37 To check such narrative falseness, I have tried to tell Solov’ev’s life with the method of contextual biography. Though it is impossible for historians and critics to approach texts without questions that are motivated by their specific present circumstances, using historical and contextual methods, it is possible to illuminate questions of cultural, social, and political history as well as questions of biography. As a recent work has put it, the “new biography or social biography” can be used to “focus on individuals in order to illuminate larger cultural developments.” To do this, one is “interested in the everyday details of” a life “only insofar as they [offer] insight into larger questions.”125 To be sure, there have been other examples of such biographies that Sepinwall does not cite.126 And this method has only recently begun to shape the historiography of Imperial Russia.127

Be that as it may, one can also do the obverse of these biographies—use the cultural, social, and institutional contexts in order to illuminate questions of biography. To do so, however, means to focus only on specific moments in a given life that, given the present condition of scholarship, seem to need answering. I attempt only to give an intelligible (and not necessarily internally coherent) account of one facet in one man’s intellectual experience.128

With regard to Solov’ev, the thing that needs explaining is the way Solov’ev understood mystical religion and its role in politics and society. Although Solov’ev’s career was not “mysteriously

125 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégore and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4-5. Sepinwall’s prototype for this genre of historiography is Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 126 The locus classicus for this sort of biographical approach is Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 [1967]), esp. ix. This book shaped a recent biography of Dmitrii Mendeleev: Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 11, n.24. 127 Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing and Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 128 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 6.

38 handcuffed to history” like Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, whose birth coincided with

India’s independence on 15 August 1947, Solov’ev’s “destinies” were in some respects “chained to those of [his] country.”129

Additionally, the narrative of this dissertation can be somewhat digressive when explaining the historical meaning of conceptual problems with which Solov’ev dealt. The purpose is to show the complicated links between social and religious thought in Russia and the rest of Europe, as well as the seriousness with which problems were posed and answered.

Scholars have called this method “exegesis outward.”130 Rather than assert an alleged

“influence,” the effort is to explain the meaning that the assertion or evidence of intellectual connections—whether individuals, schools, traditions, or discourses—has for understanding the development of Solov’ev’s arguments throughout his early works.

OUTLINE OF DISSERTATION

Chapter one describes the intellectual concerns agitating Moscow society in the late

1860s in order to show what John Dunn called “the historicity of the problems” Solov’ev encountered as a young man.131 This section does not provide an exhaustive account of the intellectual culture of Moscow in the 1860s since not all of it had a bearing on Solov’ev’s interests. Rather, it provides an account of Solov’ev’s Moscow—the social and intellectual world that described the “horizon” of available language with which to pose and solve

129 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1980), 3. 130 Wayne C. Booth, “M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (1976): 432. 131 John Dunn, Political Obligation in Its Historical Context: Essays in Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 6. Reviewing V.V. Zenkovskii’s encyclopedic history of Russian philosophy, Leopold Haimson made a similar argument. See Leopold H. Haimson, review of A History of Russian Philosophy, by V. V. Zenkovsky, George L. Kline in American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1954): 931-933.

39 problems.132 For Solov’ev, his intellectual world was dominated by the promotion and development of scholarship and Enlightenment. It was also dominated by the moral problems posed by “evolutionary social theory” through N.K. Mikhailovskii’s long reviews of Herbert

Spencer and Charles Darwin.133 As Mikhailovskii noted, the evolutionary social theory of

Spencer, and the one implied in Darwin, raised what scholars call “the problem of teleology.”134

If individuals and societies are moved by purposeless processes in nature, moral freedom is impossible since morality is merely an accidental artifact of evolution—mankind has no possibility to assert moral principles since, according to this scheme of nature, everything that is arises from natural processes utterly independent of human will or action. Mikhailovskii perceived this ethical problem, but solved it by boldly asserting his personality as a source of morality. As we shall see, Solov’ev found this barbaric and threatening to individual salvation and social order.

This chapter may seem the most speculative because of a dearth of sources. Unlike historians of Hegel, for instance, who have at their disposal an abundance of Hegel’s schoolboy works and detailed studies of his social and educational milieu from which to give detailed portraits of the early intellectual development of their subjects, no such materials exist for

Solov’ev.135 Although scholars of Solov’ev do not have to rely solely on passing references in

132 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1975), 301-306. See also Reinhart Koselleck, “Linguistic Change and the History of Events,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 4 (1989): 649-666. 133 John Wyon Burrow. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966) and Daniel Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 134 Rudolph Otto, “Darwinism and Religion,” in Religious Essays: A Supplement to ‘The Idea of the Holy’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 137. 135 Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143-185.

40 autobiographies, as historians of Saint Augustine, for instance, the situation is not much richer.136 Though S.S. Luk’ianov’s account of Solov’ev’s “young years” is massive, it is merely a compendium of the few letters Solov’ev wrote as an adolescent. It is also an unsubstantiated study of Solov’ev’s family life and an arid institutional history of Solov’ev’s elementary school and gymnasium.137 Luk’ianov did, however, reproduce a play written by Count F.L. Sollogub, a friend and aristocratic wit, that captured what contemporaries regarded as Solov’ev’s limitless ambition. Entitled “Solov’ev in Thebes,” the play begins with Satan and the Sphinx debating the nature of good and evil on a flat plain bounded by the Nile on one side, the Pyramids on the other, and Cairo in the distance. In the middle of their argument, Solov’ev entered to solve the problem: “I have come to this burning desert at this burning hour/in order to accomplish my feat

[podvig].”138 The main source of information on Solov’ev’s youthful interests and personality, however, are letters he wrote to his cousin, E.V. Selevina [née Romanova], in the early 1870s.

In the letters, Solov’ev lectured his cousin on the absurdities of the educational ideals of the

“Going to the People’s” movement and admonished her to read English and German poets to understand human nature. K.V. Mochul’skii justly called these letters Solov’ev’s “philosophical diary.”139 Although speculative, this is the best scholars of Solov’ev can hope for.

To solve the moral problem posed by Mikhailovskii, as chapter two will show, Solov’ev turned to theism as a complex set of arguments that show meaning in both the individual’s life as well as in nature based on a particular interpretation of Christian religion. Solov’ev’s master’s thesis, The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists) (1874), identified the moral

136 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 16-22. 137 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody: materialy k biografii, 4 vols. (Petrograd: Senatskaia tipgrafiia, 1916-1921 [the fourth volume appeared in 1990]). 138 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 286. 139 K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951), 30.

41 problem in evolutionary social theory and positivism. At the same time, such a vision of religion was regarded as scientific. Solov’ev encountered theism at Moscow Clerical Academy under the tutelage of Viktor Dmitrievich Kudraivtsev-Platonov, who is known as the father of

Russian theism. From this religious perspective, Solov’ev would argue that the social and political problems that he thought evolutionary social theories could not solve were in fact religious problems and required religious solutions. To the extent that there is an abiding theme in Solov’ev’s thought it is this assertion.

Chapter three will show how Solov’ev used the discourse of theism as a resource for moralizing two important intellectual movements: socialism and Slavophilism. When Solov’ev began to compose his extended philosophical works, he perceived in socialism a similar moral problem to that which he had discerned in evolutionary social theories. In this case it is the recently discovered dialogue, composed in French, entitled La Sophia (1876). Given its purely immanent focus on man and society from a strictly economic perspective, socialism could not offer a compelling argument for anything but a relative morality. Premised on the mere equal distribution of material goods, socialism did not offer guidance on how to consume these goods or leisure time. To introduce morality into socialism, Solov’ev assimilated social equity into a theistic scheme of history in which the achievement of equity was a religious calling from God.

Such a transcendent source of duty, to be freely accepted of course, imparted moral significance to socialism.

In chapter four, we shall see Solov’ev extend his moral argument at greater length to the full field of the history of politics and society in the first draft of his doctoral thesis, known as the

Philosophical Principles of Whole Knowledge as well as some public lectures and journalism in

42 1876 and 1877. At this point in his development, Solov’ev attempted to develop an extended epistemological critique of positivism and, indeed, all of western European philosophy, religion, and culture. Yet he also developed his theistic scheme of history in which man is given religious commands to be moral in the world. Given the approach of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, which Solov’ev had been following since 1875, he fit international relations within a theistic scheme in order to argue for Russia’s preeminate place among the great powers as a bastion of morality and freedom properly understood.

The fifth and final chapter will offer a new reading of Solov’ev’s famous Lectures on

Godmanhood (1878). These lectures are the cornerstone of the “Symbolist Conceit,” and I hope my historical interpretation of their meaning and Solov’ev’s intentions complicates the traditional view of Solov’ev as an inveterate mystic. On my reading, theism offered Solov’ev a scheme of historical development within which he could show how socialism, Slavophilsim, and the Russian Empire in international relations could play a role in the promotion of morality. As

Solov’ev and his contemporaries acknowledged, however, the Lectures were unsuccessful as a public performance and represented a phase in the process of developing an explanation of the relationship between religion, society, and politics in the modern age. The fullest explanation of these relationships, however, would not come until later in the 1880s through Solov’ev’s journal debates with the Panslav oracle Ivan Aksakov and culminate in his The National Question and

The Russian Idea at the end of the 1880s.

In a certain sense, this dissertation aims to substantiate some of Petr Struve’s remarks about Solov’ev’s importance as a theorist of nationalism, but without secularizing Solov’ev. In an obituary for Solov’ev that appeared in 1901, Struve drew a strict distinction between two

43 Solov’evs: a philosopher and a moral critic of nationalism.140 The former, according to

Struve, was weak, uninteresting, and of no consequence to the present. The latter, however, articulated a vision of community based on the ideal of a nation that, so Struve suggested, could be the basis of an identity capable of unifying the people of the Russian empire without the empire itself. This dissertation argues that the philosopher and the national thinker were not divisible in the way Struve presented Solov’ev. It also suggests that, as Solov’ev and Struve illustrate, some form of imperial political authority always worked as an unstated assumption behind attempts to articulate an alternative and moral non-state order. Although I focus on the career of one man, I hope to show that this paradoxical relationship between state order and moral order was a fundamental irony in the history of the intelligentsia as a whole.

140 Petr Struve, “Pamiati Vladimira Solov’eva,” in Na raznye temy, 1893-1901 gg.: Sbornik statei, ed. idem (Saint Petersburg: A.E. Kolpinskii, 1902), 189-202.

44 CHAPTER I: Solov’ev’s Moscow: Social Science, Civic Culture, and the Problem of Education, 1835-1873

Vladimir Solov’ev’s youth has always presented his biographer’s with an enigma.

Unlike Saint Augustine, J.-J. Rousseau, or A.I. Herzen, Solov’ev left no lengthy autobiographical masterpiece of inner development, however complicated such sources may be for biography. Nor do students of Solov’ev’s thought have schoolboy notes and assignments from which to narrate the thinker’s developing mind, as scholars of G.W.F. Hegel do.

Solov’ev’s biographer must rely on brief remarks that Solov’ev made in some of his letters and short reminiscences as well as a few reminiscences by friends and acquaintances. The richest source for Solov’ev’s early life, however, is what K.V. Mochul’skii aptly called Solov’ev’s

“philosophical diary.”141 In late 1872 and 1873, Solov’ev wrote a series of philosophical-cum- love letters to his cousin, Ekaterina Vladimirovich Selevina (née Romanova), that are evidence of an earnest, ambitious, and sometimes glib young man—traits that characterized an older

Solov’ev as well. The main subject of the letters concerns the intellectual underpinnings of what later came to be known as the “Going to the People Movement.” Solov’ev’s philosophical wooing came to naught for Selevina rejected Solov’ev’s marriage proposal.142 On 19 January

1873, Solov’ev sympathized with Selevina’s desire “‘to lead the people [narod] from their terrible darkness;’” however, as Solov’ev went on, merely teaching the people “to read, write, and count was not quite [uzhe ne] enlightenment” and, what was worse, that “it is impossible to find better means for intellectual vulgarization and moral corruption than contemporary

141 K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951), 30. 142 For this episode in Solov’ev’s life, see S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody: materialy k biografii, vol. 1 (Petrograd: Senatskaia Tipografiia, 1916; reprint, Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 268-310.

45 literature.”143 Although Solov’ev agreed with the need to educate peasants, he was highly critical of the naturalistic and purely practical subjects Selevina and her cohort intended to teach.

As Solov’ev admonished his cousin, “all the wisdom of this century comes down to a simple proposition: humanity is a beast.”144

To understand Solov’ev’s condemnation of more than half a century of intellectual development, we need to know something about the social and cultural consequences of

Nicholas I’s reign, a period that shaped many of the attitudes and social possibilities of the generation of Solov’ev’s father, the historian Sergei Mikhailovich, and that protean subculture of conscious criticism of the state—the Russian intelligentsiia.145 As we shall see, the ramifications of social and cultural transformations begun under Nicholas I would leave their mark on the

Moscow in which Solov’ev grew up, while the political and social problems raised under

Alexander II would shape Solov’ev’s intellectual identity. Regarding the former, the bureaucratization and expansion of formal education opened up opportunities for social movement across estates; it also made the issue of “enlightenment” (prosveshchenie) and

“scholarship” (nauka) political and social questions.146 Alexander II’s sweeping reforms raised the issue of “statehood” (gosudarstvennost’) in the context of persistent social malaise and disaffection with the reforms. In the context of profound social transformations and persistent

143 Vl.S. Solov’ev to Ekaterina Selevina, in E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1911), 79. 144 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 79. 145 On subcultures, see David Jan Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). The treatment of the intelligentsia as a subculture is suggested by some older and more recent scholarship: Leopold H. Haimson with the collaboration of Ziva Galili y Garcia and Richard Wortman, The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3-6; John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 21-53. 146 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).

46 social malaise, Solov’ev perceived a moral problem in evolutionary social theories. As we shall see in the following chapter, theism offered Solov’ev a solution to the moral problem as he saw it.

A. Government Reform under Nicholas I and Alexander II, 1835-1874

It is a venerable tradition in scholarship on Vladimir Solov’ev to note that he was born in

Moscow as the son of great historian of Russia, S.M. Solov’ev. It is also conventional to remark, somewhat cryptically, that his paternal grandfather was an Orthodox priest and that his mother was a distant relative of Grigorii Skovoroda (1722-1794), who translated some Plato in the eighteenth century.147 Interestingly, however, neither of these two forebears finds mention in

Solov’ev’s extant works. Vladimir did have a serious relationship with his father regarding politics, history, and religion, and we will examine this relationship in greater detail in chapter 2.

None of the interpretations of Solov’ev’s life and thought belonging to the Symbolist conceit examine the significance of Moscow as a city undergoing transformation and the ways those transformation shaped Solov’ev’s life. This was due, in part, to the fact that there were no economic, social, or urban histories of Moscow available until the 1970s. At more fundamental level, however, a basic assumption of the Symbolist conceit—that all of Solov’ev’s life and thought can ultimately be explained by three alleged mystical encounters with Sophia, the Divine

Wisdom of God—drew scholars’ attention away from the world Solov’ev inhabited. Solov’ev’s early biographer, S.M. Luk’ianov, a bacteriologist who served stints as the Minister of Education and the Procurator of the Holy Synod in the early twentieth century, expressed these problems

147 K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev, 12-14; Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work, trans. Elizabeth Meyendorff, eds. Phillip Guilbeau and Heather Elise MacGregor (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1980), 20-25; Peyton Engel, “Background,” in Kornblatt and Gustafson, ed., Russian Religious Thought, 27; A.F. Losev, Vladimir Solov’ev i ego vremia (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2000).

47 nicely. Luk’ianov limited himself strictly to the collection of biographical materials because, as he put it:

In our opinion, the time for writing a full and thoroughly developed biography of Vl.S. Solov’ev still has not come. Many of the individuals with whom he had come into contact are still happily thriving; many of those who entered relations with his assistance feign, even in our day, that it [a complete biography] is not completely allowed; many of the facts of our social life [obshchestvennosti] in those days are still only liable to a quite colorless and incomplete outline.148

Times have since changed quite a bit in the scholarship in Russia’s social, institutional, and cultural history. It is now possible to see that many of the so-called Great Reforms undertaken under Alexander II (reigned 1855-1881)—from the end of serfdom in 1861 to the military reforms of 1874—were begun under Nicholas I.149 In order for the monarch to exercise his autocratic will, he needed a bureaucratic mechanism to realize it in practice.150 The apparatus of state administration expanded dramatically under Nicholas I with its attendant bureaucrats and bureaucratic rules of administration. In Moscow, social groups based on estate origin and relative economic independence (that is, serf ownership) began to emerge with distinct interests.

To understand how Vladimir Solov’ev fit into this complex social world, we need to know something about innovations in state administration in Moscow and the social responses it provoked.

Until the 1960s, scholars followed the intelligentsia’s characterizations of Nicholas I’s reign as an era of oppression and stagnation. They took Sergei Uvarov’s famous formula of

Official Nationality—Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Narodnost’ [nationality]—as the Minister of

148 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody. Materialy k biografii, kn. 1 (Petrograd: Senatskaia Tipografiia, 1916; reprint, Moscow, “Kniga,” 1990), 1. 149 For a summation of these reforms, see W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990). 150 P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 109- 110. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 9-26, 44-50, 185.

48 Education’s pusillanimous justification of a deliberately obscurantist, oppressive, and violent regime. A parting of ways between educated Russians in the capital cities and the government was only inevitable for any right-thinking person.151 It is something of a stereotype in Imperial

Russian historiography to associate Westernizers with Saint Petersburg and Slavophiles with

Moscow. Indeed, in a standard work on Slavophilism, the following is emblematic on the subject:

All Slavophiles were very closely associated with Moscow, even with a particular section of Moscow. Moscow was then more important than St. Petersburg as an intellectual center of Russia, and its university, which many of the Slavophiles attended, was the best in the country. The instinctive and deep feeling of inferiority and dislike on the part of many members of the Moscow gentry towards the official capital, with its courts, its numerous foreign names, and its claims of precedence in Russia, was a potent factor in the formation of a number of nationalist ideologies; in Slavophilism it attained its most complete and most powerful theoretical expression.152

More recent studies of educational institutions, government reforms, and urbanization have shown that life in Moscow was considerably more complex than conveyed by such an intelligentsia perspective. As urban historians have shown, Moscow was fast becoming an economic center within the Russian empire and the social and demographic effects were apparent in the city’s physiognomy no longer dominated by the townhouses and mansions of powerful gentry nobles but consisting of identifiably merchant (Old Believers and Orthodox in separate regions) and migrant peasant neighborhoods as well.153 Indeed, there is good evidence that small put powerful “interest groups” composed of peasants, merchants, and nobles had

151 Classics in this genre are Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959) and idem., A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976). For the opposite perspective, see Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786- 1855 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). 152 Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 30. 153 Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 9-99.

49 begun to exert significant influence in shaping Russia’s industrial spurt, culture, and political life in the nineteenth century, especially through the links between the Aksakov, Chizhov, and

Koshelev gentry families with Old Believer families like the Morozovs, Soldatenkovs, and

Kokorevs.154

Since the 1960s, institutional and cultural historians have elaborated on the paradoxical expansion of bureaucratic government and technical education, and the creative appropriation of

European ideas in the service of Nicholaevan autocracy long ago highlighted by A.E.

Presniakov, who in 1925 characterized the political dilemma facing Nicholas I’s military- dynastic dictatorship:

The urge to pour new wine into old bottles in so moderate an amount that the bottles would not overflow, and to use all the forces of authority to bolster antiquated forms against the pressure of new contents was characteristic of Nicholas’s politics. The more or less clear understanding that a developing internal crisis required creative work paralyzed the autocracy in its own peculiar way, at such historic moments, by an ‘inability to help itself, without repudiating its very essence.’ (in the words of E.V. Tarle).155

Indeed, since the 1970s, it is customary to date the origins of so-called “enlightened bureaucrats” to the middle of Nicholas’s reign as well as the explosion of bureaucratic and educational institutions.156 And, the scenario by which Nicholas I legitimated his power before himself, his

154 Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 133-139, 143-144, 187. 155 A.E. Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: The Apogee of Autocracy, 1825-1855, Judith C. Zacek ed. and trans. (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1974 [1925]), 29 and a passage from a letter of Nicholas’ on p. 75. See also W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989). 156 W. Bruce Lincoln, “The Genesis of an ‘Enlightened’ Bureaucracy in Russia,1825-1856,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 20, no. 3 (1972): 321-330 and Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeeth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For a good older presentation of educational reform beginning only after Nicholas and despite the ruler, see Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861-1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 35-65. For a recent reiteration of the purpose of the educational reforms as a means, in part, to provide the bureaucracy with competent personnel, see B.V. Anan’ich, ed., Upravlencheskaia elita rossiiskoi imperii: Istoriia ministerstv, 1802-1917 (Saint Petersburg: ‘Liki Rossii,’ 2008), 477-478.

50 subjects, and his bureaucratic servitors has been shown to have been a deliberate and creative attempt at the maintenance of autocratic authority.157 The new consensus is that “even reaction required a framework of rationality and enlightenment for legitimation.”158

This rationality extended to the multiplication of educational institutions throughout the empire. As Walter Pintner has shown, “probably not since the time of Peter the Great” had the

Russian government early in Nicholas I’s reign sought “the diffusion of technical and commercial information,” or what the Minister of Finance, Egor Frantsevich Kankrin called the

“capital of knowledge.”159 As part of this process, the medical training of physicians and surgeons, who were “originally conceived as bureaucrats like others who owed their position to the state’s benevolence,” grew as well as teaching staffs at various levels of instruction.160 Since the eighteenth century, most physicians in the Empire had come from among young men in the clerical estate. They were often moved into administrative positions for which the government had need.161 Even before these transformations, though, the creation and expansion of educational institutions for the teaching of law had begun under Alexander I’s reign in connection with the establishment of the ministerial system of government in 1802.162

The extent of the social transformations engendered by this process, however, should not be over emphasized. Whatever the overall number of non-nobles in the Russian bureaucracy,

157 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 158 Kostonis, “Introduction,” 6. 159 Walter Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 48, 49-50. 160 Frieden, Russian Physicians, 27. 161 Frieden, Russian Physicians, 23-24; Walter McKenzie Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 96; V.R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polivine XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo “Mysl’,” 1971), 135-138, 150-151; Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth- Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 146. However, Freeze claimed that there were serious barriers preventing seminarians from entering civil service in The Parish Clergy, 150-155. Zaionchkovskii had reservations about Leikina-Svirskaia’s data in Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, 21. 162 Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 37-50.

51 they never outnumbered nobles at its highest levels. On the basis of extensive archival research, Pintner has claimed with authority that in the first half of the nineteenth century, civil service underwent “a revolution not in social recruitment but in socialization.”163 For, according to his study of Imperial civil service records [formuliarnye zapiski], the proportion of nobles at the top levels of civil service remained remarkably constant.164 The proportion of nobles at the highest levels of the bureaucracy was maintained through legislation that simultaneously gave nobles preferential treatment for advancement while continually raising the minimum rank to achieve hereditary nobility.165 As Pintner put it: “Major and rapid change occurred not in the pedigree and economic background of officialdom, but in the nature of their service experience and in the training officials underwent as preparation for it.”166 Indeed, even a thinker with liberal or socialist bona fides like Alexander Herzen evinced social snobbery when recalling his days at Imperial Moscow University:

The whole upbringing [vospitanie] of unhappy seminarians, all their ideas were completely different than ours; we spoke different languages. Raised under the knout of monastic despotism, crammed with their rhetoric and theology, they envied our free-and- easy sociability [razviaznosti], and we were annoyed at their Christian humility.167

Anecdotal evidence from the period suggests that what Pintner described as change in career patterns within Russian government, from military to civil and from ad hoc training to

163 Pintner, “The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755-1855,” 224. 164 Ibid., 192-193, 195-196. 165 Frieden, Russian Physicians, 27-28, 35. See also, Daniel T. Orlovsky, “High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1855-1881,” in Pintner and Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom, 263. According to Frieden’s data, the number of physicians in Russia grew from about 2,000 in 1803 to 6,879 in 1840 and 8,605 in 1854. It should be noted, however, that the figures she cites also show a reduction of the number of physicians between 1855 and 1859 to about 6,000. The 1845 law raising the minimum rank for hereditary nobility to 5 can be found in PSZ, II, vol. 20, no. 19086 (11 June 1845). In 1856, the rank was again raised, this time to 4, see Frieden, Russian Physicians, pp. 48-49. 166 Pintner, “The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755-1855,” 209. See also Orlovsky, “High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1855-1881,” 280-281. 167 A.I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, in B.P. Koz’min et al., eds., Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 8 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1956), 106-109, quotation 109.

52 uniform education, was in fact the bureaucratization of Russian society overall. Given the small size of the members of society from which bureaucratic positions could be filled and the ancient importance of the state for their social status, the bureaucratization of government had an enormous impact on very small but vocal social groups. To borrow Stepan Iavorskii’s metaphor of Muscovite society’s protest against Peter I’s reforms as a cart with squeaking wheels, the nobles who formed the kernel of the intelligentsia squeaked loudest, though they no longer wanted any grease from the government for moral reasons.168 Other groups, though, accepted whatever opportunities state service opened up.

By the early nineteenth century, Iavorskii’s metaphor no longer corresponded to the social complexion of the Empire, and more voices supported the bureaucratic government.

Baron M.S. Korf, Pushkin’s classmate at the Alexander Lycée and later a member of the State

Council, mixed aristocratic prejudices with a bureaucratic, professional ethos. Writing in his diary in 1838, Korf remarked that he and his colleague in the State Council and Committee of

Ministers, Count Vasil’chikov, went over new members appointed to the State Council listed in the Address Calendar [Adres-Kalendar’], an official list of all members of the Russian government, and “found no one who could really be suitable and useful at this rank [v etom zvanii]. The poverty in people is horrible and not only at such a high level, but also in secondary offices.”169 In 1848, however, he could be slightly more generous to one of Nicholas I’s

Ministers of War, A.I. Chernyshev. Though Korf thought that Chernyshev “must have necessarily been subject to the influence of others, with his very ordinary education, without

168 Cited in N.I. Pavlenko, Petr velikii (Moscow: ‘Mysl’,’ 1990), 513. 169 Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, 115. A shorter, redacted version of Korf’s diary was published in Russkaia starina in 1899; the unredacted diary, which Zaionchkovskii cites, is part of the manuscript collection of the Winter Palace’s library held at what is now called GARF, p. 17, 226n.27. Compare the reactions to F.P. Vronchenko’s succession to E.F. Kankrin in the Ministery of Finance, pp. 117-118.

53 higher knowledge, without an independent circle of ideas, without higher state ideas, without a close acquaintance with the details and mechanisms of affairs,” he could regard Chernyshev’s activity as Minister of War, and member of both the State Council and Council of Ministers as

“incomparably higher than the late Vasil’chikov.”170 D.A. Miliutin, Alexander II’s Minister of

War complained in 1840:

Our officers are educated [obrazuiutsia] just like parrots. Before their commission they are kept in a cage, and they incessantly tell them: ‘Polly, left face!’ and Polly repeats: ‘Left face.’ ‘Polly, present arms!,’ and Polly repeats this… When Polly has firmly learned all these words by heart, and [others] besides, he will know how to stand on one foot… They put epaulettes on him, open the cage, and he flies from it with pleasure, [but] with hatred for his cage and his former instructors.171

The standardization of education was not always greeted uncritically even by high members of

Imperial Russian government, though the motive for their criticisms seems to be Nicholas’ cautious reform of education and the retention of non-educational standards for advancement within the ministries after graduation. Complaints about the expansion of bureaucratic government emerged in Moscow as well. Overall, however, each group supported the system of bureaucratic government: gentry notables heading government offices in Moscow; wealthy and less wealthy gentry; and certain members of the lower orders who had gained some upward mobility through the expansion of bureaucratic institutions.

The important institution for understanding Solov’ev’s Moscow is Imperial Moscow

University and the gentry social and cultural life centered around it. Solov’ev’s father, Sergei

Mikhailovich, owed his entire livelihood to this university, and a young Vladimir Solov’ev

170 Ibid., 122, 123. For the dates, see 235n.42. In 1849, Korf could even say that “Surely joining in himself alone of immensely difficult office of Minister of War with the rank of representative of the State Council and the Committee of Ministers is such a feat the likes of which have, hitherto, not been met with in the history of our administration,” p. 123. 171 Ibid., 108, 234n.9. The passage comes from a diary Miliutin kept while abroad which is held at the Manuscript Section of the Russian State Library.

54 envisioned his future life within an academic world. Solov’ev expressed the importance of academia to his cousin, E.V. Selevina: “All of this [study of the history of religion] is only beginning, preparatory occupations (zaniatiia), the real cause is still ahead. Without this cause, without this great task there would be nothing for me to live for, without it I would not even have the courage to love you.”172 While the institutional context of Solov’ev’s upbringing shaped his conception of the importance of scholarship and enlightenment, his extension of those concepts in a religious direction is connected to his father’s response to the bureaucratization of education.

B. Education, Religion, and Interest Groups in Moscow, 1840s-1860s

Some time ago, Leopold Haimson suggested a promising but largely ignored ideological reading of the Slavophile historiography. According to Haimson, “beneath the elaborate edifice of historical and philosophical fantasy,” one could discern the “notion that the proper task for men of good will was not to struggle for control of a political structure which already exercised too pervasive an influence in Russian life, but rather to strive for the development of cultural and social forms free from the evil embrace of the political process.”173 As we have seen in the forgoing discussion of the development of Russian government, Haimson’s insight dovetails nicely with the problems that were emerging with the expansion of Russian government under

Nicholas I. Subsequent scholars have amplified this insight.174 A bureaucratic government

172 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 105-106. 173 Leopold H. Haimson, “The Parties and the State: The Evolution of Political Attitudes,” in Cyril E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 112. Laura Engelstein has begun to develop this insight in “Holy Russia in Modern Times: The Slavophile Quest for the Lost Faith,” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 99-125, esp. 99-100. 174 Michael Hughes has developed a similar interpretation on the basis of far more evidence in “‘Independent Gentlemen’: The Social Position of the Moscow Slavophiles and Its Impact on Their Political Thought,” Slavonic and East European Review 71, no. 1 (1993): 66-88 and Alfred J. Rieber, “Interest-Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms,” in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881 (Bloomington” Indiana University Press, 1994), 58-83.

55 sponsored by Nicholas I was, indeed, expanding. To appreciate the responses to this political process, however, and given my contextualist commitments, we must pay close attention to what

Haimson regarded as mere historical and philosophical fantasy to understand what the

Slavophiles and their fellow Muscovites meant in saying what they said at this time.

Above all, the spectrum of opinions regarding the proper relationship between state and society transcends the standard binary between “Slavophile” and Westernizer.” Vladimir

Solov’ev’s father socialized with many members of these groups in the 1830s and 1840s and shared many of their moral commitments. However, he differed from the “Slavophiles” in his optimism of the moral efficacy of the Russian state and from the “Westernizers” in his firm belief in God, though not necessarily in any institutional Church. The source of Vladimir

Solov’ev’s conviction that “all of the great thinkers—the glory of humanity—were truly and deeply religious believers (atheists, of course, were only empty chatterboxes in the genus of the

French Encyclopeadists or contemporary Büchners and Vogts)” appears to have come from his father.175 In contrast to the atheism that had become a defining aspect of the cultural identity of figures like Alexander Herzen, Sergei Solov’ev remained a believer.176 As Sergei Solov’ev remembered in his memoirs,

the western party at the university (i.e., the party of professors who had received an education [vospitanie] in western universities, was the reigning one. The party was broad, there were many nuances in it; therefore relations in it were broad and free. Chivilev, Granovskii, Kavelin, and I belonged to one party, despite the fact that there were great differences among us: I, for example, was a religious man, with Christian convictions; Granovskii remained in deep thought regarding the religious question; Chivilev was very cautious—only later I learned that he believed in nothing; Kavelin as well, but he didn’t reveal this; according to political convictions, Granovskii was very close to me (i.e. very moderate, so that less moderate friends called him a supporter of the Prussian academic monarchy; as a man who was terribly carried away, Kavelin was not

175 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 73-74. 176 On the role of atheism in Herzen’s cultural identity, see Frede, Doubt, 54-86.

56 afraid of any extreme in social reforms, nor even before communism, like their common friend, the famous Herzen. I was never a home acquaintance with the latter, but I met him at Granovskii’s and at other gatherings; I loved to hear him, for the wit of this man was brilliant and inexhaustible; but this sharpness in the expression of his convictions, the lack of consideration regarding others’ convictions continually drove me away; so, for example, he very well knew of my religio-Christian convictions and, despite that, not only did not refrain from blasphemies in my presence, but sometimes he directly addressed me with them; intolerance was terrible in this man.177

When Sergei Solov’ev’s memoirs appeared, Solov’ev defended his father’s religious convictions.178 Attitudes toward state authority were no less influential.

Moscow Imperial University played a central role in the social and cultural life of gentry

Moscow, and, therefore, illustrates the complexity of public opinion. The educational ethos of this institution was shaped in large part by the Superintendant of the Moscow Instructional

District, Count S.G. Stroganov (1794-1882), and his relationship to the bureaucratizing autocracy in Saint Petersburg was shaped by his inimical relationship with Minister of

Education, Count S.S. Uvarov (1786-1855). As the leading expert in English on Uvarov tersely put it, “Uvarov and Stroganov hated each other.”179

The combination of Stroganov’s antipathy to the bureaucratization of Russian government and his financial independence from it, enabled by his fabulous wealth and his status as one of the “notables” [znat’] of the Russian nobility, informed the cultural values of personal and cultural independence that marked the self-presentations of cultured individuals at this time.

Prince V.A. Cherkasskii, who attended the university from 1840-1844, claimed that “Muscovite

177 S.M. Solov’ev, Moi zapiski dlia detei moikh, a esli mozhno, i dlia drugikh (Petrograd: Tip. t-va “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za” i kn-vo “Prometei” N.N. Mikhailova, 1915), 102-103. 178 V.S. Solov’ev, “Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev: Neskol’ko dannykh dlia kharakteristiki,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 6 (1896):. 179 Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 227-229, quotation 158. Given that all of the superintendants seemed to have hated each other, such animosity was likely meant to buttress Nicholas I’s autocratic position as ultimate arbiter of the bureaucracy, pp. 158-159.

57 society and Moscow University were then in close connection with each other, all phenomena of science, thought, and word were events and were echoed in all of Muscovite society.”180

There was also another center for the criticism of the expanding Nicholaevan bureaucracy that Haimson noted was certainly a feature of the culture of Muscovite gentry: the salon hosted by Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804-1860). Analyzing the assessments of Stroganov and

Khomiakov, which abound in the memoir and epistolary evidence from the period, enables us to describe a spectrum of attitudes—shaped, but not determined, by social origin—toward the government, education, other social groups. The young Vladimir Solov’ev would grow up in a milieu informed by these various attitudes and perspectives. Indeed, Stroganov and Khomiakov can be regarded as the foci of educated gentry culture in Moscow. As we shall see, Muscovites articulated visions of what they regarded as the proper relationship between statecraft in the foreign and statehood in domestic realms (gosudarstvennost’) and a cultured society

(obrazovannoe obshchestvo) possessed of a particular sense of self (lichnost’).181

Prerevolutionary historians appreciated the cultural importance of education in the 1850s and 1860s, and B.B. Glinskii even appreciated its political importance.182 Only very recently has this connection begun to occupy the attention of contemporary historians.183 In the early

180 Quoted in F.A. Feodorov, Formirovanie sistemy universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, vol. 4, Rossiiskie universitety i liudi 1840-kh godov, part 2, Studenty (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 2003), 78. For the independence afforded by his wealth, see ibid., part 1, 129. Illustrating Stroganov’s wealth, urban historian Ivan Zabelin recorded a story told to him by philologist F.I. Buslaev in his diary that he would pay some professors at the university with his own monies [sobstvennye] instead of the state’s [kazennye]. See I.E. Zabelin, Dnevniki, zapisnye knizhki (Moscow: Izd-vo imeni Sabashnikovykh, 2001), 57 (dated 21 May 1861) and 44 (dated 25 January 1860). 181 The Russian word gosudarstvennost’, which is derived from the word gosudarstvo, or state, freights a great deal of meaning. Depending on the convictions and occupation of the person uttering the word, it can mean statecraft or statehood. I favor the former translation for discussions of the moral identity of the state and the latter for public men in the higher ranks of state service. 182 B.B. Glinskii, Revoliutsionnyi period russkoi istorii (1861-1881 gg.): isotricheskie ocherki, 2 parts (Saint Petersburg: A.S. Suvorin, ‘Novoe Vremia,’ 1913), 57-83. 183 Richard Wortman, “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations on the Court Reform of 1864,” Kritika 6, no. 1 (2005): 145-170, esp. 145-147; Richard Wortman, “Intellectual Constructs and Political Issues,”

58 twentieth century, P.F. Kapterev, the historian of Imperial Russian pedagogy, appreciated that the question of education—pedagogy in his terms—was one of the most pressing questions that occupied the minds of educated Russians in the era of the so-called Great Reforms.184 He dated the origins of educational discussions in print with the appearance in an 1856 issue of Morskoi sbornik [Naval Miscellany] of its editorial staff’s call for articles on the “education” [vospitanie] of young people preparing for naval service. In the following year, two new pedagogical journals appeared, Zhurnal dlia vospitaniia [Journal for Education] and Russkii pedagogicheskii vestnik [Russian Pedagogical Herald]. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, pedagogical questions appeared on the pages of more new pedagogical journals as well as “in the journals of more general content.”185 Thus, he argued, “with the development of reform aspirations, pedagogical questions also began to be posed in a new way.”186

One important new approach to educational debates took shape in debates over the meaning of vospitanie (education) and obrazovanie (culture) in Russian educational thought and practice. The issue was first raised by the physician N.I. Pirogov in an 1856 issue of Morskoi sbornik and the lawyer P.G. Redkin, a childhood friend of Alexander Herzen, in an 1857 issue of

Kritikia 7, no. 2 (2006): 275-282; E.A. Pravilova, Zakonnost’ i prava lichnosti: administrativnnaia iustitsiia v Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.-oktiabr’ 1917 g.) (Saint Petersburg: Izd-vo SZAGS, Izd-vo ‘Obrazovanie-Kul’tura,’ 2000), esp. 11; Francis Wcislo, “Sergei Witte and His Times: A Historiographical Note,” Kritika 5, no. 4 (2004): 749-758; and B.V. Anan’ich, et al., eds., Vlast’ i reformy: ot samoderzhavnoi k sovetskoi Rossii (Saint Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1996). 184 P.F. Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Akts. Obshch-va Tipografskogo Dela, 1910), 240-242. I say “so-called” Great Reforms because the government studiously refuse to call the government reforms by this name. Rather, it was the label applied by what might be considered civil society in the era of these reforms and codified on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of serfdom in A.K Dzhivelegov, S.P. Mel’gunov, and V.I. Picheta, eds., Velikaia reforma: russkoe obshchestvo i krest’ianskii vopros v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 6 vols. (Moscow: Izd. I.D. Sytina, 1911). 185 Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogiki, 241. 186 Ibid., 242.

59 Zhurnal dlia vospitaniia.187 The novelist L.N. Tolstoi started a peasant school on his estate,

Iasnaia Poliana, in order to consider the educational question in theory and practice. One scholar has gone so far as to call Tolstoi, along with Pirogov, “one of the first pioneers in Russian educational theory and practice.”188 To participate in these discussions, Tolstoi published a journal communicating his teaching experiences and his educational theories at his own expense: he had personally asked N.G. Chernyshevskii to review the journal in order to generate interest in it.189 Theorizing about the various national peculiarities of education, Tolstoi strove to give a clear and unambiguous meaning, which he assumed would mean a clear policy for education, to the key concepts in Russian educational theory. In July 1862, Tolstoi wrote:

Education [vospitanie]—the French éducation, the English education, the German Erziehung—are concepts which exist in Europe, culture [obrazovanie], however, is a concept which exists only in Russia and partly in Germany, where it has a nearly corresponding word—Bildung. In French and in English, this concept and word do not exist at all. Civilization in enlightenment, training is a European concept (untranslatable in Russian), which signifies the wealth of school, scholarly [nauchnoi] information or the transmission of it, but is not education [obrazovanie], which includes scholarly knowledge, art, and physical development as well.190

Though these articles appeared only after the death of Nicholas I, it is likely the issues were discussed in the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow well before their appearance.

187 Ibid., 242. For Redkin’s article, see P.D. Redkin, “Chto takoe vospitanie?,” Zhurnal dlia vospitaniia: rukovodtsvo dlia roditelei i prepodavatelei (1857): 3-14, 137-154, 265-287. For Pirogov, see N.I. Pirogov, “Universitetskii vopros,” in V. Z. Smirnov, ed., Izbrannye pedagogicheskie sochineniia (Moscow, 1952), 324-393. 188 Nicholas Hans, History of Russian Educational Policy (1701-1917) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 135. 189 N.G. Chernyshevskii, “Iasnaia Poliana. Shkola. Zhurnal pedagogicheskii, izdavaemyi gr. L.N. Tolstym––Iasnaia Poliana. Knizheki dlia detei. Kniazhki 1-i i 2-i,” Sovremennik, no. 3 (1862): 122-138. For Tolstoi’s personal request, see the letter dated Moscow, 6 February 1862 in L.N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 60, V.G. Chertkov et al., eds. (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Kudozh. Literatury, 1949), 416. 190 L.N. Tolstoi, “Vospitanie i obraznovanie,” in V.G. Chertkov, ed., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1936), 216. The word formation in the sense of Bildung is not attested in Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1875), 1731, though religious and intellectual meanings of the verb former are attested at pp. 1733-1734. By contrast, formation in the sense of Bildung is historically attested in Trésor de la langue française: dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècles (1789-1960), vol. 8 (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1980), 1088.

60 Even before this period, though, government officials preparing the end of serfdom were interested in the issue of education. Some of the authors of the emancipation legislation even appreciated the importance of education for the serfs given their acknowledgment of “the very fragility of civil culture” in the countryside.191 In 1857, General Ia.I. Rostovtsev considered that reform would require a long and slow change “which required scrupulous state

‘guardianship’ [popechitel’stvo]’ given the low ‘moral level’ of the serfs;” hence, it was impossible “to ‘suddenly transfer half-educated people from full slavery to full freedom;’ similarly, in July 1857 P.D. Kiselev warned Alexander that ‘this huge mass [was] not prepared for total freedom.’”192

How are we to explain the connection both educated society and government officials saw between the abolition of a previously servile order and the need for educational reforms? As in other European countries, Russians were anxious about the emergence of an order of individuals who had previously not experienced freedom, however attenuated it may have in fact been. A leading scholar of German state formation and education has appreciated this connection in the German context. Not possessed of Tolstoi’s broad vision, Rudolf Vierhaus has shown that the German concept of Bildung [culture]

experienced a unique philosophical-aesthetic and pedagogical increase and ideological loading, which can only be understood in connection with the state-society development of Germany. Equivalents to the German concept of Bildung in the full content of its meaning [Bedeutungsgehalt] cannot be traced in other languages, above all not its preeminence [Heraushebung] over other concepts like ‘upbringing’ and ‘instruction.’ In

191 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 13. 192 Cited in Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 19. Wcislo, in turn, cites P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava (Moscow: 1968), 69-71, 76-77. The problem of education continued to inform political debates through Alexander II’s reign and into Alexander III’s. See P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Moscow: Izd-vo “Mysl’,” 1970), 309-365.

61 addition, a parallel offers a qualitative distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ in Germany.193

A similar constellation of state formation, education, and the self crystallized under the custodianship of François Guizot and Victor Cousin in the July Monarchy in France.194 It was just these sorts of circumstance that obtained in Russia from the 1840s through the 1860s.

Because of different indigenous cultural values regarding social activity and political authority, however, the responses were different. As the Superintendent of the Moscow Instructional

District, Stroganov played an important role in shaping educational policies at Imperial Moscow

University and, thus, the responses from prominent gentry members of Khomiakov’s salon.

Whatever their differences, Stroganov and Uvarov both regarded what they called

“enlightenment” [prosveshchenie] as fundamentally good for the Russian state and, to varying degrees, for its subjects.195 Strognanov’s nickname among students, according to a recent historian of Moscow University, as an “enlightened grandee” [prosveshvchennyi vel’mozha] captures well his motives for promoting education as an ideal form of cultural consumption for the “preeminent estate” of the realm.196 Although ideas from elsewhere in Europe might be beneficial to the Russian state, they should be restricted to the higher estates of the realm in order to modernize the gentry, which he regarded as the main buttress to autocracy. From varying perspectives, alumni from the university recognized this combination of interests in the man.197

193 Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche grundbegriffe: historiches lexicon zur politisch-sozialen sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Stuttgardt: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972), 508-509. See also pp. 529-531 where Vierhaus links ideologists of Bildung with Wilhelm von Humbolt’s “Neo-Humanist” and Hegel’s participation in the creation of the Prussian state. 194 Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 182-232. 195 Petrov, Formirovanie sistemy universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, vol. 3, 210-211. 196 Ibid., vol. 4, part 1., 133. 197 Nikolai Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, kn. 9 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1895), 235- 253.

62 Boris Chicherin described the period of Stroganov’s superintendancy “as a ray of light in a long night.” Even Alexander Herzen, a figure who stood to the left of Chicherin in political if not social matters, appreciated this combination of ancient and modern. In his memoirs, Herzen regarded the aim of Stroganov’s educational policy as an attempt “to raise the university in the eyes of the sovereign, standing up for its rights, defending students from police raids, and [he] was a liberal, insofar as someone who wore a General-Adjutant’s ‘N’-and-drumstick on his shoulder and was a humble possessor of Stroganov’s entailed estate could be a liberal.”198

During Stroganov’s tenure as the Superintendent of the Moscow Instructional District from 1835 to 1848, an appreciation of enlightenment and the preeminence of the gentry estate were institutionalized in Muscovite higher education.

These ideals also found purchase in Muscovite society at A.S. Khomiakov’s salon. He does not appear to have attended Moscow University except as an auditor, but he received the equivalent of a Doctorate in Mathematics from the university after passing the exam for the degree in the early 1820s.199 When the university’s faculty and student body began to grow after the new University Statute of 1835, Khomiakov’s salon evenings became an obligatory event for ambitious young students and professors alike. These evenings were not always a peaceful and sociable diversion, however, sometimes provoking heated disputes among attendees.200

198 Chicherin and Herzen quoted in ibid., 130, 131. 199 P.Shch., “Khomiakov (Aleksei Stepanovich), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 37 (74) (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Akts. Obshch. Brokgauz-Efron, 1903), 543. 200 S.M. Solov’ev, Moi zapiski dlia detei moikh, a esli mozhno, i dlia drugikh (Petrograd: Tip. T-va “Obshchestvennaia Pol’z” i kn-vo “Prometei” N.N. Mikhailova, n.d.), 99-110; A.N. Koshelev, Zapiski, 1806-1883 (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag (E. Bock), 1884; reprint, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1976), 67-73; A.I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, in idem., Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 9, edited by V.P. Volgin et al. (Moscow: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1956), 202-212 and P.V. Annenkov, Zamechatel’noe desiatiletie, 1838-1848, in idem., Literaturnye vospominaniia, ed. V.P. Dorofeev (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Khud. Lit., 1960), 261-282, 284-86.; B.N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia: Moskva sorokovykh godov, S.V. Bakhrushin, ed. (Moscow: Izdanie M. i S Sabashnikovykh, 1929), 5-6; Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, kn. 9, pp. 116-122; E.M. Feoktistov,

63 Khomiakov’s behavior in these disputes provoked some outrage. In his memoirs, S.M.

Solov’ev claimed that, in order to support an assertion in the course of an argument, he would invent books and authorities. On the other hand, A.I. Koshelev devotes space to a defense of

Khomiakov’s probity in argument.201

Although these indictments and defenses may seem petty and insignificant, they are indicative of deeper social and political differences within this group of patriotic Muscovites.

Although they all may have regarded enlightenment as a good for the state or the nation, they chose different enlightenments from other European countries. For reasons of temperament, education, or finances, Ivan Kireevskii fits in badly with this group of thinkers for his lack of interest in farming and country life as well as what men like Khomiakov regarded as his almost scandalous denigration of European enlightenment and overestimation of the moral life of pre-

Petrine Russia.202

As recent research has shown, many of the most prominent of the so-called Slavophiles who promoted an ideology of resistance to Nicholaevan bureaucracy, like Khomiakov, Koshelev, and Iurii Samarin, possessed enough land and serfs to place them within the top 2% of the wealthiest subjects of the Russian empire. They derived their wealth from the application of leading farming techniques learned from other European sources and discussed as members of the Lebedian’ Agricultural Society which met annually in the Tambov district. The fact that

Vospominaniia za kulisami politiki i literatury, 1848-1896, Iu.G. Oksman, ed. (Leningrad: “Priboi,” 1929; reprint, Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1975), 79-127. 201 Solov’ev, Moi zapiski, 104-106; Koshelev, Zapiski, 69n. 202 Hughes, “‘Independent Gentlemen,’” 73-74, esp. 73n.33 and 74n.37. For his heretical historical views, see I.V. Kireevskii, “O Kharaktere prosvheshcheniia evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosveshcheniiu Rossii (pis’mo k gr. E.E. Komarovskomu) [1852],” in I.V. Kireevskii, Kritika i estetika (Moscow: “Iskusstvo,” 1998), 266-314. See especially the scandalized responses by Samarin, Aksakov, and Khomiakov on pp. 453-454. On Kireevskii’s unusually dim view of human individuals and his religious interests, see Laura Engelstein, “Orthodox Self- Reflection in a Modernizing Age: The Case of Ivan and Natal’ia Kireevskii,” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 125-150.

64 their wealth derived from serfdom, however, does not mean they supported the serf order. In fact, these three men were some of the most active authors and executors of the legislation that put an end to serfdom. Their interest in exploiting their serfs and land for the wealth that could be derived from them seems to have set them off from the rest of their gentry cousins in the countryside or the capitals.203

This wealth gave Khomiakov, Koshelev, and Samarin enough financial independence from Nicholas I’s expanding bureaucracy that they could pursue their own social and cultural interests. They could afford to criticize the Nicholaevan state and develop their own notions of education, culture, and a whole style of life that has been called, following historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, a “country” party opposed to the “court.”204 In such circumstances, they could develop a theory of the state’s proper sphere of authority “limited to range of narrowly defined ‘political’ tasks”—e.g., the restoration of order in the case of uprising and protection of borders—because the “moral and social order” supervised by these enlightened magnates might be “achieved spontaneously in the Land [Zemlia]” through the moral authority of properly educated gentry.205

S.M. Solov’ev could not have shared this understanding of the proper role of government and aims of education. The son of an Orthodox priest, he was legally barred from owning serfs even if he had wanted to. He depended for his and his family’s livelihood on the salary he could earn from state service in the empire’s educational institutions. Lacking access to land, Solov’ev

203 Hughes, “‘Independent Gentlemen,’” 72-79. Their source of wealth distinguished them from the Aksakov family, which had a reputation for being more Muscovite than Muscovites. The Aksakov’s had less, fewer serfs, and apparently more children, which threatened to divide up what little wealth the family had. This circumstance might explain why the Aksakov’s were such avid publishers and pursued economic links with the merchant magnates, a distinctly lower estate according to the laws of the realm and the rules of cultural distinction. 204 Ibid., 79-83. 205 Ibid., 86.

65 devoted himself to scholarship both as livelihood and vocation. Though he could appreciate

Stroganov as “an active man who wanted to everything in his jurisdiction in the best possible way and who had, in addition, the means,” he had a very different view of his place within the social structure of the empire.206 In his memoirs, Solov’ev claimed Stroganov’s social values were paradoxically progressive while the Count’s level of culture remained rudimentary.

Stroganov, according to Solov’ev, was

the most powerful proponent of aristocratic aspirations. His fundamental ideas was to elevate the highest gentry estate in Russia, to give it the means to support its position, to remain forever the highest estate; the most powerful means for this in his eyes was culture [obrazovanie], science [nauka]; hence the idea that people, who have been placed by birth and wealth in the upper social stratum, must, for the most part, study. He, himself, had received a bad, superficial education, but thanks to instinct he understood that science [nauka] is might.207

Such a vision of the role of science (nauka) and culture (obrazovanie) were woven into

Solov’ev’s own influential, multi-volume history of Russia. Summing up the history of pre-

Petrine Russia in the important thirteenth volume of his history, Solov’ev portrayed educators like Simeon Polotskii (1629-1680), a monk from what is now Belarus’, and the Catholic Serb

Juraj Krizanic (1618-1683) as proponents of a new and alien culture (obrazovanie), science

(nauka), and enlightenment (prosveshchenie) that Muscovy vitally needed to assimilate in order to survive and prosper. Because of what Solov’ev portrayed as the Muscovites’ stubborn and self-righteous adherence to their own ancient customs, however, these bearers of western

European culture were driven out. The end result of this process, according to Solov’ev, was the cultural crisis associated with the confrontation between Archpriest Avvakum (1620-1682) and

Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681), which culminated in the emergence of Old Belief as a heretical

206 Solov’ev, Moi zapiski, 25. See also pp. 125-157 for an account of university politics, 1847-1855. 207 Ibid., 26-27. Also cited in Petrov, Formirovanie sistemy universitetskogo obrazovanie v Rossii, vol. 4, part 1, 133.

