Vasily Rozanov (and Pavel Florensky) 227 FOUR Vasily Rozanov (and Pavel Florensky): The sacred and the secrets of the Jews 228 Chapter Four Vasily Rozanov (and Pavel Florensky) 229 FOUR ‘Sinful slave Vasily….’ Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov was born in 1856, that is, three years aft er Vladimir Soloviev. He is close friends with the philosopher and a far-off worshiper of Soloviev’s late-found friend, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a strange turn, but only the fi rst of a manifold series of strange events in Rozanov’s life that will be explored here, he will marry Dostoevsky’s former lover, Anna Suslova, in the very year that his idol dies. Th e term “idol” is rightly chosen: Rozanov considered himself to have been spiritually fathered by Dostoevsky and liked to refer to himself as the real-life incarnation of the writer’s fi ctional Underground Man. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, his marriage to his spiritual father’s wife was bitter and painful, and would overshadow him for the rest of his life. And that life continues for another eighteen years aft er Soloviev’s death. Rozanov lives through the apocalyptic events that Soloviev intuits with dread in the fi nal years of the nineteenth century. His last work is entitled Apocalypse of Our Time. Shortly aft er fi nishing it, he dies in 1919 of starvation and exhaustion in Sergiev Posad, the holy heart of Russia, one of the many victims of famine and deprivation brought on by the fi rst groundswell of the Revolution and Civil War. Rozanov is Soloviev’s contemporary, and twenty odd years older than Bulgakov and Berdyaev. But it is perhaps fi tting to discuss him somewhat out of chronological turn, for he is truly eccentric, that is, off centre, out of kilt, at an angle to any carefully calculated schema. In looking at Rozanov, we will see aspects of Berdyaev and Bulgakov foreshadowed, as it were. In addition to his own self-designation as the living Underground Man, Rozanov has been called the “Marmeladov1 of philosophy” (S.A. Levitsky’s masterful epithet), a Little Judas Golovlev2 (according to Soloviev during the years of their quarrel). Zenkovsky and others called him the Russian Nietzsche. In a telling phrase of Levitsky, “what Rozanov let drop by chance would later become the starting point for systematic development by more professional philosophers and writers.” Rozanov coins the term “sacred fl esh,” which Merezhkovsky develops in depth, and which permeates much of Bulgakov’s thinking too. But as far as Jews and Judaism is concerned, Rozanov plunges us into an analysis of Judaism that is both enlightening and appalling by – seemingly unpredictable – turns. Even more so than Berdyaev, Rozanov hovers 1 Of course, aft er the garrulous drunk with a penchant for home-spun philosophizing from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 2 A well-known character from Saltikov-Schedrin’s Th e Golovlev gentlemen, a contrary, ill-tempered, stingy old man who preached the obvious to all and sundry with didactic tediousness. 230 Chapter Four on the peripheries of Christian orthodoxy, and very oft en storms out beyond the walls of the Church, before rushing tearfully back in again. If Bulgakov came to decipher the mystery of Judaism through the prism of “sacred blood,” Rozanov anticipated this, probably infl uenced it in roundabout ways, through his attraction to and then growing obsession with the secretness of Jewish blood, of Judaism and of Jewry. More than anyone, Rozanov embodies the troubled relationship between Judaism and Christianity, between Russia and Jewry – and, as will become clear, between all these and paganism. Rozanov’s analyses of Jewry are not directly Christian; sometimes they are manifestly and self-consciously anti-Christian, and yet he has a relationship to the Russian Church and the church life of his day. What is more, Rozanov just like the other fi gures who have been examined has re-entered the stream of modern Russian literary, cultural and Church consciousness. Like them, he is not a fi gure of the past, but a fi gure whose frozen form has come to life again now that the ice of seventy years that had encased him has started to thaw out. In Rozanov’s case, this rediscovery of a pre-Revolutionary fi gure by post- Soviet Russia is particularly lively and problematic. Th is is due to Rozanov’s essential duality, or as some have seen it, duplicity. Th ere seems to be a “left ” Rozanov and a “right” Rozanov, who – to make matters worse – oft en inhabit one and the same space at one and the same time. Shortly aft er his death, eff orts were being to collect the heritage of the “left ” Rozanov for publication in Soviet Russia, but this came to nothing.3 Th e eff ort to disseminate his heritage was taken up again only in the 1990s, and