Vasily Rozanov

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Vasily Rozanov died of starvation in a monastery in the hungry years after the Russian Revolution, which is a fitting end for a man who spent his life feeding on contradiction. He was a writer who praised Christian faith and attacked it within the same breath. He defended Judaism and indulged in unabashed anti-Semitism. He accepted homosexuality as a side of human nature and then turned around to accuse Nikolai Gogol of being a latent homosexual. His adversary Nikolai Berdyaev summed it up this way: Rozanov "set up sex in opposition to the Word." How did this walking contradiction become one of the most important philosophers of the pre-revolutionary Russian symbolist movement? What drew Maxim Gorky, Venedikt Erofeev, and possibly Vladimir Nabokov into his orbit? And why does his legacy remain stubbornly alive in Russia while staying almost invisible to the rest of the world?

• 2. Sex, Faith, and Paradox

  ›

  Rozanov's lifelong project was an attempt to reconcile Christian teachings with ideas of healthy sex and family life. That combination was explosive in the cultural climate of nineteenth-century Russia, and it brought him close to the Russian Symbolist movement, which was itself drawn to transgressive and mystical ideas. Klaus von Beyme, the political scientist, gave Rozanov a label that captures the shock value of his position: the Rasputin of the Russian intelligentsia. The comparison pointed directly at the phallic references scattered throughout Rozanov's writings, which were unlike anything in respectable philosophical literature of the time. Yet Rozanov was not simply a provocateur. His leaps between polar positions were deliberate. He proclaimed that politics was "obsolete" because, in his own words, "God doesn't want politics any more." He also constructed what he called an "apocalypse of our times" and held up the "healthy instincts" of the Russian people as a kind of counter-force to modernism. His philosophical identity was built on the right to hold contrary opinions simultaneously, a right he defended loudly and often.

• 3. The Voice of Solitaria

  ›

  In the 1890s, Rozanov first attracted wider attention through political sketches published in the conservative newspaper Novoye Vremya, meaning "New Time," which was owned and run by Aleksey Suvorin. His comments were always paradoxical and reliably sparked controversy, drawing him into clashes with the Tsarist government and with radicals including Lenin. As his thinking matured, he moved away from the newspaper column and toward a radically different literary form. His mature works are personal diaries filled with intimate thoughts, impromptu lines, unfinished maxims, vivid aphorisms, reminiscences, and short essays. In the loosely connected trilogy of Solitaria, published in 1911, and the two volumes of Fallen Leaves, published in 1913 and 1915, he tried to recreate the actual intonations of spoken thought on the page. Rozanov also frequently identified himself as Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man" and used that persona to justify his refusal to stay in one intellectual position for long. The Underground Man, famously, reserves the right to contradict himself, and Rozanov treated that fictional precedent as a personal philosophy.

• 4. Legacy and Suppression

  ›

  After the revolution, Rozanov's work was suppressed and largely forgotten in the Soviet Union, a silence that lasted for decades. Among those who kept his memory alive were writers of considerable standing: Maxim Gorky and Venedikt Erofeev counted themselves his admirers. His ideas are also thought to have shaped Vladimir Nabokov's treatment of the everyday world of existence, the Russian concept known as byt, as something utopian. In 1988, the philosopher Dmitry Galkovsky published a novel called The Infinite Deadlock, which revises nineteenth-century Russian history and places Rozanov at the center of Russian philosophical thought; Galkovsky identified Rozanov as his main source of inspiration. More recently, Rozanov's paradoxical writings became available again to Russian readers, and a resurgence of interest followed, particularly among readers drawn to his political views. Outside Russia, his name remains little known, though a growing number of western scholars have become fascinated by both his work and his persona.