66 sect within Orthodoxy.208 The moral Solov’ev meant to convey here was the need to assimilate foreign culture in order to avoid backwardness. We can also see that Solov’ev had a different attitude to the state than the Slavophiles like Koshelev, Khomiakov, and Samarin.

Unlike these independent gentlemen, Solov’ev obtained a comfortable livelihood within the state’s bureaucracy, and regarded his role as the custodian of culture and science as a vocation that could be realized through its institutions.

As we can see, over the course of the 1830s and 1860s, the problem of education had begun to occupy the minds of Russians in both capitals. Despite the venerable dichotomy of

Slavophiles and Westernizers as the only viable cultural options, we see that there was a spectrum of attitude regarding the proper sources, types, and ends of education. For Khomiakov, education and culture maintained a community of spontaneous love within gentry families as well as between other gentry families and serfs. The state, with its formal bureaucratic rules, was supposed to keep out of this sphere because it would disrupt this natural, in a divinely ordained sense, social harmony. For a man like Ivan Kireevskii, only a nostalgic vision of

Orthodoxy as practiced in the monastery could maintain the moral purity of the individual

(lichnost’) that was a prerequisite for the type of spontaneous community the Slavophile gentry valued.209 And Sergei Solov’ev regarded “scientific culture” (nauchnoe obrazovanie) as vitally necessary to the future prosperity of the Russian state (gosudarstvo): he regarded the state itself as a much more important, and less morally suspect, vehicle for delivering culture to the subjects of the realm. Indeed, Sergei Solov’ev regarded himself as a member of a “scholarly estate”

208 S.M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, kn. 8, vol. 13 (Moscow: Izd-vo Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1962), 149-172. According to N.L. Rubinshtein, Sergei Solov’ev summed up his vision of pre-Petrine Russian history and what might be regarded as his philosophy of history in volume thirteen of his great work. See N.L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia (Moscow: OGIZ Gospolitizdat, 1941), 312-342. 209 Engelstein, “Orthodox Self-Reflection in a Modernizing Age.”

67 (uchenoe soslovie) who had an obligation and duty to serve the state as custodians of scientific knowledge.210

When Vladimir Solov’ev began to think for himself in the 1860s, it is this constellation of issues that he must confront. Added to this, however, were the problems of evolutionary social theory, as expressed by Herbert Spencer, and the profound social transformations the Russian empire experienced in the 1860s. The combination of these external and intellectual factors brought the issue of progress to the fore of public discussion. It remains for us to examine how

Vladimir Solov’ev confronted these issues.

C. “All the Wisdom of This Century Comes Down to a Simple Proposition: Humanity is a Beast”: The Ethical Problem in Evolutionary Social Theory and the Turn to Theism, 1869-1873

Vladimir Solov’ev’s childhood friend, the sociologist and future Duma deputy representative N.I. Kareev recalled that in the early 1870s Solov’ev read with great interest N.K.

Mikhailovskii’s articles on evolutionary theory and society and maintained his sympathy for populism until at least the early 1890s.211 As Kareev wrote to Luk’ianov:

Populism enjoyed Solov’ev’s sympathy mainly in N.K. Mikhailovskii’s journal articles in The Fatherland Notes. In the summer of 1873, Solov’ev visited me in the country (Smolenskaia guberniia), and we had conversations regarding the peasant affair (land etc), about Mikhailovskii’s recent articles, of which he thought very highly. Later, in the 80s and 90s, he met Mikhailovskii for dinner at the residence of V.A. Gol’tsev, who had come to Saint Petersburg, and gave a toast in honor to Mikhailovskii, in which he gave him credit for the zeal about the Russian people (I was among those present). Solov’ev’s hopes in the people and the Populists’ [, however,] had a completely different character, and from this side the Populists saw in Solov’ev not an ally, but an antagonist. At

210 Solov’ev, Moi zapiski, 97. 211 The articles are collected in N.K. Mikhailovskii, Sochineniia N.K. Mikhailovskogo, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. B.M. Vol’fa, 1896). For Kudriavtsev-Platonov’s lecture on theism, see V.D. Kudriavtsev Platonov, “Teizm,” in Sochineniia V.D. Kudriavtseva-Platonova, doktora bogosloviia, professora filosofii v Moskovskoi dukhovnoi akademii, vol. 2, Issledovaniia i stat’i po estestvennomu bogoslovii (Sergiev Posad: Izd-vo Bratstva Prepodobnogo Sergiia, 1893), 156-204.

68 Gol’tsev’s dinner, Mikhailovskii, who was generally marked by great reserve, treated Solov’ev’s toast with great coldness.212

The recollections of L.M. Lopatin, a life-long friend and a future professor of philosophy at

Moscow University, complement Kareev’s. Because Loptain was interested in making Solov’ev an outstanding representative of the development of institutionalized, academic philosophy in

Russian, he did not trace Solov’ev’s long-term social and political views. Instead, he remarked that August Comte, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and George Lewes were the authors labeled

“positivist” in Russian in the 1860s and 1870s, just those authors that Mikhailovskii subjected to criticism.213 The memoirs of both Kareev and Lopatin suggest some of the intellectual currents that led Solov’ev to declare that contemporary culture had reduced man to “a beast.”

Additionally, Solov’ev’s somewhat distant intellectual relationship with Kareev throughout their lives suggest that an abiding interest of the two of them was the meaning of history.214 For our immediate purposes, however, why did Solov’ev’s criticism of these intellectual lead him to study human nature and history of human intellectual development, religious, philosophical, and scientific?

An initial answer can be found in N.K. Mikhailovskii’s extended reviews of Herbert

Spencer and Charles Darwin that Kareev remembered reading with Solov’ev in the late 1860s

212 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 312-313n.597. This was one of the letters Luk’ianov solicited from people who knew Solov’ev. Gol’tsev was a member of the Moscow Psychological Society and the unofficial editor of Russkaia mysl’. He agreed to handle financial matters for VFP through Russkaia mysl’. See, respectively, the miniutes of the Psychological Society’s meetings in VFP 1, no. 1 (1890): 103-104 and VFP 7, no. 1 (31) (1896): 68. 213 L.M. Lopatin, “Filosofskoe miroszertsanie V.S. Solov’eva,” VFP 12, no. 1 (56) (1901): 47-48. A version of this essay appeared in English translation: L.M. Lopatin, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev,” Mind 25, no. 100 (1916): 425-460. 214 In 1891, Solov’ev reviewed the first issues of Istoricheskoe obozrenie, which was edited by N.I. Kareev. See Vl.S. Solov’ev, “Rukovodiashchie mysli ‘Istoricheskogo obozreniia,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, no. 10 (1891): 75-86. In 1895, Kareev gave Solov’ev a signed copy of his Istoriko-filosofskie i sotsiologicheskie etiudy (Saint Petersburg, 1895), the title page of which is preserved at OR RNB f. 423 (A.N. Lbovskii), no. 1274. On Istoricheskoe obozrenie, see Wladimir Bérélowitch, “History in Russia Comes of Age: Institution Building, Cosmopolitanism, and Theoretical Debates among Historians in Late-Imperial Russia,” Kritika 9, no. 1 (2008): 113- 134.

69 and early 1870s. Without drawing out the implications of the Solov’ev-Mikhalovskii link,

Luk’ianov hinted at its significance. At the end of a list of major political and social events in late-Imperial Russia—from the reforms begun by Ia.I. Rostovtsev culminating in 19 February

1861, the birth of Russian terroristic activity in The People’s Will and Nechaev’s five-man cells—Luk’ianov quoted at length from an article written by Mikhailovskii in 1870 that summed up both the intellectual and social life of the time:

Man can say: yes, nature is merciless toward me, it doesn’t know the difference, in the sense of a right, between me and a sparrow; but I, myself, will be merciless toward her and with my own bloody work [trud] I will subdue her, force her to serve me, I will expunge evil and create good. I am not a goal of nature, and nature doesn’t have any goals. But I have goals, and I will achieve them.215

Mikhailovskii’s language echoed Solov’ev’s criticism of “contemporary wisdom” as the reduction of man to “a beast” while it also described a nature that was inimical to humankind.

Neither of these conceptions of mankind or nature, in Solov’ev’s mind, could provide the basis from which to derive moral principles. The problem of morality in what scholars have called

“evolutionary social theory” was the fundamental problem that shaped the contours of the young

Solov’ev’s intellectual development.

As scholars have shown, to characterize as “Darwinian” the evolutionary outlook on society that spread in the second half of the nineteenth century raises more questions than it answers. Many of the leading evolutionary thinkers—Herbert Spencer, E.B. Tylor, Sir Henry

Maine, and J.F. McLennan—had all published works in other fields that would later make them famous before the appearance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.216 Scholars and

215 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 2-3. The article can be found in “Teoriia Darvina i obshchestvennaia nauka,” stat’ia 2-aia, “Teoriia Darvina i teleologiia,” Otechestvennaia zapiski (March 1870): 1-48, 20 or Sochineniia, vol. 1, 194-240. 216 J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 21.

70 public intellectuals had made sense of the inchoate mass of social, legal, and anthropological data by arranging them in evolutionary schemes that did not depend on Darwin. Even the phrase most associated with Darwin’s name, “survival of the fittest,” derived from Thomas Malthus’ work on population from earlier in the century.217 In was only in later editions of Origin of

Species that Darwin used Spencer’s phrase to describe his theory of evolution.218 It should come as no surprise, then, that when Darwin was first translated into Russian in 1864, his ideas were not immediately seen as applicable to social life.219 That honor belonged to Herbert Spencer, two volumes of whose essays appeared in translation in 1866.

Reviewing On the Origin of Species in 1864, D.I. Pisarev devoted six of nearly one hundred and seventy five pages to “natural selection” (estestvennyi vybor) but never explicitly applied the idea to human society.220 Pisarev regarded the theory as a natural law by which “the useful” (poleznyi) was selected against “the harmful” (vrednyi) in “all the organic world.”221 He only veered in the direction of the social world once while summing up the effects of natural selection: “all organs and all abilities of all organisms could in this way [i.e., by natural selection] be brought up (vospityvat’sia), and actually were brought up this way in the course of centuries and millennia.”222

217 Ibid., 183. In the first edition, Darwin refered to the “struggle for existence” in connection with Malthus’ work. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimilie of the First Edition, with an introduction by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1859]), 63. 218 J.W. Burrow, “Editor’s Introduction,” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 33. 219 On Darwin’s reception in Russia, see Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8-49 and Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7-23. 220 D.I. Pisarev, “Progress v mire zhivotnykh i rastenii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, L.D. Gromova, ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), 48-53. The article appeared serially in Russkoe slovo throughout 1864. See also, James Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), 28. 221 Ibid., 48. Billington elides the distinction between social and organic worlds in Mikhailovsky, 28. 222 Ibid., 51.

71 The first attempt to apply Darwin’s theory to the social and moral world came via

France. In 1862, N.N. Strakhov reviewed Clémence Royer’s translation of On the Origin of

Species that generated little discussion.223 A subdued interest in the applicability of Darwin’s theory to society might also have been a function of the fact that Karl Ernst von Baer, a Russian subject, had himself expounded a leading theory of evolution himself. Indeed, Pisarev took patriotic pride in the achievements of Russian scientists, while also acknowledging the motley nature of the empire:

Some real investigators, who bring actual utility [pol’zu] to universal science live, it is true, in Russian cities and sometimes even bear Russian last names, but their works remain dead and even unknown capital for our society. Our academic Karl-Ernst von Baer is considered one of the greatest embryologists of our time in all of Europe. Darwin, Karl Vogt, and Huxley always cite his opinions with particular respect.224

If Russians greeted Darwin’s theory of natural selection coolly, the same cannot be said about their reception of Herbert Spencer’s writings. In 1866, a retired military officer, N.L.

Tiblen, published two volumes of Spencer’s Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative

(1854).225 In the prefatory remarks to the first volume, Tiblen revealed high hopes for Spencer’s ideas in Russia’s “troubled times.”226 In Tiblen’s opinion, Spencer had both scientific knowledge and a moral example to offer Russia. Morally,

Spencer carries one away into a region in which there is no admittance of political passions and vices. His thought, his intellectual and physical perfection will be the final goal of such a man [really interested in the good of society], when he grasps Spencer. No malicious intent, no pride, no delusions in his condition will entice such a man to

223 N.N. Strakhov, “Durnye priznaki,” Vremia, no. 11 (1862). For Royer’s translation, see Clémence-Auguste Royer, “Introduction,” in Charles Darwin, De l’origine des espèces, ou Des lois du progress chez les êtres organisés, Clémence-Auguste Royer (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862), xv-xxiii. 224 D.I. Pisarev, “Realisty,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, L.D. Gromova, ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), 291. 225 Gerbert Spenser, Nauchnye, politicheskie i filosofskie opyty, vol. 2, N.L. Tiblen, trans. and ed. (Saint Petersburg: Tip. N. Tiblena i Ko. (N. Nekliudova), 1866). On Tiblen, see Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism, 30, 189n.D and G.Z. Eliseev, Vospominaniia, in Shestidesiatye gody, V. Evgen’ev-Maksimov and G.F. Tizengauzen, eds. (Moscow-Leningrad: Academia, 1933), 559n.45. 226 Ibid., vi.

72 political role-playing: but isn’t the whole essence of that security which society seeks at present contained in that?227

Spencer also offered an ideal of the “good citizen” equivalent to being “the most perfect individuals, parents, teachers [vospitateliami] of one’s heirs as possible.”228 Above all, Spencer was an educator:

We make so bold as to think that the development of farming and the education [vospitanie] of society constitute the basic conditions of Russia’s flowering ‘neath the vault of privilege [pod sen’iu l’got] granted it in the past ten years. We also make so bold as to think that, if Spencer did nothing for the former, then he would prove to be more of a service to the latter than anyone else: each line of Spencer’s works aims at the means of self-formation and self-education of the adult: the whole volume is dedicated to the education of his child.229

At about this time, Polish liberals in Warsaw were beginning to read Spencer in just this way: the violent implications of the role of survival of the fittest in Spencer’s thought were deemphasized for his discussion of work and gradual progress.230

It was Spencer’s contribution to scientific knowledge, however, that would have the greatest impact on Mikhailovskii and, therefore, Solov’ev because of its assumptions about historical development. Introducing the essays to Russia’s small but presumably avid reading public, Tiblen identified Spencer’s main contribution to thought as “the comparative sociological method.”231 In his biography of Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart authoritatively called this “species of philosophical investigation” either “theoretical” or “conjectural” history, and equated it with

227 Ibid., v-vi. 228 Ibid., vi. 229 Ibid., vi-vii. 230 Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 65-69. Billington paints the opposite picture of Spencer for Russians in Mikhailovsky, 30. 231 N.L. Tiblen, prefatory remarks in Gerbert Spenser, Nauchnye, politicheskie i filosofskie opyty, vol. 1, viii.

73 David Hume’s “natural” history of religion and French genre of “histoire raisonnée.”232 A unique feature of the Scottish version of this genre was its interest in the role of the division of labor in promoting the progress of morality in civil society. After studying with Dugald Stewart in Scotland, James Mill brought it south and transformed it.233 Both the Scottish conjectural historians of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century practitioners of the comparative method recognized similarities in practices and beliefs among contemporary primitive and barbaric peoples with beliefs and practices in the past of the more civilized countries. Where the

Scots relied on conjecture “to illuminate the less by the more familiar,” the comparative method was used by nineteenth-century social scientists “as a basis for systematic classification, with the object of constructing a hypothetical sequence illustrating the development of civilization.”234 A comparison of the two approaches should illustrate the difference. In An Essay on the History of

Civil Society (1767), Adam Ferguson explained the purposes, but most importantly the limits, of conjectural history:

The inquiry refers to a distant period, and every conclusion should be built on the facts which are preserved for our use. Our method, notwithstanding, too frequently, is to rest the whole on conjecture; to impute every advantage of our nature to those arts which we ourselves possess; and to imagine, that a mere negation of all our virtues is a sufficient description of man in his original state. We ourselves are the supposed standards of politeness and civilization; and where our features do not appear, we apprehend, that there is nothing which deserves to be known. But it is probably that here, as in many other cases, we are ill qualified, from our supposed knowledge of causes, to prognosticate effects, or to determine what must have been the properties and operations, even of our own nature, in the absence of those circumstances in which we have seen it engaged.235

232 Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, LL.D., William Robertson, D.D., and of Thomas Reid, D.D. (Edinburgh: George Ramsay & Co., 1811), 49. 233 Burrow, Evolution and Society, 15-16. 234 Burrow,” Evolution and Society, 10-11, quotation p. 11. 235 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75. Another famous formulation of the conjectural method can be found in J.-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (Second Discourse), in The First and Second Discourses, Roger D. and Judith R. Masters, trans. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 103.

74 Nearly one hundred years later, Herbert Spencer’s comparisons and conjectures lost

Ferguson’s modesty. In his First Principles (1864), Spencer made the following comparison illustrating his principle of evolution:

The progress here so clearly marked, is a progress traceable throughout social functions at large. Comparing the rule of a savage chief with that of a civilized government, aided by its subordinate local governments and their officers, down to the police in the streets, we see how they, as men have advanced from tribes of tens to nations of millions, the regulative process has grown large in amount; how guided by written laws, it has passed from vagueness and irregularity to comparative precision; and how it has subdivided into processes increasingly multiform. Or observe how the barter that goes on among barbarians, differs from our own commercial processes, by which a million’s worth of commodities is distributed daily;…236

Ferguson’s awareness of the subjectivity of the conjectural method, indicated by “supposed,” is not a feature of Spencer’s cast of mind. The arrangement of social phenomena in a homogenous scheme of development led some evolutionary social theorists, like E.B. Tylor, to elaborate the concept of “survivals” to explain the persistence of phenomena that serve no clear or rational functional role in a given society.237 The problem with this method of arranging the fact of social life, and one that would concern Mikhailovskii and Solov’ev, is that there are unacknowledged values not immanent within the observed facts providing the criteria of judgment for more or less progressed.

Scholars of religion have described this problem of value in terms of teleology or, more polemically, a “religion of progress.”238 As it happens, Mikhailovskii saw the same problem in

236 Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 4th ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1882 [1864]), 392. Compare Adam Smith’s famous illustration of the power of the division of labor by comparing the accommodation of a frugal European peasant with an African king in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 23-24. 237 Burrow, Evolution and Society, 14. Tylor’s ideas have been shown to have guided Soviet ethnographers as they set nationality policy. See Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 218-219. 238 Burrow, Evolution and Society, 13n.2; Rudolf Otto, Religious Essays: A Supplement to ‘The Idea of the Holy’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 127, 137-139; C.H. Dodd, “Eschatology and History,” in The Apostolic

75 much of what Spencer and Darwin wrote. In the 1860s and 1870s, Mikhailovskii was profoundly interested in the “philosophy of history.”239 As we shall see, his interests ranged well beyond socialist authors. While Mikhailovskii agonized over the philosophy of history in secular terms, the young Solov’ev turned toward rational religion.240 To understand why Solov’ev turned to religion, we need to know some of the problems Mikhailovskii raised in criticizing evolutionary social theory and conundrums he could not solve.

The first difficulty Mikhailovskii confronted while considering Spencer’s vision of society and history was the problem of the “preconceived notion” (predviziatoe mnenie).

Throughout the early sections of What Is Progress? Mikhailovskii considered what type of knowledge outside the self was possible if any scientific investigation meant approaching facts with “preconceived notions” that vitiated the objectivity aimed after. At the same time, he acknowledged that an investigation without any “preconceived notions” was just as impossible because the human mind was incapable of apprehending the infinite aggregate of phenomena.241

What Mikhailovskii regarded as the “Achilles’ heel” of Spencer’s system was that “the law of sociological progress [was] for [Spencer] nothing more than a particular instance of general, transcendental laws of evolution [razvitiia] in general.”242 Without solving the epistemological

Preaching and Its Developments (New York: Harper & Row, 1964 [1934]), 90-96; and Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 59-62, 72-73. For “religion of progress,” see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 112-114. These issues can also be treated in terms of “universal history.” See M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 201-217. 239 Billington, Mikhailovsky, 30-41, quotation p. 41. Mikhailovskii’s interests were much more varied and far less explicitly socialist than Billington argues. 240 Georges Florovsky, “Reason and Faith in the Philosophy of Solov’iëv,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, Ernest J. Simmons, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 283-297. 241 N.K. Mikhailovskii, “Chto takoe progress?,” Sochineniia, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. B.M. Vol’fa, 1896), 11- 17. 242 Ibid., 16. Mikhailovskii translates “evolution” as razvitie at p. 18.

76 issue on the conceptual level, Mikhailovskii drew a psychological lesson that had social implications:

Fortunately or unfortunately, we are not old enough for an objective relationship to the facts of social life, and the subjective point of view shines through in every line both of our own political writers, and the greater part of those foreign authors with whom we have until now been acquainted. Therefore, meeting a calm thinker searching for only a single naked and objective truth, who obviously isn’t undermining anyone’s interests, we can either simply reject the truths [istin] obtained by him, [but] which are unpleasant for us, or can be blindly carried away by their truthfulness [istinnost’]. The one and the other are, of course, lamentable. And anyway, relative to Western Europe, we play the role of cooks who’ve inherited an old-fashioned hat from the lord. While we’re still divided into materialists and spiritualists, leading western thought, in the persons of Comte, Spencer, etc. deny both systems. While in our society we hear over and over again reproaches of atheism against our leading people—positivism calls atheists ‘the most illogical theologians’ (Comte’s expression, and—completely independent of him—one of the extreme left Hegelians). It could easily be that some principles of positive sociology will move to us when they are already perishing in Western Europe.243

Along with the pessimistic outlook for the future development of sociology in Russia,

Mikhailovskii presented the positivist collection of facts as a sort of calming and maturing process. Since this outlook was also based on the acknowledgment of the relativity of its conclusions in a moral sense, the psychological motive for its pursuit was based on either arbitrary reasons or something like a will to the “calm” collection of facts. As we shall see in the next chapter, Solov’ev’s turn to religion was partly motivated by a psychological need to connect human activity to the realization of absolute value, as rational theologians do.244

Developing an answer to the question “what is progress” in Spencer’s thought,

Mikhailovskii almost immediately rephrased the question as “what is evolution” (razvitie). In making this move, Mikhailovskii followed Spencer’s own dissatisfaction with the concept of

243 Ibid., 16-17. 244 C.H. Dodd, Gospel and Law: The Relation of Faith and Ethics in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 39-42.

77 progress because it was a “teleological concept.”245 Changing the terminology, however, did not change the structure of the inquiry, for he formulated the question as “what are its transcendental laws?”246 Just like Spencer, Mikhailovskii offered a vague definition of evolution after consideration of an enormous amount of variegated materials (from astronomy to geography, zoology, and society): “the formula of progress must be exactly expressed as the movement from the less heterogenous to the more heterogenous” or, “for brevity’s sake,” “the movement from the homogenous to the heterogenous.”247 Though this formulation may be a description, it does not explain how the process occurs. The next section considered the mechanisms by which societies move from the homogenous to the heterogenous.

At this point in the explication of Spencer’ thought, Mikhailovskii introduced the principle of “the division of labor” (razdelenie truda) first, following Spencer’s own example, with Guizot’s History of Civilization, before moving on to Xenophon, Plato, Schiller, Proudhon,

Mill, and Adam Smith.248 Here, Mikhailovskii developed a criticism of Spencer, as well as

Buckle and Comte, originating in the German writings of Friedrich Schiller, who, reading Adam

Smith and Adam Ferguson in German in the eighteenth century, developed a criticism of the social effects of the division of labor as well as a remedy based in aesthetic taste. In his

Aesthetic Letters, Schiller developed an aesthetic attitude in order to contain the stultifying effects of specialization resulting from the division of labor in society.249 Similarly,

Mikhailovskii made the same criticism of Spencer. Indeed, Spencer’s reliance on political

245 Mikhailovskii, “Chto takoe progress?” 18. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid., 31. Compare Spencer, First Principles, 394. 248 Ibid., 31-42. 249 Roy Pascal, “‘Bildung’ and the Division of Labor,” in German Studies Presented to Walter Horace Bruford on His Retirement by His Pupils, Colleagues, and Friends (London: G.G. Harrap, 1962), 14-28; Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 206-217.

78 economists to “describe in sufficient detail the movement of industrial organization from homogeneity to heterogeneity with the aid of the division of labor” set Mikhailovskii’s socialist antennae spinning. For he immediately introduced the “shop economists’” critique of the “dual significance of the division of labor:” the increased heterogeneity of society entails a homogenization, or alienation, of individual human beings.250 In Mikhailovskii’s words,

Spencer “understood progress or evolution not as perfection or amelioration, but simply a consecutive series of changes whatever their results may be in relation to the happiness of mankind.”251 Mikhailovskii continued to purse what he called Spencer’s “blunder” in thinking about the social effects of the division of labor on society in his articles considering the place of

Darwin’s theory of natural selection in social science, focusing on Smith and Ferguson among many other German, French, and English authors.252 To deal with the problem of the individual in modern economic society, Mikhailovskii could think only of struggle because of his commitment to secular and naturalistic explanations of society. Thus his solution to struggle violently with nature.253 Having equated struggle with work, Mikhailovskii, like his contemporary Poles, minimized the violent implications that could be drawn from Spencer’s doctrine.254 What was at issue was the possibility of moral improvement on the individual level and whether education was even possible.

250 Ibid., 35-36, quotations on 35. 251 Ibid., 39. 252 Ibid., 42. On Smith and Ferguson, see his “Teoriia Darvina i obshchestvannaia nauka,” Sochineniia, vol. 1, 171- 173 and the notes. On Ferguson’s handling of the division of labor, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, with a new afterword (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1975]), 499-505. 253 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 2-3. The article can be found in “Teoriia Darvina i obshchestvennaia nauka,” stat’ia 2-aia, “Teoriia Darvina i teleologiia,” Otechestvennaia zapiski (March 1870): 1-48, 20 or Sochineniia, vol. 1, 194-240. 254 In this regard, Daniel Todes discusses the reception of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the context of radical thought in the 1860s. Radical thought, however, was a minority opinion, and to discuss the problem of

79 In this context, Solov’ev first turned to P.D. Iurkevich’s religious philosophy in order to justify high-minded, religious goals for work in society. Iurkevich was an Orthodox priest and scholar who had been educated at the Kiev Clerical Academy and eventually taught there. He became famous in the 1860s for his critique of N.G. Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis on the anthropological principle in philosophy. The critique first appeared in a Kiev journal, but was later republished by M.N. Katkov in Russian Messenger. This article paved the way for

Iurkevich’s move to the department of philosophy at Moscow University. Solov’ev expressed his objections to evolutionary social theory in letters he wrote to his cousin, E.V. Selevina. In these letters from 1873 about the pedagogical goals of the “Going to the People” movement,

Solov’ev makes some very telling remarks. In a letter written 25 July 1873, Solov’ev wrote:

I not only hope, but am as convinced as I am of my own existence that the truth, as I’ve understood it, will transform them and all this world of like by its own inner force, it will forever annihilate all injustice and evil of personal and social life at the root—the rude ignorance of the narodnye masses, the abomination of the moral desolation of the cultured classes [obrazovannykh klassov], the kulak’s law between states—that abyss of darkness, filth, and blood in which humanity has been cast up to now. All of this will disappear like a night specter before the sun of Christ’s eternal truth rising in consciousness, which has hitherto been misunderstood and rejected by humanity. And, the kingdom of God will appear in all its glory—the kingdom of inner, spiritual relations, pure love and joy—a new heaven and new earth in which justice lives. But, it is impossible for a worthless man to live continually in this thought-world, which still has not been realized for us.255

In another letter, from 2 August 1873, Solov’ev continued to explain the link he made between religious forms and social and political order. The problem for the present, according to

Solov’ev, was the form in which Christian content was expressed, for “Christianity, although

natural selection as a scientific explanation of Jacobin social or political terror is to misconstrue what Russian’s regarded as the problem with Darwin. See his important, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24-32. 255 E. L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1911), 84-85.

80 unconditionally true in itself, has had up to now merely a very one-sided and insufficient expression on account of historical conditions” which led it to say “nothing to reason.”256 In order to provide a true ethical doctrine by which to orient individual action in the world,

Solov’ev proposed to lead “the eternal content of Christianity into a new form corresponding to it [its true form], i.e. the rationally unconditional.”257 Even more programmatically in the same letter, Solov’ev thought “monasticism at one time had its own high appointed purpose, but now the time had come not to run from the world, but to go into the world in order to transform it.”258

Solov’ev was beginning to regard religion as compatible with enlightenment. As we shall see, the ideal Solov’ev has of religion has had a long history in the Judeo-Christian world.

In another letter to his cousin, Solov’ev elaborates on this connection. Admonishing Selevina for wanting “‘to lead the narod from its terrible darkness’”—quoting from her letter to him— merely by teaching them “to read, to write, and to count,” Solov’ev claimed “was still not enlightenment” because it neglected the fact that “what one reads is important.” Further addressing the issue of the content of the enlightenment Selevina meant to take to the people,

Solov’ev claimed that ‘it is impossible to find better means for intellectual vulgarization and moral corruption than contemporary literature.” More precisely, according to Solov’ev, contemporary civilization and enlightenment reduced mankind to mere animal and biological needs.259 Solov’ev’s general assessment of the level of enlightenment of his age was that “we still do not know where it is dark and where it is light.” The sole source of enlightenment of his age, according to Solov’ev, was Dostoevskii (whose Crime and Punishment had apparently

256 Ibid., 88. 257 Ibid., 88. 258 Ibid., 89. 259 Ibid., 79.

81 “disturbed” Selevina) because he was “one of the few writers who still preserved in our time the image and likeness of God.”260

As Solov’ev began to construct an independent intellectual identity, he thought in characteristically epic terms. He extended his desire to transform the mass of the Russian people to encompass the entire domestic and international order. Relating these grandiose hopes to his cousin, Solov’ev explained that a rationally expressed version of Christianity would transform the moral order of international relations, politics, and society.261 This intellectual ambition would be a feature of Solov’ev’s intellectual motives for the rest of his relatively short life.

To trace Solov’ev’s emergence as an independent mind, we turn in the next chapter to his educational experiences with Pamfil Iurkevich, his father S.M. Solov’ev, and the father of

Russian theism V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov. The connection in Solov’ev’s mind between religious conceptions and social action should be obvious. This connection remained intact into the 1880s. Solov’ev wrote in similar terms in Istoriia i budushchnost’ teokratii in 1885. There,

Solov’ev began his work with the proclamation that his purpose was “to justify the faith of our fathers, raising it up to a new degree of rational consciousness; to show how this ancient faith, liberated from the fetters of provincial isolation and national self-love, coincides with the eternal and ecumenical truth.”262 Long ago, and consciously rejecting the take on Solov’ev developed by Berdiaev and especially Bulgakov, Father Georges Florovsky argued that this phrase summed up Solov’ev’s intellectual work.263

260 Ibid., 80. 261 84-85. 262 V.S. Solov’ev, Istoriia i budushchnost’ teokratii: izsledovanie vsemirno-istoricheskago puti k istinoi zhizni, in E.L. Radlov and S.M. Solov’ev, eds., Sobranie Sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 4 (Saint Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, n.d.; reprint, Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1966), 243. 263 Georges Florovsky, “Reason and Faith in the Philosophy of Solov’ev,” in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 283.

82 Like the German and English romantic poets and German idealists that he read in the early 1870s, Solov’ev understood the relationship between so-called mysticism to the practical aspects of social and, eventually, political life in both/and terms. In that same letter in which

Solov’ev condemned “contemporary wisdom” for reducing man to “a beast,” Solov’ev recommended the works of F.M. Dostoevskii because he promoted religion as a moralizing force.264 The only other curricular recommendation Solov’ev made in this correspondence was not to worry too much about “the natural sciences” for they were “completely empty and phantasmagorical;” the only subjects worthy of study were “human nature and life” about which one could learn most “in true poetic works” of “great poets.” To facilitate the study of human nature, Solov’ev implicitly recommended English and German Romantic poets when he advised

Selevina “to learn the English language and finish learning German.”265 Though he did not identify any German or English poets in particular, John Keats expressed a similar desire to present what he regarded as the truth of Christian religion in a rational form. In a letter in 1819, he wrote that he envisioned his destiny as a poet to develop “a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.”266 As historians of enlightenment and liberal religious movements in the rest of Europe have shown, the concept of “modernity” arbitrarily privileges a caricatured version of a radically secular and scientific enlightenment associated with eighteenth- century Paris.267 There were other enlightenments, including religious enlightenments, whose proponents—like Benjamin Constant, who read deeply in German literature on the history of

264 Letter to E.V. Selevina dated late 1872 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma vol. 3, 79-80. 265 Ibid., 57. 266 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (new York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 33 and 485n.36. 267 For example, David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1-21 and Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17-19, 311.

83 religion—strove to renovate religion, in the sense of perfecting it, in order to make it ethically relevant to modern civilization without making man the measure of ethics by maintaining faith in the existence of a transcendent God.268 One strategy for making Orthodoxy ethically relevant was theism, and this strategy had a vision of human kind located between a morally indifferent world and a religious calling to realize morality in society through action guided by a high- minded conception of God. A human being’s position between the world and God was permanently tense and unresolved, but the high-minded ideal of God was meant to act as guide to his actions in the world. While Solov’ev’s initial understanding of theism derived from his reading of Dostoevskii and German and English poets, he developed his understanding of this tradition of discourse under V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov at Imperial Moscow Clerical

Academy.269 It is to that context that we now turn.

268 Laurence Dickey, “Constant and Religion: ‘Theism Descends from Heaven to Earth,” in Helena Rosenblatt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 313-348. 269 S. Kedrov, “Studenty-Platoniki v Akademii,” U Troitsy v Akademii, 1814-1914: Iubileinyi sbornik (Moscow: Tip. I.D. Sytina, 1914), 224 and anonymous, “Kratkaia vospominaniia o Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii v period 1876-1880 gg.” In ibid., 182-183. See also Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 333n.638, 336.

84 CHAPTER 2: The Genesis of Solov’ev’s “Conscious Faith Founded on Reason:” History, Religion, and the Future of Mankind, 1873-1874

The weight of the social malaise that characterized the culture of Alexander II’s reform- dominated reign crystallized for Solov’ev in the dominant intellectual tendency of cultured

Moscow. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, Solov’ev perceived what Fred Hirsch has called the “depleting moral legacy” of social evolutionary theories based on a positivistic metaphysic.270 If the human being were characterized only by his or her observable, animal traits, then, as Solov’ev put it, all of contemporary culture had reduced human kind to “a beast.”271 Solov’ev’s perception of the amoral implications of evolutionary social theory did not distinguish him from his contemporaries—Mikhailovskii had noted the same thing. Whereas

Mikhailovskii accepted the social evolutionary conception of man in order to insist on moral action, in the sense of a moral rebellion against nature, while also remaining scientific, Solov’ev sought to develop a normative conception of mankind that was morally uplifting, in a conventional sense. To do so, Solov’ev turned to religion and philosophy. Philosophy could be a resource for developing a “conscious faith founded on reason” that would provide mankind with a moral conception of who he or she ought to be and how one worked toward that goal within history.272 This chapter will show how Solov’ev allowed himself to be guided by the discourse of theism in developing his answer to the moral problem that he perceived in evolutionary social theory.

Although Solov’ev downplayed the significance of his first philosophy teacher at

Moscow University, Father P.D. Iurkevich, this man introduced Solov’ev to a particular vision of

270 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 117-158, esp. 138-143. 271 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 79. 272 Vl.S. Solov’ev to Ekaterina Selevina, 19 June 1873 in E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1911), 75.

85 the history of philosophy and Russia’s place in that scheme.273 Without Iurkevich’s early guidance, Solov’ev never would have composed his master’s thesis, The Crisis of Western

Philosophy (Against the Positivists) [hereafter CWPh], in the way he did. In particular, Solov’ev derived his conviction of Russia’s place in the future development of philosophy from

Iurkevich’s apparent insistence that “ex oriente lux.”274 Solov’ev first began to study philosophy and religion in a systematic way under a man who was convinced of Russia’s moral mission in universal history. How did this Orthodox clergyman and academic who had trained and taught at

Kiev’s Clerical academy shape Solov’ev’s master’s thesis?

On 18 March 1874, in the academic year 1873-1874, Iurkevich, submitted an unusually diffident “proposal” (the word was not part of regular bureaucratic language at the time) to grant

Solov’ev a master’s thesis in philosophy and send him abroad for two years of study “in preparation for teaching philosophy at Moscow University.” The komandirovka, originally envisioned by S.S. Uvarov, had become a hallmark of higher education in post-Nikolaevan

Russia but quickly became a rarity after 1866.275 The proposal registered the concern

Iurkevich—who was in ill health—had for the future of the philosophy department at Moscow

University: “Repeating this, my most insistent [userdneishii] request, to the historico- philological faculty, I consider it my duty to add that in kandidat Speranskii, who is preparing for his master’s thesis exam, and in kandidat Solov’ev, whom I’ve just now presented, I hope to

273 PSS, vol. 1, pp. 156-175. 274 PSS, vol. 2, 181. 275 A.N. Pypin, Moi zametki: s prilozheniem statei ‘Dva mesiatsa v Prage’ i ‘Viacheslav Ganka’, ed. V.A. Liatskaia (Moscow: L.E. Bukhgeim, 1910), 106-107. See also Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861-1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 43, 50; R.G. Eimontova, Russkie universitety na putiakh reformy: shestidesiatye gody XIX veka (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1993), 198-203; A.E. Ivanov, Uchenye stepeni v rossiiskoi imperii XVIII v.—1917 g. (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1994), 74-86; and E.L. Staferova, A.V. Golovnin i liberal’nye reformy v prosveshchenii (pervaia polovina 1860 gg.) (Moscow: Kanon, 2007), 89-90, 198.

86 obtain teachers of philosophy for the faculty who will serve to the honor of the university, to the benefit of the youth studying here, and to the success of scholarship [nauka].”276

Part of Iurkevich’s concern for funding his students’ study abroad stemmed, no doubt, from financial considerations: the faculty had set the budget for the following year in March of the preceding year.277 Because he had been in ill health since the death of his wife in 1873,

Iurkevich may also have been making arrangements for the philosophy department in Moscow

University in the event of his death.278 At any rate, the faculty council voted unanimously to support Iurkevich’s proposal, and Solov’ev was officially on his way to obtaining a master’s thesis of philosophy.279 Because of an 1864 university statute requiring students studying abroad to have received either a master’s thesis or an MD, and an 1863 statute that permitted students seeking a master’s thesis to sit their exams no sooner than a year after receiving a kandidat

(Solov’ev received his on 8 June 1873), Solov’ev could not take his master’s thesis exam until 8

June 1874, the beginning of the 1874-1875 academic year.280 Likely because of Iurkevich’s failing health, Solov’ev had his public defense at Saint Petersburg University rather than

Moscow.281 At the end of September 1874, Solov’ev quit Moscow for Saint Petersburg, and his defense took place 24 November 1874 in an academic hall at Saint Petersburg University.

276 S.M. Luk’ianov described Solov’ev’s preparations for his master’s defense in exacting, if sometimes painful, detail in S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody: materialy k biografii, vol. 1 (Petrograd: Senatskaia Tipografiia, 1916; reprint, Moscow: ‘Kniga’ 1990), 350-392. Luk’ianov presented Iurkevich’s petition as recorded in the historico-philological faculty’s meeting minutes (pp. 350-352), the quotations are on pp. 350, 351, 352. On Iurkevich’s health and the 1863 University statute requiring all lecturers to have at least a master’s degree, see pp. 378-379. 277 Such was Luk’ianov’s surmise in ibid., 363. 278 Ibid., 379. 279 Ibid., 352. 280 Ibid., 361-362. 281 Ibid., 396-397.

87 Under the supervision of Iurkevich and after a year at the Moscow Clerical Academy,

Solov’ev published and defended his dissertation for the degree of master’s thesis in philosophy,

The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists). In it, he developed the rudiments for an argument justifying the scientific status of metaphysics by constructing an extended argument against the preeminence of positivism as the sole method and epistemology by which to study humanity and society scientifically. He did so based on four “convictions.” First, he was convinced that what he called the “speculative tendency of philosophy,” or “metaphysics,” was not antithetical to the “empirical” tendency in philosophy, which he associated with positivism.

Second, though he agreed with positivists that contemporary idealistic philosophy had come to an end, the whole endeavor had not been “fruitless;” rather, the present “task” was the

“definition” of this strand of philosophy’s relevance to the present. Third, though positivists may have regarded metaphysics as “groundless” and, therefore, “to be abandoned,” Solov’ev “hoped, on the contrary, to prove that the latest philosophical development had bequeathed to the near future a full, universal solution to those questions that, by this very development, had been solved in a very one-sided way and were, therefore, unsatisfactory.” Fourth, and most important,

Solov’ev understood contemporary philosophy in terms of a particular conception of the history of philosophy, an explanation to which he devoted much more space than the preceding three

“convictions” because, as he wrote, “the essential distinction of [his] view from the positivistic one becomes clear in the very explication of philosophical development.”282

According to Solov’ev, “the basic elements in the life of mankind are language, mythology, and the primary forms of society,” because these artifacts of human civilization were

282 Vl.S. Solov’ev, Krizis zapadnoi filosofii (protiv positivitstov), in N.V. Kotrelev and A.A. Nosov, eds., V.S. Solov’ev: Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh [PSS], vol. 1 (Moscow: ‘Nauka,’ 2000), 39.

88 “completely independent of the conscious will of individual persons.” Indeed, as Solov’ev went on to say: “In the perfect state of scholarship [nauka], there is no doubt that language or the state is not produced by personal, conscious activity, not invented by individual persons—just as, for example, the hive is not invented by individual bees.”283 Among the artifacts of human civilization, however, religion occupied a special place. Only religion, according to Solov’ev, offered a source of absolute value for society and politics because it “cannot be invented; in it, a more passionate meaning [bolee stradatel’noe znachenie] belongs to the individual person, as such.”284

This opening passage raises several important questions. First, why does Solov’ev base his argument on the history of philosophy, and why does Solov’ev regard metaphysics as the pinnacle of the development of that discipline? Second, why did metaphysics also have to be

“scientific” (nauchnyi) in some particular sense, and in what sense did Solov’ev mean “science” or “scholarship” (nauka) or “the scientific” (nauchnyi)? Third, how could Solov’ev have made such a bold assertion about the objectivity of religion and, at the same time, have claimed to uphold the principles of good scholarship (nauka)? Moreover, why did he connect religion with social order? Was he merely paying lip service to academic standards in order to further his mystical vision of Divine Sophia, as standard accounts of Solov’ev would have it?285 Was he just confused? Or was he drawing on specific methods for considering, in a systematic and scholarly way, how morality arose in human societies and how morality made people sociable?

To answer these questions, we must look to the combination of perceived disorder, malaise, and hope that characterized the era of the so-called Great reforms (1861-1874). First,

283 Ibid. 284 Ibid., 39-40. 285 See the works cited in the introduction, pp. 3-4nn.5-7.

89 among the various attempts to renovate the autocratic order, professional expertise emerged as a mode of service to the state that educated and urban Russians regarded as a tool to preserve order or to promote prosperity. Such professional expertise could be legal, natural scientific, or scholarly in a humanistic sense.286 Whatever the particular specialty, however, such activity was generically referred to as nauka (or the adjectival form nauchnyi): science or scholarship.287 As one scholar has put it, and as we shall see in the next chapter, the scholarly community’s response to Spiritualism in Russia, led by Dmitrii Mendeleev and followed very closely by

Solov’ev, “served as a microcosm of the concerns about science’s relation to the disjointed society of the Great Reforms.”288 Second, in the realm of history and what has come to be known as social science, ethnography and histories of morality dominated scholarly inquiry into the sources of social order and its future stability.289

286 Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 9-10, 17, 20-22, 50-51, 58-59, 81-110. In contrast to the state service perspective, a Russian sociologist of education has argued that education [obrazovanie] came to be regarded as an issue of public importance requiring public input. See A.L. Andreev, Rossiiskoe obrazovanie: sotsial’no-istoricheskye kontektsy (Moscow: Nauka, 2008), 83, 89, 95-103. 287 For the various meanings of nauka and nauchnyi, see the entries for nauka in: Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 4th ed. (Saint Petersburg-Moscow: Izdanie T-va M.O. Vol’f, 1914), 1272; Russki entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. I.N. Berezin, otd. 3, t. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Tov-a “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1875), 584; Vl.S. Solov’ev, “Nauka,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 20 (Saint Petersburg: Tipo-Litografiia I.A. Efrona, 1897), 692; and K. Timiriazev, “Nauka,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Russkogo Bibliograficheskogo Instituta Granat., vol. 30 (Moscow: Tipo-Litografiia “Mospoligraf,” n.d.), 2-53. For a description of the various ways the Russian term for “enlightenment” [prosveshchenie] was construed, see R.G. Eimontova, Idei prosveshcheniia v obnovbliaiushcheisia Rossii (50-60-e gody XIX veka) (Moscow: Izdatel’skii tsentr Instituta rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1998). For an earlier period, see N.N. Aurova, “Idei prosveshcheniia v 1-m kadetskom korpuse (konets XVIII-pervaia chetvert’ XIX v.),” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriia 8, Istoriia , no. 1 (1996): 34-42. 288 Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing, 82. 289 This problem structures much of Ivanov-Razumnik’s explanation of the development of Populism in the 1870s. See his Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli: individualizm i meshchanstvo v russkoi literature i zhizni XIX v., vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1911), especially 112-113, 123-134. For modern works that appreciate the importance of historical vision to the intelligentsia sense of itself and of Russia, albeit according to the consciousness/spontaneity paradigm, see David McDonald, “Introduction,” in Leopold Haimson, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905-1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), ix-x and Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), esp. 8, 209-212. See also Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing, 6-7.

90 In the previous chapter, I showed how closely Solov’ev followed such discussions, particularly N.K. Mikhailovskii’s critical reviews of Herbert Spencer’s conception of evolution

(and to a lesser extent Charles Darwin’s). I will show in this chapter that Solov’ev had become troubled by the amoral anthropological implications of Mikhailovskii’s answer to Spencer. The results of the “Going to the People” movement had forced socially and politically engaged

Russians to rethink their idealization of the Russian peasantry. In the summer of 1873, groups of young college students went out to teach or learn from peasants, but by 1874 they had been beaten or turned over to the authorities by the peasants themselves. The experience provoked a deep and troubling reconceptualization of the meaning and role of the “people” [narod] in

Russian history.290 Such brutal and apparently backward behavior only served to confirm

Solov’ev’s convictions. As a result, Solov’ev turned to a particular genre of the history of morality that emerged in the seventeenth century known as theism to show how, in history, religion had provided human societies with normative guides to social behavior.291 Solov’ev learned of this discourse from V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov (1828-1891) at the Moscow Clerical

Academy [hereafter MDA], and it guided his thinking in the first two works he published: an article entitled “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism” (1873) and his dissertation, The

Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists) (1874).

The sources of Solov’ev’s concerns and the answers he developed can be traced to the world he inhabited, not to his alleged mystical visions of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God.

290 On this movement, see B.S. Itenberg, Dvizhenie revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva: Narodnicheskie kruzhki i ‘khozhdenie v narod’ v 70-kh godakh XIX v. (Moscow: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1965). For an appreciation of the intellectual trauma experienced by several participants, see Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 291 A.E. Taylor, “Theism,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1958), 261 and also 281.

91 Indeed, in letters with his cousin, Elizaveta Vladimirovna Selevina—which, as we have seen,

Mochul’skii aptly called his “philosophical diary”—Solov’ev clearly expressed his concerns.292

In 1872, before the students of the “Going to the People” movement set out for the countryside,

Solov’ev advised his cousin to occupy herself “not too assiduously” with any one discipline, above all “the natural sciences,” which Solov’ev at the time regarded as “completely empty and phantasmagorical in themselves.” Instead, Solov’ev advised Selevina to study “only human nature and life,” of which “one can learn best of all in true poetical works,” especially those in

English and German.293

By the middle of 1873, Solov’ev had focused his attention on the issue of anthropology as it appeared in the history of religion: “… relative to religion, man passes through three ages in his correct development: at first, the age of childish or blind faith; then the second age—the development of reasoning and the rejection of blind faith; and finally the last age of conscious faith founded on the development of reason.”294 It was with this vision of the development of religion that Solov’ev criticized Selevina’s desire “to lead the narod from its terrible darkness” through reading, writing, arithmetic, and “contemporary literature,” for, as Solov’ev claimed, contemporary civilization had reduced mankind to mere animal and biological needs.295

Ultimately, then, Solov’ev drew on a systematic way of showing the development of morality in human societies, but from sources unfamiliar to the majority of his audience.

A. The Apprehension of the Great Reforms: Scholarship and the Domestic Order

292 K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951), 30. 293 E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za,” 1911), 57. 294 Ibid., 78. 295 Ibid., 79.

92 Though the sources for Solov’ev’s own answers were unfamiliar to his secular academic audience, the questions he addressed were not. Recall from the first chapter that

Russians in the era of the so-called “Great Reforms” of the 1860s and 1870s had experienced a profound humiliation in the Crimean War (1853-1856) a debacle that shook confidence in the potential of the autocratic order throughout society, including high officialdom and even the autocrat himself, Alexander II (1855-1881). As part of a long-term strategy to recover Russia’s ability to participate as a full-fledged member of the great powers in international affairs, the

Russian government prepared a series of reforms beginning in 1855. They culminated with the end of serfdom 19 February 1861 (old style). Because the institution of serfdom and the servile economy were tightly intertwined with the political, social, and cultural life of the empire, a further series of educational, legal, economic, police, and military reforms were undertaken up to

1874.296

These profound changes caused a great deal of apprehension among all orders of the empire. The few wealthy nobles who could sell their estates, transferred their capital outside the country and often took holidays abroad; to avoid peasant protests in the countryside, their less wealthy noble cousins sought at least to move to the cities.297 Much activity during the 1860s and 1870s was motivated by the imperatives of what contemporaries regarded as almost

296 Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914, trans. Bruce Little (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987 [1977]), 17-32; L.G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 1856-1861 (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1984), 26-34; and Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11-45. 297 Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 24.