critics are still trying to make sense of the chronology and interrelatedness of his works and the development of his thought,4 and of who the “real” Rozanov is or was. Th ese eff orts are a continuation of the unfi nished business of the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century when Rozanov moved in a semi-permanent cloud of scandal, causing provocation to left and right by turns. He wrote prolifi cally for the conservative, nationalistic as well as the liberal, reforming press. Articles issued from his pen in praise of Orthodoxy and autocracy, as well as pieces that excoriate Orthodoxy, praise paganism and celebrate the 1905 revolution as a slap to a dying regime.5 One of the most infl uential fi gures of both 3 By Grzebin, who tried to enlist the support of Jewish philosopher A.Z. Steinberg and writer Ivanov-Razumnik, cf. Steinberg’s account in Aaron Steinberg, “Filosofskoe sodruzhestvo,” in Steinberg A. Druzya moikh rannikh let (1911-1928), (Paris: Syntaxis, 1991), ch.2. Rozanov himself asked for his reactionary anti-Semitic books of 1911-1914 to be destroyed aft er his death, which would have partly, but certainly not fully, demolished the twin “right” Rozanov. 4 Cf. Leonid Katsis, “Kastratorskii kompleks publikatorov, ili Rozanov v menjajushchemsja supere,” in Nezavisimiy fi lologichsekiy zhurnal No.61(2003). Katsis is appreciative of Respublika’s publication of new and unknown volumes of the writer, but critical of the ordering of the contents of various collections, maintaining they obscure the real line of Rozanov’s thinking. 5 Cf. the collection Kogda nachalstvo ushlo, (Moscow: Respublika, 2005).In that Vasily Rozanov (and Pavel Florensky) 231 the intellectual and political life of the time, P.S. Struve, denounced Rozanov in print for his shameless duplicity. For Struve this welter of contradictory views existed because Rozanov simply wrote for money what the readers of diff erent journals wanted to read; he was a man shamelessly lacking in principle. For the present purposes it is germane that the greatest scandal of Rozanov’s scandal-strewn life erupted due to his views on Judaism and Jewry. For Rozanov’s name and reputation came to be inextricably linked with the Beilis trial of 1911- 1913. Indeed, Struve’s angry denunciation of Rozanov was written as a result of this debacle. We will examine Rozanov’s attitude to the Beilis trial more fully below. Th e bare facts of this “Dreyfus aff air” of Russia, however, are these6. Th e Jewish Mendel Beilis was a superintendent at a brick factory in Kiev, who was arrested in 1911 and charged with the murder of thirteen-year old schoolboy, Andrei Yushchinsky. Th e Russian government, to the consternation of liberal Russia, prosecuted Beilis on the charge of ritual murder and brought its most able lawyers to make the charge stick. Not by chance, the case against Beilis was opened a month aft er the Th ird State Duma began debating a law that would ratify the abolition of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Th is provoked a furore among right wing elements in Russian politics and cultural life, including high-up offi cials in the government close to the tsar. Th e police investigation of the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky took a diff erent turn under pressure applied from these sources, and attention was switched from a criminal band to whose activity Yushchinsky had become privy to Mendel Beilis. Th e unfortunate Beilis was now forced to assume the role of causing some rethinking among liberal campaigners for the abolition of the Pale. He spent two years in prison before being acquitted. During this time, the case against him was again and again revealed as a farce, causing even well-known anti-Semites to come out in favor of his innocence. During those two years an existential battle for the identity of Russia – medieval throwback or emerging liberal nation-state – was waged in the national and larger European press. And Rozanov came out in favor of Beilis’ guilt. However, as for many others in his camp, Beilis’ guilt was not even the main point for him. Whether or not this Jew was guilty of ritual killing, there was the larger question of whether Jewish ritual murder existed, and whether it was a tool in the hands of the Jews, who were waging a sinister international conspiracy to undermine Russia. For liberals and progressives, merely to state such a charge was to bring shame and ridicule on Russia. And for black- hundreds extremists and reactionaries of diff erent shades, to deny the truth of year, Rozanov had emerged from a Slavophile phase, and was turning to liberal, pro-Revolutionary thoughts. In this snapshot of time, he thus presents an opposite picture to Sergei Bulgakov who had thrown off Marxism for monarchy under the pressure of the same events.