of sophia in Christ Himself; for sophia is "the idea which God has before him as Creator and which He realizes" in his creation.57
But how is one concretely to find sophia, to help attain God's "all-unity" on earth? Solov'ev offered a variety of programs and ideas for overcoming conflict in the course of the late seventies. He began by donating the substantial amount of money that he received for his twelve lectures on God-manhood to the Red Cross on the one hand and to the fund for restoring the Santa Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople on the other. Practical steps to alleviate immediate suffering and renewed reverence for the older spiritual unity of Christendom-these were the main points in his program. In May, 1878, he joined Dostoevsky (who had attended his lectures) on a pilgrimage to visit the elders of the Optyna Pustyn. The death of his father in October, 1879, further intensified his sense of spiritual
calling.
The split between science and faith could be overcome by less dogmatic philosophies in both fields. He proposed a "free and scientific theosophy" which-following Boehme-would recognize as equally valid and ultimately complementary three methods of knowledge: the mystical, the intellectual, and the empirical. The split between East and West could be overcome if each recognized that it had something to learn from the other. The East believes in God but not humanity; the West believes in humanity without God. Each needs to believe in both. Secular humanism cannot survive on a philosophic base which contends in effect that "man is a hair-Jess monkey and therefore must lay down his life for his friends.58 But the Orthodox East is equally doomed with its contention that man is made in the image of God and must therefore be ruled with the knout. Russia must learn from the West, and particularly from Auguste Comte's humanistic positivism. In Comte's religion of humanity and his identification of humanity as le Grand Etre, or as a kind of feminine goddess, Solov'ev detected an idea strikingly akin to that of sophia. The Comtian idea that history moved from a theological to a metaphysical to a final "positive" stage and a rational, altruistic society seemed entirely compatible with Solov'ev's concept of God Himself moving toward self-realization in the concrete world of men. The good society is for Solov'ev, as for Comte, that of "normal" man; and the divisions in humanity are only passing and irrational holdovers from the senseless doctrinal quarrels of the past.59
In the late seventies Solov'ev began to speak out sharply against excessive chauvinism, denouncing, for instance, the proposal made by some Pan-Slavs for using chemical warfare against the Turks. His famous lecture after the assassination of Alexander II, in which he urged the new Tsar to forgive the assassins and thus usher in a new era of Christian love in Rus-
sia, was received with tears of joy by a large audience, including Dostoevsky's widow, who assured Solov'ev that her husband would have approved. As a result of this experience, Solov'ev was publicly reprimanded and temporarily prohibited from giving public lectures. He decided to resign from his teaching position and also from a post in the ministry of public education. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev used the period of reaction in the eighties as one of "withdrawal and return": of intellectual reassessment in order to provide new answers for Russia's problems. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev acquired a new appreciation for the importance of change in the social and political sphere; but he advocated neither liberal democracy nor proletarian socialism but "free theocracy." This highly original conception, which Solov'ev sought to perfect throughout his writings and travels of the eighties and early nineties, was designed to reconcile total freedom with a recognition of the authority of God. God was to have three earthly vicars: the Tsar, the Pope, and the Prophet. The Tsar would bring into the new age the ideal of a Christian ruler, the Pope of a unified church, and the prophet would speak in the poetic language of the higher unity yet to come. Free theocracy would come about not through coercion but through man's free impulse toward "all-unity" through sophia, "to whom our ancestors with wonderful prophetic feeling built temples and altars without yet knowing who she was."60