93 permanent crisis since the humiliating 1856 Treaty of Paris that had put an end to the Crimean

War and the inauguration of what retrospectively became known as the Great Reforms.298

This period is also regarded as the seedtime of the Russian revolutionary movement which triumphed in October 1917.299 As I have tried to show in the previous chapter, however, this narrative is too simplistic, for it fails to offer a place for Solov’ev, who, as we shall see, was a far more prominent public intellectual than the few conspiratorial terrorists who had emerged only in the late 1860s and 1870s and whom the Bolsheviks counted as their legacy. Motivated as twentieth-century scholars were by the question of the origins of Bolshevik ideology, it is understandable that their studies mined the Imperial past for precedents of political violence, disciplined conspiratorial groups, and the willingness to use violence as a political tool. There was warrant for investigating such a connection in Lenin’s own writings, particularly What Is to

Be Done? (1901-1902).300

298 For a work that emphasizes the distinction between “crisis” as a rhetorical figure employed by historical actors and “crisis” as a useful category of historical analysis by scholars, see Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 299 Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 1084-1085; James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 528; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 469 (most strongly); Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; reprint, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,, 1989), 96; ibid., A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979 [1973]), 440-441; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Penguin Books, 1995 [1974]), 274-75, 296-97, 316-318. The standard Soviet account is M.V. Nechkina, ed., Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii v 1859-1861 gg. (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1963). An exception, despite its title, is Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1952]), 633-708. For the history and reception of this book, see the same author’s own “Russian Populism,” in Studies in Free Russia, trans. Fausta Segre Walsby and Margaret O’Dell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 216-287. 300 For an English translation, see V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 84-91, 112-113. For an account of the institutionalization of this version of the imperial past, see Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

94 Amid the general apprehension caused by the fundamental reorganization of the

Imperial order, however, the vast majority of educated Russians turned to the study of history in search of a useable past that could plausibly provide guidance for projecting the empire’s future.301 As we saw in chapter one, Herbert Spencer’s understanding of evolution as a natural process of the movement from the simple to the more complex to which all societies were subject posed significant problems for Russians who hoped for a better future.302 According to

Solov’ev’s childhood friend, the future sociologist and historian N.I. Kareev, he and Solov’ev closely followed N.K. Mikhailovskii’s series of articles in Fatherland Notes (Otechestvennye zapiski), in which he criticized Spencer’s theory of evolution for its amoral implications. As we have seen, Mikhailovskii posed a very difficult ethical question, which Solov’ev’ took very seriously, to social theories based on Spencer’s theory of evolution in 1869.303

There is reason to believe, however, that Solov’ev read more than Mikhailovskii’s article in Fatherland Notes, for in 1878 he considered publishing part of his doctoral dissertation,

Critique of Abstract Principles, in that journal.304 This intention should not be surprising. Many of the leading articles in that journal from the late 1860s and early 1870s considered whether history could be written without a telos, whether a telos was something intelligible, and how one might scientifically discover the telos of human society. Indeed, such considerations exercised

P.L. Lavrov in his Historical Letters (1866-1869),305 as well as a series of articles published

301Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli, vol. 2, especially 112-113, 123-134. 302 One Soviet historian has appreciated this. See B.S. Itenberg, Dvizhenie revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva: narodnicheskie kruzhki i ‘khozhdenie v narod’ v 70-kh godakh XIX v. (Mocsow: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1965), 108-109. 303 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 312-313n.597. 304 Letter of Vl.S. Solov’ev to kn. D.N. Tsertelev, 19 November 1878 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 2, 241. One Russian scholar thinks this is a misprint in both the original and the published version of Solov’ev’s letter. See I.V. Borisova’s notes to Solov’ev’s doctoral dissertation in PSS, vol. 3 ed., N.V. Kotrelev (Moscow: ‘Nauka,’ 2001), 432n.5. 305 The standard edition is P.L. Lavrov, Istoricheskie pis’ma (Saint Petersburg: Tip. N.N. Klobukova, 1905).

95 anonymously or pseudonymously (he was officially in administrative exile) in Fatherland

Notes from 1869-1870, entitled “Civilization and Barbarous Tribes,” “Before Man,” a review of

W.E.H. Lecky’s History of European Morals (1869) entitled “Modern Doctrines of Morality and

Its History,” and a review of Mikhailovskii’s articles on Darwin and Spencer entitled “Mr.

Mikhailovskii’s Formula of Progress.”306 Moreover, one of Solov’ev’s future opponents at his master’s thesis’s defense, M.I. Vladislavlev (who hailed from the clerical estate and had attended the Saint Petersburg Clerical Academy before being expelled), published large parts of his dissertation entitled “Contemporary Trends in the Science of the Soul” (1866) in Fatherland

Notes.307 In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Lavrov’s Historical Letters “were almost the sole work (including even N.K. Mikhailovskii’s article “What Is Progress?”) on the theory of socialist morality.”308 In that work, Lavrov assigned an important role to the historian and the discipline of history in the study of society:

… Natural science explains to man the laws of the world in which man himself is only a barely noticeable part; it recounts the products of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological, and mental processes; it finds among the products of the latter processes in the whole animal kingdom the consciousness of suffering and delight; in part of this kingdom, nearest to man, the consciousness of the possibility of positing goals for oneself and striving toward their achievement. This fact of natural science constitutes the sole basis of the biographies of separate beings of the animal world and histories of separate groups of this world. History, as scholarship [nauka], takes this fact as given and develops before the reader, by which path history, as a process of the life of mankind, has

306 Because Lavrov was officially in administrative exile, he could publish only under pseudonyms or anonymously. For a list of articles in Fatherland Notes with the true identities of their authors, see S. Borshchevskii, ‘Otechestvennye zapiski,’ 1868-1884: khronologicheskii ukazatel’ anonimnykh i psevdonimnykh tekstov (Moscow: Izd-vo ‘Kniga,’ 1966), esp. 14-19. Still the best article on Lavrov’s life and bibliography before emigrating in 1871 is the very old “P.L. Lavrov o sebe samom,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 10 (1910): 92-108. Lavrov’s review of Mikhailovskii is in “Formula progressa g. Mikhailovskogo,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 2 (1870): 228-255. Solov’ev was familiar with Lecky’s work. See Krizis zapadnoi filosofii (protiv positivistov), in PSS, vol. 1, 134n.107. 307 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 2 (Petrograd: 2-aia Gosudarstvennaia Tipografiia, 1918), 6. N.Ia. Grot and E.L. Radlov were both students of Vladislavlev’s, ibid., 11. 308 B.S. Itenberg, “Problema revoliutsii i nravstvennosti v mirovozrenii P.L. Lavrova,” in M.V. Nechkina et al., eds., Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii v seredine XIX veka: deiateli i istoriki (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1986), 40.

96 produced out of aspirations to get rid of what man has understood as suffering, and from the aspiration to obtain what mankind has understood as delight; and at the same time what alterations have occurred in the concept connected with the words delight and suffering, in the classification and hierarchy of delights and sufferings; which philosophical forms of ideas and practical forms of social structure have been begotten by these alterations; by what logical process has the aspiration for the better and the more just begotten protests and conservatism, reaction and progress; what connection exists in each epoch between man’s perception of the world in the form of faith, knowledge, philosophical representation, and by the practical theories of the better and the more just embodied in the activities of a personality, in the forms of society, in the conditions of the life of nations. Therefore it is not the negation of the natural scientist’s labors that constitutes the labor of the historian, but their inevitable supplement. The historian, who regards the naturalist with scorn, does not understand history; he wants to build a home without a foundation, he speaks about the utility of education [o pol’ze obrazovaniia] while denying the necessity of basic literacy [gramotnost’]. The natural scientist, who regards the historian with scorn, proves only the narrowness and underdevelopment of his thought; he does not want, or does not know how, to see that the positing of goals and the aspiration toward them is just as inevitable, just as natural a fact in the nature of man as breathing, the circulation of blood, or the metabolism; that goals can be mean or sublime, aspirations pathetic or estimable, actions irrational or reasonable. But goals, aspirations, and action always existed and will always exist, and consequently they are objects of study that are just as legitimate as the color spectrum, as the elements of chemical analysis, as the species and varieties of the plant and animal kingdoms. The natural scientist who is limited by the external world does not want to, or cannot, see that the whole external world is only the material of delight, of suffering, of desires, of actuality for man, that the most specialized naturalist studies the external world not as something external, but as something cognizable and given to him, the scholar, enjoyment as a process of knowing that stimulated his activity, which brings him into his life’s process. The natural scientist who scorns history imagines that someone lays a foundation without intending to build a home on it; he assumes that all human development must be limited by basic literacy [gramotnost’].309

As Itenberg also noted, Lavrov “considered The History of Thought his life’s main work.”310

Motivated by the general apprehension of the reform era, these histories were meant to show the ways morality had arisen in human societies as a means for sustaining social life.

309 Lavrov, Istoricheskie pis’ma, 10-12. 310 Itenberg, “Problema revoliutsii i nravstvennosti v mirovozrenii P.L. Lavrova,” 39.

97 As a young man in the 1870s, Solov’ev also voiced such apprehensions with the reigning order. In a letter to his cousin, E.V. Selevina, Solov’ev called this order “all this world of lies” about which he was certain that “the truth, cognized by me” would

forever annihilate all injustice and evil of personal and social life at the root—the rude ignorance of the mass of the people [narodnye massy], the abomination of moral desolation of the cultured classes [obrazovannye klassy], the kulak’s law between states [gosudarstva]—that abyss of darkness, filth, and blood into which humanity up to now has been cast; all this will disappear like a night specter before the sun of Christ’s eternal truth—hitherto misunderstood and rejected by humanity—rising in consciousness: the kingdom of God will appear in all its glory, the kingdom of inner, spiritual relations, pure love and ecstasy, a new heaven and new earth in which justice [spravedlivost’] lives. But it is impossible for a worthless man to live in this thought-world for good, which still has not been realized for us.311

At this point in his intellectual development, Solov’ev made his break with the existing order— of contemporary consciousness, domestic order, and foreign relations. But he was also beginning to find what was to his mind a clear solution to the moral problems he saw around him. Later in the same year, Solov’ev explained his “goals and concerns” to Selevina.

Because he regarded “the existing order” as being “far from what it ought to be,” as being

“founded not on reason or law, but, on the contrary, in large part on meaninglessness, chance, blind force, egoism, and violent subjection,” he could not abide existing “social and civil relations.” Being neither a “practical person” capable of making compromises with the existing order, nor one of those who consider “worldly evil” as something “necessary and eternal” and who, therefore, satisfy themselves “with powerless contempt for existing reality, à la Lord

Byron,” Solov’ev had to find a third way to address the existing order. For him, “the conscious conviction of the fact that the present circumstances of humanity are not as they ought to be,

[meant] for me that it ought to be altered, transformed.”

311 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to E.V. Selevina, 25 July 1873 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 84-85.

98 The most “important question” for him, though, was “by what means.” In contrast to those who sought to abolish “violence with violence, injustice with injustice, blood with blood,” those who “want to elevate humanity with murders and arsons” only later asking “God to forgive them for they know not what they do,” Solov’ev thought “the whole transformation ought to be done from within—from the human mind and heart.” To effect such an internal transformation,

Solov’ev conceived of his main task as restating the truth of Christianity in a new form. As he put it, “Christianity, although unconditionally true in itself, has had up to now only a very one- sided and insufficient expression on account of historical conditions.” In particular, the problem was that “the half-conscious faith” of earlier forms of Christianity “said nothing to reason, did not enter into reason.” Although in Solov’ev’s own time, “Christianity was destroyed in its false form,” it was the modern world’s task, so Solov’ev believed, “to reinstate the true” form of

Christianity by “leading the eternal content of Christianity into a new form, i.e. the rationally unconditional.”312

Such a task required a great deal of preparation, but Solov’ev’s primary subject was the intellectual history of mankind—just those sorts of concerns discussed by the articles in

Fatherland Notes, especially Lavrov’s. To prepare what he called “the theoretical side” or

“theological doctrines of faith,” Solov’ev availed himself “of everything that had been worked out in preceding ages by the human mind” for “it was necessary to master for oneself the universal results of scholarly [nauchnyi] development, it was necessary to study all of philosophy.” As Solov’ev epigrammatically put his program: “Monasticism at one time had its own high appointed purpose, but now the time had come not to run from the world, but to go into

312 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to E.V. Selevina 2 August 1873, in ibid., 87-89.

99 the world in order to transform it.”313 In a very young Solov’ev’s mind, the history of religious and intellectual developments in world history had both a theoretical dimension and a practical one. As we have already seen, though, Solov’ev was apprehensive about the aims of the “Going to the People” movement because they based their understandings of human needs on

Spencerian and Darwinian understandings of anthropology. Where would Solov’ev find the resources for a normative account of human nature?

B. Moscow Clerical Academy: V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov and the Tradition of “Russian

Theism”

Ironically, Solov’ev’s first step toward mastering the world history of philosophy and religion was to enroll as an auditor at Moscow Clerical Academy [MDA], located in one of

Russia’s oldest and most venerated monasteries, for the academic year 1873-1874.314 Solov’ev was so committed to his convictions that he took the apparently unprecedented step of taking courses as an auditor there. Indeed, the decision’s difficulty is reflected in a letter to Selevina dated 6 July 1873. There Solov’ev revealed the significance that contemporary problems had for him: “I love you in so far as I am able to love; but I belong not to myself but to that cause which

I will serve and which has nothing in common with personal feelings, with the interests and goals of a private [lichnyi] life.”315

313 Ibid., 89. Ludolf Müller cited this letter as evidence of what he considered “the protestant-idealistic type of piety and Schelling’s view of history, especially through the sentences in which he speaks of the necessity to being the content of Christianity into a rational form” as well as the Schelling’s “ethical concern” for Christian principles to shape secular activity. See his Solovjev und der Protestantismus (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1951), 118. Without placing so much importance on a single name, I argue that Solov’ev was drawing on an institutionalized way of approaching the history of morality known as theism. 314 Besides Luk’ianov, one other scholar has briefly mentioned a moderate progressivism at the Clerical Academy. See Zdenek Vaclav David, “The Formation of the Religious and Social System of Vladimir S. Solov’ev,” (Ph.D. diss.: Harvard University, 1960), 118-123, 292-295. 315 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 81.

100 Solov’ev’s commitment to his intellectual project led him to undertake some socially unprecedented moves. Underlining the social barrier he crossed when entering the Clerical

Academy and his brashness, Solov’ev wrote in an undated letter from Sergiev Posad: “Already now I have provoked bewilderment: some take me for a nihilist, others for a religious fanatic, and a third group simply for a madman. I hope, subsequently, to provoke even more bewilderment.”316 In another undated letter, Solov’ev paints an even clearer picture of his unusual social position within the Clerical Academy evoking Gogol’s Inspector General:

I am now in a rather original position. My arrival in the academy produced almost the same impression as the presence of the imaginary inspector-general in that famous city ‘from which you could gallop for three years if you’d like and not reach any [other] state.’ The professors here imagine that I’ve arrived with the exclusive goal of disturbing their peace with my criticism. They are all amiable with me to the extreme, like the mayor with Khlestakov. In gratitude for this, I will leave them in peace insofar as it is possible (although those lectures which I have heard up to now are quite good). However, they, themselves, value their business very lowly, and they can in no way believe that an outsider, a gentryman and candidate at the university could arrive at a fantasy of being occupied with theological sciences; actually, I’m the first example; therefore, they assume some sort of practical goals in me. Moreover, the academy, in any event, does not present such an absolute desert as the university. The students in all their rudeness strike me as a business-like people [narodom del’nym]; besides, they are good- naturedly merry and the big foremen get drunk—in general the people are all right. However, I don’t have to become intimate with them—there will be no time.317

It is likely, as was his wont, that Solov’ev exaggerated the degree to which his presence was unexpected. On 30 December 1871, the council of MDA announced that Solov’ev’s father, the historian and rector of Imperial Moscow University S.M. Solov’ev, had been unanimously elected an honorary member of MDA “in honor of his scholarly works on Russian history, which were also fruitful for the history of the Russian Church.”318 The Council also elected other

316 Ibid., 91. 317 Ibid., 105. 318 Tsentral’nyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy [TsIAM], f. 229, o. 4, ed. khr. 5675, l. 1. This file contains copies of the letters, not the originals.

101 officials prominent in the government’s educational and clerical administration, like Ober-

Prokurator D.A. Tolstoi and Count S.G. Stroganov.319 S.M. Solov’ev promptly replied to this announcement 6 January 1872 in a more than pro forma reply: “If my works can prove to be even the least faithful fruits, then the cause lay in the author’s firm convictions of the divine significance of Christianity for the history of the human race and the lofty meaning of the

Orthodox Church for the history of the Russian nation [narod].”320 The only time that Vladimir

Solov’ev’s name appeared in the instructional council’s journals, his petition to attend was noted, but no decision was recorded in that meeting’s minutes or any other subsequent meeting minutes.321 Whatever the great novelty of a member of the gentry going to study at MDA may have been, Solov’ev made good use of his time there (the possibility of differing estate positions may have shaped Solov’ev’s relationship with his father). But what exactly did he gain from his experience at MDA?

In a short memoir commemorating the centenary of the establishment in 1814 of the

MDA, an alumnus of that school, I.N. Korsunskii, boldly asserted that MDA and, specifically, its long-time professor of philosophy, Viktor Dmitrievich Kudriavtsev-Platonov (1828-1891)

[hereafter Kudriavtsev], institutionalized rational religion in Russian Orthodoxy. In

Korsunskii’s estimation, the foundations of contemporary Russian Orthodox apologetics, church history, New Testament studies, and philosophy were the direct result of Kudriavtsev’s mentorship to an entire generation of theology students. More broadly, Korsunskii claimed that

319 TsIAM, f. 229, o. 3, d. 25, ll. 17-17ob. 320 TsIAM, f. 229, o. 4, ed. khr. 5675,, l. 2. Compare S.M. Solov’ev’s remarks from a speech delivered at the Moscow Slav Congress in 1867, “Progress i religiia,” in Sobranie sochinenii Sergeia Mikhailovicha Solov’eva (Saint Petersburg: “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, n.d.), 949-968. 321 TsIAM, f. 229, o. 3, ed. khr. 44 (Zhurnal sobranii soveta za 1873 god [25 Ianvaria 1873 g.–17 Dekabria 1873 g.]), l. 120.

102 “without [Kudriavtsev’s] help, V.S. Solov’ev,” whom scholars regard as the leading figure of

Russian religious thought, “could not have stood on his own two feet: he attended his lectures at the Moscow Academy.”322 Such declarations raise at least two questions: 1) who was

Kudriavtsev; and 2) why was he considered to be so important to the intellectual biography of

Vladimir Solov’ev, and, more broadly, to the intellectual life of Russian Orthodoxy during the late-Imperial period? Another contributor to the volume in which Korsunskii published his memoir suggested an answer to both of these questions when he called Kudriavtsev “the founder of Russian theism.”323 Despite the exaggeration appropriate to such encomiums, the alumnus’ assertion of the intellectual importance of MDA and Kudriavtsev to a particular discourse in

Russian Orthodox theology deserves to be taken seriously because of a significant lacuna in the historiography of Russian religious thought, namely, the intellectual culture of the Church’s institutions of higher education. Kudriavtsev’s career as a theist should interest scholars of lay religious thought in Russia because of the light it sheds on Vladimir Solov’ev’s intellectual work, which several underappreciated scholars have called “theistic.”324 More broadly,

Kudriavtsev’s career should interest scholars of Imperial Russia more generally because it complicates and enriches our understanding of the intellectual culture of Russian Orthodox higher education and its links with broader discourses about Russian history, society, and politics in the last half of the nineteenth century.

322 I.N. Korsunskii, “Kratkie vospominaniia o Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii v period 1876-1880 g.,” in U Troitsy v Akademii, 1814-1914: Iubileinyi sbornik (Moscow: Tip. T-va I.D. Sytina, 1914), 182. 323 S. Kedrov, “Studenty-Platoniki v Akademii,” in U Troitsy v Akademii, 224. 324 Ossip-Lourié, La philosophie Russe contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1902), 33; Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli: individualizm i meshchanstvo v russkoi literature i zhizni XIX v., vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1911), 496; A.E. Taylor, “Theism,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1958 [1909]), 281. See also Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 239n.23.

103 Perhaps because of the stereotypical image of Russia as the last redoubt of Orthodoxy and of Russians as exceptionally, even pathologically, religious, we still know very little about the intellectual life of Russia’s spiritual academies, let alone the intellectual life of the rest of

Imperial Russia’s educational institutions.325 It might be said that Alexander Herzen’s class- biased barb against seminarians in his memoirs still reigns:

The unhappy seminarians’ whole upbringing, all their ideas were completely different than ours—we spoke different languages. Raised under the knout of monastic despotism, crammed with their rhetoric and theology, they envied our swagger [razviaznosti], and we were annoyed at their Christian humility.326

Indeed, Nicolas Zernov’s paradigmatic depiction of the clerical estate in the late Empire echoes

Herzen’s opposition between “state” [gosudarstvo] and “society” [obshchestvo] around which

Russian intelligenty organized their experience of social and political reality.327 According to

Zernov, the seminarian

was decidedly inferior to other westernized Russians, and yet a stranger to those Orthodox who valued the pre-Petrine culture. […] The seminarists were fed on a version of Christian religion which ignored the social and intellectual problems of the contemporary world. At the same time they were taught Church doctrine in an idiom alien to their own Eastern tradition. It is not surprising that many of them lost not only their vocation but their faith after such a training.328

It is important, however, to recall Alexandre Koyré’s admonition. More than eighty years ago,

Koyré noted that “Herzen was seriously mistaken” about the clerical estate for “the ‘seminarians’ at the Moscow Academy received rather solid instruction and were acquainted with German philosophy while it was still ignored at the university.” With only a few exceptions, Koyré’s

325 Boris Groys, “Poisk russkoi natsional’noi identichnosti,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 1 (1992): 52-60. 326 A.I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, in B.P. Koz’min et al., eds., Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 8 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1956), 106-109, quotation 109. 327 David McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 222n.5. 328 Nicolas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 45-50, quotation 47.

104 conclusion that “the world of the academy was a closed world of which nearly nothing was know on the outside” remains true to this day.329

This is not to say that scholars are entirely unfamiliar with Russian Orthodoxy. Scholars have recently produced detailed studies of politics within the institutional Orthodox Church and the religious practices of society at large. Yet a prejudice against the clerical estate’s institutions of higher education, which was inherited from the imperial period, still shapes scholarship.330

Most studies of the official Church’s institutional practices treat the academies as administrative problems or as incubators of radicalism.331 While recent attempts to document “lived religion” in Imperial Russia have resulted in more inclusive conceptions of Russian Orthodoxy, educational institutions of Russian Orthodoxy have remained on the margins.332 And recent studies of the social identities of seminarians and the educated laity interested in religious belief have appreciated the importance of higher education; however, the structure and life of the seminaries and academies remain in the background.333

329 Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle (Paris: 1929; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 197n.100. Exceptions are: Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin- Madison, 2007), 29-92; Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 19-108, and idem., “M.M. Tareev: A Study in Russian Ethics and Mysticism” (Ph.D. diss.: Columbia University, 1974). 330 Maria Köhler-Baur, Die Gesitlichen Akademien in Rußland im 19. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997) and Jennifer Hedda, “Good Shepherds: The St. Petersburg Pastorate and the Emergence of Social Activisim in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1855-1917,” (Ph.D. diss.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15-20, 62-147. 331 Igor Smolitsch, Geschichte der Russischen Kirche, 1700-1917, vol. 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964), 538-690; Gregory L. Freeze, Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); idem., The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Scott Kenworthy, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 332 Quotation in Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 268n.23. See also Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); and Gregory L. Freeze, “Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850),” in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210-249. 333 Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox

105 The institutions of Russian government have remained in the background because the

Russian intelligentsia’s narrative of the Russian autocracy as incompetent and unpopular was for many years uncritically accepted within academia. As scholars have shown since the early

1980s, however, the Imperial Russian state and its secular institutions of government were serious, functioning organizations that shaped, but did not determine, individual outlooks.334

Only very recently have scholars begun to devote the same attention to the institutions of the

Russian Orthodox Church.335 Indeed, assessing the contributions to a recent collection of essays on how Orthodoxy shaped everyday experience, Thomas Tentler, a historian of early modern

Christianity, noted the curious absence of institutions of higher education in the historiography of

Orthodoxy in Russia.336

I aim to fill in this blank spot by describing and explaining Kudriavtsev’s version of theism. Such a relatively unusual use of biography requires some explanation. I focus on one small part of one man’s intellectual experience in order to illuminate broader social and

Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Victoria Frede, “The Rise of Unbelief among Educated Russians in the Late Imperial Period,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of California-Berkeley, 2002). 334 P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Izd-vo Mysl’, 1978) and Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 1980). More recently, see Yanni Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” Kritika 12, no. 1 (2011): 25- 52. 335 B.V. Anan’ich, ed., Upravlencheskaia elita rossiiskoi imperii: Istoriia ministerstv, 1802-1917 (Saint Petersburg: ‘Liki Rossii,’ 2008), 488-526 and P.G. Rogoznyi, Tserkovnaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda (Vysshee dukhoventsvo v Rossiiskoi Tserkvi v bor’be za vlast’ v eparkhiiakh posle Fevral’skoi revoliutsii) (Saint Petersburg: “Liki Rossii,” 2008). 336 Thomas N. Tentler, “Epilogue: A View from the West,” in Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 263-264. For a recent study of the Spiritual Academies, see V.A. Tarasova, Vysshaia dukhovnaia shkola v Rossii v kontse XIX–nachale XX veka: istoriia imperatorskikh pravoslavnykh dukhovnykh akademii (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2005).

106 institutional changes in late-Imperial Russia.337 As we shall see, the culture of MDA shows that the meaning of Orthodoxy in Russia was by no means an unambiguous given within or without the confines of the official Church. Moreover, MDA’s academic culture also shows that leading members of the Russian Orthodox Church, in this case a professor of philosophy, participated in a conversation about the sources of Russia’s proper historical development that scholars almost exclusively associate with the intelligentisa. Kudriavtsev employed and reshaped intelligentsiia categories of thought in developing his version of theism within the context of a Russian instance of a Europe-wide debate over the relationship of scientific knowledge to morality embodied in the genre of encyclopedia.338 Like other important thinkers,

Kudriavtsev shaped, and was shaped by, rich and complex institutional cultures of the Russian empire, one of which strove to provide what contemporaries regarded as scientific (nauchnyi) reasons for modern belief in Orthodoxy.

1. The Problem of Social Order and the Need for Reform: Religion, Science, and Encyclopedia

There is neither the time nor the space for the biographical overview usually presented in brief studies of neglected subjects.339 However, two episodes in Kudriavtsev’s life, which cannot be reduced to this small aspect of his intellectual endeavor, shed light on his account of theism:

1) his education at MDA directed mainly by F.A. Golubinskii (1797-1854), a professor of

337 For recent examples of this method, see Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004) and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 338 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, being Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 8-23, 170-195 and Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 267-272, 303-323. 339 There is no modern biography of Kudriavtsev. The fullest is still I.N. Korsunskii, “Viktor Dmitrievich Kudriavtsev-Platonov,” in Sobranie sochinenii V.D. Kudriavtseva-Platonova [SS], vol. 1, part 1 (Sergiev Posad: Izdanie Bratstva Prepodobna Sergia, 1894), 1-56. See also V.V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, George L. Kline, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 532-546.

107 theology who formally introduced Kudriavtsev to theism as a method of studying religion; and 2) the problem of the acknowledged need for socio-economic reform without undermining political order that faced Russians in the aftermath of defeat in the Crimean War.340

Unfortunately, the absence of evidence on Kudriavtsev’s relationship with Golubinskii precludes the examination of this important moment.341 As they did for Russian statesmen and educated society, the related problems of socio-economic reform and the desire for political stability, however, cast a great deal of light.342 Indeed, as one scholar has noted, statesmen and members of educated society in Russia have regarded this antinomy as a “persistent” problem in Russian visions of the domestic and foreign orders.343 These problems shaped the way Kudriavtsev developed arguments for the relevance of religion in a contemporary world organized according to “scientific” knowledge, the moral and epistemological monument of which was the genre of encyclopedia. Proponents of this “scientific” vision of society and politics continually addressed the problem of moral relativism. Theism offered Kudriavtsev arguments for justifying the place of religion in general and Russian Orthodoxy in particular as a source of moral uplift based on absolute truths that could answer the problem of moral relativity.

As part of a long-term strategy to rebuild Russia’s infrastructure in order to participate as a full-fledged member of the great powers in international affairs, the Russian government

340 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 6. 341 The fullest discussion of this relationship is still Korsunskii, “Kudriavtsev-Platonov,” 7-14. 342 David McDonald, “1991 and the History of Russian Gosudarstvennost’,” Ab Imperio no. 3 (2011): 223-238, esp. 224-228. For the link between this notion of statecraft, religion, and the discipline of the monarch’s subjects throughout western Europe, see Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 29, 117-119, 178n.87, 200n.15 343 Alfred Rieber, “Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay.” In Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 315-359 and idem., “Interest- Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms,” in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 58-83.

108 prepared a series of reforms beginning in 1855 that was initiated with the end of serfdom 19

February 1861 (old style) and culminated in universal military service in 1874. Because the institution of serfdom and the servile economy were tightly intertwined with the political, social, and cultural life of the empire, a series of educational, legal, economic, police, and military reforms were undertaken simultaneously.344 Amid these structural transformations, Russian officials and members of Russian society saw the threat of disorder posed by the emancipation of serfs as, in part, a cultural and educational problem. In 1857, General Ia.I. Rostovtsev thought reform would require a long and slow change “which required scrupulous state ‘guardianship’

[popechitel’stvo]’ given the low ‘moral level’ of the serfs;” hence, it was impossible “to

‘suddenly transfer half-educated people from full slavery to full freedom;’ similarly, in July 1857

P.D. Kiselev warned Alexander that ‘this huge mass [was] not prepared for total freedom.’”345

According to the perceptions of even Russia’s so-called “enlightened bureaucrats,” the end of serfdom threatened social order.346 Similar to a process that scholars have noted for the late-

Empire, in the era of the so-called “Great Reforms” statesmen and educated society acknowledged the need for a scientific form of discipline that would make subjects (poddannye) modern.347

344 Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914, trans. Bruce Little (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987 [1977]), 17-32; L.G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 1856-1861 (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1984), 26-34; and Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11-45. 345 Cited in Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 19. Laurie Manchester has shown that education as a tool for civilizing the peasantry shaped much discourse in the clerical press in her “Gender and Social Estate as National Identity: The Wives and Daughters of Orthodox Clergymen as Civilizing Agents in Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 1 (2011): 48-77. 346 W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982). 347 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) and idem., “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 338-353.

109 By the late 1850s and 1860s, there were two main responses to this problem: a conservative and a more complicated set of arguments variously described by contemporaries as

“progressive,” “liberal,” “nihilist,” or “enlightened.” Conservatives since the reign of Alexander

I posed the problem of social order as fundamentally a moral one: without fundamentally altering the political or social order, how could subjects be persuaded to restrain themselves for moral reasons.348 The more varied set of solutions looked to emerging scientific disciplines, like political economy, anthropology, biology, and agronomy as guides to social and political reform that were less conservative of the social structures upon which political order rested.349 Whether conservative or not, both of these solutions extended a vision of the world and its problems in terms of elemental spontaneity (stikhiinnost’) and consciousness (soznanie)—to eliminate the accidental and spontaneous in historical development, one had to have the proper consciousness of the direction of historical development.350 Europeans and their confrères beyond the

Continent regarded scientific knowledge as progressive and unitary, the endeavors of which led to more and more global explanations of disparate physical, biological, chemical, and social phenomena.351 The genre through which this moral vision of science and the world found

348 For conservatism under Alexander I, see Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, and Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), esp. 57-90. 349 Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970); Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing; and Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 41-64. 350 Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), esp. 8, 209-219. 351 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, John Burrow, ‘That Noble Science of Politics: A Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

110 expression was the encyclopedia—monuments to the unity, or aspiration to unity, of all realms of human intellectual endeavor.352

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia experienced a local instance of a

European-wide confrontation between knowledge and social order that was embodied in encyclopedia. In 1861, the main editor of the Encyclopedic Dictionary Composed by Russian

Scholars and Writers expressed the same paradoxical vision of knowledge:

We have striven not to preach any particular doctrine, but to put the reader on a contemporary-scientific factual standpoint. The unity of our general work, despite the variety of our personal views of details consists in this marriage [sovokuplenie] of large, leading articles with minor, reference ones.353

The paradox provoked some discussion of the nature of the relationship between scientific knowledge and social utility. An anonymous reviewer for The Contemporary emphasized the strange appearance of the first volume of this encyclopedia. Whereas the public could hardly stop talking about the preparation of the encyclopedia, the reviewer noted that three months after it appearance “it was as if everyone had forgotten about it, as if they had even forgotten about it existence”—the “strangeness” of the silence and apathy required explanation.354 As the reviewer put it, the problem resided in the editorial decision to include all facts of all branches of contemporary knowledge “from a contemporary-scientific-factual stand point.” This decision undermined its moral unity and utility by including facts that the reviewer regarded as so many trivialities that “a German orientalist probably could not know them all.”355 Such a work offered the reader no guidance:

352 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 2-3, 18-25, 170-195. 353 A.A. Kraevskii, ed., Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, sostavlennyi russkimi uchenymi i literatorami, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg, 1861), iv. 354 [N.A.], “Novye knigi,” Sovremennik vol. 88 (1861): 19. 355 Ibid., 23, 21.

111 Any encyclopedic dictionary is a roiling sea, a boundless ocean in which the poor reader sails without a compass, ‘without helm and sail’—not knowing where, to what side to set his course; and if he gives himself over to the course and path of the waves, then they will cast him where he would probably not at all want to go.356

A scholar did not need the basic information that the encyclopedia offered, and an educated member of the public was left, to borrow the reviewer’s metaphor, awash in a see of disparate and meaningless facts.

Kudriavtsev developed themes from the discourse of theism to provide a source of order that imparted a meaningful unity to the facts of science. In turning to theism, Kudriavtsev was participating in a Europe-wide discourse that originated at the beginnings of the “religious

Enlightenment” in the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, from

Ralph Cudworth to Benjamin Constant.357 Indeed, as Imperial Russian and European scholars well knew, theism was a neologism that had been coined in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe what was then being constructed as a scholarly discourse about God’s providential relationship to creation in general, and man in particular.358 The most influential theist, however, was Immanuel Kant in his so-called third critique, The Critique of Judgment

(1790) and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). As some of his most important interpreters have put it, “Kant’s conception of God” as “an intuitive Understanding for which the

356 Ibid., 26. 357 David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp. 1-11. For a more explicit link between theism and the religious enlightenment, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 2/1 (1997): 7-28, esp. 20. For examples of theistic arguments, see Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Printed for Richard Royston, 1678); David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, E.H. Root, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957 [1757]), 41-48; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques,” in Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, eds., Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 968. 358 Vvedenskii, “O kharaktere, sostave i znachenii filosofii Kudriavtseva-Platonova,” 116; A.E. Taylor, “Theism,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: R.A. Kessinger Publishing Co., 1921), 261. In “Teizm” (p. 159), Kudriavtsev–Platonov, like Lavrov, associated theism specifically with a school of early- nineteenth-century German philosophers and theologians: Ulrici, Fichte the Younger, and J.G. Wirth.

112 whole and the parts mutually and organically involve each other” is “an inalienable element in the edifice of modern theism.”359

Kant’s legacy in this regard became a fundamental issue in the religious and political debates in Germany among post-Kantian philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel, Schelling, F.H. Jacobi, and the Vormärz generation, who all defined their own social and philosophical identities on similar issues against post-Kantian philosophy. In these controversies, the religious and the political were interwoven: conceptions of God as an intelligent, transcendent personality served as a basis for drawing conclusions about the human personality and its possibilities and limits in the immanent social and political realms.360 In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia experienced homologous social, political, and religious problems that Kudriavtsev sought to answer by developing a version of theism.

In the 1860s, Kudriavtsev addressed this problem of knowledge and morality through criticism, but it was only in the 1870s that he presented theistic religion as a solution to moral relativity. In an anonymous, 1863 review directed at P.L. Lavrov, Kudriavtsev argued that the main problem with the Encyclopedic Dictionary was its incompetent and superficial treatment of theological and philosophical themes. Such a shortcoming was lamentable since “an especially wide circle of readers, and, moreover, readers who are little acquainted with theological and philosophical sciences” would get what Kudriavtsev regarded as a false picture of vitally

359 Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, “Introduction,” in Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone idem. trans. (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1960 [1934]), xlix, see also lxvi-lxvii. On Kant’s importance to theism, see also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 51-54 and Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, James Haden, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 [1918]), 318-391. 360 For an important recent study on Kant’s relationship to theism, see John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 6-7, 176. For Kant’s legacy in Vormärz Germany, see Warren Breckman, Marx, The Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 20-27.

113 important subjects.361 Moreover, it would contradict what Kudriavtsev and, ostensibly, the encyclopedia’s editors regarded as the purpose of an encyclopedia:

The goal of an encyclopedic dictionary is not to put forward any of one’s own, one-sided theories, but to communicate all the information that concerns known subjects. The reader looks to a dictionary not for the personal opinions of compilers of various, specialized articles […]; he looks to a dictionary for the dispassionate explication of opinions which had or still have actual significance in science.362

Nevertheless, according to Kudriavtsev, the encyclopedia revealed “if not a completely negative” attitude “then at least an ambiguous light” on “Christian beliefs.”363 The rest of the review is an apologetic for scientific Orthodox Christianity.

In the 1870s, Kudriavtsev addressed the moral relativism of “scientific” culture in conversation with developments in German protestant theology. In 1873, at the public defense of his dissertation, entitled “Religion, Its Essence and Provenance,” Kudriavtsev cast his work as an attempt to improve what he called “fundamental theology” [osnosvnoe bogoslovie]:

“Fundamental theology is a science, which, compared with other theological sciences, is new and, therefore, it is not surprising that its content, its main task, and its method are still not defined with sufficient precision and clarity.”364 He improved this form of theology by promoting theistic religion “as the interrelationship between God and man.”365 Kudriavtsev referred his audience to Karl Rudolf Hagenbach’s Encyclopädie und Methdologie der theologischen Wissenschaften as the basic source of the “significance and content of this

361 [V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov], “Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, sostavlennyi russkimi uchenymi i literatorami,” Pribavleniia k Tvoreniiam sv. Ottsov, chast’ 22, kn. 3 (Sergieve Posad, 1863), 291-368 [first pagination], citation 291. 362 Ibid., 293-294. 363 Ibid., 295. 364 Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Rech’ na dispute, pred zashchitoiu dissertatsii na stepen’ doktora bogosloviia: ‘Religiia, eia sushchnost’ i proiskhozhdenie,’” in Sochineniia V.D. Kudriavtseva-Platonova, vol. 2, part 1, Izsledovaniia i stat’i po estestvennomu bogosloviiu (Sergiev Posad: 2-aia tipografiia A.I. Snegirevoi v Sergievem Posade Moskovsk. Gub, 1892), 81. 365 V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Religiia, eia sushchnost’ i proiskhozhdenie,” in ibid., 279-315, quotation 280.

114 science” of “fundamental theology” or, as Kudriavtsev also put it, “apologetics of

Christianity.”366 A textbook that went through twelve editions between 1833 and 1889,

Hagenbach’s Encyclopädie was the most widely used attempt to present religion as a science.367

It was one important artifact in German “culture Protestantism” in the nineteenth century. As

Richard Rothe, the founder of the Protestant Union and “culture Protestantism,” put it, this version of Protestantism sought the “reconciliation of religion and culture.”368 Hagenbach’s definition of theological encyclopedia is emblematic for this endeavor and the genre as a whole:

By theological encyclopedia, we mean the formal outline of everything belonging to the area of theological learning or pertaining to the knowledge and craft of it. It ought to serve, therefore, not so much as the fragmentary communication of the superficiality of a scientific subject, as much as the proper demarcation of its outer and inner limits, so as to convey its true scientific nature through a clear designation of the characteristic features of every individual fact in contrast to a crude empiricism.369

As the genre showed, however, the progressive unification of more and more facts was vitiated by the growing disciplinary specialization that came to define scientific endeavors. Despite what now seems an obvious contradiction, scholars and scientists regarded the tension as a problem to be solved by the refinement and extension of their scientific methods, not as a systemic flaw in the endeavor as a whole.

The attempt to address the problem of moral relativity posed by “science” through the development of a vision of scientific and culturally relevant religion was institutionalized at

366 Ibid., 81n. 367 Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University, 303-323. 368 Cited in F.W. Graf, “Kulturprotestantismus. Zur Begriffsgeschichte einer theologischen Chiffre.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 28 (1984): 214-268, quotation 217. See also George Rupp, Culture-Protestantism: German Liberal Theology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977). 369 Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, Encyclopädie und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1833), 1.

115 MDA in the 1870s. The Academy’s rector, A.V. Gorskii, praised Kudriavtsev’s dissertation as an example of publically engaged and theologically rational religious scholarship that expressed

in various philosophical and, in particular, theological systems answers to the question [about the essence and provenance of religion] in a strictly scientific way, [a question] which lay at the bottom of critical research and which was independently and fully explicated; seeing in religion the combination of both elements of the divine and the human, [Kudriavtsev] explains the divine dignity of religion in its essence, identifies the light and the dark in the religious phenomena of various ages and peoples, and faithfully answers the Apostolic view, which is even in the dedication: “to the unknown God, ‘I know how to find and read the name of the same god who came to earth as a preacher of God’s Only Son.370

Gorskii and Kudriavtsev both promoted their ideal of science and enlightenment in a religious institution that, paradoxically, officially sought the promotion of secular ideals of scholarship.

According the 1869 statute that reformed the curricula and organization of spiritual academies, enlightenment (prosveshchenie) was fundamental to the religious and cultural mission of these institutions: “An Orthodox Spiritual Academy is a higher Spiritual-instructional institution that has as its goal: to convey higher theological education in the spirit of Orthodoxy, for the enlightened service of the Church and to prepare teacher for the Spiritual-instructional institutions.”371

Kudriavtsev developed his version of theism most fully in lectures on the philosophy of religion in the 1870s.372 In the academic year 1873-1874, the same year that Vladimir Solov’ev audited classes at MDA, Kudriavtsev taught a course on metaphysics that addressed

370 Tsentral’nyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy [TsIAM], f. 229, o. 3, d. 44, ll. 22ob.-23. The Synod confirmed the Academy’s recommendation. See TsIAM, f. 229, o. 3, d. 44,, l. 28, 51-51ob, and 239. 371 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1869 [PSZ], sob. 2, t. 44, ot. 1, (Saint Petersburg: Tip. II Otd. Sobstvennoi ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Kantselariia, 1873), no. 47, 154, (article 1), p. 545. 372 For the fullest discussion of this aspect of Kudriavtsev-Platonov’s thought, see A.I. Vvedenskii, “O Kharaktere, sostave i znachenii filosofii Viktora Dmitrievicha Kudriavtseva-Platonova,” 62n.1, 103-117 and Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, 544.

116 epistemological problems in positivism and materialism. A significant component of this course revolved around the philosophy of religion. According to a report summarizing the content of the course, Kudriavtsev covered “the metaphysical doctrine of god and his relationship to the world with an explication of the fundamental principles of the philosophy of religion.”373 Though there are no student notes, and Kudriavtsev’s own lecture notes, if he had them, are not extant in the archives, we do have his collected works, which were the written products of courses he taught at MDA. For our purposes, his most important work is a part of his Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion entitled “Theism.”374

2. Kudriavtsev and the Making of Russian Orthodox Theism

Conceptually, theism offered Kudriavtsev a philosophically unifying explanation of the history of religion that addressed the social and epistemological problems of post-emancipation

Russia. His theistic answer relied on a complex of discrete but interconnected themes. First, it relied on a “synergistic” account of the relationship among Providence, God, and mankind.375 In the theistic perspective, a personal, transcendent God cares for, and calls on, mankind via providence to realize absolute and universally binding moral norms. Such norms are realized in the world through the religious activity of mankind in social and political realms: he must know what an ethnical norm might be, and, having such knowledge, he is bound to realize it in the world. In this sense, theism attempts to connect the transcendent and the immanent together.

Second, this connection is made possible through a normative anthropology based on a

373 TsIAM, f.229, o. 3, ed. khr. 51, l. 21. For the passing of the proposal, see TsIAM, f. 229, o. 3, d. 25, ll. 6ob.-7. 374 V.D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Teizm,” in Sochineniia V.D. Kudriavtseva-Platonova, vol. 2, Issledovaniia i stat’i po estestvennomu bogosloviiu (Sergiev Posad: Izdanie Bratstva Prepodobnogo Sergeia, 1893), 156-204. See also a textbook definition in idem., “Teizm; uchenie o Promysle,” Nachal’nye osnovaniia filosofii, 3rd ed. (Moscow and Sergiev Posad: 2-aia Tip. A.I. Snegirevoi, 1893), 230-235. 375 For a helpful sketch, see Dickey, “Constant and Religion,” 313-314, 319-322.

117 Platonizing reading of Genesis 1:26 that was pioneered by some early Church Fathers and was being discovered in Russian Spiritual academies in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Platonizing Church Fathers linked the claim in Genesis 1:26 that mankind had been created “in the image and likeness of God” to passages in Plato’s Theaetetus and Republic that enjoined man to cultivate the divine characteristics inherent to him by modeling one’s behavior in the world according to the civilized attributes of God.376 Such a theological anthropology made moral perfection the purpose of human life. Third, Kudriavtsev used the study of the history of religion and the hermeneutical principle of accommodation to trace ever more perfect conceptions of God that always achieved the fullest expression in versions of the Christian God.377 Together, these three elements were meant to accommodate religion to the world without secularizing it in order to provide mankind with universally binding standards of ethical action in politics and society.

As we have already seen, such a discourse had significant proponents at MDA in

Golubinskii and especially in Kudriavtsev. Though Kant’s philosophy seems to have found no significant purchase among the lay estates in Imperial Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, Kudriavtsev’s philosophy of religion indicates that educated clerics dealt with it extensively.378 Indeed, Kudriavtsev posed the problem of the type of knowledge human beings could obtain about God as a choice between F.H. Jacobi’s critique of rational theology and

Kant’s defense of it.379

376 On Russian translations of the Early Church Fathers, see Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right,’” 29-92. Kudriavtsev was involved in this project early in his career. See Korsunksii, “Kudriavtsev-Platonov,” 28. 377 On the importance of accommodationism in Judeo-Christian thought, see Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accomodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992) and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeentth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202-289. 378 Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie et le problème national, 91-93. 379 Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Teizm,” 163-165, 169-172. Vvedenskii stressed the importance of Jacobi for Kudriavtsev’s philosophy of religion in “O kharaktere, sostave, i znachenii,” 104, 117.

118 In Kudriavtsev’s account of theism, he traced the development, and gradual perfection, of the concept of God and man’s relationship to that God. Such a conception of God and His relationship to creation, according to Kudriavtsev, could be used as a delivery mechanism of moral values to members of the church. The unifying principle in the narrative was the gradual and ever perfecting “religious sense” that Kudriavtsev regarded as a fundamental attribute of all human beings. As he understood the discipline of the comparative history of religion, the religious sense also indicated that a conception of God was, in some sense, a natural need for the human mind given its presence in almost all epochs of human intellectual and religious history. According to Kudriavtsev’s scheme of the development of the concept of God, humanity had passed through “three main, positive forms of religious consciousness”: polytheism, deism, and pantheism.380 Each of these epochs in the religious mind of mankind had its role to play in the development of a perfect conception of God, but ultimately they were mere moments in the development of the perfect conception. As Kudriavtsev put it to his students and readers:

Each of them, including several indubitable elements which satisfy the religious sense— otherwise they would not have persisted in the history of religion with such duration and establish themselves with such insistence in the area of philosophical thinking—at the same time generally proved to be groundless before the court of more and more highly developed religious conscience and clearer philosophical thought.381

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the more highly developed religious consciousness belonged to “that religio-philosophical view which in modern philosophy is known by the name of theism, and which (to say nothing of polytheism) is distinguished from deism by the recognition of the unboundedness of the Divinity and, as a consequence of this, of the closest

380 Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Teizm,” 156-159. 381 Ibid., 156.

119 connection of it Him with the world; and from pantheism by the recognition of His personality [lichnost’] and distinctness from the world.” According to Kudriavtsev’s view of its history, modern theism arose as a response to defects in the pantheistic systems of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling; its leading proponents in the nineteenth century were Hermann Ulrici, Fichte the younger, J.G. Wirth, and others.382 Because of this school’s engagement with pantheism, however, Kudriavtsev claimed to discern in their work the “tinges” of pantheism which gave him hope that “the possibility of new definitions of the idea of the Divinity have not been exhausted by the forms of representations I have presented.”383

Having thus described theism in general terms, Kudriavtsev gave himself two further tasks “so that such a positive disclosure of the concept of God might have an actual scientific significance”: 1) a justification of “the very right of our reason to constitute such an idea;” and 2) to indicate the general principles from which “all the most particular definitions of the idea of

God might be derived.”384 Although the procedures for these demonstrations might seem, at first glance, to be logical problems, Kudriavtsev approached them historically, following the scheme outlined in Friedrich Ueberweg’s Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie, as the problem of overcoming skepticism from antiquity to the present by means of rational religion.385

Ultimately, Kudriavtsev appealed to the need for some sort of “Revelation” that would give human beings, in their limited capacity, access to what he called variously “the supersensual” or

382 P.L. Lavrov treated these figures in “Sovremennye Germanskie teisty,” Russkoe slovo 1, no. 7 (1859): 141-212. 383 Kudriavtsev-Platonov, “Teizm,” 159. Kudriavtsev-Platonov presents the same formulation in “Teizm; uchenie o Promysle,” in Nachalnye osnoviia filosofii, 230. 384 Ibid., 159-160. 385 Ibid., for the first task, pp. 160-184 (cited Ueberweg at 162n.). For Ueberweg’s importance as the textbook of the Kantian history of philosophy, see Knud Haakonssen, “The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: History or Philosophy?,” in idem., ed., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8, 14-15. For evidence of the stature of Ueberweg’s history into the twentieth century, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Sceptical Crisis and the Rise of Modern Philosophy I,” Review of Metaphysics 7, no. 1 (1953): 132.

120 “the supernatural.”386 Whatever this revelation was, however, it required justification through philological criticism for its possibility or through philosophy for the moral benefits that could be derived from it.

The second task addressed the problem of justification by identifying a method for explaining the relevance of religion. Kudriavtsev identified three “methods” or “paths” for a

“rational disclosure” of the concept of God in ascending order of merit: 1) the method of causality (via casualitas); the method of negation (via negationis); and 3) the method of excellence or analogy (via eminentiae s. analogiae).387 Though Kudriavtsev’s reliance on revelation as the condition for the possibility of knowledge about God may seem pre-critical, in the Kantian sense, the attempt to justify the belief in certain meanings of revelations as rational allowed for the definition of specific attributes of divinity based on the logical coherence of accounts of the good. The faculty of the “religious consciousness” [religioznoe soznanie] gave human beings the initial sense of the divine, and the “method of superiority” allowed human beings to describe “the concept of God as a completely perfect Being.”388 As Kudriavtsev used this method, “superiority” referred to those “predicates of the Divinity derived from the idea of

His complete perfection” and sought evidence for them in the history of the “evolution”

[razvitie] of “religious consciousness.”389 Having determined that “spiritual existence”

[dukhovnoe bytie] was logically superior to “physical existence,” Kudriavtsev identified

“consciousness, wisdom, and freedom” as the predicates of spiritual existence most perfectly

386 Ibid., 179-184. 387 Ibid., 184-204, especially 184. 388 Ibid., 190. 389 Ibid.

121 realized in the proper idea of God.390 And it was from these perfections that human beings were enjoined to develop consciousness, wisdom, and freedom within themselves as a moral guides to ethical behavior in society. As Kudriavtsev put it at the end of his lectures: “If man is the image of the Creator, then it is natural that he contemplates in his prototype in the highest degree those characteristics which constitute the divine image of his nature [bogopodobie ego prirody]. Man, as [F.H.] Jacobi rightly notes, anthropomorphizes God precisely because God, in the process of creating, deomorphizes him [Bog, sozdavaia, ego deomorfizirovat’].”391 In this vision of religion, God shows human beings their higher selves.

In the context of the “Great Reforms,” Kudriavtsev’s theistic conception of the synergistic relationship between human beings and God offered a solution to the problem of social order.392 In this conception, God shows human beings absolute moral values that all human beings are enjoined to realize in the world. Such a conception allowed for measured change that avoided what Kudriavtsev regarded as the moral relativism of purely secular visions of social change and the stagnation of conservative visions of the social order. In other words, the theist conception of the relationship between God and human kind offered a scientific basis for social discipline: it could make subjects modern.

Given the historiography of Russian religious thought, it is surprising to see the development of rational religion, even a religious enlightenment, at MDA. Though religion might seem the least scientific subject to study, Kudriavtsev employed—like enlighteners in ancient Greece and modern Europe—methods of philological and historical criticism as well as

390 Ibid., 204. 391 Ibid. 392 On synergism, see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 88-89, 141n.5.

122 philosophical analysis in order to provide contemporary Orthodox Russians with “modern reasons to believe in myth and the marvelous.”393 In the context of the perceived decay and imperative to reform or revolutionize social and political life in post-Crimean Russia,

Kudriavtsev’s theistic account of religion provided a basis for social discipline. Such an attitude and approach to Russian Orthodoxy was eminently modern and scientific.

Kudriavtsev’s articulation and dissemination of rational religion at MDA has broader implications for the study of Russian religious thought. Vladimir Solov’ev’s period of study at

MDA, for example, suggests that the canonical story about Solov’ev’s intellectual endeavor as an expression of the mystical visions of Divine Sophia needs to be revised. Additionally, it suggests the need to explain why Symbolist poets and members of the Russian emigration constructed what I call the “Symbolist conceit”: the narrative about Solov’ev that explains his life and work as the attempt to articulate the meaning of his mystical visions of Divine Sophia.

Above all, it suggests the need to examine the other three Academies of the empire. By taking the clerical estate’s institutions of higher learning as more than “mere” handmaidens of the state, however powerful such a vision of clerical life may have been as a rhetorical trope in the imperial period, we can enrich our understanding of the Russian Orthodox Church, its practices, its relationship to the government, society, and the empire.394

C. Thesis and Defense: The Search for Social Values and the Role of Nauka

In this context, then, Solov’ev’s fourth conviction—that the best way to understand the present predicament in philosophy is to trace its history—can be seen as an attempt to address

393 Paul Veyne, “Social Diversity of Beliefs and Mental Balkanization,” in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, Paul Wissing, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1983]), 47. 394 Gregory L. Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State? The Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 1 (1985): 82-102, esp. 84.

