Vladimir Solovyov

“ The mystic philosopher Vladimir Solovieff used to dream of the union of the churches with the Pope as the spiritual head, and democracy in the Russian sense as the broad basis of the rejuvenated Christendom. Dostoyevsky, a writer most sensitive to the claims of nationality in Russia, defined the ideal of the Russians in a celebrated speech as the embodiment of a universally humanitarian type. These are extremes, but characteristic extremes pointing to the trend of national thought. Russia is so huge and so strong that material power has ceased to be attractive to her thinkers. ”

“ Significantly enough, amongst the four classic novelists, three—Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—have ultimately been converted from scepticism and atheism to Christianity, and the fourth—Turgenev—only continued to adhere to positivism because he continued to live an exile in Germany and France. The only great philosophical thinker Russia has produced—Vladimir Soloviov—may be properly called a Christian Plato, and it is equally significant that the revolutionary leader who hitherto has had the strongest influence over the masses has been a priest. ”

“ People's lives are held together, not by liberty but by fear. Submission to law is essential to man. But the revolutionists reject law. They form two parties. One wants to make quick work with the ministers and the faithful subjects of the Czar by means of bombs, etc. The other party is willing to wait a little; first they'll have a general uprising, then they'll kill off everybody at once." Solovyov raised his eyes pensively, and paused an instant. "It is difficult for us to comprehend their politics. ”

“ He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Ténèbres, reveals the influences of Dostoïevsky and Tolstoy. It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the same profession as Dostoïevsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. [Pg 85] For the rest there is Vladimir Soloviev, who is a poet-metaphysician with a following. He has mystic proclivities. Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. ”

“ In the corner near Sasha about a dozen men had gathered. Yevsey quietly moved up to the group, and heard the enraptured voice of Piotr:
"That's the way to speak! Twice two are four, and all are aces."
"No, I'm not satisfied," said Solovyov sweetly with a prying note in his voice. "Think! What does it mean to think? Everyone may think in his own way. You should tell me what to do."
"You have been told!" put in Krasavin roughly and sharply.
"I don't understand," Maklakov declared calmly.
"You?" shouted Sasha. "You lie! You do understand!" ”

“ True, Solomin typifies the splendid sturdiness of the Russian people, the caution and craftiness of the peasant-born and the intellectual honesty of his race; but these qualities need a more individual soul behind them to combine them into a great artistic creation. And in fact the Russian Solomins have not yet left the factories: they are the foremen who do not speak up enough for 'the people' in the national life. ”

“ He has been up till now the scapegoat of Russian literature. All Russian writers preach humility, even those who began by heading revolts—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoi ... here is the one single man who never gave in and never submitted to his last breath ... he is the Cain of Russian literature and has been killed by Abel, the spirit of humility. Solovyòv's cry of 'Devilish superman' is only another proof of the fact that the struggle between superhumanism and deo-humanism is the eternal problem of life." Merejkòvski's idea is that Lèrmontov could remember the past of his eternity ... ”

“ I want you to know that; though I am no more to her than—than the man who waits on her at dinner, or who opens a cab door for her and gets a smile and a coin for his service!”
It was a childish outburst, perhaps, but it moved Loris Solovieff to a queer response.
“I understand,” he said softly in French.
He spoke English admirably, but in emotional moments he lapsed into the language that is more familiar than their mother-tongue to all Russians of his rank.
“It is so with us all. She loves Russia,—our poor Russia, agonizing in the throes of a new birth; while we—we love her, the woman. ”

“ From God and chaos, Solov'ev evolves the world and its history, evolves them as do all mythagogues, notionally and in their reality.
The sophia strives against chaos; this struggle presupposes a soul, the world-soul, the materia prima, the potential mother of the created world. The creation of the world proceeds from the father; the logos brings forth the higher world of ideas, but these ideas are mere contemplative and impassive beings; from the holy ghost originate the pure spirits or angels, which have feeling and will, and possess a higher order of freedom than man. ”

“ Russian scholars became aware that "general human knowledge cannot be realized by a nation without self-knowledge," which is the chief factor of progress, and many of them turned their minds to the study of Russian history.
This idea was not easy of access to historians like Karamsin, who was much more interested in the fortunes of the Russian monarchy than in the history of the Russian nation; but it was one of the leading principles of Solovyev's great work. Solovyev at one time attended the lectures of Ritter and was a disciple of Guizot and an adherent of Ewers ”

“ It cannot reasonably be contended that Solov'ev's greatness and originality lay in an alleged organic synthesis of opposites. Apart from the fact that a synthesis of such opposites cannot possibly be organic, it is in the very failure of the attempt that, in my view, is to be discovered Solov'ev's originality and significance, above all for Russia. Unwillingly did he become a heretic to his own teaching. ”

“ Why do they choose just me to be a servant?"
"You look like one," said Sasha, with a smile.
"There will be three," Solovyov repeated sighing. "What do you say to having some beer? All right?"
Piotr opened the door, and shouted in an irritated voice:
181"Half a dozen beer," and he went to the window clenching his fists and cracking his knuckles.
"There, you see, Maklakov?" said Sasha. "Among us no one wants to work seriously, with enthusiasm. But the revolutionists are pushing right on—banquets, meetings, a shower of literature, open propaganda in the factories!" ”

“ In his analysis of Dostoevskii, Solov'ev accepts this formula and develops it as follows.
A man who bases his right to change the world upon his wickedness and unreason is essentially a murderer; he will employ force against others, and will himself ultimately perish through force. He considers himself strong, but is in the power of others. He is proud of his freedom, but is the slave of chance and of outward happenings. ”