He urged Alexander III to become "the new Charlemagne," who would unite Christendom politically; and he was blessed by the Pope and leading Western Catholic officials, many of whom were deeply impressed by his project for reunification. Solov'ev was perhaps the most profound and searching apostle of Christian unity in the nineteenth-century world. For, although he was in his later years more sympathetic with Catholicism than with Orthodoxy or Protestantism, he had (almost alone in nineteenth-century Russia) a sympathetic understanding of all three branches of Christendom. Moreover, he conceived of the problem of unification not in terms of conversion but in terms of leading all the churches to a higher form of unity that none of them had yet found. The Catholic Church was admired as the germ of a social order that transcended nationalism. The isolation and persecution of the Jews in Russia was condemned not only for humane reasons but also because the coming theocracy needed the prophetic spirit and interest in social justice that the Jews had kept alive:
Their only fault perhaps is that they remain Jews and preserve their isolationism. Then show them visible and tangible Christianity so that they should have something to adhere to. They are practical people-show them Christianity in practice. . . . The Jews are certainly not going to accept Christianity so long as it is rejected by Christians themselves. . . .61
Solov'ev seems to have regarded himself as the prophet of this new theocracy; and the poems, fables, and essays on art that he wrote in his last years are in many ways an effort to give concrete form to this prophetic spirit. But pessimism began to replace his earlier hopeful expectation of a "free theocracy." A new and violent paganism was rising to challenge the Judaeo-Christian world; and the symbol of this new force was Asia, which was just being discovered by the Russian popular mind, thanks to the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the beginnings of Russian imperialistic adventures in the Far East.62 Solov'ev was both repulsed and fascinated by the rising East. Even before the first Sino-Japanese War in the mid-nineties, Solov'ev wrote a poem, "Pan-Mongolism," which depicted the conquest of Russia by a horde of Mongolians. In his Three Conversations with a Short Story of the Antichrist, written in 1900, the year of his death, Solov'ev portrays Japan as having unified the Orient and overrun the world. This anticipation of the surprising triumph that Japan was shortly to register over Russia is only one of the many prophetic elements in the work. The Antichrist has come to rule over this new world empire -claiming like Dostoevsky's Inquisitor to be carrying on and perfecting Christ's work. The Antichrist is rather uncharitably given many of the opinions and attributes of Solov'ev's ideological opponent, Tolstoy. All three Christian churches have declined in strength with the growth of material prosperity and new forms of entertainment. They are easily subordinated to his rule. But a few from each communion have the strength to resist and retire to the desert, including an Orthodox community under the leadership of an elder.
Russian Orthodoxy had lost millions of its nominal members when political events changed the official position of the Church, but it had the joy of being united to the best elements among the Old Believers and even among many sectarians. . . . The regenerated Church, while not increasing in numbers, grew in spiritual power.63
These Orthodox are reunited with all other Christians when the Jews, who had helped build the rule of Antichrist, suddenly realize that he is not the Messiah and begin a rebellion against him. Thus, the Jews are reunited in solidarity with Christians, the pagan cities are swallowed up by rivers of fire, the dead are resurrected, and Christ comes again to launch his millennial rule on earth together with his saints and "the Jews and Christians executed by Antichrist."64
Solov'ev's prophetic writings and magnetic personality helped inspire a variety of new developments of the silver age. First of all, he played a leading role in the revival of idealism as an intellectually respectable philos-
ophy. He attempted to show that philosophic idealism was logically implied by the moral idealism of the populist traditi
on. Whereas Plekhanov cited this same fact to criticize the populists, Solov'ev cited it in order to beckon the moral idealists on to idealism and his own brand of dynamic mysticism. Many who started out as Marxists in the nineties soon went over to the new idealism under Solov'ev's influence: Berdiaev, Starve, and others. His Justification of the Good, which began to appear serially in 1894 (and was republished as a book in 1897 and 1899), vigorously contended that idealism was the only possible basis on which moral imperatives could be elevated above material self-interest and defended from philosophic scepticism.