123 just these issues that had been raised by the contributors to Fatherland Notes. But in conceptualizing a philosophical problem this way, Solov’ev, like Kudriavtsev-Platonov, was following standard procedure for what one scholar has called “the epistemological paradigm” against which Mikhailovskii and Lavrov argued.395

This paradigm for writing the history of philosophy was inaugurated by Immanuel Kant, institutionalized by his students, and codified throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Because Kant had defined the subject matter of professional philosophy as a discipline concerned above all with epistemology, histories of philosophy written within this paradigm tell a very peculiar history of early-modern philosophy organized around Kant’s epistemological turn. Before Kant, developments in philosophy were related as a series of events—understood as occurring in individual minds—in which philosophers of either an empirical (Locke and Hume) or rationalist (Descartes, Leibnitz, and Wolff) philosophy endlessly failed to provide a solution to skepticism: that all knowledge and institutions based on knowledge are relative and, therefore, do not inherently demand social, political, or logical obligations. Pre-Kantian philosophers had not given up on ontology and turned philosophy to the task, as Kant had done in the Critique of Pure Reason, of justifying beliefs and judgments.396

Many of the great histories of philosophy in the nineteenth century followed this paradigm, making the history of philosophy moments in the development of a contemporary philosopher’s own system, as did J.G. Buhle, W.G. Tennemann, G.W.F. Hegel and Victor

395 Knud Haakonssen, “The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: History or Philosophy?,” in idem., ed., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7. 396 Ibid., 6-10, 14-15. The locus classicus for this depiction Kant’s role in writing the history of philosophy is Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiv-xvii, developed more full in ibid., “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” in Anthony Pagden, Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99-119. Tuck’s student, T.J. Hochstrasser, elaborated on the idea in Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

124 Cousin.397 By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, Friedrich Ueberweg’s

Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (1863) had become the standard textbook of the history of philosophy throughout the continent, and it remained a standard textbook into the middle of the twentieth century.398

In general terms—and explicitly following the works of Buhle, Tennemann, and Hegel—

Ueberweg defined “modern philosophy” as all “philosophy since the discontinuance of its condition of subservience to theology (which characterized it in its scholastic form) in its gradual development into an independent science, having for its subject the essence and laws of nature and mind, as enriched and deepened by prior growths, and exerting influence upon contemporaneous investigations in positive science and upon social life, and being in turn reacted upon by these.” The history of modern philosophy, Ueberweg went on, could be divided into three main epochs: 1) the renewal of Platonism in the Renaissance; 2) the epoch of what he called empiricism, dogmatism, and skepticism (from Bacon to Descartes, the Encyclopedists, and Hume); and 3) the epoch of Kantian criticism “and of the systems issuing from it, from Kant till the present time.”399

Ueberweg’s perfunctory treatment of the first two phases in relation to the Kantian is obvious. In the story he told, prior historical development of philosophy had meaning only in so far as it had anticipated or helped define Kantian criticism. Thus, Ueberweg identified Hume’s skepticism as significant only because it “prepared the way for the third stage in the history of

397 T.J. Hochstrasser, “The Institutionalization of Philosophy in Continental Europe,” in Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1, 69-96. 398 Haakonssen, “The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy,” 8, 14-15. For evidence of Ueberweg’s stature into the twentieth century, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Sceptical Crisis and the Rise of Modern Philosophy I,” Review of Metaphysics 7, no. 1 (1953): 132. 399 Friederich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, vol. 2, History of Modern Philosophy, trans. George S. Morris (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1876), 1.

125 modern philosophy, which was founded by criticism,” and Kant’s criticism was so important because, on Ueberweg’s view, all subsequent modern philosophical systems were “lineal descendants from the Kantian philosophy, which is still of immediate (not merely historical) significance for the philosophy of the present day.”400

In setting up his problem in the thesis, Solov’ev devoted the first two chapters to the history of Western philosophy from Scholasticism to Kant, and from Kant to Schopenhauer following Ueberweg’s scheme.401 Descartes, in a line extending back to Johannes Scotus

Erigena and Pierre Abelard and forward to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel appeared as a

“rationalist.”402 Asserting his academic pretensions and, perhaps, expressing some estate allegiance, Solov’ev followed Nikita Giliarov-Platonov’s criticism of Hegel as the theorist of a

“system of absolute rationalism.”403 In a footnote he recommended the work of the clergyman’s son and MDA graduate who also worked with Ivan Aksakov against Khomiakov and Kireevskii.

As Solov’ev put it, “one could find in some of [their] articles a too general criticism of philosophical rationalism.”404 On the “empiricist” side, Solov’ev traced a line from Frances

Bacon through Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Bishop George Berkeley up to its “most extreme expression” in David Hume.405 In chapter two, he offered a description of

Schopenhauer’s and Eduard von Hartmann’s metaphysical systems so that he could demonstrate

400 Ibid., 2, 3. 401 Solov’ev, Krizis zapadnoi filosofii, in PSS, vol. 1, 39-82. Ueberweg is cited only on p. 42n.5, but Solov’ev followed Ueberweg’s scheme of the history of early-modern philosophy. 402 Ibid., 42-51. 403 Ibid., 65. For Nikita Giliarov-Platonov’s article, see G-v., N., [Giliarov-Platonov]. “Ratsionalisticheskoe dvizhenie filosofii novykh vremen: ocherk.” Russkaia beseda, no. 3 (1859): 1-64. 404 Ibid., 65n.39. On this reading of Hegel in Russia, see Patrick Lally Michelson, “Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830-1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 239-267. 405 Ibid., 52-55, quotation 52. Solov’ev relied on von Kirchmann’s German translations of Berkeley and Hume.

126 his mastery of these figures who played such an important part in his history of philosophy.406 A general criticism of Western philosophy through the works of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, chapter three was merely a prolegomenon to chapters four and five, where

Solov’ev began to explain how he could solve the dilemma posed by skepticism.407 In chapter three, though, he explained what he meant by saying that all of the errors of Eduard von

Hartmann’s philosophy “have a general significance for all of western philosophy”—namely that the “abstract, or ratiocinating [rassudochnoe], cognition” which, according to Solov’ev, was the hallmark of western philosophy, “consisted of the dissolution of the immediate, concrete view of man’s sensual and logical elements.”408 That is, in order to make coherent sense of the manifold elements of the world by selecting only some relations over others, western philosophy deformed real objects.409

Interestingly, in the fourth chapter, Solov’ev extended this criticism to the socialist literature of the so-called left Hegelians Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner. According to

Solov’ev, the types of abstractions western rationalist philosophers had been making (and here he meant Hegel) had been drawn to absurd conclusions in which property was apotheosized above the self or the self above God.410 The task for contemporary Russian philosophy, as

Solov’ev saw it, was to be able to talk about society and individuals without abstracting or alienating specific aspects that might be useful for answering a particular problem. For now, he

406 Ibid., 82-98. 407 Ibid., chapter 3 (pp. 98-106, chapter 4 (pp. 106-120), chapter 5 (120-138). 408 Ibid., 98. 409 Ibid., especially 98-99. 410 Ibid., 115-120.

127 could only cite one of Heraclitus’ fragments, to the effect that “the one is made up of all things, and all things the one.”411

Early on in the thesis, Solov’ev gave readers another clue to his intentions. In the introduction, Solov’ev defined his purpose in terms of what Karl Jasper’s famously called “the axial age”—the “ethical rebellion” against an existing state of affairs in order to reshape the world according to the “specifically human in man.”412 Drawing a stark distinction between philosophy and religion, Solov’ev asserted that

the common worldview of peoples [narody] and tribes always has a religious, and not a philosophical character, and that is why while all individual persons live by the common spiritual life of their narod, philosophy as an independent and supreme view is impossible: the intellectual activities of persons is wholly determined by a narod’s religious beliefs. This is clear a priori and beyond all doubt historically. Thus, philosophy arises only when, for the individual, thinking person, the faith of the narod stops being his own faith and loses the significance of an inner, instinctive conviction for him, and becomes from the beginning only an object of thought; philosophy begins when the thinking individual distinguishes his thinking from the common faith, opposing it to this faith as something external.413

Solov’ev had what might be called an axial moment in which he contrasted his own ideals with the ideals of the world around him. Finding his Russia morally deficient, he set about articulating a moral vision based on a retelling of Christianity. A significant problematic shaping his answers arose from his understanding of the history of philosophy since the Middle Ages:

“the relationship between knowledge and faith, reason and authority.”414

Though Solov’ev’s first publication appeared in 1873, the young philosopher became a public figure only with the publication of his thesis for the master’s thesis and the public debate

411 Ibid., 138, see also 105. 412 Karl Jaspers The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953 [1949]), 1-4, esp. 3. 413 Vl.S. Solov’ev, Krizis zapadnoi filosofii (protiv positivistov), in PSS, vol. 1, 40. 414 Ibid. and 113.

128 it provoked the following year.415 Because textual support for what I call the Symbolist conceit has been found in responses to Solov’ev’s thesis, it is important to maintain a strict analytical distinction between Solov’ev the public figure and Solov’ev the developing student of philosophy. Though Solov’ev had begun to be regarded as a “mystical philosopher” after the publication of his thesis and his public defense in Saint Petersburg,416 and he regarded himself as having “mystical tendencies” at this time, what the public understood by mysticism and what

Solov’ev meant by it are not necessarily the same thing. At this point in his intellectual development, in fact, Solov’ev did not show much interest in mysticism as an experience. In his letters and in memoirs written by those who grew up with him, Solov’ev was interested in the history of the human mind and morality.

On a superficial level, Solov’ev’s thesis provoked a great deal of ire, some ridicule, and bewilderment among leading public intellectuals, including N.K. Mikhailovskii, whom, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Solov’ev regarded with admiration. As one recent scholar has put it, “the response in the press provoked by S[olov’ev]’s defense was one of the loudest in the history of academic defenses in Russia; the most influential newspapers of both capitals responded to it.”417 It should be remembered, though, that Russians interested in purely academic disciplines outside academe constituted a small number relative to the rest of Russia’s

415 His first publication, entitled “Mifologicheskii protsess v drevnem iazychestve [The Mythological Process in Ancient Antiquity],” was originally published in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie [Orthodox Review], no. 11 (1873): 635- 665. The best modern version can be found in PSS, vol. 1, 17-36, 255-264. Some pre-revolutionary scholars have argued that Solov’ev had written an article in 1872 entitled “The Vital Meaning of Christianity (Philosophical Commentary on the Doctrine of Logos in the Apostle John the Theologian,” but it was not published until 1883 in Orthodox Review. See Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 94-95n.194, 354n.683. 416 For this interpretation of Solov’ev’s reception in the 1870s, see A.A. Nosov’s commentary in PSS, vol. 1, 362. 417 I.V. Borisova, Primechaniia k Krizisu zapadnoi filosofii, in PSS, vol. 1, 272. For an older statement, see K.N. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951), 57. Borisova’s extensive notes (pp. 264-329) are essential for the reception of Solov’ev’s master’s thesis, especially pp. 272-304.

129 reading public. While Solov’ve’s master’s thesis may have made his academic name, he was still an unknown outside this rarified circle.

Before launching into a withering critique of Solov’ev’s dissertation and the public response to it, for example, Mikhailovskii remarked: “the defense attracted a multitudinous public and took place with a liveliness not often seen at similar addresses in the official temple of scholarship [nauka].” Though Mikhailovskii claimed to have looked on a very young Solov’ev

“with great sympathy,” as the “defense went forward and acquainted me with the views of the master’s thesis (I received his thesis, published in Moscow, only on the eve of the defense), a very bitter and vexing feeling became more and more strongly mixed with this sympathy.”418 He concluded his letter by drawing attention to the pernicious effects of one of Solov’ev’s theses for scholarship in Russia and the public’s light treatment of it:

I repeat: I do not intend only to criticize, but to explicate the content of Mr. Solov’ev’s thesis. I will bring up only one of his theses (the last one), which will give, if not a full, then a very salient, so to speak, and undoubtedly accessible idea of the character of the thesis: ‘The last goal and highest good are achieved only by the aggregate of beings by means of the logically necessary and reasonable course of world development, the end of which is the annihilation of the material world as the material, and the restoration of it as the kingdom of spirits (emphasis in the original) in the universality of the absolute spirit.’ That, Dear Sirs, is what you furiously applauded today in a hall at Saint Petersburg University! That is what you not only bade farewell to, but you rewarded the crudity [grubost’] of the master’s thesis and his boastful awareness of his own ignorance with ovations. You know that if there is an indisputable truth in natural science, undoubtedly accepted by everyone, it is the proposition of the conservation of matter. All of physics, all of chemistry, and, finally, all of scholarship [nauka] are based on it. Not even theological writers deny it. The professors of Saint Petersburg University suggested this truth to their audience in the auditorium. But in this hall, under the same roof with this audience, Mr. Vladimir Solov’ev appeared and, under the cover of the courtesy of representatives of the University’s scholarship and the furious applause of a public suspected of materialism, pulled out its foundation from under scholarship. Dear Sirs, I do not know, at present, of a more confused occurrence. I wanted to say that applause

418 N.K. Mikhailovskii, “O dispute g-da Solov’eva (pis’mo redaktoru),” in E.E. Kolosov, ed., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii N.K. Mikhailovskogo, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1913), 87. The letter originally appeared in Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 324 (1874).

130 was not the only thing heard—there were also hisses; but not one of them made it to the ear of the master’s thesis: he won only laurels and roses without thorns.”419

The philosopher V.V. Lesevich, too, derided Solov’ev’s thesis on the contemporary intellectual movement of the west in a very idiomatic Russian. The thesis, according to

Lesevich, was a “Suzdal’ work: the Suzdal’ artist dabs a little paint of positivism, then dabs a little paint of philosophy of the unconscious, and the painting is finished.”420 Writing for a

Muscovite audience, N.N. Strakhov reported “myths and legends; sagas, one stranger than the other, move from newspaper to newspaper; feuilletonists are horrified, cry, philosophize, prophesy, scoff….”421 Such were the ad hominem aspects of the attacks against Solov’ev’s thesis and defense.

On a more fundamental level, though, Solov’ev’s defense also raised questions about the place of philosophy in Russian universities, about its level of development, about the proper objects of scholarly or scientific investigation, and about the proper role of a University professor and public intellectual in Russian society. One member of Solov’ev’s defense committee described the context in which Solov’ev defended his thesis. M.I. Vladislavlev wrote:

Our philosophical forces are still quite meager. In general, we have a few people who do serious scholarship [nauka], but we have even fewer of those who are philosophically educate and capable of thinking about abstract questions. The poverty of our forces stretches back to the fact that all the philosophical departments have not yet been replaced in our universities. With such an absence of staff, Russian philosophy in the last two years has lost two of its most remarkable representatives: Father Sidonskii and Iurkevich. It is understandable with what satisfaction the friends of Russian thought must meet the appearance of this young and gifted philosopher, who unexpectedly and so opportunely appeared in defense of the cause of scholarship [nauka].422

419 Ibid., 94-95. 420 V.V. Lesevich, “Kak inogda pishutsia disertatsii,” Otechetvennye zapiski, no. 1 (1875): 45, and see 48. 421 N.N. Strakhov, “Eshche o dispute Vl.S. Solov’eva,” Moskovskie vedomosti (9 December 1874): 2. 422 M.I. Vladislavlev, “Kritika i bibliografiia: Krizis zapadnoi filsofii protiv positivistov,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia (January 1875): 247-248.

131 He ended his review by lamenting the “sad newspaper polemic” that revealed a public that

“was not in a condition to value new, fresh forces appearing in our literature and scholarship

[nauka].”423 As a member of the Saint Petersburg faculty, these comments are representative of a type of pedagogy aimed at persuasion rather than out-and-out police measures. Even

Mikhailovskii’s criticism, beneath its churlish tone, made a similar point.

But none of the responses to Solov’ev’s defense illustrates these issues more than K.D.

Kavelin’s. Though he did not share Solov’ev’s views about the significance of Eduard von

Hartmann and Schopenhauer, the famous “liberal” from the early-reform era, K.D. Kavelin, thought the subject of Solov’ev’s thesis important enough to write a serious review of it, the intention of which he communicated to another famous figure, usually labeled a “Slavophile,” from the early-reform era, Iu.F. Samarin.424 In a letter to Samarin, Kavelin wrote:

To me, the theses seem disputable. Obviously, Solov’ev sees the gleam of new philosophical direction in Schopenhauer and Hartmann, whereas they seem to me torchbearers and gravediggers of the old. [V.F.] Korsh wants me to write a review of the book—which I would do with pleasure—only I’m afraid they will give me but a little space in the newspaper; but the opportunity would be excellent to express my opinion. The old philosophy has died: its desire and the attempts to find a language and formulas for what religion teaches are either naivety or hypocrisy and prevent it from uttering its final word. Its final word is the laws of mental life, which it is summoned to study and formulate as a positive fact, a phenomenon that is no longer subject to further analysis. The phenomenon and the laws of an individual person’s mental life, the individuum— these are the limits of philosophy, which it will not overstep. The life of human society and the human race are only the development of various combinations, flowing out of the complexity of people found at various degrees of mental development. These phenomena take shape partially by themselves, according to the laws inherent in

423 Ibid., 248. 424 On the ambiguity of these political lables in Russia, and the reason for the quotation marks, see Richard Wortman, “Koshelev, Samarin, and Cherkassky and the Fate of Liberal Slavophilism,” Slavic Review 21, no. 2 (1962): 261-279; Daniel Field, “Kavlin and Russian Liberalism,” Slavic Review 32, no. 1 (1973): 60, 77-78; Alfred J. Rieber, “Interest Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms,” in John Bushnell, Ben Eklof, and Larrisa G. Zakharova, eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 63; and Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing, 5-9, 258-260. See also Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 26-35 and Charles E. Timberlake, “Introduction: The Concept of Liberalism in Russia,” in idem., ed., Essays on Russian Liberalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 5-13.

132 phenomena themselves, and partially deliberately and intentionally by the actions of people. Therefore, a necessary supplement to psychology is ethics, a doctrine of morality and moral action, which is rather more art than science [nauka].425

What drew the attention of such eminent public figures to the work of such a young and unknown man from Moscow? Why were Solov’ev’s ideas met with such utter disdain by

Lesevich and Mikhailovskii, but sincere, if somewhat condescending, interest by Kavelin?

Similar to Mendeleev’s insistence that he preside over the way the discipline of chemistry was conducted, so Kavelin had a particular notion of how an academic ought to behave and mediate ideas—it was an irenic ideal. Even in the 1860s, he wrote a memorandum to Alexander

II arguing that the best way to stop the spread of what was called “nihilism” was to grant university faculty the freedom to discuss and persuade their students away from the ideology in a civilized manner. Kavelin was optimistic about the ability of faculty members to persuade and the students to be persuaded.426 Similar concerns appear in Kavelin’s first response to

Solov’ev’s dissertation. The first thing he noted was the “the attention that the author, his booklet, and dispute brought on themselves” and the fact that they “had become the object of lively discussions in Petersburg circles interested in philosophy.”427 Among the many causes of the gossip surrounding Solov’ev, Kavelin highlights his youth and the brilliance of his defense, which had not occurred in Saint Petersburg before, as well as the breadth of knowledge and depth of conviction Solov’ev displayed in the dissertation, which had been written with talent on some of the most controversial questions of the day. “It was no surprise,” according to Kavelin,

425 Cited in PSS, vol. 1, 353. 426 K.D. Kavelin, “Zapiska K. D. Kavelin o nigilizme,” ed. P.A. Zaionchkovskii, in Istoricheskii archiv, no. 5. (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk, 1950), 323-341. 427 K.D. Kavelin, “Apriornaia filosofiia ili polozhitel’naia nauka?: Po povodu dissertatsii g. V. Solov’eva,” in Sobranie sochinenii K.D. Kavelina, ed. A.F. Koni and D.A. Korsakov (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevich, 1899), 285.

133 “that a multitudinous public assembled at the defense and that the same contradiction of views and opinions, which are observable in society itself, was expressed at it. The impression created by the dissertation and the controversy which it provoked impose a duty on the critic to examine this book in a little more detail.”428 Though he did not agree with much in Solov’ev’s thesis, as the letter and the article both showed, Kavelin saw the furor provoked by the defense as an opportunity to demonstrate the proper sociability of the public critic.429 Despite his philosophical disagreements with Solov’ev, he could not help but continue to comment on what he saw as the uncivilized way Solov’ev was criticized in the press.430 In 1877, Kavlin even reviewed a book by Lesevich to demonstrate his vision of cultured sociability.431

Solov’ev’s thesis and his public defense created two Solov’evs. One was the public misfit who had retrograde or quasi-mystical notions about philosophy and scholarship. The other was the aspiring academic philosopher and public intellectual who was, as we saw in our discussion of his master’s thesis, interested in providing a more integral basis on which to view individuals, nations, and states.432 Solov’ev derived this integral vision from his reading of socialist authors and, in a complicated way, to his reading of Slavophile authors like Ivan

Kireevskii and Aleksei Khomiakov. As time went on, the public misfit overshadowed the aspiring academic. As we shall see, however, Solov’ev had an abiding interest in socialism up to at least 1878, if not further. Until then, though, he still struggled to find a way to make socialism

428 Ibid., 285-286. 429 For the whole article, see ibid., pp. 285-320. 430 For his concern with the criticism, see K.D. Kavelin, “Filosofskaia kritika (Po povodu polemiki gg. Lesevicha i V. Solov’eva),” in ibid., 319-326. For another attempt to show the public how it was done, see idem., “Vozmozhno li metafizicheskoe znanie?,” in ibid., 325-338. 431 K.D. Kavelin, “Russkoe issledovanie o pozitivizme,” in ibid., 339-348. 432 The only investigation of Solov’ev’s relationship to socialism is Hans Gleixner, “Vladimir Solov’evs Verstädnis und Kritik des Sozialismus,” in Maria Deppermann, ed., Russiches Denken im europäischen Dialog (Innsbruck und Vienna: Studien Verlag, 1998), 246-265. I thank Dmitrii Belkin for this citation.

134 address whole individuals, nations, and states. Subsequent chapters will trace Solov’ev’s efforts to find a solution to this problem. In the next chapter, we will follow Solov’ev as he travels abroad for doctoral research, but also to observe the fortunes of the Russian empire abroad.

135 CHAPTER 3

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOLOV’EV ABROAD: SOCIALISM, ETHICS, AND FOREIGN POLICY—LONDON AND CAIRO, 1875-1876

According to the official petition for a komandirovka—a period of study abroad financially supported by the Ministry of Education in preparation for an academic career—that

Solov’ev submitted to Moscow University’s instructional committee, Solov’ev wished to study

“the monuments of Indian, Gnostic, and Medieval philosophy” at the British Museum from June

1875 to September 1876.433 Like many official statements of purpose, this petition did not tell the whole story of Solov’ev’s research agenda, nor does it provide us with an account of his day- to-day life while abroad. During his komandirovka, Solov’ev wrote letters to his mother and father in which he explained his scholarly studies. He also made periodic requests for money, observed foreign manners, and remarked on current events.434

Several months before his early return to Russia in June 1876, Solov’ev wrote a letter to his mother from Cairo that not-so-neatly summed up the purpose of his extensive study-abroad itinerary, which had taken him from the British Museum in London, to Italy, Cairo, and, finally,

La Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.435 In the letter, Solov’ev explained to his mother that he would “take up quarters for a month [all of March 1876] in Sorrento where, in the quiet of solitude I will finish writing a certain work of mystico-theosopho-philosopho-theurgo-political

433 Part of the instructional council’s minutes are reproduced in S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody. Materialy k biografii, vol. 3 (Petrograd: 12 Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1921), 64. 434 See for example, E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za,” 1909), 8, 17-20, 24. 435 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to Prince D.N. Tsertelev, dated Moscow 19 June 1876 in ibid., 233.

136 content and in dialogical form.”436 He thought the work so important that he sought to publish it in France.

By early May 1876, he had installed himself in Paris where he was “occupied with the publication of his work, which was small in size but great in significance,” that he called the

Principes de la religion universelle. In Paris he also sought the editorial advice of Wladimir

Guettée, a Catholic priest who had converted to Orthodoxy and wrote on similar themes and, according to Solov’ev, had even consulted with Minister of Education D.A. Tolstoi regarding the latter’s work on Roman Catholicism in Russia.437 Another letter from Paris underscores the importance that Solov’ev attached to this work. He wrote: “I need to publish [my work] since it will be the foundation of all my future studies [zaniatiia], and I can’t do anything without referring to it.”438 In Solov’ev’s own words, then, this work was a first attempt to combine his prior academic work with the results of his foreign studies. The importance that he attached to this work demands our attention because it sheds light on the interplay between religion and politics in Solov’ev’s thought.

With rare exceptions, scholars of Solov’ev have understandably emphasized the first four elements of the pentad that Solov’ev expressed to his mother—the mystical, the theosophical, philosophical, and theurgical—in characterizing Solov’ev’s work in the 1870s and later. This

436 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to his mother in ibid., 23. 437 Ibid., 27. On Guettée, see s.v. Guettée, René-François (Vladimir), in François Laplanche, ed., Les sciences religieuses: le XIXe siècle, 1800-1914, vol. 9 in Jean-Marie Mayeur and Yves-Marie Hilaire, eds., Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 306-307. For Tolstoi’s work, see Dmitry Tolstoy, Le Catholicisme romain en Russie: études historiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Dentu, Libraire-Éditeur, 1863-1864) and the same work in Russian graf D.A. Tolstoi, Rimskii katolitsizm v Rossii: istoricheskoe issledovanie, 2 vols. (Saint Petersburg: Izd. i tip. V.F. Demakova, 1876). 438 Ibid., 28.

137 overemphasis has deemphasized the final aspect—the political.439 Indeed, scholars have viewed Solov’ev’s experiences in London and Cairo through a literal reading of a very ironic poem, Three Encounters. Written in 1898 amid a polemic with Symbolist poets, Solov’ev relates three mystical encounters with a mysterious feminine being: 1) in church as a ten-year- old; 2) in the reading room of the British Museum in London; and 3) in Cairo.440 When

Solov’ev’s early works are read through the lens of this poem, London and Cairo are seen exclusively as sites of mystical encounters—even though nowhere in the poem is the mysterious being identified as Sophia. The effect is to have drawn scholarly attention away from investigating the concrete experiences available to Solov’ev in London and Cairo. For our purposes, these experiences sprang from his interest in socialism, spiritism, and the fortunes of the Eastern Question.

To some extent, a gap in Solov’ev’s oeuvre has led scholars to this overemphasis. Before

1978, scholars associated the work referred to in his letter with his unfinished Philosophical

439 K.N. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951[1936]), 64-76; Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work, trans. Elizabeth Meyendorff (Belmont, Mass.” Nordland Publishing Co., 1980 [1935]), 47-74; Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979 [1973]), 376- 377. For the history of Solov’ev’s unpublished French dialogue, see Michael A. Meerson, “Appendix: The History of the First Publication of Two Manuscripts: La Sophia by Vladimir Solov’ëv and Vladimir Solov’ëv: His Life and Creative Evolution by His Nephew Sergej Solov’ëv,” in Wil van den Birken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zweerde, eds., Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist (Leuven, Paris, Sterling, Virginia: Peeters, 2000), 360- 361 and Judith Deutsch-Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,” in idem., ed., Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1-97. For the exceptions, see E.L. Radlov, “Istoricheskie i politicheskie vzgliady Vl. Solov’eva,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, no. 8 (1912): 196-218 and its modern continuation in Manon de Courten, History, Sophia, and the Russian Nation: A Reassessment of Vladimir Solov’ev’s Views on History and His Social Commitment (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2004). De Courten examines Solov’ev’s politics and vision of history only from 1881 on. In contrast to de Courten, I find Solov’ev to be committed to politics and history from 1873 onward. 440 For the Russian version, see Vl.S. Solov’ev, Tri svidaniia, Vestnik Evropy, no. 11 (1898): 328-334. The only English version is Judith Deutsch Kornblatt’s annotated translation in Divine Sophia, 263-272. For a recent version of this recurrent theme, see Paul du Quenoy, “Vladimir Solov’ev in Egypt: The Origins of the ‘Divine Sophia’ in Russian Religious Philosophy,” Revolutionary Russia 23, no. 2 (2010): 147-158.

138 Principles of Whole Knowledge (1877).441 With the discovery in 1978 of a French-language work entitled La Sophia (1875-1876), however, scholars have identified La Sophia as the work

Solov’ev referred to in Sorrento. They have also found further confirmation of the reality and importance of the mystical visions related in Three Encounters.442 Such a conclusion is understandable since both works deal explicitly with mysticism as a legitimate epistemological method. But they do so as part of Solov’ev’s larger project to moralize scientific socialism— embodied for Solov’ev, as chapter one related, in Mikhailovskii’s and Lavrov’s articles published in Fatherland Notes in the late-1860s where they appropriated English and French social thought to address Russian problems—and international relations with theistic religion.443

The mystical and theosophical emphasis that predominates in Solov’ev scholarship significantly misinterprets the thinker’s intellectual project at this point in his intellectual formation. Above all, this perspective allows Solov’ev’s mystical convictions at this time to exist outside of any interest he might have taken in current social and political problems. As his letters from the time show, these problems were not simply a pretext for the presentation of mystical ideas. Alongside Solov’ev’s more familiar interests in the occult, mysticism, and the history of philosophy, his letters tell us that he was intensely interested in international relations.

In a letter that Solov’ev wrote to his father from Cairo 19 December 1875, Solov’ev informed his

441 The text can be found in Vl.S. Solov’ev, Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvatdtsati tomakh [PSS], vol. 2, A.A. Nosov, ed. (Moscow: “Nauka,” 2000), 183-308. 442 The text itself, along with a Russian translation on facing pages, can be found in ibid., 7-161. The French publication can be found in Vladimir S. Solov’ev, LA SOPHIA et les autres écrits français, François Rouleau, ed. (Lausanne: La Cité-L’Age d’Homme, 1978). For the scholarly assessment, see Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,” 109-115. 443 On how “appropriate” ought to be construed, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 10-11, 35-39.

139 father of the impossible position of British financiers in Egypt.444 A few days before, he had asked his mother to tell his father that, in his opinion, “there can be no Eastern Question before

1877, but if there is a question, it will be the worst one.”445 Though it is difficult to characterize

Solov’ev’s specific opinions on these questions, there can be no doubt that he thought them important.

Conceptually, how can we explain Solov’ev’s interest in both the natural and the supernatural without defining in advance one of the interests as pretext for the other? It is within the context of his theistic study of the history of religion and human thought that we need to situate Solov’ev’s komandirovka so that we can see how the religious and the political dimensions of his thought worked together. As a contextual analysis of La Sophia and the

Philosophical Principles of Whole Knowledge will show, Solov’ev continued to pursue his project of moralizing socialism throughout his studies abroad in 1875 and 1876. The sociologist and historian M.M. Kovalevskii, who socialized with Solov’ev in London, appreciated this aspect of Solov’ev’s professional identity: “He was, above all, a moralist, and he was prepared to bring morality into the relations of both government and subjects.”446 Because of his pursuit of this project, Solov’ev could write in the Principles: “Contemporary socialism demands that social forms be defined exclusively by economic relationships, that state authority be merely an

444 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to S.M. Solov’ev, dated Cairo 19/31 December 1875 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 21. 445 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to his mother, dated Cairo, 28 November/10 December 1875 in ibid., 20. 446 M.M. Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’: vospominaniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 174. The editors relied on Kovalevskii’s original manuscript preserved at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow (see ibid., 39-44). However, they are unaware that a mimeograph of the memoir exists at BAR in the M.M. Kovalevskii papers, boxes 3 and 4. The section treating his life at Moscow university from 1877 to 1887 was previously published in Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (1910): 178-221.

140 organ of economic interests of the national masses. As for spiritual society, though, contemporary socialism completely denies it, of course.”447

In order to revise the Symbolist conceit, it is necessary to reconstruct Solov’ev’s intellectual and social itinerary in London and Cairo, two cities that, in studies of Solov’ev, stand as emblems of the mystical. I do not reconstruct every aspect of Solov’ev’s daily life in these cities; Luk’ianov did so long ago.448 Rather, I treat the geographical locations of London and

Cairo as shorthand for interpretive frameworks within which to understand Solov’ev’s intellectual development during his komandirovka.449 Examined this way, London is a setting in which Solov’ev extended his study of comparative religion and socialism, which he had previously begun in Russia. He also continued to study spiritism as a phenomenon that could support his project of recovering the ontological basis of metaphysics: he ultimately rejected it as charlatanism.

Near the end of his stay in London, Solov’ev became interested in international relations as a diplomatic and ethical problem and assimilated this issue into his prior studies. Much of this interest was encouraged by Olga Novikova, whose brother, General A.A. Kireev, was president of the Saint Petersburg section of the Slavic Benevolent Committee. In London, Novikova hosted an important salon in which she sought to explain the role of Slavophile and Panslavic

447 Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo zananiia, in PSS, vol. 2, 205. 448 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody. Materially k biografii, vol. 3 (Petrograd: 12 Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1921), 81-318. 449 The locus classicus for such an approach is Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 [1967]), 7-15. See also Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33-137 and Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749-1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10-29.

141 groups to British government officials and public intellectuals.450 Solov’ev’s connection with members of the Saint Petersburg and Moscow sections of these committees began in

London, though the committees did not yet play the role they would upon his return to Moscow because of the unusually close connection between Moscow University and the leading figures of social thought outside its walls.

As Kovalevskii remembered, “The university [in the 1870s and 1880s] was the center of all interests for each of us, and for the circles outside its walls, [it was] the seedbed [ochag] from which the leading tendencies of social thought came.”451 As young faculty members at Imperial

Moscow University, both Solov’ev and Kovalevskii attended a salon hosted by A.I. Koshelev and that included Ivan Aksakov, General M.G. Cherniaev, and Iurii Samarin’s children among others. However varied their conversations may have been, Kovalevskii remembered that, above all, “the university statute of 1863 and provincial institutions [zemskie uchrezhdeniia], and the courts, which were still new at that time, found a defense from the bureaucracy at Koshelev’s salon. The tenor of the conversations was, in general, liberal, and the host’s attitude was tolerant in the highest degree.”452

But those meetings were still in the future. For now, the social context in London helps explain Solov’ev’s sudden trip to Cairo, where his political and philosophical interests began to coalesce. He even maintained contact with the Benevolent Committee in Cairo, socializing with

General Rostislav Fadeev, who helped arrange welfare services for veterans of the fighting in the

450 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 205-206. See also W.T. Stead, ed., The M.P. for Russia: Reminiscences & Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff, 2 vols. (London: A. Melrose, 1909). For Solov’ev’s polite and uninteresting correspondence with Novikova, see E.L. Radlov, Vladimir Solov’ev: pis’ma i materially (Peterburg- Berlin: Izd-vo Z.I. Grzhebina, 1922), 161-163. 451 Ibid., 207 452 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 224-225, quotation on 225.

142 Balkans as well as arranging the delivery of guns to Serbia so that Russian officers in that country’s service could fight Turks later in 1876.453 Important figures in the Russian Ministry of

Foreign Affairs (e.g., N.K. Giers and A.G. Jomini) knew that Fadeev and other government officials associated with the Slavic Benevolent Committees were moving guns into Bulgaria.454

According to Polovtstov’s diary, much of their business was conducted with the tacit approval of

Alexander II.455 In Egypt, Fadeev built up a Bulgarian division of troops to be commanded by

Russian cadres. Apparently having organized the division, he advised I.S. Aksakov that it was now time for the Committees

to rush to the points where the Turks are beginning the cleansing of the people [vyrezyvanie naroda] that will certainly occur given the Russian threat. That’s the idea I came up with in the fall, as soon as the Egyptian undertaking turned out to be lost—that is, the possibility of returning the eastern question to our favor without war. It took shape in my head in this way: without the rise of Bulgaria, even war will not lead to decisive results; without Bulgarian troops, the country will not rise unanimously; without Russian cadres, the troops won’t be capable of fighting. I would have realized this idea, of which the authorities [vlast’] are in favor, a month ago already, and I would now be, in my heart, exposed with the troops in Bulgaria [v serdtse obnazhonnoi ot voisk v Bulgarii], if I had had the means.

Unfortunately most of the money had been spent on weapons.456 General Cherniaev was also advising the Committee on ways to use Red Cross ships to smuggle items to Montenegro.457

453 Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Natsional’noi Biblioteki [OR RNB], fond 14, ed. khr. 440, ll. 17-21ob. See also S.A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety v Rossii v 1858-1876 godakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960), 335- 351. For some very unsystematic financial information on the committee, see GARF, f. 1750 (Moskovskii Slavianskii Blagotvoritel’nyi Komitet), opis’ 1, ed. khr. 8, ll. 1-108. 454 Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, Russia in the East, 1876-1880: The Russo-Turkish War and the Kuldja Crisis as Seen through the Letters of A.G. Jomini to N.K. Giers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959), 54-55, 57, 61 (letters dated 5 August 1877, 21 August 1877, and 20 September 1877). 455 See for example, GARF, f. o. 1, ed. khr. 11 (diary for 1January 1876-20 December 1876), l. 46 (entry dated 3 June 1876) and ibid., ll. 74-77 (entry dated 30 [Friday] July 1876). 456 GARF, f. 1750, o. 2, d. 51, l. 3. According to the writing on the cover of the file, the letter is dated 7 September 1876. 457 GARF, f. 1750, o. 1, d. 58, ll. 10-11. The French seem to have been aware of this use of the Red Cross. See Archive de la Préfecture de Police de Paris B^A 319, pièce 66 (report dated Saint Petersburg 6 May 1877), ff. 1-2 and pièce 81 (report dated Sainte Petersburg, 21 October 1877), f. 1. These reports originated from the Ministry of War. They were communicated to the Paris Prefecture via the Ministry of the Interior.

143 How did Solov’ev get to this point? The story begins in Moscow and moves to London then to Cairo.

A. London: Socialism, the History of Religion, and Spiritism

In the three or four months prior to his departure for London in July 1875, Solov’ev began to court a former student from Ger’e’s Women’s Courses, E.M. Polivanova, to whom he confided his intellectual project. According to Polivanova’s memoirs, written at the request of

S.M. Luk’ianov forty years later, Solov’ev was concerned with the same problems he addressed in his master’s thesis. During one of their walks alone at the Polivanovs’ family dacha, Solov’ev related his plans for the immediate future. Like many others who knew him, Polivanova remembered a young and immodest Solov’ev who “at that time believed in himself with all his heart, [who] believed in his calling to accomplish a revolution in the area of human thought.”

This revolution amounted to “reconcil[ing] faith and reason, religion and science, to open new, hitherto unknown paths for human consciousness.”458

At the same time, Solov’ev continued to be interested in socialism. On the eve of his departure for London, a friend’s mother remembered decades later that a priest from the area had told her that he “had treated [Solov’ev] with suspicion, lest this scholar start teaching socialism.”459 We know from Kovalevskii that, at one point during his research in London,

Solov’ev was reading about the Kabbalah.460 But we also know some more details from I.I.

Ianzhul, a professor of political economy at Moscow University, a future factory inspector, and someone who had been asked by Sergei Solov’ev to look after his son in London. While in

458 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody. Materially k biografii, vol. 3 (Petrograd: 12 Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1921), 55. Luk’ianov received the unpublished manuscript of E.M. Polivanova’s reminiscences as well as an additional letter in 1917 (see ibid., 42n.1237). 459 Ibid., 70n.1274. 460 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 170.

144 London, Solov’ev assiduously studied the socialist tracts of authors who have been labeled exponents of “critical-utopian socialism” since the publication and subsequent appropriations of

The Communist Manifesto.461 None of these were new intellectual interests since he had been reading Fatherland Notes in the late-1860s. Solov’ev turned to religion as a source for objective moral laws that ought to structure socialism. It is also important to note that Solov’ev sought such support in history, not his own mystical experience. The former could provide objective evidence of moral development throughout human history, while the latter could be mere subjective fantasies.

The way Solov’ev linked religion and socialism conforms to the basic conventions of theistic discourse on religion, not mystical religion. Theism, however, was unfamiliar to the secular public in Saint Petersburg, where Solov’ev had defended his master’s thesis in late-1874; hence Petersburg society’s bemused response to Solov’ev and his subsequent reputation as a pure mystic. As the previous chapter showed, this sort of religion had institutional support and intellectual life at Moscow Clerical Academy, where Solov’ev had been an auditor and encountered the father of Russian theism, V.P. Kudriavtsev-Platonov. A fundamental aspect of this discourse is the understanding of religion as undergoing development in history as more and more perfect conceptions of God are, in the language of theism, revealed to humanity. In this sense, the history of religion is viewed as the story of Providence gradually revealing more and more moralized conceptions of God. As scholars have long known, such a reading of the history of religion relies on the hermeneutical principle of accommodation, which situates the impetus of

461 I.I. Ianzhul, “Vospominaniia I.I. Ianzhula o perezhitom i vidennom (1864-1909 gg.), Glava IV,” Russkaia starina, no. 141 (1910): 479. Ianzhul remembered Solov’ev reading works by Father John Humphrey Noyes and Charles Nordhoff. On the reception of Marx’s and Engel’s Communist Manifesto and its legacy for the way socialism has been studied since then, see G.S. Jones, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguine, 2002), 14-26, 162-176 and in the Manifesto itself, 253-256.

145 change with God who accommodates His message to the cultural and intellectual level of his creatures.462 Such a moralized God serves as a transcendental guide to ethical behavior in an immanent sense because a theological, and therefore normative, anthropology made the purpose of human life the achievement of morality in the world.463 In the context of the moral problem that Solov’ev saw in evolutionary social theories that appeared in Fatherland Notes at the end of the 1860s, theism offered Solov’ev a resource for morality in the material world.

When Solov’ev entered the British Museum and began reading about gnosticism, medieval philosophy, and the Kabbalah, it was as a theist.464 In that sense, then, Solov’ev read these books not as sources for his own mystical illumination, but as moments in the history of the development of religion in the theistic sense. Doing so, Solov’ev read the history of philosophy as the story of mankind gradually and progressively imitating the divinity conceived as a standard for morality. In this way, Solov’ev read ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers for ethical, not mystical content. As one scholar has argued, the doctrine of imitation

(homoiosis, imitation of god, in ancient Greek) was an ethical and not a mystical doctrine central to Plato and Platonism: it required mankind to aspire to an ideal of goodness associated with a

462 The hermeneutic principle of accommodation had a long and somewhat under-appreciated role in the history of religion. A good introduction to this literature is Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). See also Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of the Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12-17, 305-306n.67, 310n.92 and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1986), 213-271. 463 A.E. Taylor, “Theism,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 261-287; Laurence Dickey, “Constant and Religion: ‘Theism Descends from Heaven to Earth,” in Helena Rosenblatt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 313-348. The term had a rather late appearance in Russian encyclopedias. See E.L. Radlov, ed., Filosofskii slovar’: logiki, psikhologii, etiki, estetiki i istorii filosofii (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Akts, Obshch. Brokgauz-Efron, 1904), 169, 250. 464 Unfortunately, the records of Solov’ev’s readings at the British Museum are no longer extant. In 1890, then- principle librarian Sir Edward Maunde Thompson destroyed all applications for reader passes and reading requests up to that year. I thank Stephanie Clarke, archivist and records manager at the British Museum, for this information in two email message from 13 February 2008.

146 god.465 Solov’ev sought in the history of religion the historical revelation of transcendental values.

How did this view of religion relate to his interest in socialism? As chapter two showed,

Solov’ev regarded contemporary, “scientific” socialism as a problematic intellectual movement.

He could sympathize with the desire for social justice [spravedlivost’], but not the “scientific” socialism that exponents in pursuit of such a goal. Purely secular history offered no unconditional values since all values in secular history seem to have been accidental or retrospective justifications of violence. The comparative history of religion offered Solov’ev a transcendental resource from which to derive unconditional values for social and political behavior. The comparative study of religion acted as a supplement to socialism in Solov’ev’s hands.

According to the available evidence, Solov’ev had become interested in spiritism around

1872. In a playful letter to S.D. Lapshina, Solov’ev referred to a séance they had both attended some days before. The tone of the letter, however, suggests he was more interested in Lapshina than spiritual phenomena.466 Into 1874, Solov’ev expressed caution about spiritism when publishing for public consumption. In his obituary for Iurkevich, for example, he ended the article on a cautious note regarding Iurkevich’s attitude to spiritism: “Whether Iurkevich’s belief in the credibility of spiritist phenomena be an error and self-delusion, however understandable

[ves’ma, vprochem, poniatnym], or whether these phenomena actually have objective

465 E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 75-76. See also Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007), 74-75. 466 Letter to S. D. Lapshina dated 18 August 1872 from Moscow in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 1, 158.

147 persuasiveness—only the future can tell [pokazhet budushchee].”467 To some extent,

Solov’ev’s circumspection regarding public statements about spiritism came from prudence. As he wrote his friend, Tsertelev, in January 1875 he “was more and more convinced of the importance and even the necessity of spiritual phenomena for the establishment of present metaphysics, but for the time being I don’t intend to express this openly because it brings no benefit to the cause, and it gives me a bad reputation; moreover, I still have no undoubted proofs of the authenticity of these phenomena, although the probability in their favor is great.”468

He continued to follow developments in spiritism with the same cautious interest into

April and May 1875. Like many educated Russians at the time, Solov’ev was struck by a series of articles written in defense of spiritism by chemists at Saint Petersburg University originally published in Messenger of Europe—with an exculpatory footnote appended by the journal’s editor, M.M. Stasiulevich—and subsequently published in Russian Messenger.469 The fact that spiritism was defended by A.M. Butlerov, who was perhaps Russia’s most respected chemist, and N.P. Vagner, a noted zoologist, made the controversy ostensibly about how to judge the scientific validity of claims about the existence of spirits. The controversy also had social implications because above these two men of science stood A.N. Aksakov, cousin of the more famous Aksakovs, Konstantin and Ivan, and a nobleman who had studied medicine, physiology, chemistry, and physics at Moscow University. Since 1874, Aksakov had published in Leipzig an important scientific journal on spiritism, Psychische Studien. More than Butlerov or Vagner,

467 Vl.S. Solov’ev, “O filosofskikh trudakh P.D. Iurkevicha,” in PSS, vol. 1, 175. 468 Letter dated 8 January 1875 from Moscow to Tsertelev in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 225. Solov’ev is alleged to have spoken about spiritism with E.M. Polivanova’s parents at their home in Moscow before their trip to the coutnryside. See Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 51-52. 469 Letter to Tsertelev dated 18 April 1875 from Moscow in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 226.

148 Aksakov was responsible for what success spiritism achieved in Russia’s northern capital in the 1870s.

In the context of post-reform Russia, the role of science [nauka] in society and government continued to be debated, and this spiritualist controversy fit into such a pattern: should science be done in closed labs by formally credentialed experts, or should it be subject to public scrutiny by educated dilettantes? Butlerov, Vagner, and Aksakov were proponents of the latter view. Dmitrii Mendeleev, however, supported the former, and a special commission to investigate the veracity of spiritual phenomena was set up by the Russian Physical Society in

Saint Petersburg, headed by Mendeleev. As part of this commission, Aksakov went to Britain in order to find mediums to be tested by the commission, and Solov’ev followed him in these investigations while abroad.470 Solov’ev’s main interest, however, was metaphysical. As he wrote Tsertelev in April 1875:

I have abandoned my intention to write an article about matter. This question is so important that one must say everything about it or say nothing. Instead of this, I am now writing in the form of a response to Kavelin an article on the reality of the external world and about the foundations of metaphysical knowledge, which must give a more defined statement to this question than in the dissertation.471

Gradually, Solov’ev’s interest in the metaphysical possibilities offered by spiritism would fade away. But that would not happen until after London.

In London, Solov’ev continued to investigate spiritism, but it was a tertiary project he gave up without much effort and ultimately rejected.472 Exploring séances in London, Solov’ev

470 For the social and scientific importance of this debate, see Michael D. Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 81-110, 278-288. For Solov’ev’s participation with Aksakov and Butlerov, see Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 5 and 8. 471 Letter to Tsertelev dated 18 April 1875 from Moscow in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 226. 472 On Spiritism in Russia, see Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 22-28.

149 found mediums to be charlatans and crooks in contrast to other contemporaries. A famous proponent of spiritism, Arthur Conan Doyle, once defended one of the leading spiritists of the age, D.D. Hume. Doyle said that “never in the course of the thirty years of [Hume’s] strange ministry did he touch one shilling as payment for his gifts.”473 Home did, however, accept gifts from royalty since gifts from such eminent personages “cannot be refused without boorishness.”474 Enough money surrounded spiritism, then, for money to impugn the probity of its practitioners and devotees.

Solov’ev’s disenchantment with spiritism in London and France led him to pen two wholesale condemnations of the movement. In one letter to Tsertelev, Solov’ev complained that

English and French spiritism was practiced by “charlatans who blindly believe,” though he still sought “a small kernel of real magic, the discernment of which in such an environment is almost impossible.”475 Later, Solov’ev could dismiss the spiritist movement in general:

The local spiritism [Spiritizm tamoshnii] (and, consequently, spiritism in general, since its center is in London) is something quite pitiful. I saw famous mediums, and I saw famous spirits, but I don’t know which of them is worse. Among the spirits, the most prominent is [Alfred Russel] Wallace, a rival of Darwin, a man who is, in many respects, honorable, but, in spiritism, he has become a humble student of Alan Kardec (with whom, thanks to a translation, the English have now become acquainted—it turns out that they weren’t Kardecists only because they didn’t know Kardec); moreover, this remarkable researcher, who has become a spirit, considers it his duty to believe in any medium blindly.476

Indeed, he personally had a physical altercation with a spiritist at the “Metaphysical Society,” whose headquarters were on Great Russel Street, almost directly across from the British Museum and near Solov’ev’s own residence on the same street.477 At Solov’ev’s request, Kovalevskii

473 Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, vol. 1 (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 189. 474 Ibid., 190. 475 Letter to Tsertelev from London dated 22 August 1875 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 228. 476 Letter to Tsertelev from Paris dated 2 November 1875 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 229. 477 For Solov’ev’s address in London, see Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 6-7.

150 accompanied the young master’s thesis and a marshal of the nobility from Novgorod to a séance at this society, which charged five shillings per event. A few minutes after the gas was turned down, a harp began to float above the heads of the audience. Then “Solov’ev suddenly leapt to his feet [razorval tsep’] and, in the darkness, seized the cuff of the unknown

‘materialized spirit,’ who, defending himself from [Solov’ev], hit the marshal of the nobility from Novgorod about the head with his harp.” Though the medium explained the problem as a result of “too much skepticism among the attendees,” according to Kovalevskii Solov’ev refused to “leave the business at that.” The next day, so Kovalevskii tells us, he went to the

Metaphysical Society with a written complaint demanding a refund of his five shillings. He was refused.478 In a letter to his friend Tsertelev, Solov’ev related a similar story:

I was at a séance of the famous Williams and found that this conjuror was more impudent than clever. He produced an Egyptian darkness, but he didn’t show any other miracles. When a hand-bell, which was flying around in the dark, sat on my head, I snatched it, along with a muscular hand whose owner didn’t explain himself as a spirit.479

Though Solov’ev still reserved final judgment on the possibility of spiritual phenomena in general, he had become utterly disillusioned with the English and French versions of spiritism.

The connections Solov’ev cultivated in London pushed him to think more directly about foreign affairs. This interest, however, would come later. In his letters and the memoirs of others, which constitute the sole sources for Solov’ev’s life in London, he was primarily interested in philosophical and social questions. As the appointed time for his return approached, though, Solov’ev showed much greater interest in the Eastern Question, hence his trip to Cairo in the winter of 1876. Such interests stand in stark contrast to the way adherents of the Symbolist conceit understand Solov’ev’s stays in London and Cairo. Reading the events related in Tri

478 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 171. 479 Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 228.

151 svidaniia as literal fact, adherents of the Symbolist conceit treat London as the site of a second mystical encounter with Divine Sophia, who is alleged to have told Solov’ev to go to

Cairo for a third vision. Throughout his stay in London, however, Solov’ev had socialized with

Olga Novikova, the wife of an official in the Russian Embassy and sister of General A.A.

Kireev, president of the Saint Petersburg section of the Slavic Benevolent Committee.480

Novikova’s salon was important among both Russians and British subjects. As M.M.

