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 tradition. 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