Related to his rehabilitation of idealism is Solov'ev's more general role in helping launch a tradition of serious critical philosophy in Russia. Only with the lifting of curricular restrictions on the teaching of philosophy in 1889 did such a tradition become possible in Russia. With the founding of the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in the same year, Russia at last acquired its first professional journal of technical philosophy. At last there was a medium for critical absorption of Western ideas rather than voracious consumption in the manner of earlier thick journals. The bracketing together of philosophy and psychology in the new journal indicates an immediate willingness for fresh approaches. Solov'ev contributed not only to this journal but also to an even more widely read medium for philosophic education in the 1890's, the Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia. This eighty-six-volume collection remains even to this day the greatest single treasure chest of published information in the Russian language; and Solov'ev, as the director of its philosophy section and author of many individual articles, contributed richly both to its literacy and to its sophistication.
Solov'ev also had an influence on the small but significant return to the Russian Orthodox Church that began to take place after his death in the early twentieth century. Dostoevsky's late works and Solov'ev's writings combined to enable a number of former radicals suddenly to discover in the Orthodox Church something more than the organ of state discipline that it appeared to be for Pobedonostsev. Men like Bulgakov, Frank, and Berdiaev were willing to brave ridicule by their intellectual associates in order to reaffirm allegiance to the Church in Landmarks of 1909 and several other collections. These intellectuals professed to believe in the new rather than the old Christianity, insisting that true Christianity taught freedom rather than coercion and was not in conflict with social change but was rather necessary to fulfill and sanctify it. The movement for renewal in the Russian Orthodox Church was part of the general movement
toward religious modernism that was noticeable in most Christian communities in the early twentieth century. Although the Russian Orthodox Church was remarkably slow in acknowledging the need for new approaches, it did demonstrate an element of independent vitality amidst the disintegration of authority in 1917, convening a church council in August of 1917, which re-established the long-abolished Patriarchate and launched a belated but nonetheless important claim to be an institution with a destiny and mission that should continue even though the old dream of an Eastern Christian empire should be shattered.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Solov'ev had a profound impact on the remarkable artistic revival of the silver age. Solov'ev was one of the pioneers in the rediscovery of the joys of poetry. Although his own poems are, for the most part, not masterpieces, his idea that the world is but a symbolic reflection of a more vital ideal world all around us gave poets a new impulse to discover and proclaim these higher beauties and harmonies. Solov'ev's cosmological theories revived the old idea of prophetic poetry common to Schelling and Saint-Martin. His philosophy was as important in calling forth the poetry of the silver age as had the philosophy of these earlier romantic figures been in inspiring the poetry of the golden age a half century earlier. The rediscovery of poetic beauty, of viewing the sensual world as an avenue to a higher spiritual world, came as a welcome relief from the increasingly dry prose of realism in decline. The art of social utility and photographic naturalism had held the stage for several decades; but with the decline of the thick journals, whose critics had consistently shouted down all believers in art for art's sake, the way was being opened for fresh artistic approaches. With the acquisition of The Northern Herald by Solov'ev and several other religiously oriented poets in 1891, the idea that beauty has a meaning of its own gained a new mouthpiece. The publication of Dmitry Merezhkovsky's "Symbols" in 1892 and his "On the Present Condition of Russian Literature and the Causes of Its Decline" the following year gave new popularity to the idea that the real world is only a shadow of the ideal and that the artist is uniquely able to penetrate through the former to the latter.