Kovalevskii remembered:

Interest in the Southern Slaves rose significantly after the news of the death of one of the first of the volunteers—Kireev, brother of the well-known O.A. Novikova, to whom the young, Russian philosopher, V.S. Solov’ev, had introduced me while still in London. Even at that time, she was quite popular among London high society (she numbered among her friends and frequenters [chastnye posetiteli] even the historian of the Crimean campaign, Kinglake, and many members of the English clergy, who felt sympathetic to the convergence with Orthodoxy. Olga Alekseevna directed her subsequent activity to acquainting the English with the actual character of Russian slavophilism.481

It was in contact with Olga Novikova that Solov’ev began turning his ethical interests to the world of foreign relations.

Though Solov’ev began his connection with the Slavic Benevolent Committees while in

London, it became a more prominent part of his life after his return to Moscow.482 According to

M.M. Kovalevskii, who had begun teaching at Imperial Moscow University in the second half of the 1870s, the Slavophile and Panslav salons in Moscow occupied a prominent space on the social map. In the second half of the 1870s,

480 Kovalevskii, Moia zhin’, 205, 224. For biographical information on Novikova, see Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 93-94n.1331. 481 Ibid., 205. 482 On these committees, see Michael Boro Petrovich, The Emergence of Panslavism, 1856-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 129-152 and the most extensive study S.A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety v Rossii v 1858-1876 godakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960).

152 Muscovite salons, at least the literary ones, had lived out their final years in my day. The industrial world of Moscow then still had not made up its mind about interlocutions [sobesedovaniia] on economic and social themes, as it now has. Even the idea of supporting any publications, if these publications did not immediately serve its required tasks, was alien to it. At the homes of some of the beauties from this circle, they gathered for dances even more than for card games, and the evening ended with a lively and lavish dinner. Only some of the surviving epigones of the old Westernism and old Slavophilism gathered amongst themselves for discussions of politics. I most often happened to go to A.I. Koshelev’s. Here I found I. Aksakov, D. Samarin, General Cherniaev, the Khomiakovs, the Khvostovs, and, of my younger colleagues [tovarishchi], Vl. Solov’ev among others.483

These meetings became a prominent part of Solov’ev’s life, as they did for all Moscow

University professors, only after his return to Moscow in 1876. Judging by some heated correspondence between Koshelev and Ivan Aksakov, Koshelev’s salon seemed to have been a very prominent part of Solov’ev’s life into the early 1880s.484 But that would be later. For now,

Novikova’s salon in London and Fadeev’s company in Cairo would do.

B. Cairo: The Eastern Question and Ethics in International Relations

As the introduction to this chapter suggests, Solov’ev’s correspondence with his mother and father shows that he had begun to follow the Eastern question—what would the disposition of forces in South Eastern Europe look like should the Ottoman Empire collapse? In Cairo,

Solov’ev informed his parents that he met and often visited “the remarkable General [Rostislav

Andreevich] Fadeev” whom he considered “a type of Russian bear, though a clever enough man.”485 They were both staying at the Hotel Abbat in Cairo. What did Egypt have to offer

Solov’ev and who was General Fadeev?

483 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 224. 484 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva [RGALI], fond 10 (Aksakovy), opis’ 1, ed. khr. 182. The file contains letters between Ivan Aksakov and Ivan Koshelev between 1853 and 1883. 485 Respectively, letters to his mother dated Cairo, 18 November 1875 and Cairo 27 November 1875 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 17, 19.

153 Aside from the Pyramids (which Solov’ev climbed) and an aura of ancient wisdom

(captured in the poem Three Encounters), Egypt also offered a spectacle of dramatic social and economic transformations that profoundly changed its society and role in the international community. Many of these transformations occurred with British and French interference.486

Indeed, by the late 1860s, the Eastern Question had spilled over into East Africa because Britain, which supported the Ottoman status quo in the region, disapproved of the arms trade that had emerged in southern Egypt and Christian Ethiopia—armed Egyptians and Ethiopians threatened the Ottoman status quo. Once the Ottomans lost sovereignty over Egypt and the Suez Canal opened, though, British commercial interests in the region grew since they owned the canal.487

The French also had interests in the region. As reports from French military attachés indicate, the French army was profoundly interested in the Egyptian government’s attempts to build armaments factories for an army that was undergoing significant reforms with the aid of US officers who were regarded as the most battle-experienced soldiers in the world.488 From

France’s point of view, the region had great importance. In a report dated 21 June 1881, a

Captain de Rochefort could look back on the preceding decade and conclude:

They quite rightly say [that] Egypt is a field of experimentation for European civilization in the east, and, it ought to be confessed, completely proves that the results must be extremely fertile. It is true that this first, rather seductive, impression needs to be corrected by what lies beneath [corrigée par des dessous], which does not appear at first. It is equally true

486 Kemal Karpat, “The War of 1877-1878 and Diverging Perceptions of Islam in Europe,” in idem., The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-154. 487 Jonathan Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism (Cambrudge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 38. 488 Chatêau de Vincennes, GR 7 N 1660 (Egypte, 1874-1912), pièce 1, ff. 1-22. This document is a copy of a report from the Consul General of France in Alexandria on the organization of the Egyptian army. The report, dated 16 May 1874, was written by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the request of the Ministry of War. For the remarks about US officers, see f. 17ob. The surveillance of Egypt by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be found in Ministère des Affaires étrangers, “Correspondence Politique,” Egypte 55-59 (1874-1877).

154 that behind this sparkling surface of European civilization hides very deep and very tenacious Eastern realities, though we acknowledge the accuracy of Ismail Pasha’s saying: “Today my country is truly in Europe.489

In the 1870s, Egypt was both a land of ancient mystery and a country rapidly assimilating the material elements of European civilization. As Mark Twain’s sea voyage in the late-1860s indicates, Egypt was also becoming something of a tourist attraction.490 Solov’ev, then, visited a country that, though some might regard it as imbued with mystery, was actively appropriating technology and organizational principles from Europe with the collaboration of Europeans.

Though there may have been some sort of mystical component to Solov’ev’s experience, his letters and the circumstances in Egypt suggest a much more down-to-earth interest in traveling to

Cairo.

Solov’ev’s connection with General Rostislav Fadeev in Cairo also suggests that the young philosopher was interested in the transformation of Egypt’s domestic order and its place in foreign relations. Fadeev is perhaps best known as S.Iu. Witte’s maternal uncle and a political pamphleteer who was one of the leading proponents of a certain type of “conservative”

[okhranitel’nyi] politial ideology.491 From the 1850s to 1870s, Fadeev was part of an

“aristocratic opposition” movement that opposed Alexander II’s reforms insofar as they undermined gentry economic power and social authority. Though this group publicly defended

489 Château de Vincennes, GR 7 N 1660 (Egypte, 1874-1912), pièce 7, “Note relative à l’armée Egyptienne,” dated 28 February 1879. Within this folder, there is another green folder [carbon] entitled “Voyage d’instruction militaire en Egypte, Décembre 1881-Février 1882” attributed to R. de Laisle, chef d’escadrons, dated St.-Etienne 18 April 1882. The document in the first folder within the big green folder is attributed to Monsieur le Capitaine de Rochefort, of the 3rd Dragoon Regiment, sent from Quartier Général à Tours to Paris 18 June 1881 and received 21 June 1881 by the Second Bureau. The cited passage comes from f. 6ob. 490 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: The Modern Library, 2003 [1869]), 458-476. 491 B.V. Anan’ich and R.Sh. Ganelin, “R.A. Fadeev, S.Iu. Vitte i ideologicheskie iskaniia ‘okhranitelei’ v 1881-1883 gg.,” in Issledovaniia po sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii Rossii: sbornik statei pamiati Borisa Aleksandrovicha Romanova (Leningrad: Izd-vo “Nauka,” leningradskoe otdelenie, 1971), 299-326.

155 the principle of autocracy, by the very fact that they discussed the principle at all served, paradoxically, to undermine the unassailable nature of the principle of autocracy.492 Fadeev was a tough-minded and worldly man of action.

French observers saw Fadeev similarly since he found his way into the political dispatches of an official in the French Embassy in Saint Petersburg. What the reports show is that Fadeev energetically pursued business that was normally conducted by the foreign relations departments of governments. An attaché of the French Embassy in Saint Petersburg noted, for instance, that General Fadeev was Prince Bariatinksii’s “protégé.” The same attaché regarded

Fadeev as “a writer of merit” and whose “bold and original ideas could make a good Cavalry officer.” However, the attaché went on, “he has little tact and moderation, and counts only a few friends from the army, or, rather, he hasn’t any at all.”493 His own government put him under the surveillance of the Third Section. For some reason, though, Alexander II had asked the head of the Third Section, N.V. Mezentsev, to tell Fadeev “that the Sovereign is not pleased that he was going to the places of the Slavic uprising.”494

Because Fadeev had spoken of a plan “to form a Bulgarian battalion” to someone somewhere, “the Sovereign Emperor found it agreeable to allow the establishment of prolonged surveillance of Fadeev’s activities.”495 The surveillance records were rather thin, though they did note that Fadeev met with General Major I.K. Kishel’skii, a member of the Slavic

492 I.A. Khristoforv, “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia velikim reformam: konets 1850–seredina 1870-kh gg. (Moscow: “Russkoe slovo,” 2002) and the review by Daniel Field in Kritika 6, no. 2 (2005): 409-416. 493 Archives de la Préfecture du Police de Paris, 317, 25^o (Saint Petersburg, 1873-1879, pièce 29, dated Saint Petersburg, 25 October 1873. This file contains copies of reports originating in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and requested by the Préfecture de Police de Paris as part of their efforts to police Russian émigrés in France. 494 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], fond. 583 (A.A. Polovtsov), opis’ 1, edinitsa khranieniia 11, l. 45. Polovtsov recorded a conversation between himself, Mezentsov, and Lobanov on Thursday 3 June 1876. 495 GARF, fond 109 (III otdelenie sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva), opis’ 4a, delo 457, l. 7. The confidential letter is dated 22 September 1876.

156 Benevolent Committees, in Paris in May 1876. Subsequently, Kishel’skii fell under the

Third Section’s eye. One letter noted that, in September 1876, Kishel’skii had gone to “some ministry” and “waited for the arrival of some minister in order to leave Saint Petersburg after him.”496 The officials of the Third Section were right to be worried about Fadeev, but the agency’s surviving surveillance letters indicate that they did not know the extent of his activities.

Or, rather, that the flow of information between the Third Section, the rest of the government, and the Emperor was convoluted. One brief report from 12 October 1876 noted that Fadeev had sent a “parcel in large format with papers and the inscription ‘To the Governing Minister of

Foreign Affairs, the Secret Advisor Giers.”497

The fact that Fadeev was under surveillance may have been an open secret in government and society. 17 August 1877, Fadeev sent a letter from Bulgaria to the chef des gandarmes, N.V.

Mezentsev detailing his activities in the Balkans.498 Correspondence between I.S. Aksakov and

General Fadeev indicate that the Slavic Benevolent Committees were raising an army to defend

Serbia, raising money to support the volunteers and the wounded, arranging train fares and routes for the volunteers and wounded, and buying guns to arm the volunteer army in Serbia. The buying of guns seems to have shocked even Aksakov, who wrote an exclamation mark in the margin of the letter next to this information.499 Through French officials may have regarded

496 Ibid., l. 11, 11ob. The letter is dated 25 September 1876. On Kishel’skii, see Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety, 61. He was from a Bulgarian family but served in the Russian army. 497 GARF, f. 109, o. 4a, d. 457, l. 34. On Girs, see Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, Russia in the East, 1876- 1880: The Russo-Turkish War and the Kuldja Crisis as Seen through the Letters of A.G. Jomini to N.K. Giers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959). More generally, see S.A. Nikitin, et al., eds., Osvobozhdenie Bolgarii ot turetskogo iga, vols. 1-2 (Moscow: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1961-64). 498 GARF, f. 109, o. 4a, d. 457, ll. 54-57ob. 499 OR RNB, f. 14 (Aksakovy), ed. khr. 440 (Delo o pokupke i dostavke oruzhiia dlia Bolgraskikh druzhin, 1876- 1877), ll. 11-12ob., 17, 21ob., 21, 23-24. For the exclamation point, l. 18ob.

157 Fadeev as an important figure, only the Slavic Benevolent Committees fell under their surveillance.500

While these events surrounded Solov’ev, he continued the philosophical pursuits he had been investigating in London. On his way to Egypt, Solov’ev wrote his friend and fellow student of philosophy, Prince D.N. Tsertelev, that he was “setting off for Egypt and maybe India. I will write you from Cairo and await your answer.”501 Solov’ev worked hard to get his friend to come to Cairo. He wrote several letters to Tsertelev without receiving a response until January 1875.

Solov’ev continued to persuade his friend to come:

You must come to Cairo without fail. I will be here until March. The journey will amuse you. The country is quite eccentric [original’naia], the climate is magnificent to say nothing about the satisfaction that you will give me. But if you cannot do it at all, then I will try to go to Athens or Italy in February, if you will be there. But I hope that you will come here; then, at the beginning spring we can set out for Italy and Paris together. It is utterly impossible for you to be alone now. Write me immediately if you can come. I have a little something to tell you, but I will save it until our meeting so as not to delay the letter.502

Between January 8 and 30 January, Tsertelev was able to receive Solov’ev’s letter and go to

Cairo.503 Along with whatever young men may normally do while abroad, the two friends composed a dialogue entitled “An Evening in Cairo.”504 Before the discovery of La Sophia,

Luk’ianov had argued that the dialogue Solov’ev referred to in his letter to his mother from

500 Archives de la Préfecture du Police de Paris, 317: 25^o (Saint Petersburg, 1873-1879, pièce 82 and 319: 25^o (Saint Petersburg, 1876-1887, pièces 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 23, 29, 30. Ministère des Affaires étrangeres, Russie 8 (1871-1877, Moscou), report dated Moscow, 10 September 1876, ff. 287ob.-288; report dated Moscow, 8 April 1877, ff. 355-360ob; Chatêau de Vincennes, GR 7 N 1466 (l’administration russe, panslavisme, sociétés secretes). 501 Letter from Vl.S. Solov’ev to kn. D.N. Tsertelev dated Paris, 2 November 1875 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 229. He also wrote O.A. Novikova of his intention to go to India in a letter dated 25 November 1875 from Cairo. See Radlov, ed., Pis’ma i materialy (Petersburg-Berlin: Izd-vo Z.I. Grzhbina, 1922), 162. 502 Letter to Tsertelev dated Cairo, 8/20 January 1876 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 230. 503 See the testimony in Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 241, 256-257. 504 Ibid., 247-255. Luk’ianov had obtained the dialogue from Tsertelev’s widow, Princess E.F. Tserteleva, 6 February 1917. See 247n.1616.

158 Sorrento was this dialogue.505 Given the form and lighthearted tone of the work, however, the dialogue is more likely a form of cultured recreation. Luk’ianov also presented a play written by Count F.L. Sollogub, a nephew of Iurii Samarin, whom Solov’ev knew from Moscow.506

Entitled “Solov’ev in Thebes” [Solov’ev v Fivaide], the play mocks Solov’ev’s pride and philosophical pursuits. It opens with a dialogue on good and evil between Satan and the Sphinx in the desert. Solov’ev enters to clarify their positions.507 Given the backgrounds and educations of Solov’ev, Tsertelev, and Sollogub, the dialogue represented a diverting form in which to play with their cultural interests. We should not take these documents as significant monuments in the development of Solov’ev’s mind.

Contemporary Egypt and Rostislav Fadeev’s machinations presented Solov’ev with examples of tough-minded, worldly affairs. Egypt under Ismail Pasha was undergoing profound changes in its domestic life and its relations with other European countries. Ismail reformed

Egypt’s judiciary system, built railroads, presided over the opening of the Suez Canal, imported guns, and built armaments and ammunition factories. Amid the changes in Egypt, Fadeev offered Solov’ev a closer view of these transformations and Russia’s possible role in them. The evidence from Tsertelev’s visit to Cairo, however, shows that Solov’ev had not forgotten about his philosophical interests either. To the extent that Sophia is truly important to Solov’ev’s developing mind, it may have had cultural and diplomatic significance because the Moscow

505 Ibid., 246n.1610 and 247n.1616. 506 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 1, 387. Luk’ianov surmised that the “S” to whom Solov’ev referred in a letter to Tsertelev was Sollogub. The three had apparently been discussing Lermontov’s poem “I skuchno i grustno.” See Ibid., 387. For the letter, see Vl.S. Solov’ev’s letter to Tsertelev dated Moscow, 13 September 1874 in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 224. 507 The text of the play can be found in Lik’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 283-307.

159 Slavic Benevolent Committee sent a Wisdom of God (Sophia) icon to a church in the

Balkans. The letter deserves to be cited in full:

Yourt Excellency Dear Sir Mikhail Grigor’evich [Cherniaev]

By the inscrutable fortunes of God’s Providence, You have been appointed by the Wisdom (Sophia) of Eternal Council [Predvechnyi Soveta] to be the leader of the Christians oppressed by the cruelty of the Mahomedans, who have brought our brother- Slavs to the very limit of toleration. The Russian heart suffers in sympathy; finally, having apprehended the spirit of the Slavs, You, as a Russian, have decided to express the sympathy of your compatriots through a donation for the defense of the oppressed—may our prayers attend the holy affair. We, the unknown inhabitants of Moscow, hoped to paint an icon of the Wisdom of God (Sophia), a copy from the icon of Novgorod, brought from the Cathedral of Sophia in Constantinople, whither the road lies for You and the troops faithful to You; we beg that you take this icon as a guide [putevoditel’nitsa] for favor [odolenie] over the enemies of the Wisdom of God—may it fortify the spirits and strength of the troops through the prayers of fellow believers, and my the Lord help [You] to cry: understand, heathen, and submit—as God is with us, God is the defender of right. And may the Lord help You, Mikhail Grigor’evich, bring victory to the desired end. We beg You to remember that the prayer for You and Your army is unceasing. Our hope, if it is possible to fulfill it, that this icon be located in the Main Room, and at the conclusion of the war be placed in the cathedral according to the wish of your troops, as a memorial of the sympathy of unknown Russian persons.508

Solov’ev started to connect his studies of religion from London with his, as it were, Cairo studies of foreign affairs in La Sophia, which he worked on in Sorrento in March 1876 and Paris from

April until his return to Moscow in June. As we shall see, Solov’ev developed an “imperialism of love,” to borrow Josef Bohatec’s phrase describing Dostoevskii’s outlook on Russian foreign

508 GARF, f. 1750, o. 1, ed. khr. 80, ll. 8-9. Judith Kornblatt has suggested that Solov’ev knew this particular icon from his childhood in Kornblatt, “Who Is Solovyov and What Is Sophia?,” in Boris Jakim, Judith Deutch Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus, eds., Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solov’ev, 57-60.

160 policy: all Slavs united by religious love and freely subordinated to the Russian emperor in an ethical community.509

C. La Sophia and The Principles: Foreign and Domestic Imperialism of Love

Given his study of the history of religion and human thought in London and his emerging interest in foreign events in Cairo, what are we to make of the “mystico-theosopho-philosopho- theurgo-political” work now identified as the French-language dialogue, La Sophia, and how is it related to The Principles? Given the relatively recent discovery of the text, scholars have not come to a consensus. The doyenne of Solov’ev scholarship in English links the dialogue to

Solov’ev’s poetry and finds support for the symbolist conceit in it.510 There are good reasons for doing so. Early in the dialogue, Solov’ev defines man as the “laughing being” [l’être qui rit], which conjures the humorous tone of his poems, and a Sophia is one of the interlocutors of the dialogue, which is actually only a part of the whole, variegated work.511 As this chapter has aimed to show, however, such a view of the dialogue involves a retrojection of the Symbolists’s literal reading of Solov’ev’s satirical Three Encounters (1898) onto the philosopher’s early development. The descriptions of Solov’ev’s itineraries in London and Cairo in this chapter complicate this reading of Solov’ev’s intellectual career.

Rather than describing mystical encounters with a divine and feminine being, Solov’ev was using his idealistic, philosophical, and artistic tools to address what he regarded as ethical

509 Josef Bohatec, Der Imperialismusgedanke und die Lebensphilosophie Dostoewskijs: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis des russischen Menschen (Graz-Colon: Hermann Böhlaus, 1951), vii. Whereas Bohatec regards Solov’ev as merely a source for metaphysical decoration for Dostoevskii’s ideas (pp. 224-247), I have tried to show that Solov’ev had social and political interests since the late 1860s. As I see it, the two thinkers mutually reinforced each others’ ideas about ethics and politics. For further support of this position, see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 50-53. 510 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “On Laughter and Vladimir Solov’ev’s Three Encounters,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 565-566. 511 Ibid., 571-572 and for the dialogue, pp. 74-155. The phrase is found in Vl.S. Solov’ev, La Sophia, in PSS, vol. 2, 12.

161 and epistemological problems in socialist doctrines which derived their authority from the most advanced social science of the time—evolutionary social theory. Solov’ev did so from the premise that mankind was a “laughing being” because “the most common of these phenomena

[of human nature] that, on thorough examination [pour un examen approfondi], reveals the metaphysical character of man is the phenomenon of laughter” for it is “man alone who possesses this faculty.” Though “animals may certainly cry sometimes, they never laugh.”512

To understand what Solov’ev meant in making such a comparison between mankind and animals, we need to know something about the rhetorical techniques employed by natural law theorists of society. Recent scholarship on socialism has shown that socialists in the nineteenth century had used natural law discourse to argue for human sociability as a counter argument to evolutionary social theories.513 In the middle of the nineteenth century, some socialists, such as

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, used such techniques in order to argue for needs that were unique to mankind in civilized societies but that economic markets threatened.514 These rhetorical techniques also informed the works by Lavrov and Mikhailovskii that Solov’ev read in

Fatherland Notes at the end of the 1860s.515 When read in this context, Solov’ev’s La Sophia appears much less as an attempt to recount the meaning of mystical encounters, and much more like the fruit of a long and arduous intellectual effort to address ethical problems in the Russia

Solov’ev inhabited.

512 Vl.S. Solov’ev, La Sophia, in PSS, vol. 2, 12. Italics in original. According to the editors, Solov’ev changed “nature” [la nature] for “character” [le caractère] during some revision. 513 G.S. Jones, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 2002), 165n.263. 514 On Proudhon’s “anti-theism,” see K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). See also Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith, “Introduction,” in idem., Proudhon: What Is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi- xxxiii. 515 Along with the literature cited in chapter one, see also P.L. Lavrov, “Tsivilizatsiia i dikiia plemena,” Otechesvennye Zapiski, no. 5 (1869): 107-169.

162 As scholars of European intellectual history have recently argued, comparisons between human beings and animals were a common trope in European natural law theories of society from Hugo Grotius to some of the most prominent members of what scholars have come to call the Scottish Enlightenment, namely Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William

Robertson. The importance of natural law theories of society to the Scottish Enlightenment needs no further demonstration since Duncan Forbes and others have shown that the discursive tradition of natural law theory of society “was in dry dock” for the entire Scottish Enlightenment, and as a result “the Hilfswissenschaften, the preliminary and auxiliary sciences—psychology, history, ‘sociology,’ the ‘economic interpretation of history’—came to upstage the project itself, so that the latter tended to disappear from sight.”516 One prominent feature of these theories was the use of a form of argument pioneered by Thomas Hobbes and appropriated by Samuel

Pufendorf: the comparison of animals and mankind in order to underline the contrast between barbarism and civilization. Though Pufendorf applied Hobbes’s method, he appealed to

Aristotle’s notion of “community” (koinonia) as a natural state in which man finds himself outside of the state (polis), thus criticizing Aristotle’s famous definition of man as a “political animal” (zoon politikon).

The contrast between men and animals was more important than the fact of the comparison itself in order to develop theories of human sociability based on the presence and satisfaction of needs—the goal was to explain the natural origins of human society and ways of sustaining it from resources within society itself. Because of the exclusive focus on human

516 Duncan Forbes, “Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982), 186-204, quotation 187. See also the literature cited in Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages’ Theory,” in idem., Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 160n.2.

163 society outside any political or religious contexts, Pufendorf was labeled a “socialist” in his day.517

This rhetorical strategy became a prominent feature of Russian social thought through various channels. Such an approach to the study of human societies was also a feature of Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon’s socialism.518 And scholars have long known the importance of Proudhon for the social thought of Alexander Herzen and P.L. Lavrov.519 There is evidence that even

Vladimir Solov’ev’s father, the historian Sergei Mikhailovich, structured his history of Russia around the sources of tension between barbarism and civilization through his reading of the

Protestant historian and French statesman, François Guizot. Guizot had translated Edward

Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was organized around the same

“cultural gradient” of barbarism and civilization.520 While delivering lectures on Plato and

Aristotle in 1875 for V.I. Ger’e’s Women’s Courses, according to E.M. Polivanova, Vladimir

Solov’ev dwelled on Artistotle’s famous definition of human nature as a “political animal” [zoon

517 Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce,” 159-184. On Pufendorf and Aristotle, see esp. pp. 173-174, 181-182. 518 Jones, “Introduction,” in Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 147, 165-167. 519 Martin E. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 322-325, 464-465n.32 and B.S. Itenberg, Dvizhenie revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva: Narodnicheskie kruzhki i ‘khozhdenie v narod’ v 70-kh godakh XIX v. (Moscow: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1965), 77. For an odd omission, see Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli: individualizm i meshchanstvo v russkoi literature i zhizni XIX v., 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1911), 98-134. 520 S.M. Solov’ev, Moi zapiski dlia detei moikh, a esli mozhno, i dlia drugikh (Petrograd: Tip. t-va “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za” i kn-vo “Prometei” N.N. Mikhailova, n.d.), 60 and V.O. Kliuhevskii, “Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev,” in idem., Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, vol. 7, V.L. Ianin, ed. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), 307- 308, 310. Ana Siljak, “Christianity, Science, and Progress in Sergei M. Solov’ev’s History of Russia,” in Thomas Sanders, ed., Historiography of Imperial Russian: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 215-238, esp. 235n.9; V.M. Dalin, “F. Gizo i razvitie istoricheskoi mysli v Rossii,” in idem., ed., Liudi i ideii iz istorii revoliutsionnogo: sotsialisticheskogo dvizheniia vo Frantsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 354-386. On “cultural gradient,” see Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin, eds., The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991 (Boston: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003).

164 politikon], though Solov’ev translated the phrase as “man is a social animal” (zhivotnoe obshchestvennoe).521

Solov’ev’s mistranslation of Aristotle’s famous definition of man suggests that, like

Pufendorf and those thinkers in the nineteenth century labeled socialists, he was looking for strictly social bases for human sociability that might exist without the need of a political state.

He sought to set the groundwork for such a conception of society in his master’s thesis and extended this interest through his studies in London. His first attempt to begin his own full- fledged account of such sociability is embodied in La Sophia. By defining man as a “laughing being,” Solov’ev simultaneously participated in the natural law tradition of discourse and registered his unease with its focus on the strictly natural aspects of human needs and the way durable societies emerge in order to satisfy basic and more complicated needs. One more at ease with the discourse’s naturalism might have labeled man “the laughing animal.” Solov’ev did not because one of his main aims in La Sophia was to show that along with physical needs, mankind also had metaphysical needs. Indeed, Solov’ev began the work with a man-animal comparison.

Solov’ev highlighted the importance of this aim from the very first paragraph of La

Sophia. The opening lines employ the language of natural law theories of society that were a feature of socialist discourse in the nineteenth century. Solov’ev opened with an assertion about the ultimate goal of human life:

It is evident that the general and definitive goal of all human activity is the wellbeing of man, that is to say the most complete satisfaction of all the needs of human nature [les besoins de la nature humaine]. On this point, man in no way differs from the rest of the animate beings: all tend equally to satisfy their natural needs, all aspire to wellbeing. The difference between man and the other animals appears only in the special character of the

521 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, 44 and also see 44-45n.1240. In 1898, M. Filippov took Solov’ev to task for such an eccentric translation in “Sud’by russkoi filosofii,” Nauchnoe Obozrenie, nos. 8, 9, 10 (1898): 1351-1368, 1548-1571, 1793-1812, esp. no. 10 (1898): 1797-1798.

165 needs whose satisfaction constitutes their respective wellbeing. Man, in effect, is not satisfied by the pleasures that procure for him the satisfaction of his physiological appetites and which he has in common with the beasts; to be happy, he must still satisfy a need that belongs exclusively to him, that of acting morally and knowing the truth—to act morally, that is to say according to general and universal principles and not under the impulsion of animal instincts; to know the truth, that is to say knowing things in their universality and totality and not in their apparent reality, which is always partial and temporary. In observing this supreme need as a fact, we have done nothing with its historical origin or its genesis: whether there had or had not been a time where it did not exist and where man lived the life of the brutes, this will not occupy us for the moment. It is sufficient for us to know that it exists and that without it man is not man.522

Solov’ev went on to define this “supreme need” as “the metaphysical need.” According to him, the reality of this need could be observed in human history. For him, this need was “All the systems of religion and philosophy which mean to give the universal truths that it seeks to human intelligence are the direct product of man as a metaphysical being.”523

As Solov’ev developed his line of thought, the history of religion and philosophy was not strong enough evidence for the real existence of the metaphysical need, though these histories did not contradict his basic assertion. He sought physical evidence, as it were. When he called man the “laughing being,” he did so in order to show physical evidence of a natural metaphysical need in man. For Solov’ev, laughter was the original philosophy because it indicated a critical attitude to the external world. As he put it:

The animal, completely absorbed in given reality, cannot place itself in a critical and negative position to [given reality], and this is why it cannot laugh; for laughing supposes a free state: the slave does not laugh.

Indeed, for Solov’ev laugher was proof of “the natural liberty” of man.

The great figures who embodied this notion of laughter, according to Solov’ev, were the great satirical and comic poets and the great humorists of humanity. These “citizens of another

522 V.L. Solov’ev, La Sophia, in PSS, vol. 2, 8. The editors have reproduced in brackets the passages that Solov’ev marked out in the process of editing. I have not translated them. 523 Ibid., 10.

166 [world]” used humor to “make fun of the present reality of an epoch and of a society, had not a transcendental reality but the same phenomenal reality only of another epoch or another society for their ideal.”524 The evidence for man’s metaphysical need did not end with laughter alone, however. Art and poetry also revealed the metaphysical need of man. Both the sublime and the more frivolous forms of art and poetry reveal man’s metaphysical nature for “if one man can produce these images, and if others can understand them immediately, this proves that this ideal reality, this metaphysical reality, is man’s own region, this proves that man is a metaphysical being.”525

Having established the metaphysical nature of man to his own standards, Solov’ev went on in subsequent chapters of this first section of La Sophia to establish the possibility and reality of metaphysical knowledge relying to some extent on spiritism.526 As the modern editors of

Solov’ev’s works note, Solov’ev wrote what they refer to as a “mediumistic letter” in various places on the obverse of the final page of this section. In a mixture of Greek, Russian, and

French, the “letters” read: “Sofia, I will return to you, my life. I will come to you tomorrow. I would very much like to live for you Sophie.”527

In the dialogue section of La Sophia, Solov’ev explored the possibility of theosophical ideas for establishing a metaphysical reality that could provide moral guidance in the world. He included at different points in the text various schemas of the relationship between worlds and beings.528 Given the absence of these theosophical schemas in subsequent work, Solov’ev seems to have given up on the possibilities it might have for establishing the reality of a metaphysical

524 Ibid., 12. 525 Ibid., 14. 526 Ibid., 16-42, 527 Ibid., 42n.b. 528 Ibid., 74-151.

167 realm. Therefore, not much should be made of them in relation to the rest of Solov’ev’s works. Although spiritism and theosophy fell away from Solov’ev’s main interests, his task to moralize socialism did not.

The very nature of La Sophia indicates that Solov’ev had not come to a clear conception of the relationship between the social, the political, and ethics. La Sophia consists of three stylistically distinct sections: a discourse on the metaphysical needs of man; a dialogue between

Sophie and Le Philosophe; and some brief appendices on morality and politics and theological principles.529 The fact that Solov’ev never published the work also suggests that he may have changed his mind about the coherence of what he had been studying, especially regarding theosophy. Nevertheless, he kept working on moralizing socialism. When he returned to

Moscow in June 1876, he had to combine this work with the mundane routine of university teaching and writing his dissertation. It is notable that after La Sophia Solov’ev dropped his attempts to employ theosophical schemas in his attempt to moralize socialism, but he did not give up on the project itself. He would continue to work on it in his dissertation and journalistic writings. We now turn to Solov’ev back in Moscow and these works.

529 Respectively in PSS, vol. 2, 8-73, 74-151, 152-160.

168 CHAPTER 4 THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR AND THE MOSCOW SLAVIC BENEVOLENT COMMITTEES: STATEHOOD, SOCIETY, AND RELIGION—JUNE 1876-FEBRUARY 1877

When Solov’ev returned to Moscow in June 1876, he was confronted by what might have been a paradoxical mixture of the mundane and the exceptional. After conducting research abroad for a year and a half, Solov’ev had obligations to fulfill as he embarked on an academic career. These formal obligations included completing his dissertation and publishing reviews as well as preparing and giving lectures on philosophy at Moscow University.530 As a member of one of Russia’s premiere post-secondary education institutions, Solov’ev also had informal obligations. Imperial Moscow University occupied a central place in Moscow’s socially and, to some extent, politically engaged salon life. As such, Solov’ev found himself at the center of influential discussions of the exceptional social and political transformations Russia had experienced under the reign of Alexander II. Indeed, these events overtook Solov’ev’s attention.

Above all, Solov’ev continued his association with members of the Slavic Benevolent

Committee that he had begun in London with O.A. Novikova and in Cairo with R.A. Fadeev. In

Moscow in the late-1870s, Solov’ev conversed with I.S. Aksakov, D.Iu. Samarin, General M.G.

Cherniaev, the sons of A.S. Khomiakov, and O.A. Novikova (when she was in town) at a salon hosted by A.I. Koshelev. Solov’ev’s colleague Maksim Kovalevskii remembered Koshelev’s salon as the only social institution where attendees held “conversations about politics,” including agrarian reforms and Russian interests in the Balkans.531 Near the end of his life, Solov’ev remembered this era with embarrassment. Using Anna Fedorovna Aksakova’s condemnation of

530 For Solov’ev’s reviews at this time, see PSS, vol. 1, 211-224. 531 M.M. Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’: vospominaniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 206, 224-225, quotation 224.

169 N.Ia. Danilevskii’s Rossia i Evropa (1871), Solov’ev ridiculed, with more than a tinge of

Orientalism, what he regarded with hindsight as Russia’s culturally untenable imperial mission:

You think that education [obrazovanie] stops being education because you call it ‘playing at being European’ [evropenichan’em]! As if any other culture [obrazovannost’], any other scholarship [nauka] even exists besides the European type! If you have your own [type] that isn’t European, show me at once. But if your distinct Russian culture consists only in abusing Europe, then I’ll tell you that this is only swindling and a crime against the fatherland. When you tell Russians ‘Don’t play at being Europeans, be only Russians,’ this really means ‘reject education, remain in your self-satisfied ignorance, i.e. under the pretense of distinctness, imitate the Chinese!’ No, you tell me, please: why is imitating Germans and Englishman bad, but imitating Chinese good?’”532

Solov’ev described his younger self as “partly a victim of what [Anna Fedorovna] called in anger

‘swindling’ and what in reality was a sincere enthusiasm of minds yielding to the elemental- spontaneous force of national [natsional’noe] pride and self-conceit.”533 This apparently neat description of the past actually raises some complicated questions about Solov’ev’s intellectual development. What did Solov’ev mean by this “swindling” self-conceit regarding Russian culture, and how did his youthful seduction by this particular tendency shape his continuing attempt to reconcile his ideal of Russia’s moral calling in domestic and foreign policy? Above all, what did his interest in theism have to do with education, scholarship, culture, and the

Russian imperial dignity and calling?

At the beginning of Alexander II’s reign, politically and socially engaged Russians had perceived a complex of domestic and foreign questions as opportunities for reform, yet by the end of the 1870s they seemed to be insoluble. Although a frightening but marginal terrorist movement has sometimes been seen, especially by orthodox Soviet and liberal western

532 V.S. Solov’ev, “Iz vospominaniia: Aksakovy,” in E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1911), 486. 533 Ibid. In 1885, Solov’ev publicly addressed Danilevskii’s criticism of his work on the Church in “Otvet N.Ia. Danilevskomu,” in S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Saint Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo ‘Prosveshchenie,’ 1911), 193-202.

170 historians, as the source of social and government malaise in the 1870s, contemporaries saw deep and apparently intractable social cleavages as evidence of the government’s and even the autocrat’s weakness.534

Leading Soviet and non-Soviet scholars have described the late 1870s as, respectively, a

“crisis of autocracy” or a “crisis of political values” that had dogged Alexander II’s reign since his ascension in the wake of defeat in the Crimean War in 1856.535 These scholars have understandably focused on domestic reforms as almost the sole concern of government and various orders of society. Both took their cue from a liberal narrative of the “tsar liberator” that gained prominence late in Alexander II’s reign. This narrative took shape in response to what gentry in liberal professions regarded as counter-reforms; it highlighted Alexander II’s famous address to the Moscow nobility on 30 March 1856 that “the existing order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to be abolished by itself from below.”536

Soviet historians followed a narrative of social revolution first articulated by Lenin and codified by Stalin. This narrative presented the events of October 1917 as a social revolution of liberation that had been prepared, paradoxically, by a combination of unconscious social protests

534 On Katkov’s construction of a terrorist and revolutionary myth in this period (which she suggests was a variation on the Polish theme from 1863), see Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 45-50. Compare also V.A. Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog samoderzhaviia v period krizisa ‘verkhov’ na rubezhe 70—80-kh godov XIX v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski 91 (1973): 217-266 and Andreas Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation: Mikhail Katkov and the ‘Invention’ of National Politics,” Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 4 (2003): 659-681. 535 For the “crisis of political values,” see Francis William Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 46-82, quotation 47. For the “crisis of autocracy, see P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870—1880-kh godov (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1964). 536 Cited in K.K. Arsen’ev, “Imperator Aleksandr II,” in A.K. Dzhivel’egov et al., eds., Velikaia reformy: russkoe obshchestvo i krest’ianskii vopros v proshlom i nastoiashchem, vol. 5 (Mosow: Izd. T-va I.D. Sytina, 1911), 8. For a slightly different rendering of the autocrat’s pronouncement but to the same effect, see G. Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform, 8th ed. (Moscow: Tipo-litografiia T-va I.N. Kushnerev & Co., 1900), 17.

171 guided by prescient members of the revolutionary intelligentsia. In this way, the Soviet regime could appear as the product of both social forces and a proper understanding of historical development institutionalized in the Communist Party. Liberal historians outside the Soviet

Union, by contrast, simply inverted the values of this narrative—the Russian people were tragically condemned to suffer under Soviet absolutism by the events of October 1917.537

Moreover, the sources themselves suggest the overwhelming importance of domestic policy in this period, whether the abolition of serfdom, the legal, educational, or military reforms, or the fundamental problem of authority in the countryside embodied in the zemstvo reform. Both government officials and the more articulate members of educated society were overwhelmingly concerned with these issues.538

Whether discussions of these problems can be called a “crisis” of autocracy or political faith, a very public discussion of the meaning of autocratic authority and the realm’s various estates’ relationship to that authority motivated much of the discourse of the period.539 As the

“Special Conference” (Osoboe soveshchanie) (convened on the same day as Vera Zasulich’s acquittal on 31 March 1878) reported to the Emperor, “the example of Zasulich’s acquittal is not

537 Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 538 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia; Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia; Terrence Emmons, Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and L.G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavnie i otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 1856-1861 (Moscow: Izd-vo Moscovskogo Universiteta, 1984). On government reactions, see B.A. Anan’ich et al., Vlast’ i reformy: ot samoderzhavniia k sovetskoi rossii (Saint Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1996). For this crisis among socialist and liberal youth, see Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1-34. On the issue of “united government” at this time, see V.G. Chernukha, Krestianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60-70 gg. XIX v) (Leningrad: “Nauka” Leningradskoe Otd- nie, 1972). 539 Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (New York: Cambridge University Press and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1995).

172 the only, exclusive [example of public discontent with the existing government], but constitutes, in many ways, an expression of the insufficient understanding by the jury of their appointment as judges and of the low development of the understanding of statehood

(gosudarstvennost’) in the mass of the people.”540 Given the government’s unwillingness to put constitutional limits on autocratic authority, its reliance on tried-and-true police measures, as well as official and aristocratic conservative and liberal arguments for a role within an autocratic system, there was an identity crisis of autocratic authority rather than a thoroughgoing criticism of the system of autocratic government.541

Although the majority of government and public opinion was focused on the problems of domestic reforms, international relations constituted another arena in which members of the

Russian public connected the fortunes of the empire to the principle of autocracy as a legitimate form of political authority. While Alexander II’s famous address to the Moscow nobility on 30

March 1856 highlighted the centrality of domestic transformations, Prince A.M. Gorchakov’s famous quip about the unfavorable articles of the Treaty of Paris (18/30 March 1856), which forced Russia to submit to limits on its imperial authority similar to those imposed on the

Ottoman Empire, illustrate the importance of foreign policy: “Russia is not sulking. She is gathering her strength.”542 The Treaty of Paris had similar effects on the domestic policies of the

540 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 61. See also Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog samoderzhaviia,” 256. For an overview of this concept in Imperial Russia, see David McDonald, “Domestic Conjunctures, the Russian State, and the World Outside, 1700-2006,” in Robert Legvold, ed., Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 145-204. 541 On official conservatism and official liberalism, see P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (politicheskaia reaktsiia 80-kh—nachala 90-kh godov) (Moscow: Izd-vo “Mysl’,” 1970), 217-233; V.G. Chernukha, Krestianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60-70 gg. XIX v) (Leningrad: “Nauka” Leningradskoe Otd-nie, 1972). On “aristocratic” conservatism, see I.A. Khristoforov, “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia velikim reformam: konets 1850—seredina 18700kh gg. (Moscow: Russkoe Slovo, 2002). 542 For the Treaty of Paris, see Sbornik dogovorv Rossii s drugimi gosudarstvami, 1856-1917 (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo polit. Literatury, 1952), 23-34. For Gorchakov’s quip, see A.M. Gorchakov, Sbornik izdannyi v pamiat’

173 Ottoman and Austrian Empires.543 As some scholars have argued, Alexander II’s domestic policy cannot be understood outside of its connection with the empire’s foreign policy ambitions, namely the recovery of Russia’s imperial dignity in Southern Russia and Southeastern Europe.544

Thus, whether through its fortunes in foreign or domestic policy, Alexander II’s reign threatened “the monarchical principle” by submitting its efficacy to public scrutiny, however circumscribed by formal and informal limits. These issues would be conceptually linked in the discourse of official conservatism until the eve of World War I.545 By the end of the 1870s, the necessity and effectiveness of the vast domestic reforms undertaken at the beginning of

Alexander II’s reign had to be justified by demonstrating the dignity and effectiveness of Russian arms and diplomacy in the international arena. In the 1870s, the dignity of the empire and the

dvadtsatipiatiletiia upravleniia Ministerstvom Inostrannykh Del gosudarstvennogo kantselera A.M. Gorchakova, 1856-1881 (Petersburg, 1881), 2-6. Vladimir Putin recently appropriated Gorchakov’s phrase for his presidential campaign in V.V. Putin, “Rossiia sosredotachivaetsia—vyvzovy, na kotorye my dolzhny otvetit’” Izvestiia (16 January 2012). 543 On the Ottoman Empire, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: the Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 55-171, esp. 105-141; Roderic H. Davidson, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 52-80; Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 73-78, 311-314, 317-320; and L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: New York University Press, 2000 [1958]), 381-392. For the Austrian Empire, see Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 265-278, 326-342, 344-365. 544 Alfred J. Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy: The Letters of Alexander II to Prince A.I. Bariatinskii, 1857-1864 (Paris-The Hague: Mouton, 1966); Alfred J. Rieber, “Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 315-359; Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914, Bruce Little, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987 [1977]), 17-31; David McDonald, “Domestic Conjunctures, the Russian State, and the World Outside, 1700-2006,” in Robert Legvold, ed., Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 145-204; and Dominic Lieven, “Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 2 (1999): 163-200. 545 For the fate of the “principle of autocracy” in conservative thought in Nicholas’ II’s reign, see David M. McDonald, “The Durnovo Memorandum in Context: Official Conservatism and the Crisis of Autocracy,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 4 (1996): 481-502.

174 dignity of the autocrat and the principle of autocracy were conceptually linked primarily through the prism of Russian affairs in Bulgaria.546

The cultured classes of Solov’ev’s Moscow in the 1870s could hardly keep from talking about domestic reforms and Russia’s position in the Balkans. It was this environment and the questions animating its discussions that shaped Solov’ev’s intellectual activity in 1876. From this period onward, Solov’ev attempted to synthesize his moral vision of the Russian empire in both domestic and foreign realms. One of his first public forays into the philosophical and moral implications of Russian foreign policy was Three Forces (Tri sily), which he originally read to a meeting of the Society of the Lovers of Russian Philology on 5 December 1876 and later published in M.N. Katkov’s Pravoslavnoe obozrenie in 1877. Solov’ev also offered the article for sale as a brochure to raise money for the Slavic Benevolent Committees.547 On the domestic front, Solov’ev promoted an historical vision of the Russian state as a force for moral improvement within the domestic realm, a case he developed through a series of articles on the moral improvements brought about by Peter I’s reforms in the eighteenth century.548

Additionally, Solov’ev advanced his academic career by developing his philosophical ideas in a draft of his dissertation entitled Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia and publishing reviews.

At this stage in his intellectual development, Solov’ev began to attempt to define the relationship between foreign policy, domestic policy, and theistic philosophy. The problems that this solution was meant to answer emerged in Moscow’s intellectual culture in the 1870s whose

546 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 46; Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog samoderzhaviia,” 256-259; and Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 70-85. 547 See PSS, vol. 1, 199-208, 359-362. 548 V.S. Solov’ev, “Religiozno-nravstvennoe sostoianie russkago obshchestva pred reformoi Petra Velikago,” Strannik god 18 (1877): 222-232, 216-227, 369-385.

175 institutions were Imperial Moscow University, Koshelev’s salon, and the Moscow

Benevolent Committee.

In this context, theism shaped Solov’ev’s answers to problems of foreign and domestic statehood, empire, and national identity, though his attempt to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent, which characterized nearly all post-Kantian thought in Germany and Russia, led him briefly to rely on theosophical language and images.549 Between 1876 and 1878 (La Sophia,

Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia, and Chteniia o bogochelovhechestve), Solov’ev’s philosophical thought was characterized by the highly schematic spiritual tableau of forces that he saw as uniting and governing history. This feature of Solov’ev’s work should not obscure the fact that the problematic through which Solov’ev framed his philosophical work—the relationship between the transcendent world of absolute value and the immanent world of change and imperfection—was provided by theism. Characteristically for this young, ambitious, and self-confident Russian intelligent who had not been forced to justify his ideas publicly or in an academic setting, a very young Solov’ev offered what appeared to be a quick and easy philosophical solution to the political and social problems that had engulfed Russian society during the whole of Alexander II’s reign. As Solov’ev submitted his views to the theater of public criticism from1878 onward, he relied less and less on theosophical and hermetic language and imagery. In 1876, however, it offered him resources for interpreting evolutionary social theories in a purposive and morally uplifting way.

MOSCOW BENEVOLENT COMMITTEE: EMPIRE, WAR, AND SOCIETY

549 On Germany, see John Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Warren Breckman, The Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the way Russians appropriated these issues, see Patrick Lally Micheslon, “Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830- 1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 239-267.

176

Solov’ev continued to develop the ethical critique of evolutionary social theories that, as we have seen in previous chapters, he had first become interested in as a gymnasium student and developed in Krizis zapadnoi filosofii (1874) and La Sophia (1875-1876). Although Solov’ev’s private correspondence shows that he was keenly interested in foreign affairs throughout the early 1870s, he did not begin to address this issue publicly until very late in 1876. In the heady intellectual culture of Moscow during the late-1870s—supported by the social institutions of

Imperial Moscow University, the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee, and Ivan Koshelev’s weekly salon—Solov’ev began to extend this critique further to the more concrete, in

Solov’evian terms, problems of foreign and domestic policy. He pursued these interests separately in a public speech on the role of religion in world history and a series of articles justifying Peter I’s reforms for improving the morals of Russian society.

In early 1877, Solov’ev published his first effort to bring these parallel tracks together in a draft of his dissertation, Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia [FNTsZ] (1877). Early in that work, Solov’ev identified three ideal forms of society that reflected a predetermined and harmonious order: “economic society,” whose task was “the organization of labor;” “political society, or the state (politeia, res publica),” whose task was “the organization of laborers;” and

“international relations,” whose task was “defining the relations between various states.”550 Why did Solov’ev link foreign policy to social organization, and what role did philosophy play in defining their relationship? More importantly, how did the widespread contestation over the nature of statehood in the 1870s and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) shape Solov’ev’s

550 Solov’ev, “Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia,” in Nosov, ed., PSS, vol. 2, 190-191.

177 answer to the ethical problem in evolutionary social theory that he had been pursuing since reading Mikhailovskii’s reviews of Spencer and Darwin as a gymnasium student in 1869?

The most historiographically unfamiliar characteristic of what Solov’ev wrote is its this- worldly dimension. As we have seen, scholars have emphasized the mystical dimension of

Solov’ev’s thought to the exclusion of his other interests. With respect to this period, they have done so by focusing on the mystical atmosphere cultivated by S.A. Tol’staia, K.A. Tol’stoi, S.A.

Khitrovo, and kn. D.N. Tsertelev.

This narrative relies solely on Solov’ev’s private correspondence and reminiscences.551

While Solov’ev’s interest in mysticism and thinkers about mysticism were real and important, it by no means exhausts the whole story of Solov’ev’s intellectual development. As Kovalevskii and Solov’ev himself suggest, the social institutions of Pan-Slavism played an equally important part of Solov’ev’s social, intellectual, and public life.

With some reason, Pan-Slavism has fared badly from historians and commentators on

Russian foreign policy. At the level of ideology, scholars have generally treated Pan-Slavism as a perversion of what they regarded as the romantic, religious, or quietistic nationalism of I.V.

Kireevskii, A.S. Khomiakov, or even Iu.F. Samarin into an aggressive, expansionist, and violently hegemonic nationalism that reached its tragic culmination in Stalin’s allegedly nation- breaking ethnic policies.552 Interestingly, some contemporary testimony complicates this story—

Germany’s Ambassador in Saint Petersburg regarded Samarin along with N.A. Miliutin and

551 S.M. Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve v ego molodye gody: materially k biografii, kn. 3, vyp. 2, edited by A.A. Nosov (Moscow: “Kniga,” 1990), 5-30, 133-180. 552 Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953), 146- 179, 251; Stephen Lukashevich, Ivan Aksakov, 1823-1886: A Study in Russian Thought and Politics, vol. 57 in Harvard Historical Monographs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); A.A. Kornilov, “Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov (1823-1886),” in D.N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v., vol. 5 (Moscow: Izd. T-va “Mir,” 1911); and Michael B. Petrovich, The Emergence of Panslavism, 1856-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).

178 Prince V.A. Cherkasskii as “revolutionary Slavophiles.”553 The story of the perversion of

Slavophilism focuses entirely on the journalism of prominent publishers and journalists like

Cherniaev, Aksakov, and especially Katkov but does not show if or how either government or society received and appropriated their work. At the social and political level, scholars following widespread rumors from the 1870s that Pan-Slav journalists, especially Katkov, had hijacked the

Russian government’s foreign policy, treat Pan-Slavism as evidence of an emergent social movement or a sign of the pathologically dysfunctional or duplicitous nature of Russian government and statesmen.554 Apparently at the suggestion of N.K. Giers, the same German ambassador grouped Pobedonostsev, Aksakov, and Katkov together as “the council of Moscow politicians” as if the conservative journalists were colluding with Pobedonostsev to set government policy.555

More recently, scholars have identified two issues motivating members of these groups that dovetail with the profound social and political malaise that had engulfed Russian public life at the end of the 1870s: the role of nationalism as a basis for autocratic authority and the

“Aristocratic party’s” arguments for the preeminence of the gentry as the executor of a revived autocratic authority.556 R.A. Fadeev and I.S. Aksakov were allied to this “Aristocratic party” and shared many social views with A.A. Polovtsov, another prominent figure in this party. A diary

553 General von Schweinitz, Denkwürdigkeiten des Botschafters General v. Schweinitz, vol. 2 (Berlin: Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, 1927), 153. 554 S.A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety v Rossii v 1858—1876-kh godakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960), 260-342; Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog Samoderzhaviia;” 555 Schweinitz, Denkwürdigkeiten, vol. 2, 163. 556 Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation;” I.A. Khristoforov, “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia velikim reformam: konets 1850—seredina 1870-kh gg. (Moscow: Russkoe Slovo, 2002; Daniel Field, Review of “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia velikim reformam, by I.A. Khristoforov, Kritika 6, no. 2 (2005): 409-416; Willard Sunderland, “The Caucasian Tangle,” Kritika 7, no. 1 (2006): 111-122. See also B.V. Anan’ich and R.Sh. Ganelin, “R.A. Fadeev, S.Iu. Vitte i ideologicheskie iskaniia ‘okhranitelei’ v 1881-1883,” in Issledovaniia po sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii Rossii: sbornik statei pamiati Borisa Aleksandrovicha Romanova (Leningrad: Izd-vo “Nauka” Lenin. Otdelenie, 1971), 299-326.