“ In the middle and late sixties, when the representatives of the radical trend of Černyševskii and Pisarev were being persecuted, Solov'ev, at the age of fourteen, became an enthusiastic nihilist. Until his seventeenth year he was faithful to positivism, materialism, and atheism, regarding Pisarev as the greatest Russian philosopher, and Spinoza as the greatest philosopher the world had ever produced. Further, Solov’'ev was an enthusiast for Buddhism, and his pantheistic inclinations were fostered by the study of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. ”

“ Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. ”

“ The people must live. Hundreds were killed, eh? Wounded!" shouted Solovyov.
From somewhere came the repulsive voice of Sasha, cutting the ear.
"The priest ought to have been caught. That before everything else. The idiots!"
Krasavin walked about with his hands folded behind his back, biting his lips and rolling his eyes in every direction.
Quiet Viekov took up his stand beside Yevsey, and picked at the buttons of his vest.
"So this is the point we've reached," he said. "My God! Bloodshed! What do you think, eh?"
"What happened?" Yevsey asked. ”

“ Sonpolyev continued to question. “To be once more as before, whole and bold; to contain in one body—which shall feel itself light and young and free—the fullness of life and the union of the antagonistic identities of our human breed. To be, indeed, more than whole; to feel as it were, in one’s breast, the beating of a doubled heart; to be this and that; to join two clashing souls within oneself, and to wrest the necessary manhood and hardihood for great deeds from the fiery struggle of intense contradictions.”
“Yes, yes,” said Garmonov, “I, too, sometimes dream about this.” ”

“ You have only to look at Solomin. A head as clear as the day and a body as strong as an ox. Isn’t that a wonder in itself? Why, any man with us in Russia who has had any brains, or feelings, or a conscience, has always been a physical wreck. Solomin’s heart aches just as ours does; he hates the same things that we hate, but his nerves are of iron and his body is under his full control. ”

“ To the West, Russia is a perpetual source of mystery and of fascination, and this is above all because we see in her development a tremendous conflict between opposing ideas—in the words of Soloviev, between “two ideals which embrace the entire economy of the human species.” The process which first became noticeable under Peter the Great has reached its crisis to-day, and upon its outcome depends the fate not merely of Russia herself, but of the Western world as well. ”

“ Solov'ev's essential error is, of course, that he assumes church doctrine to be absolutely true, and that from this outlook he touches up the whole of history; for him, not Jesus and Jesus' teaching, but church doctrine and church dogma, are decisive. He fashions for himself the ideal of a Christian church and the ideal of a Christian state. If, as Solov'ev tells us in his Ethics, the church is to represent sympathy with the soul, and the state is to represent sympathy with the body, there will doubtless be an organic harmony between church and state ”

“ FEDOR SOLOGUB is one of the cleverest of contemporary Russian tale-writers and poets. He ranks with Tchekhof and Kuprin and Remizof, though he has very little in common with these writers. He is not a realist; he does not love to comment on life as Tchekhof did, nor to flood his pages with delicious details as does Kuprin; he has nothing of either the melancholy or the energy of Gorky. He is more modern than these; he scents new thoughts, and endeavours to find a new medium of style and language to present them to his age. His genius lies in the power he has to suggest atmosphere. ”

“ WHEN, in his Ethics, Solov'ev expounds his free theocracy we feel throughout that his aim is to provide an ethical foundation for the idea of theocracy. Speaking generally, for Solov'ev life, history, and the world have a moral meaning. In his ethical system the Kantian outlook finds expression, and he endeavours to formulate the concept of theocracy as reasonably as possible, to bring the idea into harmony with the views of modern philosophers and sociologists. ”

“ By Schopenhauer, too, Solov’ev was won over to the cause of asceticism, or rather Schopenhauer led him to esteem religious asceticism even more highly than before. The entire superstructure of his free theocracy is founded upon asceticism. For him, church, state, individual morality, the entire moral organisation of mankind, are ascetic. In asceticism, in the sentiment of shame, man realises himself to be man, therein he finds himself to be higher than the beasts and higher than matter; and in asceticism Solov'ev seeks the essence of genius. ”

“ These studies afforded the most pleasure of all to Soloviev. This big, strong, and negligent man somehow involuntarily, imperceptibly even to himself, began to submit to that hidden, unseizable, exquisite witchery of femininity; which not infrequently lurks under the coarsest covering, in the harshest, most gnarled environment. The pupil dominated, the teacher obeyed. Through the qualities of a primitive, but on the other hand a fresh, deep, and original soul, Liubka was inclined not to obey the method of another, but to seek out her own peculiar, strange processes. ”

“ All children who come to Solovetsk are kept for a year, if not for a longer time. The lodging is homely and the teaching rough; for the schools are adapted to the state of the country; and the food and sleeping-rooms are raised only a little above the comforts of a peasant's home. No one is sent away untaught; but only a few are kept beyond a year. If a man likes to remain and work in the convent he can hire himself out as a laborer, either in the fishing-boats or on the farms. He dines in summer, like the monks, on bread, fish and quass ”

“ In its first draft, his free theocracy has a much closer resemblance with the actual theocracy of Russian caesaropapism.
In practice, Solov'ev wishes to secure a free theocracy by a union of the three main churches. In this matter the state as the second great social organisation, must cooperate with the church; the ecclesiastical and the political organisation must work in harmony. The absolute truth of the church being recognised, Christianity cannot fail to permeate the entire life of society ”