Solov'ev's poetic references to a mysterious "beautiful lady" were both a symptom and a cause of the new turn toward mystical idealism. The beautiful lady was in part Comte's goddess {vierge positive) of humanity, in part the missing madonna of a revived romanticism, and in part the divine wisdom {sophia) of Orthodox theology and occult theosophy. Although Solov'ev died earlier than either Plekhanov or Miliukov, his immediate posthumous influence in early-twentieth-century Russia was probably as great as the living impact of these other figures. Solov'ev appealed to
visionary impulses which were still very much alive in Russia. He offered Russia, so to speak, one last chance to transcend the world of the ordinary and immediate, the "conglomerated mediocrity" (posredstvennosf) that so repelled the intelligentsia. The political and economic thought of Ple-khanov and Miliukov influenced those who contended for power in an age of revolutionary change; but the extraordinary cultural revival of the early twentieth century was born under the brilliant if evanescent star of Solov'ev. The change in artistic styles from populist realism to the idealism of the silver age may be likened to the change in drinking tastes from the harsh and colorless vodka of the earlier agitators and reformers to the sweet, ruby-colored mesimarja, which became popular among the new aristocratic aesthetes. Mesimarja was a rare, exotic drink, extremely costly and best appreciated at the end of a large and leisurely meal. Like the art of the silver age, mesimarja was the product of an unnatural, half-foreign environment. Mesimarja came from Finnish Lapland, where it was distilled from a rare berry that was ripened by the midnight sun during the brief Arctic summer. The culture of early-twentieth-century Russia was equally exotic and superlative. It was a feast of delicacies tinged with foreboding. As with the mesimarja berry, premature ripeness carried with it the promise of rapid decay. Sunlight at midnight in one season led to darkness at noon in the next.
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THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS
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The Twentieth Century
i. Crescendo
The cultural explosion amidst war and revolution during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Music as the dominant art form in an age of passionate liberation and liberated passion. The Prometheanism of the revolutionary "God-builders" and of the attempt by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) to transform the world by synthesizing the arts. The ascent into outer space through the rockets of Constantine Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and the "suprematist" art of Casimir Malevich (1878-1934). The concurrent descent into sensualism and diabolism. Apocalypticism in art and life: the poetry of Alexander Blok (1880-1921); the prose of Eugene Zamiatin (1884-1937); the politics of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940).
The March and November revolutions of 1917, and the debt of Lenin (1870-1924) to the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. A quarter century of catechistic totalitarianism under Stalin (1879-1953) from the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 to his death in 1953. The complex roots of Stalinism in both the tsarist and the revolutionary traditions, in the Leninist conception of an authoritarian party, but, above all, in the need to provide an appealing mass culture for a primitive peasant people. The revenge of Muscovy on St. Petersburg, the site of the Revolution and the symbol of cosmopolitanism during the psychotic purges of the Stalin era. The Stakhanovites as "flagellants" and party apparatchiki as "Old Believers" of Muscovite Bolshevism. The metamorpho
sis of luminous icons, ringing bells, and consoling incense into lithographs of Lenin, humming machines, and cheap perfume.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and Dr. Zhivago (1958) as both a last echo of the mystical, poetic culture of late Imperial Russia and a prophetic interpretation of the Russian revolution and the Russian future. Old and new themes in the cultural ferment of the Khrushchev era (1953-64). The restless new generation "of the sixties." The recurring ironies and future possibilities of Russian culture.
Ihe revolutions of 1917 occurred in the midst of a profound cultural upheaval which Bolshevism had not initiated and did not immediately curtail. Between the late 1890's and the "great change" (perelom) effected by Stalin during the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), Russian culture continued to sputter and whir through what might be called its electric age.
Like electricity-which spread through Russia during this period- new currents of culture brought new energy and illumination into everyday life. The leading revolutionary rival of Lenin and Trotsky later complained of the "electric charges of will power" that they imparted in 1917; and those leaders in turn sought to move from power to paradise by defining Communism as "Soviet power plus electrification." Many assumed that the bringing of light and energy to the intellect was equally compatible with Soviet power. Just as amber, long thought to be merely decorative, had revealed the power of electricity to mankind, so the theater was "destined to play the part of amber in revealing to us new secrets of nature."1 Just as raw electricity often ran wildly through new metal construction in the rapidly growing cities of early-twentieth-century Russia, so these new artistic currents broke through the insulation of tradition to jolt and shock the growing numbers of those able to read and think. As with electricity, so in culture it was a case of old sources for new power. Man had simply found new ways of unlocking the latent energy within the moving waters and combustible elements of tradition. Thus, the new, dynamic culture of this electric age was, in many ways, more solidly rooted in Russian tradition than the culture of the preceding, aristocratic era.
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