179 entry of Polovtsov’s from the late 1870s eloquently illustrates this party’s vision of the social problems Russia faced. Against what he regarded as Alexander II’s mistreatment of the gentry,

Polovtsov articulated a vision of autocracy limited by informal agreement between gentry and sovereign to the exclusion of other estates:

And from exactly what kind of tyrants had he [Alexander II] freed the Russian people [narod]. At the time of the liberation, the whole government [pravitel’stvo] consisted of those who set about taking them [the peasants] off the landowners’s hands for a quarter of their worth [za ¼% vzialos’ sobirat’ ikh pomeshchiku]. The very liberation itself followed almost entirely from the labors of the same gentry which had until now been dragged through the mud.557

In 1878, Polovtsov drew a more detailed picture of Russian social problems from the point of view of gentry conservatives:

There are no leading forces in Petersburg, and in the government itself there are no fixed principles and views. The reforms of the present reign were provoked by subjection to a certain public opinion, each of which [reform] was the fruit of the personal [lichnogo] labor of various people who were not connected to each other by anything but accident. The liberal reforms pushed the landed gentry, who had hitherto formed the skeleton of the Russian body, from the political theater of action. Depriving the gentry of significance—which, for all its shortcomings, constituted the cultured [obrazovannyi] and landed class—changed nothing; the commune, the local tavern, communal liability, and the volost’ administration handed the population over into the hands of a crude, ignorant, and mercenary mass. Full civil legal equality doubtlessly belongs to [the mass], but political authority for the successful execution of affairs [dlia uspeshnogo khoda del] must be given to the best people of the country, and not the mob [cherni]. Any government holds preeminence before all other groups of the population, and one of these groups serves it as a pillar. At one time it was the feudal gentry, then the courtly gentry; at one time it was the army, at another it was the clergy; for Louis Philippe it was the bourgeoisie, and for Napoleon suffrage universel. We now have no such pillar in Russia; functionaries are meek and often unscrupulous executors of our decrees—these are our favorite, but no one has ever supported them of late; this mode of activity has intensified more and more and become more dangerous, even in the highest spheres of officialdom

557 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], fond 583 (A.A. Polovtsov), opis’ 1, edinitsa khraneniia 14, str. 19-20. Entry dated Sunday, 15 April 1879. For more, see I.A. Khristoforov, “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia velikim reformam: konets 1850—seredina 18700kh gg. (Moscow: Russkoe Slovo, 2002). P.A. Zaionchkovskii omitted passages from Polovtsov’s diary that dated before 1881 based on Polovtsov’s alleged political immaturity in his “A. A. Polovtsov (biograficheskii ocherk),” in idem., red., Dnevnik gosudarstvennogo sekretaria A. A. Polovtsova, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izd-vo “Nauka,” 1966), 14-18.

180 for any kind of person who is energetic or even just out of the ordinary [voobshche vykhodiashchaia iz riadu lichnost’].558

Polovtsov’s disgust with what he regarded as Alexander II’s mistreatment of the gentry led him to idealize Nicholas I’s reign for the regularity of its government based on a gentleman’s agreement between Counts Orlov, Kiselev, and Nessel’rode who “communicated with each other on everything touching the course of government business and tried, insofar as possible, to carry our business in a single direction. Today, each of the ministers thinks only of the preservation of the interests of his position.”559

Solov’ev’s public career in the late 1870s and into the 1880s was profoundly shaped by the discussions of nationalism, the status and welfare of the social estates [sosloviia], and autocratic authority. Although there are no extant sources documenting Solov’ev’s participation in Koshelev’s salon or the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee, correspondence and archival documents permit something of a sketch of Solov’ev’s role in these social institutions.

According to Koshelev’s correspondence with Aksakov, for example, the three of them conducted an extended and intense discussion about the nature of political authority and culture in public and in private. As Kovalevskii testified, Koshelev may have been the only figure in

Moscow who could have accommodated such opposed and large personalities, for because of his own “liberal tendency,” he treated all guests with “tolerance in the highest degree.”560 Contrary to scholarly consensus, Koshelev may have been the only Russian to support liberalism proudly since Kavelin and Chicherin supported liberalism in their anonymous article published abroad in

558 GARF, f. 583, o. 1, ed. Khr. 12, str. 24-28 (dated 3 June 1878). 559 Ibid., 28-29. On the issue of “united government” at this time, see V.G. Chernukha, Krestianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60-70 gg. XIX v) (Leningrad: “Nauka” Leningradskoe Otd-nie, 1972), 136-198. 560 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 225.

181 Herzen’s Voices from Russia in 1856.561 From the perspective of the 1880s, and rather surprisingly, Koshelev claimed “neither Khomiakov, nor Kireevskii, nor your brother [Konstatin

Sergeevich Aksakov] ever railed at liberalism. There wasn’t a single word in this sense in

Russkaia Beseda. We campaigned against westernism back then; now, there’s nothing left of it.

Who now isn’t for nationality [narodnost’] in scholarship? Who now isn’t for the study of our national beliefs, concepts, and traditions?” In the same letter from 1881, Koshelev went on to make claims that Solov’ev had already uttered in his Lectures on Godmanhood in 1878:

I read your brother’s memorandum, which he had given to the sovereign, with great pleasure. I’m in disagreement on many things with him, that is, with your brother (I don’t regard Russians or Slavs as unpolitical people, I don’t acknowledge the opposition between the land [zemlia] and the state [gosudarstvo], etc.); but I read this memorandum with sympathy because it was nourished by love for people and written without any irritation. In my opinion, we now need to change the way we act [sposob deistvii]. We need not to disconnect people, not to quarrel with people who have different opinions [raznomysliashchie], but to try to clarify opinions and convince people amicably. We now have an inclination for religiosity and uniqueness [samobytnost’]; we need to take advantage of this and not intimidate [them], not drive them from ourselves.562

After reading the fifty-sixth issue of Aksakov’s Rus’ later that year, Koshelev immediately had to express his “complete sympathy with your and Solov’ev’s articles.”563 As this testimony demonstrates, the political discussions among these public intellectuals revolved around state power, society, national identity, religion, and manners.

Because of the nature of the sources available for reconstructing the texture of the intellectual atmosphere in Solov’ev’s Moscow in the late 1870s and early 1880s, nothing

561 See Koshelev’s correspondence with Aksakov in Istoricheskii sbornik o minuvshchem (Saint Petersburg, 1909), 407-411. For the general antipathy toward the label liberal, see Charles E. Timberlake, “Introduction: The Concept of Liberalism in Russia,” in idem., ed., Essays on Russian Liberalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 3-8; Daniel Field, “Kavelin and Russian Liberalism,” Slavic Review 32, no. 1 (1973): 59-61. 562 Letter from I.A. Koshelev to I.S. Aksakov dated 23 August 1881 in Istoricheskii sbornik o minuvshchem, 410. I was unaware that these letters were available in a published format until February 2012. The originals are held at Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva [RGALI], fond 10, opis’ 1, ed. Khr. 182. 563 Letter from Koshelev to Aksakov dated 8 December 1881 in ibid., 411.

182 definitive can be said. Nevertheless, some published and archival sources dating from the

1870s and now located in far-flung places allow for some tentative conclusions. In very general terms, Koshelev’s salon and the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee were animated by the crisis of statehood as reflected in the fragmentation of the estate order and the fate of Russia’s interests in the Balkans.564 One focus for the discussion of these issues was offered by the works of Iu.F. Samarin, whom Solov’ev referred to as “uncle Iusha” in his memoir about the

Aksakovs.565 As Kovalevskii recalled, Samarin’s son, Dmitrii, frequented Koshelev’s salon.

And in 1877, Dmitrii began to publish his father’s works, the first five volumes of which concerned the Polish question, the peasant question, and the Orthodox Church.566 If S.Iu.

Witte’s archive are a reliable indication, participants debated the merits of a version of radical conservatism articulated by R.A. Fadeev in Chem nam byt’ (1874) and Iurii Samarin’s more traditional conservatism.567

Additionally, articles published in Rus’ from the early 1880s show that Solov’ev was profoundly engaged in the relationship between the state’s political authority and the official

Orthodox Church’s “spiritual” authority over the Russian nation [narod]. He addressed these issues in terms posed by K.S. Aksakov’s famous 1855 memorandum on the domestic situation in

564 On the discussion of international affairs in public and private throughout the second half of the 1870s, see S.A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety v Rossii v 1858—1876 godakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960), 269-351. 565 Solov’ev, “Aksakovy,” 482. 566 Iu.F. Samarin, Sochineniia, vols. 1-5, D.Iu. Samarin, ed. (Moscow: Izd. D. Samarina, 1877-1880). The best work on Samarin is still Baron B.E. Nol’de, Samarin i ego vremia (Paris: Société Anonyme Imprimerie de Navarre, 1926). See also Edward C. Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964). 567 Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University [BAR], Witte Papers, Box 1 contains a letter from I.S. Aksakov to Witte dated 18 September 1884 in which Aksakov expresses in surprisingly frank terms his class prejudices and his lack of confidence in Russian universities and standardized education in general. The box also contains a copy of a long letter by Iurii Samarin to R.A. Fadeev dated 14/26 September 1875 concerning Fadeev’s Chem nam byt’.

183 pre-Reform Russian.568 It is no accident, then, that the articles to which Koshelev referred were Solov’ev’s “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii” and I.S. Aksakov’s “Ob otnoshenii sovremennogo progressa k khristianstvu (po povodu stat’i V.S. Solov’eva ‘O dukhovnoi vlasti v

Rossii’”).569 These articles appeared in the December issues of Aksakov’s Rus’, but Solov’ev began composing a rough draft of his article in May 1881, which he entitled “Kogda byl ostavlen russkii put’ i kak na nego vernut’sia (po povodu zametki o vnutrennem sostoianii Rossii, K.S.

Aksakov).”570 According to an outline-cum-table of contents written at the end of the first draft, this document was to be an introduction to a longer work concluding with a chapter bearing the title of Solov’ev’s article “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii.”571

Although Konstantin Aksakov’s 1855 memorandum presented an historical and moral argument for the limitation of state authority in very specific realms of social life that ought, on

Aksakov’s view, to be administered by the gentry, Solov’ev drew different conclusions from the moral angle of the argument. In the first lines of the memorandum, Aksakov made his infamous claim that “the Russian people is a non-state people who do not seek participation in government, who do not hope for the conditions to limit the government’s authority [vlast’], who, in a word, do not have in themselves any political element, [and who] consequently do not

568 K.S. Aksakov, “Zapiska K. S. Aksakova ‘O vnutrennem sostoianii Rossii,’ predstavlennaia Gosudariu Imperatoru Aleksandru II v 1855 g,” in N. L. Brodksii, sost., Rannie slavianofily. A. S. Khomiakov, I. V. Kireevksii, K. S. i I. S. Aksakovy (Moscow: Tipografiia T-va I. D. Sytina, 1910), 69-96. 569 V.S. Solov’ev, “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii,” in S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’skoe Tovarishchestvo ‘Prosveshcheniia,” 1911), 227-242 and I.S. Aksakov, “Ob otnoshenii sovremennogo progressa k khristianstvu (po povodu stat’i V.S. Solov’eva ‘O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii’”),” in Polnoe sobranie sochineniia, vol. 4 (Moscow: Tipografiia M.G. Vol’chaninova (byv. M.N. Lavrova 1886), 189-199. 570 RGALI, f. 446, o. 1, ed. khr. 21, ll. 1-11 (second draft), 11-27 (first draft). This file contains two drafts of this essay, the second of which is dated 28 May 1881 at Krasnyi Rog, the estate of S.A. Tolstaia, and seems to have been hastily written: most words are abbreviated and the manuscript bears Solov’ev’s own editorial marks. 571 Ibid., ll. 25ob.-26.

184 contain in themselves even the seeds of revolution or a constitutional order.”572 To make this claim, Aksakov drew a strict distinction between affairs of state and the affairs of society.

Aksakov used the strong claim that the Russian people were apolitical in order to show that there was a space in the social order in which the state did not need to interfere. This language foreshadowed what Kliuchevskii would later call an “unstated limit to authority”

[neglasnoe ogranichenie vlasti] in the context of the Time of Troubles—a period that he claimed

“constituted the profound basis of the contemporary cast of our life.”573 In a similar manner,

Aksakov developed an argument to the same purpose—the limitation of the autocrat’s authority without explicitly saying so. For Aksakov, the Russian people’s abjuration of political authority involved the recognition of a sphere for the free activity of society, by which Aksakov meant the gentry. Aksakov argued for a special sort of social contract—itself a strange limitation on autocratic authority, at least in theory—in which social and cultural spheres ought not to experience the interference of state authority. Solov’ev began his draft with Aksakov’s lines:

Not seeking political freedom, [the Russian people] seeks moral freedom, the freedom of the spirit, social freedom—the people’s life within itself [narodnoi zhizni vnitri sebia]. Thus, the Russian people, after having separated the state element from itself, after having granted full state authority to the government, grants itself life, moral-social freedom, the highest goal of which is Christian society.574

Though it may have gone without saying in Solov’ev’s milieu, Konstantin Aksakov had a very limited notion of the role of Russian government. Arguing that from the most ancient times, Russia had been divided into “affairs of the sovereign and affairs of the land” [gosudarevo

572 K.S. Aksakov, “O vnutrennem sostoianii Rossii,” 69. 573 V.O. Kliuchevskii, “Kurs russkoi istorii,” in V.L. Ianin, ed., Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: “Mysl’,” 1988), 73, 5 (lectures 44 and 41). Leopold Haimson noted the political dimension in Slavophile historiography in “The Parties and the State: The Evolution of Political Attitudes,” in Cyril E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 114-115. 574 Aksakov, “O vnutrennem sostoianii Rossii,” 69. Solov’ev develops Aksakov’s idea in RGALI, f. 446, o. 1, ed. khr. 21, ll. 3-3ob.

185 i zemskoe delo], the state was limited to “the whole business of state administration, both foreign and domestic, and chiefly military business as the most vivid expression of state power

[sila].”575 Only later did Aksakov radically distinguish between state and society: “the first relationship between a government and a people is the relationship of non-interference.”576 This break was initiated by Peter I who only added to the “foreign majesty” of the realm while “he struck its inner wholeness with corruption [rastlenie]; he introduced into its life the seeds of destruction, of enmity.”577

Although Konstantin Aksakov linked foreign and domestic policy in order to argue for social autonomy without using the language of law or constitution, Solov’ev focused only on the moral aspect. He did so because at this time in his life he was optimistic about the progressive nature of state authority, however violent. As Solov’ev put it:

“The state in the person of Peter,” as the memorandum puts it, “encroached on the people, intruded on its life, its way of being in the world [byt], [the state] violently changed its laws, its customs, its very clothes, [the state] dispatched police to assemblies, [the state] even exiled tailors who made Russian clothes to Siberia.” This is, of course, outrageous, but even more outrageous things were done before Peter.578

Solov’ev expressed support for the state as what scholars tend to call a modernizing force in much starker terms in the first draft of this document. The sentiment was so stark, in fact, that

Solov’ev crossed it out on the first draft: “I propose that the ideal of Russians before Peter is historically wrong [nevernyi]” for “Rus’ was bereft of enlightenment.”579 Although pre-Petrine

Rus’ did have “select people in society who were profoundly imbued” by what Solov’ev

575 Aksakov, “O vnutrennem sostianii Rossii,” 69-70. 576 Ibid., 70. 577 Ibid. 578 RGALI, f. 446, o. 1, ed. khr. 21, ll. 6-6ob. For S.M. Solov’ev’s remarkably ungenerous recollections of the Aksakovs and other Slavophiles, see S.M. Solov’ev, Moi zapiski dlia detei moikh, a esli mozhno, i dlia drugikh (Petrograd: Tip. t-va “Obshchestvennaia Pol’za” i kn-vo “Prometei” N.N. Mikhailova, n.d.), 105-108. 579 Ibid., l. 15ob.

186 variously described as “the moral ideal” of “true Christianity” or of “the true faith of

Christians,” these were a minority. For Solov’ev, these unnamed figures from pre-Petrine Rus’ bore the “banner of Christ,” which consisted of enlightenment, justice, and morality.580

Though the documentary record indicates that Solov’ev developed this image of the

Russian state as a motor for moral development further in the final version of “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii,” he had, in fact, been defending Peter I’s reforms and by implication, given the regnant vision of historical development (zakonomernnost’), Alexander II’s.581 The fundamental assumption of this vision of historical development posited historical actors as executors of a progressive plan of historical development. Hence, Peter I’s reforms were conceptually linked with Alexander II’s.

Indeed, the issue of the role of the state as a civilizing agent in Russia’s past and present motivated the public confrontation between Ivan Aksakov and Vladimir Solov’ev that Koshelev found so important in 1881. Beginning with the an official appeal from the Holy Synod lamenting “Russia’s ruinous moral condition,” Solov’ev developed an argument for Church reform—without privileging the gentry—that would address what he regarded as the spiritual paralysis of the Russian people:

Aside from all the sins and lawlessness in separate individuals and estates, the Russian people, in aggregate, is spiritually paralyzed; its moral unity has been broken, no longer clear are the activities of a single spiritual principle that would, like the soul in the body, internally direct [upravlialo] its whole life.582

580 Ibid. 581 On the importance of the concept of zakonomernnost’ on Imperial Russian social and political thought, see Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 3-25; N.L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istorigrafiia (Moscow: OGIZ Gospolitizdat, 1941), 3; and David MacLaren McDonald, “Introduction,” in Leopold H. Haimson, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905-1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xi-x. 582 Solov’ev, “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii,” 227.

187 The primary issue concerned the relationship between Old Believers and ordinary, non- heretical Orthodox subjects. The issue of the Old Believers had become politicized in the course of the discussions of the “Special Conference” [osoboe soveshchanie] convened in 1878 to consider the consequences of the Vera Zasulich affair when they had been identified as a social pillar of conservative support for the government.583 Criticizing what he regarded as policies sowing social discord, Solov’ev criticized the government for not using “spiritual authority” to peaceably arbitrate social discord, an argument that seems woefully disconnected from the social transformations that threatened the principle of autocracy:

If the civil government really acknowledges the supreme authority of the Christian principle, then it inevitably wishes to be directed by it in its activity and, thus, stand in internal, moral dependence on the Church, insofar as it embodies this Christian principle. And if such a government does not intend to support religious unity and Church authority by violence, then it does so not out of indifference to faith and the Church, but, on the contrary, from faith in the Christian and Church principle of grace and love, which do not demand or allow violence. The true relationship between the Church and the state, without doubt, is mutual freedom—not the negative freedom of indifference but the positive freedom of consensual cooperation [soglasnoe vzaimodeistvie] in the construction of one common goal—the establishment [ustroenie] of true sociability on earth.584

Lest Solov’ev seem a strict egalitarian, he argued that cooperation in government should not come from all members of society. Only “the best people of educated society” who—after the proper reforms of the Church had introduced “a new, enlightened form of Christianity”—could cooperate with the government in its reform programs.585 Solov’ev assumed that autocracy did not work properly so long as society, imbued with a liberal version of Orthodox Christian values, did not set a moral example for the autocratic state to follow. And enlightenment for Solov’ev meant a critical appropriation of what he regarded as western civilization.

583 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 102-103, 106. 584 Solov’ev, “O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii,” 240-241. Emphases in the original. 585 Ibid., 242.

188 For I.S. Aksakov, however, enlightenment from Europe was destructive and any state institutions, as heirs of the system established by Peter I, were therefore destructive of an allegedly harmonious order throughout the realm. Only a state that supported allegedly ancient gentry privileges in a new social order was justified, irrespective of any moral principles,

Christian or otherwise. Proceeding from a Holy Synod report that he took as his point of departure to criticize the institutional Church, Aksakov defended gentry socio-political prerogatives against what he regarded as westernizing state policies (and their supporters in society) by arguing that the official Orthodox Church had lost its moral authority among the

Russian people not because it had not assimilated enough of the progressive civilization of western Europe, but because it had not maintained its independence from the state.586 Any attempts to introduce liberal religious or religious socialist principles into the Church, therefore, were wrong-headed for they only increased problems in the Church because of their similarity to state policies. As Aksakov put it:

Doubtlessly, and not without goodwill, contemporary ‘progress,’ especially as represented by its best zealots, concerns certain sides of the moral doctrine of Christianity, and it even directly profits from them, thoroughly shucking and scraping off any dogma, eliminating them from the internal, divine essence. He raised high the banner of ‘the love of humanity’ and, in so doing, repudiated God. […] The demand to make oneself in the image of God [upodoblenie Bogu] or personal moral perfection lay at the foundation the whole Christian creed and, at the same time, not as the rule of an abstract doctrine, but as the living force of love, itself, of God and one’s neighbor.587

The apparently false Christians, on Aksakov’s reckoning, were socialists like Max Stirner, whom

Katkov had labeled a “nihilist” in the 1860s, and, above all, P.L. Lavrov. It was Lavrov, after

586 For the fortunes of this argument in the early twentieth century, see Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007), 207-336 and M.A. Kolerov, Ne mir, no mech: russkaia religiozno- filosofskaia pechat’ ot ‘Problem idealizma’ do ‘Vekh,’ 1902-1909 (Saint Petersburg: Izd-vo “Aleteiia,” 1996). 587 I.S. Aksakov, “Ob otnoshenii sovremennogo progressa k khristianstvu,” 192.

189 all, who had provided much of the intellectual furniture of the “Going to the People” movement in the 1873 program article to Vpered!. In that program platform, Lavrov had declared there to be only “two universal [obshchechelovecheskie] goals, two struggles in which any thinking human being must participate:” 1) “the struggle of scholarship [nauka] against religion;” and 2) “the struggle of free association against obligatory statehood

[gosudarstvennost’], in short, the struggle for the realization of the most just structure of society.”588

It was this attitude that Aksakov associated with Solov’ev’s call for enlightenment in the official Orthodox Church. According to Aksakov’s slippery-slope argument, such criticism would lead to disastrous moral and, eventually, social consequences:

Rejecting God, man unavoidably ends with the rejection of the free spirit in himself; taking note of ‘the image of God’ in himself, he inescapably strives to make himself in the image of an animal…… All of this is happening before our eyes. On what, he asks, do we have to be convinced of ‘humanity’ or ‘philanthropy’ for this phenomenon and concept of moral order? There is, of course, no foundation for ‘humanity’ on such a basis, and it is reduced to the degree of the accidental, the personal, the natural, almost animal drive (Triebe). It is obvious that it is impossible to fortify [ukrepit’] any social structure, all the more so as the motive of humanity does not exclude the appropriateness of other, just as natural but completely opposed motives (just think of vengeance, lust, passions, etc.): the latter, in a groundless rejection of the morally obligatory law, doubtlessly have the completely logical right to existence.589

To illustrate the disastrous social consequences of religious and moral criticism, Aksakov invoked the stereotypical slogan of the French Revolution in 1789 of “liberty, equality, fraternity” tragically and ironically ending in what he depicted as the savagery, despotism, and

588 [P.L. Lavrov], “Vpered!: Nasha programma,” Vpered!: ne periodicheskoe obozrenie, tom 1 (1873): 3. On the place of Lavrov in one tendencies with the amorphous “Going to the People” movement, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Francis Haskell, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1952]), 454-468, 501-505 and Haimson, The Russian Marxists, 12-13. 589 Aksakov, “Ob otnoshenii sovremennogo progressa k khristianstvu,” 193.

190 slavery of the Terror.590 The consequences for introducing such principles into the organization of the official Orthodox Church, Aksakov argued, would be equally disastrous.591

Such, Aksakov concluded, would be the consequences of the enlightened principles that

Solov’ev thought ought to be introduced into the official Church in order to improve social morality. Aksakov added in what were then harsh terms:

Evil is growing apace, the propagation of unbelief and rejection, under the banner of ‘liberalism’ and ‘progress,’ dissolves the moral foundations of our society. The Russian land [russkaia zemlia] is disgraced by unheard-of crimes, the spirit in it withers [skudeet], it lacks the spirit of life because it lacks the life of the spirit itself… ‘Do not extinguish the spirit,’ shouts another wise, holy word from the depths of the ages.592

The spirit invoked by Aksakov, like the spirit invoked by Solov’ev, were both innovations, but the former was part of new set of radical conservative arguments for the maintenance of gentry privileges, while the latter was intended to promote slow, state-directed social transformation.

The dispute was premised on different views of the proper role of the government in the state and which social groups deserved preeminence in government.

The assassination of Alexander II in May 1881 by members of the “Land and Freedom” terrorist group—Sophia Perovskaia and Andrei Zheliabov—had a profound impact of Solov’ev’s public career. Because of Solov’ev’s misfortunes after his appeal to the new Emperor to commute the regicides’ sentences to life in 1881, he became pessimistic about the progressive potential of Russian government under Alexander III. In the late 1870s, however, he still had a great deal of optimism in the efficacy of the state as a motor for moral development in Russian society and the world. In 1877, Solov’ev developed historical arguments justifying the state’s domestic and foreign polices as progressive and enlightening. The article justifying the state as a

590 Ibid., 194-195. 591 Ibid., 195-199. 592 Ibid., 199.

191 moral delivery mechanism in Russian society is entitled “Religiozno-nravstvennoe sostoianie russkogo obshchestva pred reformoi Petra Velikogo” (1877). The article on foreign policy originated as a public speech in December 1876 and was published by Katkov in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie in 1877 under the title Three Forces.593 Although it is impossible to establish the chronology for the composition of these works, Solov’ev attempted to synthesize them in a draft of his doctoral dissertation, FNTsZ that he eventually abandoned and radically revised as Kritika otvlechennykh nachal (1880-1881). I will treat these articles in turn in order to highlight

Solov’ev’s major concerns in the cultural milieu of Moscow at the end of the 1870s.

Solov’ev’s hitherto unacknowledged article on Peter I’s moral transformation of Russian society shows very clearly that Solov’ev viewed the state as a force for modernization in Russian society, however violent the process may have been. A full appreciation of the texture of

Solov’ev’s arguments in the 1870s would require going back to the debates between K.S.

Aksakov and S.M. Solov’ev in the 1840s and 1850s. In order to focus more clearly on Solov’ev as a human being responding to historically specific problems, however, I will focus only on

Vladimir Solov’ev’s series of articles.

Beginning the article with a rhetorical question, Solov’ev immediately identified the

Russian state under Peter I, and by implication the state under Alexander II, as a motor for moral development in Russian society. Whereas Aksakov and other members of the Slavic Benevolent

Committees and the “Aristocratic Party” saw the state as a threat to their estate’s privileges,

Solov’ev saw it as progressive and beneficial. To illustrate this conviction, Solov’ev examined the transformation of gender relations by comparing pre-Petrine Rus’ gender relations—as

593 For the details of Three Forces, see PSS, vol. 1, 359-362.

192 evidenced in the sixteenth-century economic manual, Domostroi—with gender relations after

Peter I’s reforms.594

From the history of gender in Russia, Solov’ev also drew conclusions about the role of the Russian imperial state in the history of personality. As he asked rhetorically at the beginning of the article, “Was there really, in seventeenth-century Rus’, a consciousness of the dignity of the human personality in general, independent of social and private position, and, in particular, a consciousness of the existence of equal rights [ravnopravnost’] of men and women in the sense of identical human perfections and dignities?” Answering his own rhetorical question, Solov’ev asserted that “there was no such consciousness in the Rus’ of ancient times.”595

Despite the essay’s title, Solov’ev never offered a rigorous comparison of manners and morals in pre- and post-Petrine Russia. Rather, Solov’ev’ treated just those elements of the

Russian past that both K.S. and I.S. Aksakov lifted up as examples for modern Russians to recover and follow. Instead, he offered a list of caricatured representations of pre-Petrine social institutions in order to examine the “constitutive principles of our family, social, and state life,” the foundation of which in pre-Petrine Russia, was “the tutelage of the clan [roditel’skaia opeka] in the sense of the tutelage of the eldest representative of the entire clan [rodstvennoi sem’i] or the whole clan.” To substantiate his claim that pre-Petrine Rus’ was a moral backwater,

Solov’ev wrote that the “tutelage of the clan” was a principle that “excluded any representation of the idea of personality” for, according to Solov’ev, “the jealous idea of the clan, i.e. the idea

594 For a modern English rendition with scholarly apparatus, see Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, trans. and ed., The ‘Domostroi’: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). The standard Russian edition is V.V. Kolesov and V.V. Rozhdestvenskaia, eds., Domostroi (Saint Petersburg: “Nauka,” 1994). On the history of women’s liberation movements in Imperial Russia, see Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 595 Solov’ev, “Religiozno-nravstvennoe sostoianie russkogo obshchestva,” 222.

193 of the complete dependence of the individual [litso] on his clan” overwhelmingly structured all aspects of pre-Petrine Rus’.596 The “tutelage of the clan” underlay terem, marriage, the family life of the clergy, child-rearing [vospitanie], and education [obrazovanie].597 In his view, the overriding concerns of the clan stifled the personality and led to the “coarseness of manners” in pre-Petrine Rus’: drunkenness, lying, and perfidy among all orders of Muscovite society as testified by foreign travelers to Muscovy like Olearius and Herberstein.598

The only source of moral improvement in this society resided in the monasteries “in the south” where the “cast of monastic life” was “given chiefly to communal organization that allowed, at the same time, scope for personal feats of solitary life.” Vladimir Solov’ev followed his father’s scheme of Russian history organized around the interaction between the Northern region of the empire as the bearer of order and the Southern region as the source of individualism and freedom. The “character of the south,” according to Solov’ev, was marked by the mixing of

“community and solitary life.”599 Northern Russia, by contrast, could offer only Iosif

Volokalamskii, whose monastic order stifled the individual, and Nil Sorskii, who preached an isolated, unsociable individualism.600 The implication of Solov’ev’s narrative, which ended here, is that Russia awaited a strong figure of state to adopt foreign learning to improve Russian society. Such a vision of Rus’ was antithetical to Aksakov’s vision.

Solov’ev’s Moscow in the late-1870s was also animated by the imperial fortunes of

Russian arms in Central Asia and the Balkans. A.A. Polovtsov ruefully reported, on the arrival of Prince V.A. Cherkasskii in Saint Petersburg on 10 January 1877, Cherkasskii maintained “that

596 Ibid. 597 Ibid., 222-231, 216-227, 365-381. 598 Ibid., 369-381. 599 Ibid., 381. 600 Ibid., 318-385.

194 Moscow, and all of Russia with her, demands war” with the Ottoman Porte. The quintessential Petersburg courtier, Polovtsov regarded Cherkasskii as having “much wit, though a quite self-seeking wit” and made such claims in Petersburg in order to obtain the Minister of the Interior’s portfolio.601

Moscow’s discussions about the war revolved, in part, around the unity of the Russian nation as well as the dignity of the Imperial dynasty and the state that it governed. The most authoritative voices in this realm of Moscow’s intellectual life were those of M.N. Katkov, I.S.

Aksakov, and R.A. Fadeev. As leading members of the so-called Aristocratic Party, both

Aksakov and Fadeev supported a domestic program of abolishing communal land owning in favor of gentry landowners, who ought to have economic and political preeminence in the countryside and in the legislative process.602 This party also consisted of influence peddlers like

Prince A.I Bariatinskii, P.A. Shuvalov, and A.A. Polovtsov. As leading members of the Slavic

Benevolent Committee, Fadeev and Aksakov also promoted a militaristic vision of Russia’s imperial interests and destiny.603 This vision was opposed by M.N. Katkov, whose Moskovskie vedmosti was the most widely read newspaper of the age. Katkov promoted a conservative vision based on a homogenous Russian culture that had just as much aspiration to limit autocratic authority as Aksakov’s historical vision; however, Katkov’s had the paradoxical possibility of being egalitarian—culture was potentially open to anyone.604 The difference between Aksakov

601 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], fond 583 (A.A. Polovtsov), opis’, 1, edinitsa khraneniia 13, l. 19. 602 Khristoforov, “Aristokraticheskaia” oppozitsiia and Field, Review of Khristoforov, Kritika, 409-416. 603 For details of the activities and rhetoric of so-called Pan-Slavs, see David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875-1878 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 154-247 and idem., The Lion of Tashkent: The Career of General M.G. Cherniaev (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1974), 117-132. 604 Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation,” 659-681. Renner’s essay is a précis of a longer work in German: Russischer Nationalismus und Öffentlichkeit im Zarenreich 1855-1875 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000). For historical

195 and Katkov notwithstanding, the two were at one in supporting Russia’s military ambitions in the Balkans.605

Polovtsov’s jealous remark about Moscow and Cherkasskii clouds some of the truth in

Cherkasskii’s boast. Although the Slavic Benevolent Committees were able to collect large sums of donations from several strata of Russian society, raise a small army with the tacit approval of Alexander II, and establish cultural links with prominent Balkan Slavs, they ultimately could not realize their ambitious plans. Moreover, the Societies were frequented by

Balkan opportunists, gentry dilettantes, and powerful merchants who, as best the evidence tells, sought their own private or national interests at the expense of the Societies’ ideal of Slavic brotherhood.606

As we saw in the previous chapter, Alexander II had placed Fadeev put under the surveillance of the Third Section.607 Although there is archival evidence that suggests Count

N.P. Ignat’ev, who served in 1876 and 1877 as the Russian Ambassador to Constantinople, maintained links with many of the Societies members, their precise role, if any, in determining

Russian foreign policy remains unclear.608 According to French ministerial archives, Vincennes and the Quai d’Orsay kept tabs on the activities of the relationship between the Russian administration, Pan-Slavism, and secret societies devoting special attention to Katkov and

anticipations of this sort of nationalism, see Alexander M. Martin, “The Invention of ‘Russianness’ in the late-18th— early-19th Century,” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2003): 119-134. 605 On Katkov’s interest in the Balkans, see Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog samoderzhaviia,” 217-266. 606 Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety, 260-342. 607 GARF, f. 109, o. 4a, d. 457 608 See the materials at the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istorichskii Arkhiv [RGVIA], f. 431, o. 1, d. 49; idem., f. 846, o. 5, d. 2 (“Doneseniia russkikh voennykh agentov v Parizhe”)

196 Aksakov.609 For our purposes, though, the real or imagined influence of the Slavic

Benevolent Committees on government policy is not as important as the debates about autocratic authority, society, national identity, and empire that arose within these institutions.

Within Russia, at least, the Societies’ literary activity created a sense of sympathy-cum- imperial pride among the rural gentry. In August 1876, I.S. Aksakov received a letter from

“Dvorianin Gavriil Fedorovich” from the city of Nikolaev in Kherson guberniia relating his feelings upon reading a letter published by General Cherniaev in Vilenskii Vestnik. He wrote:

In no. 162 of Vilenskii Vestnik, I read in the name of Your Excellency [Prevoskhoditel’stvo] a telegram from General Cherniaev with the following content: ‘Please bring the iconostasis. A choir of choristers asked for it from us [Ot nas zhelate’no bylo khor’ pevchikh].’ After having read a telegram of such content, I felt a hope in myself that God bless me with a similar good deed. In the city of Nikolaevo (Khersonskaia guberniia) at the Simeono-Agritinovskaia Church, a small network [neskol’ko set’] exists under my leadership ‘a choir of choristers’ made up of girls, noble parents [blagorodnykh roditelei], and four male persons [chelovek muzhchin] (2 basses and 2 tenors) who with their singing gave the public quite a bit of enjoyment; the main government individuals [glavnye nachal’stvuiushchie litsa] can even testify to it. After having read Gen. Cherniaev’s telegram addressed to Your name, in which he asked You regarding the choristers, we have unanimously agreed to dedicate ourselves to this blessed cause [blagoe delo], and by this give our brothers, the Slavs, enjoyment in their present conditions [pri takom ikh polozhenii].610

It is not clear which iconostasis the provincial gentry had in mind. A likely candidate, though, was an icon of The Wisdom of God (Sophia) that had been copied from a Novgorod icon that had itself allegedly been brought from the Cathedral of Sophia in what the Russians continued to call Constantinople.611 This fact, to look ahead briefly to the following chapter, suggests a

609 Chateau de Vincennes, GR 7 N 1466 (l’administration russe, panslavisme, sociétés secrets). On the importance the French Consul in Moscow, M. Mariani, attached to Katkov and Aksakov from 22 May 1876, see Ministère des Affaires Étrangeres, Correspondence politique des consuls, Russie 8 (1871-1877 Moscou), feuilles 241-389. 610 GARF, f. 1750, o. 1, ed. khr. 80, ll. 13-13ob. 611 GARF, f. 1750, o. 1, ed. khr. 80, ll. 8-9, 9, 12.

197 radically new way of interpreting the role of the mythologem of Sophia in the Lectures on

Godmanhood in 1878.

The primary promoter of a militaristic imperial policy based on the support of the gentry was R.A. Fadeev, whom Solov’ev had met while in Egypt. One of the reasons that Fadeev was in Egypt was to avoid social humiliation in Moscow after Iurii Samarin ridiculed Fadeev’s military and social views, as expressed in Chem nam byt’? (1874), in Revoliutsionnyi konservatizm (1875).612 Throughout the 1870s, Fadeev promoted the social and imperial visions of leading members of the so-called “Aristocratic Party,” Prince Bariatinskii and P.A. Shuvalov.

Based on his experience in the Caucasus campaigns of the 1850s under the leadership of

Bariatinskii, not to mention D.A. Miliutin, Fadeev promoted a martial vision of imperial dignity along with the social vision promoted by Aksakov.613 Katkov had a similar vision of empire, though he harbored a more liberal attitude toward the social bases of the nation. Ever since the

Polish insurrection in 1863, Katkov had publicly supported the ever-increasing use of military or police measures to defend the integrity of the empire. As a cultural prophylactic, he also promoted a vision of Russian nationhood that, in theory, threatened the monarchical principle and threatened “non-Russian” peoples in the empire by emphasizing the national principle of statehood over the monarchical principle.614 What scholars have called the “imperialism of love”

612 Iu. Samarin and F. Dmitriev, Revoliutsionnyi konservatizm (Berlin, 1875). 613 B.V. Anan’ich and R.Sh. Ganelin, “F.A. Fadeev, S.Iu. Vitte i ideologicheskie iskaniia ‘okhranitelei’ v 1881-1883 gg.,” in Issledovaniia po sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii Rossii: sbornik statei pamiati Borisa Aleksandrovicha Romanova (Leningrad: Izd-vo “Nauka” Lenin. otdelenie, 1971), 300-303; Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 194-197; Sunderland, “The Caucasian Tangle.” 614 Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation,” esp. 669-677 and Tvardovskaia, “Ideolog samoderzhaviia,”

198 or the “benevolent hegemony” of the Russian Empire in the context of the work of Solov’ev and Dostoevskii equally applies to Katkov.615

On this choice-field of dominant discourses about Russian nationhood, the mutual relationship between autocratic authority and society, and Russia’s imperial mission, Solov’ev began to articulate his vision of the domestic and international orders. To this task Solov’ev brought his abiding conviction that socialism, properly founded on a religious account of the relationship between God and man, ought to structure this order. His first attempt to articulate this moral vision came on 5 December 1876 with the reading of an article that would become

Three Forces at a public meeting of the Society for the Lovers of Russian Philology at Moscow

University.616 In early 1877, the article would be published as an article in Katkov’s

Pravoslavnoe obozrenie. And, as Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti announced in its 1 February

1877 issue, a separate brochure version of the article would be sold “for the benefit of the Slavic

Benevolent Committee.”617 This brief article is connected to a much larger work that marks another step in Solov’ev’s gradual clarification of his ideas to the pubic and to himself: FNTsZ.

As Solov’ev remarked a footnote to Three Forces, “a more detailed development of the same theme will be given by me in the historical prolegomena to my work “O nachalakh tsel’nogo znaniia.”618 What meaning did Solov’ev aim to derive from history in the prolegomenon to his larger work? How was a speech on foreign relations connected to philosophy and social theory?

615 Josef Bohatec, Der Imperialismusgedanke und die Lebensphilosophie Dostoewskijs: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis des russischen Menschen (Graz-Colon: Hermann Böhlaus, 1951), vii and John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 390. See also Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 50-53. 616 PSS, vol. 1, 359-360. 617 Ibid., 360-361. 618 Ibid., 199n.1. Alexander Koschewnikoff, who is likely Alexandre Kojève, the philosopher-banker who authored the famous lectures on Hegel, argued that Three Forces was “the main source” for what Koschewnikoff called Solov’ev’s “Slavophile period.” Whether or not this period of Solov’ev’s development is describe as his “Slavophile

199 From the first line of Three Forces, Solov’ev continued his critical engagement with evolutionary social theory, although now he was addressing these problems to the realm of international relations. As he would do at greater length in FNTsZ, Solov’ev asserted in the opening line of Three Forces the existence of moral principles in the world before justifying their existence, utility, or meaning through historical analysis: “From the beginning of history, three fundamental forces [sily] have directed human development [razvitie].”619 Indeed, the main theme of the article is razvitie and how it might be depicted as process of moral improvement.

As we noted in chapter 1, Mikhailovskii had translated “evolution” as used by Darwin and Spencer as “razvitie.” After several years of study, Solov’ev had found a way to address the issue of the meaninglessness and amoral implications of evolution without an over-riding or divine purpose guiding the process. Solov’ev found a purpose in history by positing a world of historical development administered by three distinct but supplementary forces. The first force strove “to subject humanity in all spheres and in all levels of his life to one supreme principle, and in its exclusive unity [strove] to mix and amalgamate all of the diversity of individual forms, to trample on the independence of the individual, the freedom of personal life.” The second,

“opposite,” force strove “to destroy the stronghold of dead unity, to give freedom to individual forms of life everywhere, freedom to the individual and his activities.” Drawing on the language of socialism, Solov’ev described this principle as “universal egoism and anarchy, a multiplicity

period” or not, the importance of this pamphlet as a source of Solov’ev’s understanding of history is unmistakable. See Alexander Koschewnikoff, “Die Geschichtsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjews,” Der Russische Gedanke 1, no. 3 (1930): 305-324, esp. 308. 619 Ibid., 199.

200 of separate units without any internal connection.”620 In order to introduce purposive dynamism into the scheme, Solov’ev identified a third force “that gives positive content to the first two” forces by constructing “the wholeness of the organism of mankind

[obshchechelovecheskogo organizma]” and that “gives it a quiet internal life.”621 Asserting without any evidence that one could observe these three principles working out in any epoch of history, Solov’ev linked them respectively with “the Muslim East,” “western civilization,” and

“the Slavic world.”622 In the months before Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire,

Solov’ev had developed a justification for war.

Having defined the three forces governing historical development and associated them with the three regions of the world that had a vital impact on Russian foreign policy, Solov’ev made a liberal move and situated the Slavic world as a peaceful arbiter among the forces of western anarchy and Muslim authoritarianism. Developing a stereotype, Solov’ev depicted the

Ottoman Empire as a sclerotic government that, based on the authority of the Koran, had not allowed any free development of human individuals. The result had been backwardness and decay.623 Opposed to this country and principle, Solov’ev presented all of western civilization, which had demonstrated its administering force through its “swift and unbroken development, the free play of forces, independence and exclusive self-assertion of all separate forms and individual elements.” Such independence harbored a built-in threat, however, as evidenced by the Reformation—Luther’s initial criticism of Catholic authority inevitably led to anarchy.

Obliquely referring to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, Solov’ev was quick to note that “along with the

620 Ibid. 621 Ibid., 199-200. 622 Ibid., 200. 623 Ibid., 200-202.

201 representative [predstavitel’nitsei] of religious unity—the Roman Church—came forward the world of the German barbarians, who had accepted Catholicism, but hardly being imbued by it, preserved a principle that was not only distinct from Catholicism, but directly harmful to it—the principle of unconditional individual freedom, of the supreme significance of the personality.”624

This sort of freedom threatened the very existence of order even while it promised supreme self- fulfillment. As Solov’ev epigrammatically put it, perhaps in an attempt to mimic Askakov’s style, the Muslim East affirms only the “inhuman god” [beschelovechnyi bog] while western civilization affirms “godless man” [bezbozhnogo cheloveka].625

Between these two extremes of civilization, Solov’ev placed the Slavic world as the

“third force” that “ought to give its unconditional content to human development.” The Slavic world could only do this, however, “by the revelation of the highest, divine world, and those people, that nation [narod] through which this force has manifest itself must only be a mediator between humanity and that peaceful, free, conscious tool of the latter.” Unsurprisingly, Solov’ev identified the “Russian people” as the bearers of this force.626 “Russia’s great historical calling, the only thing from which its approaching tasks get their meaning, is a religious calling in the highest sense.” Indeed, appropriating the image of the Sermon on the Mount, Solov’ev argued that “the external image of the slave, in which our people are now found, Russia’s humble position in economic and other relations not only cannot serve as a dismissal of her calling, but, rather, supports it.” Somewhat ominously, he thought the “hour was near.”627

624 Ibid., 202. 625 Ibid., 206. 626 Ibid., 207. 627 Ibid., 207.

202 Based on the evidence of his private correspondence and published works, Solov’ev found language and images to depict and argue for a world in which purposeful interactions directed toward larger, moral goals were scientifically possible in Neoplatonism and the

“esoteric tradition.”628 If Solov’ev’s letters to S.A. Tolstaia in April 1877 can be taken as evidence of much older interests, he drew on the vitalist language and imagery of Jacob Böhme,

John Pordage, and Gottfried Arnold in order to depict a world in which evolution had a moral purpose. In doing so, he appropriated a language and set of images that thinkers had used for centuries to make sense of periods of perceived crisis—mutually interacting forces that move, whether necessarily or freely, toward moral ends.629 As Soviet and Western historians have shown for decades, the cusp of the 1870s and 1880s was a critical period in Imperial Russia’s history. Solov’ev took from the esoteric tradition the language of interacting forces and ultimate purpose in order to find a redemptive purpose in Alexander II’s reforms, which Solov’ev’s contemporaries had experienced as profound dislocations.

The artificiality of Solov’ev’s historical schema was noted in a withering review of the speech that appeared in Vestnik Evropy.630 Another anonymous critic publishing in a conservative newspaper could not understand why Solov’ev would appear as an enemy of all that the present civilization had created.631 The criticism had no appreciable effect on Solov’ev. In

FNTsZ, Solov’ev forced history into his developmental schema at greater length. In the closing paragraph of Three Forces, however, Solov’ev makes an uncharacteristically concrete

628 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 169-171. 629 For the letters to Tolstaia, see Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 199-200 as well as 23 for the description of what we now know was La Sophia. 630 A. Stankevich, “Tri bessiliia. Three Forces. Publichnoe chtenie Vladimira Solov’eva. Moskva, 1877,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1877): 877-891. 631 Nash vek, no. 45 (16 April 1877). Cited in PSS, vol. 1, 361.

203 assessment of Russian affairs, moving away from the esoteric language that structured the entire speech until this point:

… great foreign [vneishnie] events usually precede a great awakening of social consciousness. Thus, even the Crimean War, which was completely fruitless in politics, powerfully influenced the consciousness of our society. The negating character of the consciousness that it awoke corresponds to the negating results of that war. It must be hoped that the imminent, great struggle will serve as a powerful push for the awakening of the positive consciousness of the Russian people. But until then, we who have the misfortune to belong to the Russian intelligentsia, which instead of the image and likeness of God still continues to wear the image and likeness of an ape—we must finally see our humble position, we must start trying to restore the Russian national [narodnyi] character in ourselves, to stop creating idols out of any trifling little idea, we must become indifferent to the limited interests of this life to freely and rationally believe in another, higher reality.632

The other interesting characteristic of this dense little speech is that Solov’ev rejected mysticism in itself and asserted that the ultimate goal of mysticism must be moral.633 After having claimed that the Muslim East had not created anything in centuries, Solov’ev dismissed the threat to this claim posed by mystical Dervishes in a revealing footnote. Generalizing about religion,

Solov’ev argued “holiness consists of achieving the fullest union through the process of making oneself like the divinity [upodoblienie sebia bozhestvu].” The Dervish, Solov’ev argued, lost his individual personality consciousness in his mystical practices and, therefore, ended up in a state of “unconsciousness and anesthesia” which was a “caricature of Buddhism.”634

Throughout 1877, Solov’ev developed these philosophical themes more systematically in

FNTsZ. Despite the “historical prolegomenon” introducing the work, however, he relied a great deal more on unproven suppositions and logical derivations in order to prove the same moral

632 PSS, vol. 1, 208. 633 On this distinction in Neoplatonism, see E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 74-76. 634 PSS, vol. 1, 201n.4.

204 point.635 Indeed, the majority of the work attempts to build a theosophical system, perhaps written under the initial excitement of finding the language of the esoteric tradition with which to express his vision of domestic and foreign order in philosophical terms. It is in this work that

Solov’ev also first began to systematically develop his conception of a modern theocracy.636

Despite these celestial concerns, Solov’ev also firmly grounded these speculations in the social and political problems that had motivated his intellectual work since the end of his gymnasium days, which he presented in the “historical prolegomenon” that served as an introduction to the work.

The well-known incompleteness of FNTsZ is due in part to Solov’ev’s hasty departure from Moscow in the wake of the so-called “Liubimov Affair” in February 1877 and his efforts to become a war correspondent for Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti.637 Until the publication of the new edition of Solov’ev’s collected works, it was unknown just how hard Solov’ev worked to get such an appointment. The standard narrative, which relied on a general’s dismissive portrait of Solov’ev in the theatre of war or of de Vogüé’s orientalizing depictions of an unprepared

Solov’ev travelling to the Danube with a revolver in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other, dismissed this episode in Solov’ev’s intellectual career.638 As archival evidence has shown, however, Solov’ev worked tirelessly from April to May 1877 to get the help of Prince

Cherkasskii, Ivan Aksakov, Katkov, and his supervisor on the Instructional Committee in the

Ministry of Education, where he had found an appointment in February 1877, in order to obtain

635 PSS, vol. 2, 216-310. For the “historical prolegomena,” see 185-216. 636 Ibid., 196-216. 637 On the consensus about this work, see A.P. Kozyrev’s remarks in PSS, vol. 2, 358-361. 638 Vicomte E.-M de Vogüé, Sous l’horizon: hommes et choises d’hier (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1904), 19 and D. A. Skalon, Moi vospominaniia, 1877-1878 g.g., vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: M. O. Vol’f, 1913), 219-220. For Luk’iakov’s rendition, see Luk’ianov, O Vl. S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, vyp. 2, 169-171.

205 the appointment as war correspondent.639 Solov’ev had been taken away by the pull of events, not Sophia.

In continuity with the patriotic views expressed in Three Forces, Solov’ev portrayed the triumph of Russian arms and civilization in Bulgaria in an article entitled “Iz Svishtovo

(Sistovo), 4 Iiulia 1877.” It appeared in issue 177 of Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti on 16 July

1877.640 Based on the details Solov’ev brought together in the article, Imperial Russian civilization in Bulgaria justified the ideals he had publicly expressed in Three Forces: a benevolent administration based on harmonious social relations that were founded on and supported by the church as well as the force of arms. As Solov’ev described it, the event was

“the triumphant entrance” of a new “civil administration” presided over by a General-Major

Anuchin because Cherkasskii, the imperial head of Russian administration in Bulgaria, was headquartered at Tyrnovo.

Svishtovo was significant as “the first Bulgarian city occupied by Russian troops.” The event took place at the Church of the Transfiguration, where military and civil ranks assembled along with “the people.” At the completion of prayers and a song by the military choir, a

Bulgarian priest read “the Sovereign Emperor’s appeal to the Bulgarian people, and the new governor, Mr. Gerov, informed [vozvestil] the people about the abolition of the bedelia (a tax which the Turkish government levied instead of military duty) and about the substitution of the tithe [desiatina] on produce with a land tax in 1878.” Underlining Russia’s role as benevolent liberator, Anuchin explained the meaning of these transformations in Bulgaria, followed by the new Bulgarian governor, Naiden Gerov, who had received his education at the Richelieu Lycée

639 PSS, vol. 2, 385-387. 640 Ibid., 309-310.

206 in Odessa, been a long-time member of the Slavic Benevolent Committee there, and spent several decades in Russian service.641 Anuchin’s speech emphasized the need for order in the new circumstances secured by the Russian Autocrat:

Bulgarians! The Sovereign Emperor ordered His troops to enter Bulgaria in order to liberate You from the centuries-long Turkish oppression. May God preserve Him! The Will of the Russian Tsar’ and the fervent hopes of the Russian people have been fulfilled. Bulgarians, You will be free. But, having received freedom, you must prove that you are worthy [dostoiny] of it. You will prove this by firmly observing the established order and showing full obedience to the instructions of the authorities. The Sovereign Emperor grants you self-administration as represented by administrative councils, city councils, and electoral courts and appoints as well as the central administration in the person of the governors.642

After this display of the Russian empire’s benevolent hegemony, the new governor, Gerov, was given a chance to show fealty to the Russian Empire in Bulgarian. As Solov’ev reported:

The obligation that has been given to me today, said Mr. Gerov, is heavy; but there is a circumstance that allows me to hope that I can fulfill this obligation with success. This circumstance is that all Bulgarians from long ago and with fervent hopes have striven for liberation from Turkish disorder and for the acquisition of legal independence; therefore, I am fully convinced that each of us, without exception, will do all that is demanded of him for the securing of order and correct administration and, thus, you will all show yourselves to be worthy of those favors which the Sovereign Emperor has granted you and that fate that He and all Russia has prepared for you.643

The theatre of imperial politics concluded with the enthusiastic “Urrahs” of the assembly.

Solov’ev’ could not have imagined a more striking display of the benevolent hegemony of the

Russian Empire.

Throughout 1877, Solov’ev also published FNTsZ, a draft of his doctoral dissertation in which he extended the explanation of his understanding of history and in which he attempted to develop theosophical themes at great length. At some point in the course of 1877, which was a

641 On Grebov’v career in the Slavic Benevolent Committee, see Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety, 15-33, 95, 112-114. 642 Ibid., 309. 643 Ibid., 310.

207 turbulent year for Solov’ev, he abandoned FNTsZ for Kritika otvlechennykh nachal (1880-

1881), which he submitted for his doctoral degree in philosophy.644 For our purposes, the details of Solov’ev’s theosophical constructions are not as important as the “historical prolegomenon” in which he extended the ideas first presented in Three Forces. As far as the theosophical constructions go, it is enough to know that Solov’ev sought to use them to answer the question of meaning in history posed within a theistic framework. As we noted above, the language and images of the esoteric tradition had often been employed in western literature to present morality in the world. At this point in his development, however, Solov’ev saw theosophy as a literal answer to science, not as a meaningful way to view and present the world in order to find morality and justice. Solov’ev began to face this issue more squarely in 1877 in the course of a critical review of D.F. Strauss’ Der alte und der neue Glaube.645 Nevertheless, FNTsZ, specifically the long introduction entitled “A Universal-Historical Introduction (On the Law of

Historical Evolution)” (Obshcheistoricheskoe vvedenie (o zakone istoricheskogo razvitiia), remains the most extended development of Solov’ev’s vision of history.

In the introduction to FNTsZ, Solov’ev continued to criticize the amoral implications of evolutionary social theories, but he introduced additional and important language in his critique that shows that Solov’ev’s work was firmly within the discourses of post-Kantian philosophy, namely theism. In the opening lines of the introduction, Solov’ev provided a justification for the existence of philosophy that rests on that discipline’s ability to offer a solution to the problem of evil, the answer to which he conceived as the answer to the “goal of existence.”646 The question

644 PSS, vol. 3, 7-360. 645 PSS, vol. 3, 367-390. 646 PSS, vol. 2, 185. On the role of this question in the process of secularization, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), esp. 239n.23.

208 arose, according to Solov’ev, in man’s “imagination.”647 Indeed, the introduction was intended as lesson for improving the imagination as well as a challenge to Lavrov’s anti-theistic version of socialism. As Solov’ev put it:

If our existence were constantly blissful, then such a question could not have arisen: blissful existence would be a goal in itself and would need no explanation. But since, in fact, bliss exists more in the imagination, reality is a series of greater and lesser torments and, in the best possible case, is the constant succession of heavy labor and oppressive boredom, on the one hand, and vanishing illusions on the other, then the question arises completely naturally: what is all this for, what is the goal of life? This question appears first as a personal [lichnyi] one to every thinking human being [chelovek], as a question of the goal of his own existence.648

Though Solov’ev identified the moment of self-awareness as a positive awakening, personhood in itself was not an unmitigated good. Handing the problem of “impossible individuality,”

Solov’ev went on:

since, on the one hand, all thinking beings [sushchestva] occupy roughly the same position regarding this question, and since, on the other hand, each of us can only exist together with others so that the goal of his life is inseparably linked with the life goal of everyone else, then the personal question is necessarily transformed into a common question [obshchii vopros]: one asks—what is the goal of human existence in general, for what, to what end does humanity exist? Our consciousness demands a common and final goal for it is obvious that the dignity of private and immediate goals of human life can be defined only in relation to that common and useful goal for which they serve as means; thus, if one takes away the latter, then even our immediate goals lose all their value and meaning, and there remains for mankind only the immediate motive of base, animal nature.649

In order to show man his higher self, Solov’ev employed the language of theism as a way to develop a schema of “development” within which mankind could find a moral calling and history of its progress and regress that would serve as an example for modernity.650 Later on,

647 Ibid., 185, 194-195. 648 Ibid., 185. 649 Ibid. On “impossible individuality,” see Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787-1802 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 650 Ibid.

209 Solov’ev defined “the law of development” in the following terms: “development is a series of immanent transformations of an organic being which proceed from a known principle and are directed toward a known, definite end.”651 Eschewing the usual language of theism, however,

Solov’ev did not describe the immanent process of development as the realization of transcendent values, but as values already present “in embryo” [zarodysh].652 In theory,

Solov’ev had developed a schema of personal development that posited an original “solidarity” that man was called on to realize anew.653

As with Three Forces, Solov’ev’s historical analysis was preceded by a speculative schema of development within which to present the facts of history. At this point in the introduction, Solov’ev laid out a scheme of human history that conformed to the “three forces” that he had publicly presented in Moscow in December 1876. Instead of identifying these forces with historical civilizations, however, Solov’ev identifies them with forms of human association:

1) economic society whose elementary form was the family; 2) political society whose fundamental principle was legality or law as an expression of justice; and 3) spiritual or sacred society determined by the religious character of mankind.654 In so doing, he explicitly placed himself between Hegel’s law of development and Spencer’s.655 The purpose of this rhetorical move was to mark out a moderate and mediating place between what he regarded as two extreme views of evolution or development.

651 Ibid., 187. 652 Ibid. 653 Ibid., 187-189. 654 Ibid., 189-196. Solov’ev also refers to political society as “formal statehood” [formal’naia gosudarstvennost’], p. 194. 655 Ibid., 189n.1.

210 Having thus positioned himself, Solov’ev reintroduced socialism as an ideal, but separated good socialism from bad socialism based on religion. “Socialists,” Solov’ev asserted,

“are inclined in the theoretical sphere to attribute exclusive significance to positive knowledge, being hostile to theology and abstract philosophy” and in the most extreme instances attributing

“preeminent significance to economic relations.”656 It was this issue that Solov’ev sought to address, using religion as a resource for what one scholar has called “the moral re-entry” of values into collective action.657 At this stage in his development, Solov’ev attached the highest religious significance to a particular account of mysticism that was moral, ethical, and socially directed, not quietist or contemplative. That is why Solov’ev called “socialist mystics and socialist philosophers” “rare exceptions” [otdel’nye iskliucheniia].658 It is also why, as in Three

Forces, Solov’ev made a strict distinction between two types of mysticism:

One ought to rigorously distinguish the mystical [mistika] from mysticism [mistitsizm]: the former is a direct, immediate relationship of our spirit to the transcendental world, while the latter is the reflection of our mind on that relationship and forms a special tendency in philosophy, about which something will be said presently. A mystic and mysticism relate to each other just as an empirist relates to empiricism, for example.659

Solov’ev went on to offer further schemas of correspondences between individuals, associations, and bodies of knowledge—the language and images of theosophy run amok.660 Despite the use of the language and images of theosophy and the esoteric tradition, however, the fact that

Solov’ev deployed them within a theistic framework was scientific and modern.661 His experiment with this tradition would continue into the Chteniia o bogochelovechestve (1878),

656 Ibid., 194. 657 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 137-151. 658 Ibid., 194n.4. 659 Ibid., 195n.6. 660 Ibid., 196-308. 661 Here I disagree with Laura Engelstein’s characterization of Slavophilism as “illiberal” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

211 coinciding with Russia’s highest fortunes in international relations until their substantial modification by the Treaty of Berlin. After that point, the prominence of the tradition declined precipitately as Solov’ev began to work harder to justify such principles against the hard matter of reality.

Given the prominence of westward-looking and southward-looking empire and autocracy in the foregoing, it is worth remembering that Solov’ev’s socialism led him to look for social solutions to the problem of statehood—he had very little to say about the practice of political power, only how one imagined its working.662 Hence, he was oblivious to the Aristocratic party’s argument for its preeminent role in administering the empire. Social problems had social roots unconnected with anything having to do with political power. Solov’ev’s not unusual indifference to the workings of political power may have shaped the strange anti-political politics of the Kadet party in the early twentieth century.663 Rather than the politics of power, Solov’ev participated in the discourse of the politics of historiography that Haimson noted so long ago in connection with the importance of zakonomernnost’ in the social and, eventually, the political thought of the intelligentsia. But these considerations lie the scope of this study.

For now it suffices to treat one last episode in Solov’ev’s life that had a profound impact on his social life—the so-called “Liubimov Affair.” The immediate result of this example of the high-social stakes in Muscovite society was Solov’ev’s move to Saint Petersburg after being ostracized by the faculty at Moscow University, although the incident and the move did not

662 The fullest discussion of the role of socialist themes in Solov’ev’s work is Hans Gleixner, “Verständnis und Kritik des Sozialismus,” in Russisches Denken im europäischen Dialog (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 1998), 246-265. I assign much greater significance to the role of socialism is shaping Solov’ev’s thought than Gleixner. 663 William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

212 completely sever Solov’ev’s ties with Moscow, as his stint as a war correspondent for

Moskovskie vedmosti shows. A professional career in Moscow, though, was no longer possible.

CONCLUSION

Solov’ev’s obliviousness to, or obstinate disregard for, the social mores governing much of the intellectual life of Moscow in the late 1870s found poignant illustration by the so-called

“Liubimov Affair.” In brief, the affair concerns departmental politics vis-à-vis D.A. Tolstoi’s

Ministry of Education. In the late 1870s, Tolstoi strove to undo the liberal education statute of

1863, which had given relatively free scope to faculties in academic affairs. The professoriate at

Moscow University almost universally opposed Tolstoi’s measure. Tolstoi’s policy measure received fervent support from Katkov through Moskovskie vedomosti as well as N.A. Liubimov, a professor of natural science at Moscow University who also collaborated with Katkov at

Russkii Vestnik. Liubimov publicized the results of some departmental votes regarding Tolstoi’s reform effort that compromised the professoriate’s position and, apparently, transgressed the unwritten rules of conduct among the professoriate. Solov’ev publicly and stubbornly supported

Liubimov’s right to hold his own opinion of Tolstoi’s proposal, and was ostracized by the faculty.664 As Kovalevskii’s testimony indicates, Solov’ev was too proud to capitulate to the faculty and relocated to Saint Petersburg.665 Solov’ev’s social, political, and philosophical values could not but have alienated him from all of Moscow’s publicly engaged society.

Although literature and scholarship tends to cast Saint Petersburg society as tense and stifling because of the socio-political networks interweaving society and government, Moscow’s social

664 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 3, vyp. 2, 55-77. 665 Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn’, 207-209.

213 life had just the same stakes, although it was presided over by conservative aristocrats. The

Liubimov affair dramatized Solov’ev’s odd social fit with Moscow in the late-1870s.

In other ways, however, Solov’ev’s intellectual interests linked him to broader yet usually unacknowledged trends in Russian intellectual history, namely his interest in the role of imagination in determining judgment. His interest in the role of imagination and judgment in society links his work in unexpected ways with the master’s thesisy of Samarin and

Chernyshevskii, but distinguished his work from Lavrov.666 Establishing the Marxist genealogy of Russian progressive intellectuals from Hegel to Marx, scholars have emphasized Hegel’s influence in the former and Feuerbach’s in the latter.667 While Hegel’s ideas must surely have been important, both Samarin and Chernyshevskii developed their master’s theses on aesthetics on the basis of F.T. Vischer.668 Vischer was one of the lesser-known young Hegelians who was friends with D.F. Strauss and a prominent philosopher of aesthetics in his own right.669 Usually the discourse of judgment is connected solely with the appropriation of Schiller’s works in the

1830s, but should be expanded to include the whole spectrum of German thought on this issue that was creatively appropriated into existing problems and discourses in Russian intellectual life.670 In their haste to explain Lenin’s intellectual origins, scholars have used Hegel’s name to foreshorten the process by which Russians appropriated German thinkers and for what

666 For Samarin’s master’s thesis, the final section of which dealt with the aesthetic implications of the preaching styles of Prokopovich and Iavorskii, see Iu.F. Samarin, Sochineniia Iu.F. Samarina, vol. 5, D.Iu. Samarin, ed. (Moscow: Tip. A.I. Mamontova, 1880). 667 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 129-186; Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 183-209, esp. 191; and Frede, Doubt, 120-149. 668 For Samarin’s master’s thesis, see Iu.F. Samarin, Sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izd. D. Samarina, 1877). For Chernyshevskii, see N.G. Chernyshevskii, Antropologicheskii printsip v filosofii, in V.Ia. Kirpotin, B.P. Koz’min et al., eds., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Khud. Literatury, 1950). 669 John E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 165-168. 670 On Schiller in Russia, see Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 38-56, 434-436.

214 purposes—German intellectual culture was more variegated and complex than Russian scholarship usually presents it, and Russians knew that. Hence, the issue of the connection between aesthetic judgment and social thought ought not to be taken as a mere pretext to talk about politics à la Hegel. Although Solov’ev had not made any public justifications of socialism in any of the writings in his Moscow period, he had firmly developed his justification of so- called western civilization and enlightenment. It was only in Saint Petersburg that Solov’ev explicitly defended the ideals of socialism in the first of his Lectures on Godmanhood. What

Russian socialism needed, as we shall see, was a moral element that Solov’ev provided with his theistic vision of Russian Orthodoxy. In many ways, Solov’ev’s minor focus on the mythologem of Sophia in these Lectures indicates his intention to moralize much of the activities and ideas of the Slavic Benevolent Committees.

215 CHAPTER 5: CHTENIIA O BOGOCHELOVECHESTVE—CHRISTIAN EPIC IN A THEISTIC MODE: THEISM, MORALITY, AND SOCIETY, 1877-1878

One sees that philosophy also has its chiliastic vision, but one whose occurrence can be promoted by its idea [Idee], though only from afar, and it is thus anything but fanciful.671

1877 and 1878 were eventful years for Vladimir Solov’ev. Given the close links between the University and salon society, Solov’ev had professionally and socially ostracized himself throughout his Moscow as a consequence of the Liubimov Affair. In response to this misfortune, he hastily relocated to Saint Petersburg where he had few friends or patrons besides S.A.

Tolstaia, the widow of A.K. Tolstoi and the aunt of Solov’ev’s friend kn. D.N. Tsertelev.672

Flattering his only patroness in Saint Petersburg, Solov’ev thanked S.A. Tolstaia in April 1877 for her hospitality in such trying times writing that he had shed “a few tears before a cold fireplace in the sitting room” of Tolstaia’s apartment in Saint Petersburg and felt that “everything

[was] quiet and melancholy as it [was] now in my soul.”673

As a consequence of the Russian Army’s fortunes in the Balkans, however, his patriotism was still in full flush. Buoyed by this victory of Russian arms, he published versions of his dissertation throughout 1877: FNTsZ appeared in the Journal of the Ministry of Education in

March, April, June, October, and November while parts of his Kritika otvlechennykh nachal

[KON] began to appear along-side installments of Dostoevskii’s Brothers Karamazov in

Katkov’s Russkii Vestnik in November.674 By the beginning of 1878, he started delivering a

671 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent (1784),” in Ted Humphrey, ed. and trans., Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 36. 672 Letters to S. A. Tolstaia dated April 1877, in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 2, 199-200. 673 Ibid., 199. On the opportunities for patronage offered at S.A. Tolstaia’s salon, see K. Th. Golovin, Moi vospominaniia, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg: N.p., 1908), 321-322. 674 PSS, vol. 2, 358-361 and PSS, vol. 3, 430-436.

216 series of public lectures on the “philosophy of religion” in which he proposed “to demonstrate the rationality of positive religion, to show the truth of faith, in all the fullness of its concrete content, is at the same time also the truth of reason.”675 These lectures have come to be known as the Lectures on Godmanhood.

Begun ten days after N.P. Ignat’ev had signed the armistice ending the war with the

Ottoman empire, Solov’ev read his Lectures “for the benefit of the Red Cross, but also partially for the benefit of the restoration of Sophia of Tsargrad.”676 On 29 January 1878, Solov’ev diagnosed the cause, and suggested the cure, for the malaise that had beset both Russian society and, reflecting Solov’ev’s ambition, all of “extra-religious civilization” since the French

Revolution proclaimed “freedom and equality” political ideals that “ought to be reconciled in fraternity.” The problem was the radical secularization of culture and civilization. According to

Solov’ev, the “West” had offered two solutions to this problem: socialism and positivism. The former “related chiefly to the practical interests of social life” while the latter addressed “the theoretical area of scientific [nauchnyi] knowledge,” but both on their own “only wished to occupy the empty place left by religion in the life and consciousness of contemporary civilized humanity.”677 Given the general direction of Solov’ev’s intellectual interests, what could he

675 “O publichnykh lektsiiakh V. S. Solov’eva,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 2 (February 1878): 344. The advertisement and program for the lectures, along with some remarks about the publication history of the Chteniia, also appears in Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 12 (Brussels: Izd-vo Zhizn’ s bogom, 1970), 539-544 and a partial English translation can be found in Boris Jakim, “Editor’s Introduction,” idem., rev. and ed., Lectures on Divine Humanity (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindsfarne Press, 1995), ix. 676 Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, Letter to Prince Dmitrii Nikolaevich Tsertelev dated Moscow 1878, in E.L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1909), 242. This passage from the letter to Tsertelev is cited but not explained in K.V. Mochul’skii, Vladimir Solov’ev: zhizn’ i uchenie, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951), 91. 677 V.S. Solov’ev, “Chteniia o bogochelovechestve,” in S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (Saint Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’skoe Tovarishchestvo “Prosveshchenie,” 1911), 5. Scholars have sometimes followed the incorrect chronology listed in the collected works edited by Ernst Radlov and Vladimir Sergeevich’s nephew Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev which placed the

217 have meant by posing the problem of society’s attitude to statehood in such a way to such an audience in early 1878? How and what kind of religion could solve the problem?

In the canonical historiography, as we saw in the introduction, the Lectures define

Solov’ev’s public reputation as an outspoken mystic and constitute the hard kernel of Solov’ev’s allegedly unchanging Sophianic system of thought. For example, Strémooukhoff claimed that the Chteniia were attended by “a large and diverse public” and Mochul’skii claimed that they were “a great event in the life of the capital.”678 Such an interpretation of Solov’ev’s life and thought is supported in English by translations that, until very recently, present only the last six, most speculative lectures where Sophia plays a role.679 Although the lectures were popular, so the narrative goes, they fell on ears made deaf by the din of positivism and terrorism. Above all, the Lectures are alleged to reveal the ultimate importance of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God, in explaining Solov’ev’s entire intellectual endeavor.

By now, it should be obvious how much more complicated and historically situated

Solov’ev’s intellectual development was. Regarding the Lectures, in particular, the themes were not entirely new, but the audience and its response are noteworthy. Contrasting his intellectual relationship with Ivan Aksakov, Solov’ev presented Iu.F. Samarin—“uncle Iusha” in the memoir—as a sober and restrained conservative who had reconciled himself to state bureaucracy.680 In the 1870s, Samarin had argued that the “revolutionary conservatism,”

beginning of their publication in 1877. See Solov’ev and Radlov, eds., Sobranie Sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3, 422. They were published in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie from March 1878 to September 1881. 678 Strémooukhoff, Messianic Work, 70; Mochul’skii, Zhizn’ i uchenie, 74. 679 James Edie, et al., eds., Russian Philosophy, vol. 3, Pre-Revolutionary Philosophy and Theology, Philosophers in Exile, Marxists and Communists (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969) and Vladimir Solovyov, A Solovyov Anthology S.L. Frank, ed. (New York: Scriber, 1959). The recent exception is Vladimir Solov’ev, Lectures on Divine Humanity, Boris Jakim, ed. (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindsfarne Press, 1995). 680 Vladimir Solov’ev, “Iz vospominanii: Aksakovy,” in Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 12 (Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1970), 482-488 or in Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3, 275-282.

218 represented by R.A. Fadeev and the group around Aksakov threatened the future of Russia’s development because it rested on an “undeserved distrust of society and of the institutions that

[society] values most of all.”681 During the composition of the Lectures, Solov’ev was preparing his political break with Aksakov, Fadeev, and the “revolutionary conservatism” associated with the Slavic Benevolent Committees.

This chapter argues that if the silence surrounding them was deafening, the Lectures mark an important step in the development of Solov’ev’s thought, though only a single step. Solov’ev himself discounted the intellectual merit of the first ten lectures in a letter to the editor of

Pravoslanoe obozrenie in 1881, where the Lectures appeared in print: “What I read three years ago on ‘the last things,’ I have decided is completely irrelevant [sovsem ne kasat’sia].”682 In the

Lectures, Solov’ev began to apply his theistic conception of religion to social and political problems in an extended way. For Solov’ev, social and political questions were essentially religious questions. Following theism as a long-established tradition of discourse, Solov’ev developed a rational justification of religion as a way to turn Russian subjects from concrete and potentially divisive social and political questions toward what he regarded as loftier moral concerns that rational religion could provide.

Although Romantic poets like Wordsworth had transformed the genre’s thematic concerns and style without significantly altering the form and general motive, this endeavor placed Solov’ev in a long line of Christian thinkers who strove to apply the ancient genre of epic to Christian concerns. Given the sources from which Solov’ev developed his vision of religion

681 Iu.F. Samarin, Revoliutsionyi konservatizm (Berlin: B. Behr’s Buchhandlung (E.Bock), 1875), 9. 682 E. L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma i materialy (Petersburg: Izd-vo Z. I. Grzebina, 1922), 233. All of this was appreciated by Georges Florovsky in his “Reason and Faith in the Philosophy of Solov’ëv,” in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 285n.4 and by Ludolf Müller in his Solovjev und der Protestantismus (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1951), 22.

219 as well as the fact that his vision had no institutional authority or positive existence, this chapter also complicates the nature of Solov’ev’s Orthodoxy, although it by no means denies it or implies that he is actually protestant.683 By emphasizing the moral cultivation of the individual person, Solov’ev displaced the proper sphere of the person’s activity from society and politics to moral and religious cultivation. For this reason, Solov’ev’s Lectures can be seen as an attempt to answer the problem of the empire’s subjects’ attitudes toward statehood, an issue that the 1878 Osoboe soveshchanie on the Vera Zasulich affair had noted several years before.

Because Solov’ev chose to deliver these lectures to the beau monde, members of the royal family, and members of the Slavic Benevolent Committees, he thought the educated members of society needed to recover what he called at the beginning of lecture two “the religion of the future.”684

On 29 January 1878, a twenty-five-year-old Solov’ev delivered the first of his Lectures in the main auditorium of the Museum of Applied Knowledge in Saint Petersburg’s Solianoi

Gorodok. The location was not arbitrary, for the museum had been founded and funded with the backing of Moscow Slavophiles for the promotion of science and patriotism in the empire.685

For good reason, then, Solov’ev sought the help of A.A. Kireev—president of the Saint

Petersburg section of the Slavic Benevolent Committee and the brother of O.A. Novikova—to secure this location for his lectures.686 The audience reflected the social network supporting

Solov’ev’s intellectual endeavor. N.N. Strakhov bitterly noted in a letter to L.N. Tolstoi that

Solov’ev delivered his lectures only with the patronage of several levels of political and social

683 Müller, Solovjev und der Protestantismus, esp. 20. 684 Solov’ev, SS, vol. 3, 15. 685 Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 146-153. 686 Letter to A.A. Kireev dated 1878 in Radlov, ed., Solov’eva, vol. 2, 95-96

220 authority: Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, religious authorities, and members of “the fashionable public.”687

While deciding how to deal with Britain’s decision to send its navy to the Bosporus to ensure Russian troops did not attack Constantinople, what the government regarded as the

Zasulich debacle, as well as concerts and family meals, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich made it a point to try to attend as many of Solov’ev’s lectures as possible. Based on the form of the Grand Duke’s diary, Solov’ev’s lectures were part of a day’s business.688 Although Grand

Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich made it a point to attend Solov’ev’s Lectures when matters of state did not take precedence, he was more interested in the theater: “At 8:30 to Solov’ev’s first lecture at Solianoi Gorodok. He spoke terribly slowly and at great length and thought for a long time after each phrase. Because of this, it was dry, boring, and tiresome; but it was still unspeakably interesting to me.”689

Of the capital’s newspapers, only two sent correspondents: Golos and Tserkovsnyi vestnik. The anonymous correspondent for the former appreciated the social significance of

Solov’ev’s lectures: “Whoever follows the displays of contemporary humankind’s internal life will learn that religious questions have of late obtained more and more importance, agitating the uneducated national mass and also various circles of educated society.”690 The correspondent from the Tserkovnyi Vestnik—a student at the Saint Petersburg Clerical Academy—merely transcribed the content of Solov’ev’s lectures, while the editor added commentary on dogmatic

687 “Strakhov to Tolstoi 3 February 1878, SPb,” Tolstovskii muzei, vol. 2 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvo Tolstovskogo Muzeia, 1914), 149. 688 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], fond 722, opsi’ 1, delo 1159, ll. 1-87ob., and ibid., edinitsa khraneniia 1160, ll. 3-22. I was unable to consult A.A. Kireev’s diary at the manuscript section of the Russian State Library because that section was closed for remodeling in 2007-2008. 689 GARF, f. 722, o. 1, ed. kh 1159, ll. 66-66ob. (dated 29 January 1878). 690 Golos, no. 3 (31 January/12 February 1878): 3.

221 issues in footnotes.691 By the sixth lecture, however, Tserkovnyi Vestnik discontinued coverage because Solov’ev’s vision of religion went too far beyond the limits of dogma.692

Society’s silence on the substance of the lectures was remarkable.

By all eyewitness accounts, then, Solov’ev’s Lectures were a non-event in the social life of northern capital and a minor event in the development of Solov’ev’s thought.693 While

Solov’ev had publicly defended his master’s thesis, delivered university lectures, and read papers at learned societies, these were narrow, academic affairs. In Saint Petersburg, he was overshadowed by the diplomatic events between San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin. Above all, though, Vera Zasulich’s trial for attempting to assassinate General F.F. Trepov, the military governor of Saint Petersburg, cast a long shadow over Saint Petersburg. The German ambassador in Saint Petersburg could hardly speak of anything else.694 On 31 March, the Grand

Duke, who read newspapers daily, exclaimed in his diary that “the Zasulich who shot at Trepov was tried today” and “she has been acquitted!!!”695 Among the cultural elite, even Solov’ev’s intellectual acquaintances did not have complete sympathy with his views. If the social significance of the Lectures has been misconstrued, what are we to make of their argument in the context of the young Solov’ev’s work?

691 Gavriil Sobelev, “Chteniia po filosofii religii master’s thesisa filosofii V.S. Solov’eva,” Tserkovnyi vestnik no 5 (4 February 1878): 4-7; no. 6 (11 February 1878): 9-11; no. 7 (18 February 1878): 11-14; no. 11 (18 March 1878): 2-4; no. 14 (8 April 1878): 4-6. 692 Gavriil Sobolev, “Chteniia po filosofii religiia master’s thesisa filosofii V.S. Solov’eva,” Tserkovnyi Vestnik. No. 14 (8 April 1878): 4-6. 693 For a list of works about Solov’ev that illustrates the public silence surrounding Solov’ev, see S. P. Zaikin, “Materialy k bibliografii rabot o Vl. S. Solov’eve (1874-1922),” in A. A. Nikol’skii, Russkii Origen XIX veka: Vl. S. Solov’ev (Saint Petersburg: Nauka, 2000), 382-414, esp. 382. See also N. Strakhov, “Istoriia i Kritika Filosofii,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia, no. 1 (January 1881): 79-115 694 General v. Schweinitz, Denkwürdigkeiten des Botschafters General v. Schweinitz, vol. 2 (Berlin: Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, 1927), 1-40. 695 GARF, f. 722, o. 1, ed. khr.1160, l. 12

222 Solov’ev offered a clue to his intentions in the early 1870s when he admonished his cousin to read English and German poets for a true understanding of the nature of man.696 That literature, especially William Wordsworth’s, self-consciously sought to assimilate what has been called the genre of “philosophical-theological epic,” which had been appropriated from the middle ages to the nineteenth century in order to present a schema of the history of nature as a cosmos focused on the salvation of man. Both nature and man, therefore, had a clear moral purpose that God communicated to his creation and his creatures via Providence.697

For English romantic poets like Wordsworth, the model for this form of epic had been

John Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton had invoked the divine word to “what is in me dark/Illumine, what is low raise and support;/That to the height of this great argument/I may assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men.”698

Similarly, Wordsworth invoked the cultural authority of John Milton in “Prelude” in order to appropriate an English national epic tradition within which Wordsworth could transfer the religious scheme of salvation from a supernatural to a natural frame—from the soul’s literal ascent to God to the epic of the enlargement of mind.699 As Wordsworth described his theme:

“Not Chaos, not/The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,/Nor aught of blinder vacancy—scooped out/By help of dreams, can breed such fear and awe/As fall upon us often when we look/Into our

Minds, into the Mind of Man,/My haunt, and the main region of my song.”700 As a young man,

696 E. L. Radlov, ed., Pis’ma, vol. 3 (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1911), 57. 697 E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990 [1953]), 120 and also 59-60, 84, 243-244. 698 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., John Milton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 356. 699 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 21-31, 392 and E.S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 62-64. 700 Ibid., 467.

223 F.W.J. Schelling made an abortive attempt at an epic poem for the same purpose.701 Such a form narrated the exploits of a particular personality in the heroic acceptance of his fate.

This genre’s structural ribbing shaped nearly all of Solov’ev’s early work, from La

Sophie, to the abortive FNTsZ, and, finally, the Lectures. From the composition and publication of KON in 1880-1881 through his polemical journalism in the 1880s, Solov’ev would give up this genre, but not the method of exegesis or the impulse. Since the rules of the epic genre required the invocation of a muse to aid in the singing of the poet’s song of heroism, Christian poets had been assimilating Christian literature into this model. John Milton, for example, invoked Lady Wisdom from Proverbs 8:31, who “was daily his [the Lord’s] delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” At the beginning of the seventh canto of

Paradise Lost, Milton exalted Wisdom over the pagan Urania in order to Christianize the epic form:

Descend from heaven Urania …/The meaning, not the name I call; for thou/Nor of the muses nine, nor on the top/Of old Olympus dwell’st, but heavenly born,/Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,/Though eternal wisdom didst converse,/Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play/In presence of the almighty Father, pleased/With thy celestial song.702

In the naturalized super-naturalist version of Christian epic, Wordsworth deliberately echoed

Milton’s strategy when he depicted “the Bard,/Holiest of Men” invoking Urania’s guidance “or a greater Muse, if such/Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!”703 The main feature of this genre was to perfect and supplement Christian doctrine without displacing or secularizing it.

Instead of epic in a poetic form, Solov’ev aimed to create an Orthodox Christian epic in what he regarded as a philosophical and scientific mode.

701 Ibid., 509n.34. 702 Milton, Paradise Lost, 491. 703 Cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 466. For the Milton-Wordsworth link, see 21-22.

224 The main figure in Solov’ev’s works that has obscured the scientific nature of his endeavor is the mythologem of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God. Already by 1876, Solov’ev had begun to develop his philosophy of religion through an in-depth engagement with the

Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Jacob Böhme, Emmanuel Swedenborg and Schelling in La Sophia and various extant drafts from that period.704 In FNTsZ, Solov’ev could refer to Origen, who employed Neoplatonic methods in Biblical exegesis, as a figure who maintained the proper idealistic interpretation of the Old Testament, and law in general, in the face of the Emperor

Justinian’s codification of Roman law and Church doctrine.705

The only place in which Solov’ev discussed Sophia in mystical terms was in a letter to

S.A. Tolstaia, whom he had met through Tsertelev in April 1877, well after he had begun to develop his own ideas.706 When Solov’ev wrote to S.A. Tolstaia at her estate Krasnyi Rog, between Chernigov and Orel, that he had found “much confirmation of [his] very own ideas in mystics” like George Gichtel, Gottfried Arnold, and John Pordage, yet “they almost all [had] an extraordinarily subjective character, driveling so to speak.” Although he claimed “all three had personal experiences almost the same as mine,” “all three [were] quite weak, especially weak in theosophy.”

What that experience was, however, Solov’ev left unexplained. In any case, recapturing

Solov’ev’s specific experience is impossible and, more important, unhelpful for understanding

Solov’ev’s intellectual endeavor, which was rational and discursive.707 Privileging the name

704 Solov’ev, La Sophia, in PSS, vol. 2, 150. For the drafts, see ibid., 162-181, esp. pp. 173n.1, 176-177, 179-181. 705 Solov’ev, FNTsZ, in PSS, vol. 2, 200. 706 Luk’ianov, O Vl.S. Solov’eve, vol. 4, 133-135. 707 On the elusive nature of historical experience in historiography, see John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibiltiy of Experience,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 879-907.

225 Böhme as the master theosopher, Solov’ev claimed that the others “follow[ed] Böhme but

[were] less than he” in the development of their doctrines of Sophia. Further denigrating the theosophical doctrines constructed by the lesser lights of Sophia, Solov’ev thought “that Sophia troubled with them more for their innocence than for anything else. As a result, only Paracelsus,

Böhme, and Swedenborg prove[d] to be real people so that the field remain[ed] very broad for me.” 708

Though the intellectual atmosphere at Krasnyi Rog and in Saint Petersburg, where

Tolstaia continued to promote mystical and theosophical literature, may have been congenial to

Solov’ev, the young philosopher was already developing his own rational justifications of the cosmic schemas he had found in this literature.709 The attempt to provide rational reasons for belief in such schemas radically distinguished Solov’ev’s efforts from the poetic and mystical interests that Tolstaia cultivated. All of the Neoplatonic, Kabalistic, and Theosophical literature provided Solov’ev with microcosmic and macrocosmic schemas within which to situate the history of mankind’s religious and moral development. But Solov’ev sought to develop a rational justification of the scheme, not what Kant would have called a fanciful account in poetry.

Instead of invoking Sophia as a muse or a literal experience, however, Solov’ev employed the figure as a mythological form from which religious truth could be derived, which was just the procedure for which Plato coined the term “theology”—talk about the gods that

708 Letter to S. A. Tolstaia from Saint Petersburg dated 27 April 1877, in ibid., 200. 709 On the intellectual atmosphere cultivated by S.A. Tolstaia, see André Lirondelle, Le poète Alexis Tolstoï: l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Hachette, 1912), but see in particular 466-493; Th. D. Batiushkov, “Gr. Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi (1817-1875),” in D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v., vol. 3 (Moscow: Izdanie T-va ‘Mir,’ 1910), 412-414; and Maria Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 23-24.

226 arrived at moral principles.710 Such a vision of theology had been appropriated by the

Patristic fathers in their interpretation of the Old Testament, and the Patristics were being read in

Russia beginning in the 1820s in just this way.711 The same impulse was behind much of the mythological scholarship on which Solov’ev based his first published article and which continued to shape his method of interpreting sacred texts.712 All of this merely offered Solov’ev a method for deriving moral principles from religion that was at once religious and modern. At least in terms of historical, philological, and philosophical disciplines, this method was the state of the art. As far as natural science went, however, Solov’ev overstepped the boundaries of his method—philology and textual criticism could serve as tools for discovering man’s moral vocation, but they could no longer have anything to say about divine purposes in the natural world. Before Solov’ev developed his mythological explanation of the meaning of Christ’s incarnation for mankind, however, he defined the social problem as a religious problem.

From the very beginning of his Chteniia, Solov’ev argued that the official Church and religious practice were in vital need of reform in order to become relevant in the life of contemporary mankind. He claimed that “the contemporary opponents of religion” were right to

“maintain a negative attitude toward the religious principle” because “the contemporary state of our religion calls for rejection, because religion in actuality [was] not what it ought to be.”713

According to Solov’ev, religion was “the connection of man and the world with the

710 Allan Bloom, trans., The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 56, 450n.45. 711 On the Patristic appropriation of Plato, see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univeristy Press, 1961). On the Patristic Fathers in Russia, see Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825- 1905” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007), 1-92. 712 A.D. Momigliano, “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” in G.W. Bowerstock and T.J. Cornell, eds., A.D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1-14. See also Josine H. Block, “Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth,” History and Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 26-52. 713 Solov’ev, Chteniia, in Solov’ev and Radlov, Sochinenii, vol. 3, 3.

227 unconditional principle and focus of all that exists” and thus “it ought to determine all our interests, all the content of human life and consciousness; everything essential in what man does, knows, and produces ought to depend on it and to be related to it.”714

Religion, according to Solov’ev, ought to show man how to be moral. Invoking ancient

Pythagorean and Platonic moral geometry, Solov’ev explained the role of religion in the life of mankind at greater length:

If we grant the unconditional center of gravity, then all points on the circle of life [zhiznennago kruga] ought to be united with it in equal radii. Only then [would] unity, wholeness, and concord in life and the consciousness of man appear, only then [would] all his doings and sufferings in the noble and petty of life be changed from valueless and meaningless phenomena into rational, internally necessary events.715

Solov’ev’s account of the content of religion as articulated in the course of his lectures aimed to solve the social problems that arose when Russian subjects had “as many relative, temporary centers of life and consciousness, as we have different demands and interests, tastes and inclinations, opinions and views.”716 In language that recalled British evolutionary social theory,

Solov’ev characterized “the reigning conviction” in Russian society as the belief that “all ends and beginnings of human existence reduce[d] to present actuality, to given natural existence

[bytiiu], and all our life ought to be locked ‘in the narrow circle of sublunary impressions,’ although even in this narrow circle contemporary civilization [was] laboring [usilivaetsia] to find a unifying and organizing principle for humanity.”717

Solov’ev identified positivism and socialism as symptoms of a social malaise that both

Russia and the rest of Europe experienced in the late-1870s, whose cure could be found in a

714 Ibid. 715 Ibid. 716 Ibid., 4. 717 Ibid.

228 renovated religion. The two unsatisfactory solutions to this malaise proffered by the West were “socialism” which “related chiefly to the practical interests of social life” and “positivism” which “has in view the theoretical area of scientific [nauchnago] knowledge.”718 Both of these modern trends, according to Solov’ev, “only wished to occupy the empty place left by religion in the life and consciousness of contemporary civilized humanity.”719

Solov’ev devoted the remainder of his first lecture to the “justice [pravda] of socialism” which for Solov’ev “held no menace,” and positivism.720 For Solov’ev, the appearance of socialism in contemporary “extrareligious” civilization was provoked by the ideals proclaimed by “the French Revolution”: the “rights of man” were “liberty and equality which ought to be reconciled in fraternity.” This “attempt to build an edifice of universal culture, to organize humanity on purely worldly, external principles” was highly problematic for Solov’ev. Based

“in our world” of “struggle” and “unlimited competition” without any sublimating or elevating principle, “the authority [vlast’] of the monarchy and feudal lords was only occupied by the authority of capital and the bourgeoisie.”721 Contemporary society had to recognize a countervailing force to what Solov’ev regarded as a philistine civilization. As Solov’ev put it,

“equality of rights means nothing without equality of forces [sil].”722 The source of these

“forces,” according to Solov’ev, lay in a particular account of the meaning and purpose of religion in mankind’s life.

718 Ibid., 5. 719 Ibid. 720 Ibid. 721 Ibid., 5-6. On the complicated way “bourgeois” was used in nineteenth-century France, see Sarah C. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Russians were not unique in criticizing the bourgeoisie. 722 Ibid., 6.

229 As a solution to his perception of a crisis of statehood within society, Solov’ev argued, “the social structure ought to rest on some sort of positive basis.” Setting up his own solution as a middle position between two extremes, Solov’ev identified two sources of political authority. It would “either have an unconditional, supernatural, and super-human character, or it

[would] appertain to the conditional sphere of given human nature; society either rests on the will of God or on the will of the people, on the people’s will [vole narodnoi].”723 According to

Solov’ev’s formulation of the modern problem of social order, “the force [sila] of the state authority [vlast’] of the government” was disqualified as a possible basis in itself because “state authority itself, the government itself” rests on either of two more fundamental bases: “either on the will of God or the will of the nation.”724 The French Revolution’s claim to have “established democracy in principle” on the will of the nation had “in fact produced only a plutocracy” in which “the nation govern[ed] itself [upravliaet soboiu] only de jure, while de facto supreme authority [vlast’] belonged to a minute part [of the nation]—to the rich bourgeoisie, to the capitalists.”725 What the French Revolution had actually established, according to Solov’ev, was

“the kingdom of free competition, or rivalry” which gave “freedom and equality of rights” to

“the majority” of society’s members, but “only as an abstract possibility” making

the aspiration of socialism toward equality of the rights of material well-being, the aspiration to transfer this material well-being from the hands of the minority to the hands of the national majority appear as completely natural and legal from the point of view of those principles which were proclaimed by the French Revolution and lay at the basis of all contemporary civilization.726

723 Ibid. 724 Ibid. 725 Ibid., 6-7. 726 Ibid., 7-8.

230 The fundamental contradiction of the ideals proclaimed by the French Revolution, according to Solov’ev, lay in the lofty social ends to be achieved through the base and material means of the modern commercial economy.

Solov’ev claimed that socialism had relative validity but only insofar as it was an expression of the ideal of social equity, the fulfillment of which would be Russia’s calling based on a very rigorous notion of morality as self-denial. Although socialism made the realization of social equity a goal, it could not explain how social equity was to be achieved if it could not explain why individuals would restrain their potentially infinitely acquisitive appetites. While

“socialism appear[ed] as an historically justified force [sila],” its pretension “to be the highest moral force [sila]” and “to realize unconditional justice [pravda] in the area of social relations” led it to what Solov’ev called its “contradiction with itself.”727 Pretending to solve the problems of social inequality and disorder “in the equalization of material well-being,” socialism left only

“one of two” logical solutions to the problem of finite, material resources: 1) “material welfare”

[was] made “a goal in itself” in which case the pursuit of one’s material welfare could “have no moral significance” because “to proclaim the restoration of the rights of matter, as a moral principle, [was] the same as proclaiming the restoration of the rights of egoism” in which “the significance of absolute justice [pravda] cannot” lie; or 2) “material well-being in itself [was] not the goal for socialism, but social equity [spravedlivost’] in the distribution of this welfare [was] the goal.”728 The former alternative could have no moral significance since, according to

Solov’ev, “social equity [spravedlivost’], in the moral sense, [was] a certain self-limiting of one’s own pretensions in the interests of the rights of others; equity [spravedlivost’] [was] thus a

727 Ibid., 8. 728 Ibid., 8. As examples of the former, Solov’ev had in mind “one founder of a socio-religious sect in America who put in place of Moses’ Ten Commandments twelve of his own, of which the first says [glasit]: ‘Love thyself,’” ibid.

231 certain sacrifice, a self-denial, and the more self-sacrificing, the more self-denying, the better it [was] in the moral sense.”729 Within the parameters of this conception of what is moral, any self-interested activity could have no moral value.

“But,” as Solov’ev continued, “if socialism [could] have a moral significance in the capacity of the self-seeking striving of the class of the have-nots, then this [did] not preclude it from presenting a moral character and the demand for social justice irrespective of who present[ed] that demand.” This was true, according to Solov’ev, particularly in its conviction that “the social structure [was] founded on the egoism of separate individuals, from whence proceed[ed] their competition, their struggle, enmity, and all social evil.”730 Given this conception of “the root of social injustice [nepravdy]” as “egoism,” “social justice ought to be founded on the opposite, i. e., on the principle of self-denial and love” since “every authority

[vlast’] which [did] not represent in itself the unconditional principle of justice [pravda], every such power [was] violence and submission to it [could] only be coerced.”731

Having made political submission “on the ground of given natural conditions, in the kingdom of nature” an impossible basis for solving social evil because of what he regarded as manifest and irreconcilable natural inequalities among men and women, “the free submission of each to all [was] obviously possible only when all of these [were] themselves subordinated to the unconditional moral principle in relation to which they [were] equal among themselves as all finite quantities [were] equal in relation to infinity,” or in other words, “in the kingdom of grace, i. e., on the basis of the moral principle as the unconditional or the divine.”732

729 Ibid. 730 Ibid., 9. 731 Ibid., 9-10. 732 Ibid., 10-11.

232 Solov’ev intended to base his social theory on religion, but first he had to address the problem that Comtean positivism posed for the legitimacy of religious facts as a basis for knowledge—Comte’s three-stage scheme of the history of the human mind eliminated religion at a very early stage of human development.733 To put religion on a scientific par with positivism,

Solov’ev felt he had to offer an inverted account of the role of religion in the history of the development of the human mind. There was an obviously polemical point to Solov’ev’s strategy in order to expand the meaning of Enlightenment.

Having claimed that the only authority to which one may freely submit oneself was the absolute authority that existed above nature and all living beings, Solov’ev then limited the function of reason to “only a means, a tool, or medium of cognition [poznaniia]” in order to develop an account of how one intuits the “content” of cognition to arrive at the truth from which moral social relations [could] be deduced.734 As Solov’ev put it, “Reason [gave] the ideal form, the content of reason or rational cognition, however, [was] reality and since supernatural, metaphysical reality [was] rejected by the rationalizing [razsudochnym] Enlightenment, only the conditional reality of given, natural phenomena remain[ed].”735 Positivism narrowed the scope of what [was] considered real and the conditions of the possibility of knowledge of the real.

Solov’ev concluded that positivism, like socialism, sought an ultimate and uniting principle

in [positivism] one [could not] help but see a legitimate aspiration to realize the truth, to bring [truth] into being in the extreme limits of actuality, to show [it] as a visible, palpable fact in exactly the same way as in socialism one [could not] deny a legitimate

733 On Comte’s three-stage scheme, see Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 86, 200-207. 734 SS, vol. 3, 11. 735 Ibid. Solov’ev linked the proclamation of “the rights of man” to the “so-called Enlightenment of the 18th century” and its combat against “traditional theology.”

233 aspiration to realize the moral principle, to carry it through into the extreme limits of life, in the sphere of material economic relations.736

The positivist account of what counted as legitimate and possible objects of knowledge and the conditions for the possibility of knowledge about them, Solov’ev argued, was such that the truth from which to deduce moral laws of an internally unified society was impossible because “the given facts” were constantly multiplying and changing. The only condition under which “justice [pravda] might be brought into being by man in the lowest sphere of life” was if it

“previously exist[ed] in itself, independently of man, just as truth, before becoming a fact for man, had to have its own reality.”737 It was for this reason that Solov’ev claimed “both socialism and positivism, if one logically developed their principles, led to the demand for a religious principle in life and knowledge.”738

These doctrines, according to Solov’ev, sought after ultimate aims that were impossible to achieve given the limited, finite, and changing facts of the merely natural realm. As

Solov’ev’s own studies indicate, he thought that the natural or immanent realm had to be supplemented with a very careful account of the supernatural or transcendental realm and its significance just as Kant had. Yet, as we saw in chapter 1, his reading of the Romantic poets led him to emphasize the aesthetic and individual genius in his exposition.

Solov’ev intended to prove in the rest of the lectures that religion was the key solution to the social problems faced by modern philosophy. While positivism and socialism devoted exclusive attention to the objects of material knowledge, Solov’ev argued that “the object of religious knowledge” showed the way to the true nature of man since only this type of

736 Ibid. Solov’ev also called the economic sphere “the lowest [nizshei] sphere of life.” 737 Ibid., 11. 738 Ibid., 12.

234 knowledge revealed “absolute reality.”739 Moving the center of gravity from individual material interests to the will of God and its commands on the human will, Solov’ev argued that a

separate, given will [did] not represent in itself any good, and justice [pravdy], but [became] righteous [pravednoi] only through normal relations or harmony with the universal will, and the universal will not in the sense of a mechanical union of the wills of the many or everyone, but in the sense of the will which according to nature [was] universal, i. e., the will of Him Who is all, the will of God.740

Solov’ev related this conception of the ideal content of God to his definition of “religion” as that which was “the reunion of man and the world with the unconditional and all-encompassing principle” consisting “in leading all elements of human existence, all private principles and forces of humanity into the correct relation to the unconditional, central principle and through it and in it to the correct harmonious relationship of them among themselves.”741

In the second lecture, Solov’ev commenced his comparative study of mythology and religion as a source for showing mankind his future end. Indeed, consistent with the norms of this genre of the philosophical history of religion, Solov’ev was interested in the past only insofar as it indicated a path for mankind’s closed development into the future. He proclaimed his religious radicalism in the opening paragraph:

I have said that the purpose [naznachenie] of Western development, of Western extra- religious civilization serves as a necessary transition for mankind from the religion of the past to the religion of the future.742

Since he could not claim to have firm knowledge of the future, Solov’ev argued that “a certain conception of the general character of this future” could be discerned in “the sins of the religious past, its main untruths [nepravdy] that called forth the necessity of negation and the negative

739 Ibid., 12. 740 Ibid., 11-12. 741 Ibid., 12. 742 Ibid., 15.

235 transition to other forms.”743 The comparative study of mythology and religion taken as steps in a broader revelation of the Christian God would show mankind a map for the future.

The religious past that Solov’ev had in mind was the medieval Catholic Church as an institution that illegitimately restricted the development of human spiritual forces. As Solov’ev put it, Catholicism

leads a stubborn struggle against intellectual and social progress, a progress that will receive a fateful, irresistible force over the old principle only when it achieves positive conclusions, when it receives the bases on which the construction of a new world that is not only freer, but also richer in spiritual forces will be possible.744

Given his characterization of the Catholic Church as intellectually stagnant, Solov’ev synonymized the medieval Catholic Church with the contemporary Catholic Church in Germany in order to highlight shortcomings in German domestic and Church policy in the context of

Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.745 That struggle, according to Solov’ev, dramatized the contemporary disharmony between the sacred and secular realms. Considering the “strict division, demarcation of church and civil spheres,” Solov’ev argued that “if the church [was] actually the kingdom of

God on Earth, then all other forces and powers [sily i vlasti] ought to be subordinated to it, ought to be its instruments. If the Church represents in itself the divine, unconditional principle, then everything else ought to be conditional, dependent, servile [sluzhebnym].”746

At first glance, Solov’ev might seem to have argued that the state ought to subordinate itself the spiritual authority of the Church. However, that would be one-sided in Solov’ev’s language. Rather, true spiritual authority, which the Catholic Church only barely conveyed because of its worldly corruption, should lead both Church and State to recognize their own

743 Ibid. 744 Ibid., 15. 745 Ibid., 16. 746 Ibid., 17.

236 proper spheres of activity. In both cases, the transcendent Kingdom of God should serve as the example for both the secular and sacred realms. Arguing that the “temporal life of humanity serve[d] only as a means and transition toward eternal life” it followed that “all interests and affairs of this temporal life ought to be only means and instruments for eternal, spiritual interests and affairs, ought to be in one way or another conditioned by eternal life and the kingdom of

God.”747 For “once state and society recognize[d] themselves as Christians, such a point of view ought to be obligatory for them.”748 Such was the institutional side of the Kingdom of God.

There was also a personal aspect to the Kingdom of God that focused on the human personality, for the Kingdom of God could accommodate the human personality in ways that materialism could not. Citing John 14:2, Solov’ev explained the ideal that the Kingdom of God ought to represent to the Kingdom on Earth: “There is a place for everything in the Kingdom of

God, everything can be connected by an internal, harmonious [garmonicheskoi] connection; nothing ought to be suppressed or destroyed.”749 The possibility of union with Divinity was assured, according to Solov’ev, because “the human personality [lichnost'] can only be united freely, [and] from within, with the divine principle because it, itself, is divine in a particular sense, or more correctly, it participates in Divinity.”750 The creative aspect of divinity that human beings possessed in potential was something that allowed them, if they allowed themselves to be properly guided by God, to realize moral principles in life in ways that materialism could not explain.

747 Ibid. 748 Ibid. 749 Ibid., 18. For the identification of the Biblical passage, see Boris Jakim’s translation, entitled Lectures on Divine Humanity, 16. 750 Ibid., 19.

237 Natural science and materialism in contemporary intellectual life, Solov’ev argued, were inadequate for attaining the absolute truth on which personal morality could be based.

Outlining what he considered the “mechanical world-view or materialism,” using the two terms interchangeably—“since [he had] in view only that meaning of them in which they coincide,” as the basic structure of natural scientific knowledge—Solov’ev identified two of “its general, basic assertions” that “were completely true.” First, “everything which exists consists of force and matter.” Second, “everything which is in the process of being perfected [sovershaiushchee] is perfected [sovershaetsia] by necessity, or according to immutable laws.”751 Not wishing to deny the relative intellectual merit of natural science and the mechanical world-view, Solov’ev claimed “these [two] propositions exclude[d] nothing in their generality [obshchnosti]” so that they could “also be recognized even from the point of view of spiritualism.”752 Natural science grounded in the materialistic and mechanistic world-view erred only when it asserted that

there [were] no other forces besides the physical; that there [was] no other matter besides what experimental physics and chemistry dealt with; that there [were] no other laws in nature besides mechanical laws which regulate[d] the motion of matter (and perhaps even other equally [stol’ zhe] mechanical laws of the association of ideas in human consciousness) [because it then asserted that] if we [met] something in experience which [did] not present a mechanical character (e. g., life, artistic creativity [tvorchestvo], then this [was] only an illusion: in essence everything [was] a mechanism and everything ought to be reduced to mechanical relations.753

Though “science dealt with matter and forces,” it had nothing to do with “what matter and force

[were] in essence [v sushchnost’].”754 This was the province of the philosophy of religion.

751 Ibid., 22. Emphasis in original. 752 Ibid. Solov’ev added: “Actually, everything consists of matter and force, but of course these are very general propositions. We speak of physical forces [and] we speak of spiritual forces. Both the one and the other can be at the same time actual forces.” 753 Ibid., 24. 754 Ibid., 24.

238 For Solov’ev, modern, philosophical, and scientific religion offered resources for what he regarded as the enlargement of an important category of intelligentsia thought: consciousness.755 According to Solov’ev, “consciousness” of the unconditional content contained in the human “personality” was a prerequisite for “achieving the unconditional content in life.” Later in his Lectures, Solov’ev developed his concept of “religious consciousness” as an essential component of human nature and as a source for morality.756 Defining the social problem as a problem of knowledge, Solov’ev ambitiously asserted in the closing lines of lecture two that “the old, traditional form of religion” and “contemporary extra-religious civilization” could not ameliorate society because neither had followed the former’s “faith in God” and the latter’s “faith in man” to its logical conclusion—a “single, full, and whole truth of the

Godman.”757

Here Solov’ev introduced the theological trope of Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the transcendent in the immanent realm in order to serve both as the Son of God and as a moral archetype for man. In the discursive context of theism, this archetype was the foundation of a normative anthropology that ascribed a divine nature to man. God called on mankind to cultivate this divine element in order to rise above the material aspect of mankind’s nature. “The beginning of truth [istiny] [was] the conviction that the human personality [lichnost’] [was] not only negatively unconditioned (a fact)” but was also recognition of the fact “that human personality [lichnost’] [could] also achieve positive unconditionality, i. e., that it [could] possess

755 The locus classicus for the importance of “consciousness” as a way to check the liberating but threatening forces of “elemental spontaneity,” see Haimson, The Russian Marxists, esp. 8-12. 756 SS, vol. 3, esp. 111-115. 757 Ibid., 26.

239 total [vsetselym] content, this fullness of existence [bytiia] [was] not only a fantasy, a subjective phantom, but a real actuality full of forces.”758

Solov’ev was convinced that “faith in oneself, faith in the human personality [lichnost’]

[was] at the same time faith in God, for divinity appertain[ed] to man and to God with the difference that it appertain[ed] to God in eternal actuality, but it [was] only achieved by man, only received; in the given circumstances it [was] only a possibility, only an aspiration.”759

Although Solov’ev only hints at the role of Genesis 1:26 as the basis for a normative anthropology, he develops the idea more explicitly in subsequent lectures.760 As Solov’ev put it most clearly:

If man has the image of God in his ideal consciousness, then his unconditional freedom from idea as well as from fact (the formal unboundedness of the human “ego”) represents the likeness of God in him. Man not only has the same internal essence of life—all- encompassing unity—that God has, but is free to direct his desire upward [voskhotet’] to have it like God, i.e. he can direct his desire upward out of himself [ot sebia voskhotet’] to be like God.761

Since this conception of mankind’s relationship with God guides Solov’ev’s development of a normative anthropology in lectures seven through twelve, it would do to rehearse the structure and implications of the idea here.

To explain the significance of Jesus Christ for mankind’s moral behavior, Solov’ev introduced what scholars have called “synergism” into his account of the relationship between

God and mankind in order to make Orthodoxy a religion of morality.762 The exegetical basis for defining the relationship between God and mankind this way was assimilating certain passages

758 Ibid., 25. 759 Ibid., 25. 760 Ibid., 140, 150, 179. 761 Ibid., 150. 762 On synergism in Gregory of Nyssa, see Werner Jager, “Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise De Instituto Christiano,” in idem., ed., Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954), 70-114 especially 92.

240 in Plato’s Thaeatetus and Republic with Genesis 1:26 so that “image and likeness” in Genesis could be read in a Platonic sense to mean that God wanted mankind to strive to recover the image of God that had been planted in individual souls. If man was a combination of the mortal and divine at creation, other passages in the Bible could be read as the story of the development of man toward the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the “Second Adam.” For the Greek Fathers like

Clement of Alexandria and Origen, the God of the Bible appeared as a divine pedagogue communicating to his creatures a religious and moral culture via Providence.763

This exegetical principle informed Marsilio Ficino’s and Pico de Mirandola’s appropriation of Platonism at the Florentine Academy in the Renaissance, and it informed the

Cambridge Platonists’ account of the relationship between God and mankind in seventeenth- century England.764 This was also a prominent way for reform-minded German Protestants to read Plato and the Bible, and, it would seem a bit embarrassingly, the way reform-minded

Orthodox were reading the Greek Fathers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.765

Given the prominent interpretation of Solov’ev as a mystic, it is important to note here that

“synergism” as used by Alexandrian philosophers and theologians was not a mystical doctrine of mankind’s immediate identification with divinity, but a moral doctrine by which man constantly strives in the immanent realm to assimilate his actions to the moral ideals represented by divinity

763 Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 67, 86-102, 141n.5 and Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1967 [1959]), 83-107. 764 On Ficino and Pico, see Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 174-199. On the Cambridge Platonists, see C.A. Patrides, “‘The High and Aiery Hills of Platonisme’: An Introduction to the Cambridge Platonists,” in idem., ed., The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 4-8, 19-23 and Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, James P. Pettegrove, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; reprint, New York: Gordian Press, 1970), 25-41. 765 For the German lands, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of the Spirit, 1770- 1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12-32. For Russia, see Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right,’” 53-92.

241 in the transcendent realm.766 Organizing the presentation of history around the transcendent and the immanent has been a dilemma at the center of the “secularization thesis.”767 By introducing “synergism” into his conception of the relationship between God and Mankind,

Solov’ev followed his teacher at MDA, Kudriavtsev-Platonov. Having followed a venerable tradition of religious discourse in identifying a potentially synergistic relationship between God and mankind, Solov’ev had to show evidence of the results of this relationship in the history of religion.

As Kudriavtsev had taught, the history of religion provided evidence of the existence of a

“religious sense” in human nature that could be used as a rational and scientific justification for the continuing existence of a similar sense in modern mankind. Having asserted “the unconditional character of human life” and declared “the human personality” to be “the bearer of unconditional content” in the idea of God-manhood, Solov’ev developed an account of the methodological procedure by which the content of the idea of God-manhood was learned.768

That object, according to Solov’ev, was “the objective and unconditional principle” in the three

“spheres of spiritual life” which consisted of the true, the good, and the beautiful that constituted the “normative [normal’noe] something” which was also “something” that “ought to be because it, in itself, [was] good, true, and beautiful, [or] in other words, that it [was] the unconditional good, the true, and the beautiful.”769 These three elements were the philosophical content of religion according to Solov’ev:

766 On this essential distinction, see E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 74-76. 767 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 768 SS, vol. 3, 27. 769 Ibid., 32.

242 And so, the unconditional principle demands the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic interests of man. These three interests in their unity constitute religious interest for both the will, reason, and sense [chuvstvo] of the force of a single spirit, and the objects corresponding to them are merely disparate aspects (ideas) of a single unconditional principle which in its actuality is also the proper content of religion.770

Since “the actuality of the unconditional principle, as that which exists in itself independently of us—the actuality of God (as the independent actuality, in general, of whatever other being may be besides we ourselves) [could not] be deduced from pure reason, [could not] be proven purely logically,” it was necessary that “full and unconditional certainty in [the unconditional principle]

[could] be given only by faith.”771 Because all that human beings truly know was the content of their own experience mediated by their own minds, knowledge of an absolute that existed outside oneself must rely on an initial intuition of the existence of such an absolute entity so that

“faith alone remains” as the evidence of such a being.772 Paraphrasing Kant, Solov’ev put the matter this way:

We cannot know that something exists outside of us and independently of us because all that we know (really), i. e., all that we experience, exists in us and not outside us (like our sensations and out thoughts); that which is not in us but in itself, then, is thereby [tem samym] found beyond the limits of our experience and, consequently, our actual knowledge and can thus be asserted only by an act of the spirit which reaches beyond the limits of this our actuality, which is also called faith.773

In such a way, Solov’ev reinstated faith to a prominent epistemological role in mankind’s apperception of himself and the world.

Thus, Solov’ev found his own approach to addressing the problem that Schelling had identified in Hegel’s system in Schelling’s famous 1841 Berlin lecture that inaugurated “the many-pronged attack made by the Young Hegelians upon Hegel’s system” over the ability to

770 Ibid., 32. 771 Ibid., 32, 33. 772 Ibid., 33. 773 Ibid.

243 attain knowledge of the essence of an object by means of its existence.774 According to

Solov’ev, faith acted as the prerequisite for “the data of experience.” In order to become

“evidence of that which actually exists [deistvitel’no-sushchestvuiushchem] and as such constitutes the basis of objective knowledge,” a preceding act of faith in what one took as the really existent was necessary.775

However, faith as the sole source for the coherence of the data of experience was not enough, according to Solov’ev. It was possible for “knowledge” to synthesize the “separate evidence of what exists” only through faith, for there must be some basis for facts to be

“connected among themselves in order that experience be organized in a whole system, that it also achieve rational thinking which [would give] form to the empirical material.”776 Solov’ev offered an account of the process by which knowledge was achieved:

experience gives only psychical facts, the facts of consciousness; the objective significance of these facts is determined by the creative act of faith. In this faith, the internal facts of religious experience are cognized as the activity of the divine principle on us, as its revelation in us, and it, itself, appears thus as the actual object of our consciousness.777

The organization of the religious experience of revelation, according to Solov’ev, was the task of

“the philosophy of religion.”778 According to Solov’ev,

only a philosophy of religion as the connected system and full synthesis of religious truths can gives us an adequate (corresponding) knowledge of the divine principle as the unconditional or all-inclusive—for outside such a synthesis of separate religions facts they appear merely as discordant parts of an unknown whole.779

774 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1964), 115. Strémooukhoff linked Solov’ev’s understanding of mythology and revelation to his reading of Schelling in Messianic Work, 37-38. 775 SS, vol. 3, 34. 776 Ibid. 777 Ibid., 35. 778 Ibid. 779 Ibid., 36.

244 Philosophy of religion based on a theistic motive was for Solov’ev the academic discipline by which absolute knowledge of morality could be achieved. A key component of the philosophy of religion was the comparative history of religion and mythology with a very particular schema within which to ascribe meaning to various phases in the development or evolution of religion.

In developing this schema of the history of religion, Solov’ev followed another key component of theism—the hermeneutical principle of accommodationism. In the hands of philosophers and theologians whom Solov’ev self-assuredly regarded as his predecessors, the principle had been used to harmonize the different ways in which God had related to humanity in the Old and New Testaments, although some Greek Fathers and Renaissance Platonists would also extend the principle to Plato’s works as an early revelation of God.780 Befitting Solov’ev’s

Promethean ambition, he expanded this principle to encompass the entire history of world religions. In this way, he attempted to reintroduce the reality of the religious sense that had been eliminated by practitioners of comparative religion and mythology, like Friedrich Max Müller.781

Since Solov’ev argued that the only knowledge that could serve to unite the interests of disparate members of society in a legitimate and durable way was knowledge of God, he developed his philosophy of religion in regard to the intuitions individuals had experienced of

God’s own thoughts. In lecture three, Solov’ev inaugurated his ambitious attempt to identify the

“meaning and goal” of history through the comparative study of world religions, which in many

780 On the history of this principle, see Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accomodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202-289; and Dickey, Hegel, 12-32. 781 On the history of this discipline in the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, John Burrow, ‘That Noble Science of Politics: A Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 207-246.

245 ways anticipated what scholars now call “the axial age.”782 Typical of Solov’ev’s patriotism, however, the scheme Solov’ev constructed culminated in a renovated Russian Orthodoxy.

Applying the hermeneutic principle of accommodationism, Solov’ev devoted lecture three to asserting the primacy of the religious mode of cognition in man. As we saw in chapter three, this principle allowed the exegete to organize the mix of barbarous and civilized events in the Bible within a scheme of historical development that made the gradual development of civilized religion evidence of God’s progressive revelation to mankind. On this reading, Christianity occupied the highest and last place in the evolutionary scale of revelations. Solov’ev explained:

Since the human spirit in general, and consequently religious consciousness as well, is not something finished or prepared, but something that was rising up and being perfected (being completed), something that was found in process, then revelation of the divine principle in this consciousness necessarily appears as gradual. Just as external nature was only revealed gradually to the mind of man and humanity—and we should consequently speak about the development of experience and natural science—so the divine principle was gradually revealed to human consciousness, and we ought to speak of the development of religious experience and religious thinking.783

Solov’ev, however, extended the process of divine revelation across all of the world’s religions, beginning with Buddhism in the remainder of lecture three, through Hinduism, Classical,

Paganism, and Judaism in lectures four through five and leading up to the climax of the appearance of Christ and Christianity as the last great revelation of God on earth and to the consciousness of man.784

In his sixth lecture, Solov’ev revealed the sources of his theistic interpretation of

Orthodoxy in Platonized Christianity, from the Greek Fathers of the Church, through

Renaissance Platonists who used the pagan Greek tradition of independent human “philosophical

782 SS, vol. 3, 30. On the “Axial Age,” see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), esp. 1-21. 783 SS, vol. 3, 36. 784 See ibid., 41-78.

246 speculation” about truth as a means of supporting “a positive religion” based on the divine revelation contained in the Bible.785 At this point in his argument, Solov’ev presented Justin

Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory the Theologian as the sources of “the first speculations about God and his internal life” who developed “the essential truth of Philo’s and the Neoplatonists’ doctrine.”786

This truth, according to Solov’ev, amounted to the hermeneutical principle of accommodation, for all of these religious philosophers presented “the self-revelation of the all- encompassing unity of Divinity [vseedinoe Bozhestvo]” as “different variations of the same speculative theme.”787 And in a move worthy of Henry More, one of the leading Cambridge

Platonists, Solov’ev added in a footnote that contemporary scholarship on the history of religion ought to examine “the significance of native Egyptian theosophy (the revelations of Tot and

Hermes [Tresmegistus])” in relation to “Alexandrian theosophy and Christian doctrine.”788 In

1647, Henry More praised the content of these sources in several lines of verse from Psychozoia:

“Plato’s school/…well agrees with learned Pythagore,/Egyptian Trismegist, and th’antique roll/Of Chaldee wisdome, all which time hath tore/But Plato and deep Plotin do restore.”789

Such a conflation of Platonic schools was a common place in the Renaissance established by

Ficino and Pico in the Academy at Florence.790

785 SS, vol. 3, 79-102. 786 Ibid., 81, 82. 787 Ibid., 82. 788 Ibid., 83n.1. 789 Cited in Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists, 6. 790 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Eugenio Garin, Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1969); and Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Mario Domandi, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963[1927]), 3.

247 It was in the discursive context of the “speculative philosophy of religion” that

Solov’ev introduced and developed his conception of Sophia.791 This genre of philosophy aimed to preserve the moral element of religion through speculation on the possible meaning of religion. The rational coherence of the resulting account of religion was meant to check extravagant speculations that might threaten to undermine religion as a whole or sanction immorality. Within the context of Solov’ev’s argument and the intellectual resources on which he developed it, Sophia was a mythological representation of a vitalist Providence—the way God communicated purposes to mankind through the history of man and nature. Such a move was consistent with Solov’ev’s exalted sense of calling and ability since trying to explain the coherence of an idea by means of a mythological figure posed great difficulties even for Philo.792

Whatever conceptual difficulties Sophia posed for a coherent, discursive description and justification of the workings of God’s Providence, the utter over-determination of the significance of Sophia in the Lectures in particular, and Solov’ev’s body of work in general should now be clear.793 As an exercise in the philosophy of religion that was shaped by theism and comparative methods in the study of mythology, Sophia was merely the way Solov’ev chose to present the theistic principle of Providence.

The reason, in part, that he chose a mythological figure to represent this idea relates to the issue Solov’ev addressed in his master’s thesis through Giliarov-Platonov’s criticism of Hegelian philosophy. In the era immediately preceding the so-called Great Reforms, Giliarov-Platonov

791 Sophia is introduced at Solov’ev, Chteniia, in SS, vol. 3, 115. 792 John Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 80 B. C. to A. D. 220 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 163-164. 793 Solov’ev added two pages at the end of lecture seven defending himself against charges of pantheism because of his concept of Sophia. See Solov’ev, Chteniia, in SS, vol. 3, 116-118. Florovsky appreciated the dogmatic problems Solov’ev faced which also delayed the publication of the lectures in “Reason and Faith in the Philosophy of Solov’ëv,” 285n.4.

248 developed a conservative argument that the technical philosophical language on which

Hegel, indeed all philosophers, relied to present religious or philosophical truths, whatever those may be, would be useless as a way to educated illiterate and barbaric serfs. In order to appeal to their imaginations, so Solov’ev argued along with these conservatives, truth had to be presented in a way that would stir the imagination to an apprehension of practical religious truth.

The development of this part of his argument involved several discrete but related steps in defining the meaning of the Trinity, the ideal of human freedom implied in the Trinity, a justification of applying this freedom in order to transform nature, the possibility and meaning of theosis [obozhestvlenie], and the meaning of Jesus Christ as the Second Adam. First, Solov’ev defined the truth God aimed to communicate by determining the meaning of divinity in

Christianity. For Solov’ev, this meant a “speculative” explication of the Trinity that he determined through a breathless history of the course of “religious consciousness” up to the appearance of Christianity.794 Indeed, Solov’ev developed a history of the development of

“religious consciousness” that encompassed pessimism and asceticism, idealism, and monotheism as represented by an array of world religions. The culmination of all of this was the

Christian Trinity that, in Solov’ev’s speculative explication, was a schematic representation of the process by which individuals come to consciousness. In developing this account, Solov’ev also linked his project with Hegel’s, whom he claimed also recognized that “there were many real philosophers among the great Fathers of the Church who not only acknowledged the profound speculative truth in the dogma of the Trinity, but who also, themselves, did much to develop and clarify this truth.”795

794 SS, vol. 3, 83-102, quotations 115, 111. 795 Ibid., 99 and n.18.

249 The Trinity, according to Solov’ev, served as an archetype for social relations based on a series of analogies between the divine world, God, and mankind each of which was made up of three elements found in various degrees in each of these worlds. The first of these worlds,

“the divine world,” was composed of “three main spheres: the sphere of pure spirits, the sphere of mind, and the sphere of souls.”796 A step down on the Great Chain of Being was God, who, as the doctrine of the Trinity indicated, was also composed of these three elements represented by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.797 At this level, according to Solov’ev, the Trinity had social implications. For “all of these three spheres are in close and unbroken connection among themselves, represent the full, inner unity or solidarity among themselves since each of them fulfills the other, is necessary for the other, and is supported by the other.”798 And mankind, as a being who belongs to both the “divine” and “natural” worlds “by an act of intellectual contemplation can and must touch the divine world and remaining in the world of struggle and vague anxiety [smutnaia trevoga] enter into communication with clear images from the kingdom of glory and eternal beauty.”799 Solov’ev associated this faculty of “intellectual contemplation” with “poetic creativity” and “the true poet” who could decribe the divine world.800 Solov’ev illustrated this faculty with several lines of A.K. Tolstoi’s poetry.801

In Solov’ev’s own poetic imagination, which he strove to express discursively and philosophically, the figure of Sophia functioned as a conduit for God’s Providential guidance. In doing so, he followed a tradition of discourse that had a prominent role in the history of

796 Ibid., 117. 797 Ibid., 112, 117. 798 Ibid., 117. 799 Ibid., 118. 800 Ibid. 801 Ibid., 118-119.

250 Christianity that, as we have seen, Henry More and John Milton followed. Sophia allowed both poets to appropriate humanistic learning into Christianity on the authority of scripture. As

Solov’ev informed his audience in Saint Petersburg, the figure of Sophia existed in canonical and apocryphal books of the Old Testament: Song of Solomon and the Book of Wisdom. Solov’ev also found scriptural support for Sophia in chapters two and three of St. Paul’s first letter to the

Corinthians, which was particularly apt since St. Paul addressed social and political problems in the early Christian community in that letter.802 Solov’ev used this scriptural figure in order to show that while human beings live in the “natural world,” they can only imperfectly realize the potential of the Logos that Jesus Christ achieved.803

In the following lecture, Solov’ev used Kantian language in an attempted to develop a justification of this representation of the relationship between God and mankind using Kantian language. The importance that Solov’ev ascribed to poetry and the extension of Providence to the entire natural world constantly undermined his attempt to rationally justify this historical scheme of humankind’s salvation. As Kant noted in his famous “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), philosophy’s “chiliastic vision” which could impart a coherent scheme of the moral improvement of nations was possible only if the scheme were promoted by philosophy’s “idea.” Only by rigorously discursive philosophy could such a scheme of human history with a moral end be promoted so that it did not seem “fanciful,” or open to the potentially infinite number of individual interpretations or experiences.804

In lecture eight, Solov’ev relied on mythological and poetic language to promote his scheme of universal history with a moral intent, or as he put it, to explain “the riddle for reason”

802 Ibid., 115. 803 Ibid., 115-116. 804 Kant, “Universal History,” 36.

251 that such a scheme posed.805 The discourse of theism commonly focused on some miraculous event from scripture in order to establish the presence of the transcendent in the immanent realm—the Creation, the Flood, or Moses, for example. But the most important event was the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. And in this figure, as Solov’ev well knew, Christ was described as the “Second Adam” emphasizing his redemptive role and the possibility of a return to the perfect, prelapsarian world.806 For no clear reason, Solov’ev introduced the second figure of Sophia as “the principle of humanity” and “the ideal or normal man” who participates in the same divinity as Christ the Logos.807 If Christ already performs these functions, it is not at all clear what Sophia adds to the historical scheme Solov’ev sketched. Given his attempt to describe human freedom with certain restraints built into it—the restraint is the freedom to strive toward a normative end communicated by God—Sophia seems to be an attempt to introduce an intermediary between humanity and Christ in order to emphasize the inability of individual humans to realize in full the moral ideals communicated by God. With the figure of Sophia,

Solov’ev attempted to provide consolation to humanity for the ultimately unachievable end toward which his historical scheme bends. For Solov’ev, this type of “human freedom” is premised on what Solov’ev regarded as the necessary truth of “human immortality” which justified human actions that furthered the ideals of a world beyond the natural world.808

In lecture nine, Solov’ev developed his justification of reformist action, properly guided by Divine Providence,” in the “actual, natural world” that is “imperfect and abnormal.”809

Solov’ev’s account of freedom sanctioned reformist activity within the natural world so long as it

805 SS, vol. 3, 120. 806 Ibid., 121. 807 Ibid., 121. 808 Ibid., 127. 809 Ibid., 129.

252 was restrained or guided by the divine principles Solov’ev associated with his interpretation of the Trinity, Christ, and Sophia. At this point in his argument, Solov’ev described the harmonious relationship between the Trinity, Christ, and Sophia which was made possible by the fact that they all freely subjected themselves to the world soul.810 Here Solov’ev ran into a conundrum—how could human beings be free if they submitted their will to the “world soul” unless the world soul was just philosophical language for Providence.811 Solov’ev ran into a paradox he could not, like many idealists, resolve coherently. While Solov’ev was committed to the cause of reason and the rational justification of religion, he perceived the limits of reason’s persuasiveness. For that reason, Solov’ev was also committed to presenting religion in mythical form, which undermined his rational project.

In lecture ten, Solov’ev extended his scheme of historical development to the natural world. In doing so, he continued to follow his ambitious quest to explain morality in the entire world. Here, he went beyond what Kudriavtsev taught and tried to provide an answer to the questions raised by Spiritism that he had investigated in 1874 but in theological terms.812 In so doing, Solov’ev returned to sources of seventeenth-century natural science that dealt with the natural world in theological language about the body of God, a period in which “theological and physical arguments became nearly indistinguishable.”813 At this point, too, Solov’ev moved into the realm that Kant called “fanciful,” for Solov’ev extended purposes to the natural world instead of restricting them to the history of the human race. Hence, Solov’ev could talk about the

810 Ibid., 132-134 811 Ibid., 142. 812 Michael Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 81-110. 813 Amos Funkentsein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 23-116, quotation 72-73.

253 “incarnation of the divine idea in the world, which constituted the goal of all of the world’s movement, was conditioned by the conjunction of the divine principle with the soul of the world,” or as he also put it “theosis.”814 By reinserting divine purposes into the natural world at the level of science, Solov’ev went beyond the limits of science, philosophy, and theism.

In the final lectures, which come down to us as a combination of lectures eleven and twelve, Solov’ev moved back to the figure of Christ as “the Second Adam” and “incarnation of the divine Logos.”815 Though Solov’ev changed focus, he still situated Christ within the context of “the cosmic process in the material world that ended with the birth of natural man and, subsequently, the historical process that prepared the birth of the spiritual man.”816 Here,

Solov’ev reiterated the significance of Christ as an example of bounded freedom that he had already developed, for the “personality of the Godman” showed that humanity’s proper relationship to God required “the self-denial of the human will and the free submission to its divinity.”817 However, at the end of this lecture, Solov’ev extended his discussion of this ideal of

“personality” to the historical world of nations while also reiterating his interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Europe since the end of the eighteenth century. Solov’ev defined his own philosophical task against a polemical caricature of the Enlightenment as narrowly rational:

Theoretically, the principle of rationalism was expressed in the pretension to derive the whole content of knowledge from pure reason (a priori), or to speculatively construct all sciences: this pretention constituted the essence of German philosophy—naively proposed by Leibniz and Wolff, consciously but in a humble form and advanced with

814 SS, vol. 3, 146, 145. 815 Ibid., 163. 816 Ibid., 165. 817 Ibid., 172.

254 limitations by Kant, decisively declared by Fichte, and finally with full self- confidence and self-consciousness and with the same complete failure continued by Hegel.818

As Solov’ev suggestively put it, this sort of German philosophy had shown that “in the practical realm, reason proved to be powerless against the passions and the interests, and the kingdom of reason announced by the French Revolution proved to be a savage chaos of madness and violence; and in the theoretical realm, reason proved to be powerless against empirical fact, and the pretension to construct a universal science on the principles of pure reason allowed for the construction of systems of empty, abstract concepts.”819

Though Solov’ev criticized reason alone, he did not reject it outright. Rather, Solov’ev sought, as Kant had in his later works, to find a supplement to reason without falling into mysticism or barbaric imagery.820 In many ways, Friedrich Schiller had aimed to control the anarchic implications of Scottish political economy’s depiction of the interplay between “the passions and the interests” through appeals to high-minded values innate in the human soul or personality.821 Rational and theistic religion provided Kant, Schiller, and Solov’ev with this supplement for morality.

And just as Kant had extended his critical principles to the history of the human race’s international relations, so Solov’ev drew conclusions about what he described as Western

Europe’s philosophical and political failures: “the supremacy of rationalism in European politics

818 Ibid., 175. 819 Ibid., 176. 820 On Kant’s search for supplements to reason, see Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, James Haden, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 381-391. 821 On the Scots, who set the terms of much of nineteenth-century socialism, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). On Schiller and the Scots, see Roy Pascal, “‘Bildung’ and the Division of Labor,” in German Studies Presented to Walter Horace Bruford on His Retirement by His Pupils, Colleagues, and Friends (London: G. G. Harrap, 1962). This aspect of Schiller’s career in Russia needs investigation. See Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 38-56.

255 and science [gave] place to predominance of materialism and empiricism.”822 That Solov’ev spoke of the “supremacy” of these methods indicates that he appreciated other elements in

European history that were unhelpful for his polemical purposes throughout the bulk of the

Lectures. Despite this unusual moment of intellectual generosity, Solov’ev went on to push his polemical point in a lengthy and rich passage that amounts to what might have been his Lectures’ crescendo:

...if it turned out that the principle of rationalism was not in a condition to form either a correct civil society [obshchestvennost’], nor a true science, then it follows that one must turn to another, more potent principle of unity, but in no way ought it to be limited by the material side of life and thought, which, in itself, forms neither human society nor science. Therefore, when we see that economic socialism wants to place material interests at the foundation of all society, and positivism empirical knowledge at the foundation of all science, then we can predict in advance the failure of both of these systems with the same certainty with which we would assert that a pile of stones by itself, without an architect or plan, does not take shape into a proper and sensible building.823

Because “the East” had preserved the image of Christ and the Church that Solov’ev outlined in his lectures, it was in a position to solve the problem of unity and order in the life of nations.824

In an unexpected way, Solov’ev’s philosophical work, as this lengthy passage suggest, aimed to provide a philosophical justification of the “monarchical principle” or the “conservative principle” in Russian statehood.825

The Solov’ev who published the last of his Lectures in 1881, much less the younger

Solov’ev who finished speaking in April 1878, was still at a very early stage of his intellectual development. As Solov’ev, himself, noted in the letter to Father P.A. Preobrazhenskii, the editor who oversaw publication of the Lectures in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, he thought all the work he

822 SS, vol. 3, 177. 823 Ibid., 177. 824 Ibid., 178-181. 825 David M. McDonald, “The Durnovo Memorandum in Context: Official Conservatism and the Crisis of Autocracy,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 4 (1996): 481-502.

256 had done up to the final two lectures undeveloped. Although committed to idealism in philosophy and theism in theology, Solov’ev did not quite know how to work those discourses— with roots in Russia by the middle of the nineteenth century—together in order to provide an alternative to socialism and positivism. Solov’ev’s concern with these developments, moreover, was linked to the broader crisis of statehood in society. However liberal, even radical,

Solov’ev’s vision of religion, he drew on it for conservative political ends—as a way to encourage individuals to restrain their demands on the autocratic government without giving up a commitment to social equity and justice. While Solov’ev was in no way enamored with the

Russian people (narod) as were many other members of his generation, he did not seek to keep them in servile conditions. It should be clear now that within the broader arc of Solov’ev’s argument in the Lectures, Sophia played a very minor role. Indeed, the overemphasis on her importance has obscured many of the social and political issues Solov’ev sought to solve with rational religion.

257 CONCLUSION

The young Solov’ev inhabited a vastly different Russia in the 1870s that the Russia inhabited by the Symbolist poets at the turn of the twentieth century. For the young Solov’ev, whatever imperfections there may have been in the autocratic system of government, Russian culture, and the Orthodox Church, they were worthy and capable of being reformed. In the context of the so-called “crisis of autocracy” on the cusp of the twentieth century, the Symbolist poets who authored what I have called the Symbolist conceit—namely Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr

Blok, and S.M. Solov’ev—had no such hopes since they shared in the widely-perceived systemic crisis of autocratic government, culture, and the Orthodox Church.826 By creating a narrative of

Solov’ev in which the true “night-time” Solov’ev of mystical creativity was always masked by the publicly engaged and rational “day-time” Solov’ev, they sought a source of cultural continuity and new principles in life. They also emphasized the coincidence of Solov’ev’s death in 1900 as an ominous sign of the death of traditional social, political, and religious values in the twentieth century. While the Symbolist poets perceived Solov’ev’s legacy in pessimistic terms, others like the Vekhovtsy looked to Solov’ev’s emphasis on the autonomy of the individual

(lichnost’) as a resource for moral renewal that would have beneficial effects on society and politics.827 But even during Solov’ev’s life, his contemporaries had no consensus on what he was doing and what it meant for Russia.

The twenty-five-year-old Vladimir Solov’ev who delivered the first of his Lectures at

Solianoi Gorodok in January 1878 was a prophet of Sophia neither to his audience nor to

826 B.V. Anan’ich, et al., eds., Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1895-1917 (Leningrad: “Nauka” Leningradskoe otd- nie, 1984). 827 S.N. Bulgakov, et al., Problemy idealizma, M.A. Kolerov, ed. (Moscow: Modest Kolerov i “Tri Kvadrata,” 2002 [1902]) and Vekhi: sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, no ed., 2nd ed. (Moscow: Izd-vo I. N.Kushnereva, 1909).

258 himself. As I showed in Chapter 5, the audience was respectful, dumbfounded, or scandalized by what Strakhov regarded as the social compromises Solov’ev made to present his ideas in public. And from the perspective of early 1881, Solov’ev himself criticized his juvenilia as imperfect. Until 1881, Solov’ev was neither a prominent public figure nor a mature philosopher, although the two were not coincident. It was Solov’ev’s bad luck to have to compete with a small number of sensational terrorist attacks culminating in the assassination of

Alexander II by leaders of The People’s Will, Sof’ia Perovskaia and Andrei Zheliabov. Solov’ev became a public figure for the scandal he caused when he publicly called Alexander III to commute the regicides’ death sentences to life entitled “Critique of Contemporary Enlightenment and the Crisis of the World Process.” His philosophical and theological work was an after- thought.

Although Solov’ev’s boldness or imprudence in this speech was noteworthy, his reaction was part of a broader criticism among some of the upper classes. In a report on the Russian press in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination, French Ambassador General Chazny linked

Solov’ev’s speech with these broader movements:

For a week, journals could live and satisfy the impassioned curiosity of their readers with reports of the judicial proceedings of the regicides; they permitted the reproduction in extenso of the proceedings, and minds are very divided on the opportunity to publish these proceedings. Many fear that in the present state of imaginations, the boastfulness of a Jéliabow and the declamations about the poverty of the people no longer makes supporters of the procurator general. Your Excellency knows that the execution of the five convicts had taken place quite publicly and without any incident, save for the arrest of some people who had made some compromising statements. The cold resolve of the plot’s two leaders, Zheliabov and Perovskii, was not contradicted on the scaffold. The time came for the punishment to be carried out and for the notorious names to be delivered into oblivion; as the impression of the Czar’s death had receded into the distance, the instinct of the Russian people, very hostile to the idea of capital punishment that had never figured in its cops [condes], was visibly awakened; the lower classes were still out of their minds over the murderers of their sovereign, but a part of high society

259 and this whole middling class that calls itself the ‘thinking class’ called for the convicts to be reprieved; being daring, a professor whom the youth follow, made an imperative appeal for clemency to the authorities at a public conference and was warmly applauded by many women and students in the audience.828

Similarly, Russian officialdom took note of the young professor of philosophy after his sensational speech. In a diary entry for 29 March 1881, Minister of War D.A. Miliutin noted that some members of society were agitated for the commutation of Sofiia Perovskaia’s sentence to life on the basis of an old law exempting the gentry from capital punishment. He also made note of “the recent public lecture by our young philosopher, Solov’ev, who aroused frightful indignation through his crazy outburst, given the present circumstances, that the Russian tsar, in order to be faithful to ‘the ideal of the Russian narod,’ is obliged to pardon the regicides,” a remark that provoked applause from the members of the audience sympathetic to socialism and threats from the other part of the audience.829

Though the ober-prokurator K.P. Pobedonostsev made no comment on the speech, he received a letter calling Solov’ev a traitor.830 And on 30 March 1881, an agent of M.N. Katkov reported how unusual it was that there were “no police in the hall where it happened” and that the educated residents of Saint Petersburg “talked about this [event] with extreme exaggeration:”

Solov’ev’s ban from teaching was not extreme, given the circumstances and the government, and the speech was not the bombshell that some called it.831 To his contemporaries, Solov’ev was a politically engaged society man with a serious interest in philosophy and theology.

828 Ministère des Affairs Étrangères (Ambassades, Consulates, etc.), Russie, 264 (1881 avril-août), ff. 67-67ob. The report, numbered 43 was dated Saint Petersburg 21 April 1881 and entitled “Presse Russe.” 829 D.A. Miliutin, Dnevnik D.A. Miliutin, 1881-1882, P.A. Zaionchkovskii, ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia ordena Lenina ibilioteka SSSR imena V.I. Lenina, 1950), 50, 164n.39. 830 S. Sheremetev to K.P. Pobodonostsev, in M.M. Pokrovskii, ed., Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty: pis’ma i zapiski, vol. 1 (Moscow-Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izd-vo, 1923), 174. Dated 20 March 1881. 831 GARF, f. 1718 (M.N. Katkov), o. 1, ed. kh. 10 (Pis’ma bez podpisi [ot Markevicha Boleslav Mikhailovicha] iz Peterburga o sobytiiakh politicheskoi i obshchestvennoi zhizni Rossii, 1866-1881), l. 112.

260 If the Solov’ev of the Symbolist conceit is no longer tenable, then what are we left with? This dissertation has aimed to show that the bulk of the information and interpretation of

Solov’ev within the paradigm of the Symbolist conceit is fundamentally skewed. From an antiquarian point of view, such a rectification of facts might be sufficient. But the mere correction of historical fact, in itself, is not a matter of much historical significance. Yet the image of Solov’ev that the Symbolist conceit presented has been cited by historians as well as modern critics and public intellectuals to help corroborate much more wide-ranging claims about

Russian history, of both the Imperial and Soviet periods. One purpose of this dissertation has been to use the historical Solov’ev as a starting point for a more general reconsideration of these claims.832

The primary assumption this study of Solov’ev’s early career has aimed to complicate is the assumption of Russia’s distinctness from the rest of Europe due to the alleged absence of

“the” Enlightenment among an influential segment of Russian educated society. As Laura

Engelstein has recently argued, in the twentieth century proponents of “the Western liberal perspective” lauding “rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere” were

“outnumbered, to the right and to the left,” by groups united by “an antiliberal consensus” opposed to those values that Engelstein, following Michel Foucault, associates with “the”

Enlightenment.833 As Rudy Koshar perceived in a response to an early essay in this volume,

Engelstein structures her essay on Russian history around a Sonderweg thesis meant to explain

832 On these considerations, see Quentin Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society,” Historical Journal 12, no. 2 (1969): 217-218. 833 Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), quotations ix. On “the” Enlightenment, see pp. 2, 3, 6. In earlier work, Engelstein does not use the polemical definite article, 13-20, 36-46. For an earlier and more critical assessment of “Enlightenment” and “modernity,” see idem., “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia, across the 1991 Divide,” Kritika 2, no. 2 (2001): 364-365.

261 the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation by the absence of features of an idealized and polemical account of European history as the triumph of political and economic liberalism.834

This russische Sonderweg ignores the complexity of European history and enlightenment on which Russians could draw in the nineteenth century. Rousseau’s Second Discourse, an epic of the human race beginning with “It is of man that I am to speak,” illustrates the complex relationship between secularism and religion as well as science and art in the thought of a leading enlightenment thinker:

Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The researches which can be undertaken concerning this subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clarify the nature of things than to show their true origin, like those our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings surrounding him, about what the human race might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself. That is what I am asked and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. As my subject concerns man in general, I shall try to use a language that suits all nations, or rather, forgetting times and places in order to think only of the men to whom I speak, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, with Plato and Xeoncrates for judges, and the human race for an audience.835

The religious, scientific, aesthetic, and the secular mingle in ways that are not unfamiliar in

Russia. In another formulation of a Russian Sonderweg that appreciates European complexity,

Martin Malia highlighted just this aspect of Russian history. As he argued, since Nicholas I’s reign, much of Russian history was shaped by the assumption that between 1789 and 1848 the

“West” had “betrayed a once common heritage” characterized by absolutist statecraft and a

834 Rudy Koshar, “Foucault and Social History: ‘Comments on ‘Combined Underdevelopment,’” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 359-360. For the still influential critique of the Sonderweg thesis in German history, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 835 J.J. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, Rodger D. Masters, ed. and trans. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 101, 103.

262 culture of distinction.836 The complexity of European civilization was reflected in Solov’ev’s career as he appropriated specific elements and applied them to problems specific to the Russian context.

Perhaps nowhere is the complexity of Russian appropriations of European religious discourse more clearly illustrated than Solov’ev’s career. This is doubly so since, along with

F.M. Dostoevskii, Solov’ev formed one of the cornerstones of what Martin Malia called N.A.

Berdiaev’s “soul for export” from Russia to Europeans in the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods of European history, when the viability of what is now called the Radical Enlightenment, characterized solely by science and secularism, came under sustained threat from various forms of modernism and the force of events.837

As we have seen, Solov’ev experienced a different Europe and the legacy of a different enlightenment that scholars now call the Religious Enlightenment.838 Moreover, this enlightenment had already found institutional homes within Solov’ev’s mid-century Russia at

Moscow Clerical Academy, where Kudriavtsev-Platonov served as the custodian of Russian theism. It was there that Solov’ev first encountered the scheme of history within which to present his vision of the proper historical development of all mankind. Though theism contained a mystical moment, the whole theistic endeavor aimed to justify the meaning of this experience in modern and rational terms. The whole tradition of discourse on which Solov’ev drew through

Kudriavtsev—from Plato, through Plotinus, the Greek Church Fathers, Renaissance Platonists,

836 Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 139-146. 837 Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, 207-211. On the radical enlightenment, see Jonathan Israel’s controversial Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 838 David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

263 Jacob Böhme, and German poets and philosophers—aimed to provide succeeding generations with “modern reasons to believe in myth and the marvelous.”839 The rational justification did not mask mystical experience, as the Symbolist conceit argues; the two were complementary, and emphasis was placed on justification.

Although the two endeavors cannot be conflated a priori, Solov’ev was a deeply social and political thinker, albeit from a philosophical and religious perspective. Following a minority interpretation of Solov’ev, the late A.A. Nosov once asserted: “Solov’ev himself was a very socially engaged, one might even say politically engaged, man.”840 Philosophy and theism offered Solov’ev a sort of retrospective metaphysic on which to ground his social and political ideals. Solov’ev used his theistic philosophy to argue that human beings had more than merely material social, political, and economic interests that ought to be taken into consideration before taking action for, according to Solov’ev, philosophy understood this way would show human beings how to act in society and politics. Such had been the way liberals in France and Germany had employed this discourse in politics.841 To this extent, Solov’ev’s first editors, his nephew

S.M. Solov’ev and the philosopher E.L. Radlov, suggested this interpretation based on the way they edited volume three of Solov’ev’s collected works. That volume began with the Lectures and went through Solov’ev’s speeches on Dostoevskii, and ended with the articles originally published in Rus’ between 1881 and 1884 and published separately as On the Path to True

839 Paul Veyne, “Social Diversity of Beliefs and Mental Balkanization,” in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, Paul Wissing, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1983]), 47. 840 Aleksandr Gavrilov, “V Poiskakh novogo Vladimira Solov’eva,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (10 March 2000). The earliest treatment of Solov’ev’s political views is Radlov, E.L. “Istoricheskie i politicheskie vzgliady Vl. Solov’eva.” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, no. 8 (Aug., 1912): 196-218. 841 Laurence Dickey, “Constant and Religion: ‘Theism Descends from Heaven to Earth,” in Helena Rosenblatt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 313-348.

264 Philosophy (1884) and The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1882-1884).842 This continuity could be extended to 1888 with L’idée Russe. In order to render accounts with Ivan Aksaov,

Solov’ev presented “the meaning [raison] of Russia’s existence in universal history” within a dipolar scheme of history between “what a [nation] thinks of itself” and “what God thinks of it in eternity.”843 The discourse of theism was persistent and variable within Solov’ev’s oeuvre.

The prominence of religious discourse in the careers of both Solov’ev and some of his prominent contemporaries also complicates and expands the so-called “spontaneity- consciousness paradigm.”844 Leopold Haimson developed a fundamental interpretation of the implications of the way so-called intelligenty shaped their own experience within a schema organized according to the “elemental spontaneity” of unenlightenend groups, individuals, and actions guided by “conscious” thought and action.845 This scheme of historical development certainly shaped the way a great many intelligenty made sense of their experience. However, it omitted a religious dimension that provided the telos of consciously guided history. It was this element that Solov’ev constantly asserted as a young man. From a socio-political perspective,

Solov’ev participated in a discussion about the nature of God that had implications for limiting the political authority of the state.846 Slavophiles used religion for relatively radical ends of promoting and preserving estate privileges in the face of autocratic authority.847 As Victoria

842 S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (Saint Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’skoe Tovarishchestvo “Prosveshchenie,” 1911). 843 Vladimir Soloviev, L’idée Russe (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1888), 6. 844 Anna Krylova, “Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct” as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (2003): 1-23. My interpretation is not so radical as Krylova’s. 845 Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1955). 846 “The Parties and the State: Evolution of Political Attitudes,” in Cyril E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 110-145. 847 Patrick Lally Michelson, “‘The First and Most Sacred Right’: Religious Freedom and the Liberation of the Russian Nation, 1825-1905,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007), 145-154.

265 Frede has recently shown, atheist youth pursued the same ends for their own estates and interest groups by promoting atheism.848 Theism offered Solov’ev a way of presenting a middle way between these arguments that also preserved harmonious loyalty to state authority.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians have begun to recover and commemorate parts of their cultural heritage that, if not banned outright, were marginalized by the Soviet cultural authorities. Solov’ev has enjoyed a great deal of attention from this process of recovering individuals and events from the Russian past the contemporaries could regard as positive contributions to Russian and world history.849 S.S. Khoruzhii has been one of the most vocal and prominent voices to emphasize a mystical, Orthodox Solov’ev as a source of guidance for the future.850 As I have endeavored to show, however, this Solov’ev requires a great deal of manipulation—one has to ignore his conservative, even quietist, political inclinations, his cultural prejudices, and his imperialism in order to see such a Solov’ev. While there may be good reasons for seeing such a Solov’ev, this image needs to be explicitly justified in its utility, especially in a Russia striving to reassert its imperial dignity in domestic and foreign policy. In this context, the so-called new Russian historiography that seeks to promote positive aspects and individuals in Russian history would do well to reconsider the stereotypical images of figures like Solov’ev who were lauded or reviled according to their role in promoting October 1917 during the Cold War. Even the old saws of Russian history can provide resources for a usable past. While it is impossible to interpret the past outside of present concerns and epistemological

848 Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), esp. 15. 849 Boris M. Mironov, “Vvedenie,” in Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): genesis lichnosti, demokaticheskoi sem’I, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravavogo gosudarstva, vol. 1 (Saint Petersburg, 1999), 13-18. 850 S.S. Khoruzhii, “Nasledie Vladimira Solov’eva sto let spustia,” in I. V. Borisovaia and A. P. Kosyrev, eds., Solov’evskii sbornik: materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “V. S. Solov’ev i ego filosofskoe nasledie,” 28-30 Avgusta 2000 g. (Moscow: “Fenomenologiia-Germenevtika” Institut filosofii RAN, 2001), 1-28.

266 assumptions, such interpretations must be verifiable against the evidence of the past.851 But answers to these questions are not for history to answer.

851 Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49-75 and John Toews, “Salvaging Truth and Ethical Obligation from the Historicist Tide: Thomas Haskell’s Moderate Historicism,” History and Theory 38, no. 3 (1999): 348-364.

267 Bibliography

Archival Sources:

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GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [Moscow]) Fond 109 (Third Section) Fond 564 (Koni, Anatolii Fedorovich) Fond 583 (Polovtsov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich) Opis’ 1, ed. khr. 5 (Dnevnik, 1863g., 8 Maia 1873g.-19 Noiab. 1876), 76 pp. Opis’ 1, ed. khr. 9 (Dnevnik, 1873g.-1875), 95 pp. Opis’ 1, ed. khr. 10 (Dnevnik, 1873-1880), 20 pp. Opis’ 1, ed. khr. 11 (Dnevnik, 1 Ianvaria 1876-20 Dekab. 1876), 99 pp. Opis’ 1, ed, khr. 12 (Dnevnik while abroad, 11 Sent. 1876g.-3 Iiunia 1878g.), 46 pp. Opis’ 1, ed. khr. 13 (Dnevnik, Ianv. 1877g.-27 Noiabria 1878g.), 249 pp. Fond 722 (Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich) Fond 1718 (Katkov, Mikhail Nikoforovich) Fond 1750 (Moskovskii slavianskii blagotvoritel’nyi komitet)

RGALI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i isskustva [Moscow]) Fond 10 (Aksakovy) Fond 446 (Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev) Fond 587 (Ivan Ivanovich Ianzhul/E. N. Ianzhul)

RO RNB (Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka [Saint Petersburg]) Fond 14 (I. S. Aksakov) Fond 124 (Stasiulevich/V. D. Spasovich) Fond 208 (A. V. Golovnin) Fond 332 (Stasiulevich/Chizhov) Fond 621 (Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pypin) Fond 747 (Stasiulevich/Strakhov)

Dom Plekhanova RNB Fond 753 (P.S. Struve)

TsIAM (Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy) Fond 229 (Moskovskaia Dukhovnaia Akademiia) Opis’ 2: documents relating to academic business Opis’ 4 (Lichnye dela studentov, prepodovatelei, sluzhashcikh i drugikh) Delo 908 (Giliarov-Platonov, Nikita Petrovich) Delo 1015 (Gorskii, Pavel Ivanovich) Delo 1496 (Ivantsov-Platonov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich)

268 Delo 5617 (Ivantsov-Platonov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich) Delo 5667 (Samarin, Iurii Fedorovich) Delo 5675 (Solov’ev, Sergei Mikhailovich) Delo 5676 (Soliarskii, Pavel) Delo 5682 (Graf Tolstoi, Dmitrii Andreevich) Delo 5684 (Troitskii, Ivan Gavrilovich) Opis’ 5 Delo 643 (Delo s dokumentami, otnosiashchikhsia k professoru V. Kliuchvskomu) Fond 418 (Moskovskii universitet) Opis’ 38 (1869) Opis’ 39 (1870) Opis’ 40 (1871) Opis’ 41 (1872) Opis’ 42 (1873) Opis’ 43 (1874) Opis’ 44 (1875)

United States

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269

University Archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Paul B. Anderson Papers Donald A. Lowrie Papers Philip Mosely Papers

France

Archive de la Préfecture de Police Série B, sous-Série B/A Archives de la Défense (Chateau de Vincennes) Série N Archives nationales F/7 (Police) F/12 (Ministère de l’agriculture, du commerce et des travaux publics) F/18 (Presse) Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine (Nanterre) F delta rés: 571 811 824 827 863 864 892 897 918 GF delta rés: 123 Ministère des Affaires étrangères Correspondence politique

Periodicals:

A. Imperial Russia

Birzhevyia vedomosti Bogoslovskii vestnik Byloe Golos Golos minuvshego Grazhdanin Khristianskoe chtenie Minuvshie gody

270 Mir bozhii Moskovskyia vedomosti Mysl’ Otechestvennyia zapiski Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik Pravoslavnoe obozrenie Pravoslavnyi sobesednik Russkaia beseda Russkaia mysl’ Russkaia starina Russkii arkhiv Russkii vestnik Russkoe bogatstvo Russkyia vedomosti Rus’ Slovo Sovremennik Strannik Tserkovnyi vestnik Vestnik evropy Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii Zaria Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia Znanie

B. Russia Abroad

Logos Novyi zhurnal Posledniia novosti Put’ Rul’ Sovremenniia zapiski

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855 For some of the materials contained in this volume, as well as the edition by Tsimbaev, it’s required reading. 856 Published by the Bibliothèque Socialiste.

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