The Icon and the Axe

ransacked by the victorious Bolsheviks, and he was deliberately called "citizen" rather than "comrade" in view of his "pedantic" insistence that a ‹ democratic revolution must precede a proletarian one. An old and lonely man now in disgrace with left and right alike, Plekhanov left Russia shortly thereafter for newly independent Finland, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1918.53 With him perished Marxism as an extension of Western radical humanism into Russia and a rational doctrine of economic progress and cultural enrichment. Plekhanov had hoped to overcome the conspiratorial attitudes and peasant-bred, Utopian fanaticism of the Russian revolutionary tradition on which Lenin with his greater opportunism-and perhaps deeper roots in Russian popular thinking-was building.

Plekhanov dying in Finland while Russia was in flames in 1918 resembled in many ways Miliukov dying in France while Russia was again in flames in 1943. Both men were intellectuals, men of European culture who were at the same time profound analysts of Russian thought. Both wished to correct the errors and irrationalities of past Russian traditions by introducing rational methods of analysis and encouraging greater familiarity with the reformist traditions of the West. Both maintained concern for their native country even in defeat and oblivion, Plekhanov calling for resistance to White as well as Red terror in his last lonely days, just as Miliukov called for support of Russia against Hitler's invasion.

Both were rejected in the early twentieth century partly because of the primitiveness of Russian' thought and the unfamiliarity and complexity of their proposals. Even more decisive, however, in the defeat of both liberal and social democracy was the failure of the West either to prevent the great war which crushed and disintegrated Russian society, or to support fully in the aftermath of that war those forces that still clamored for a chance to relate Russian development to the patterns of Western democracy.

Mystical Idealism

If dialectical materialism provided a method for a new generation of radicals to rise above the isolation and pessimism of the age of small deeds, mystical idealism provided the way out of subjectivism for more conservative thinkers. If Plekhanov, the prophet of Marxism, was a critic of populist particularism, Solov'ev, the spokesman for the new mysticism, was a trenchant critic of Pan-Slav and Orthodox parochialism. No less than Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev was a man of broad European interests who was steeped in Comtian philosophy and widely traveled in the West.

But his preoccupations were religious and aesthetic rather than political. He was concerned for spiritual rather than political reasons with the fate of the Poles and the Jews within the Russian empire, and was anxious to affect a rapprochement with Roman Catholicism in the interests of a reunited and totally renovated "universal church": a "free theocracy" that would include Jews as well as Christians and would harmonize science and religion with a "free and scientific theosophy."

Like Plekhanov and Miliukov, Solov'ev was born in the fifties and deeply affected by the ideological trends of the sixties. He was the second son and fourth child of Sergius Solov'ev, author of a history of Russia which has never been equaled either in size or in encyclopedic command of sources. From his early years young Vladimir seems to have dreamed of accomplishing something equally remarkable. As a boy, however, he was less close to his stern, humorless father than to his part-Polish mother and his grandfather, who was a priest. His youth was enlivened by a vivid imagination and a Schilleresque love of play. Known as "the pecheneg" (the most feared and adventuresome of the early steppe people), he was fascinated by tales of Spanish knights in his youth. At the age of nine he had the first of his visions of the divine feminine principle which would inspire both his poetry and his social theories. The image of the divine woman, whom he later called sophia, came to him holding a flower in the midst of shining light and is typical of the occult mystical tradition which he did much to revive and make respectable in Russia. A second vision of sophia came to him in the British Museum, where on a traveling scholarship in the mid-seventies he was studying Gnostic philosophy. He set off immediately for Egypt, where he had a third vision of sophia, before returning to Russia to present his new theories to a large and excited audience. The major philosophic rival in late Imperial Russia to the materialistic doctrine which Marx had drawn up from the economic treatises and revolutionary reflections in the British Museum proved to be the new idealism that Solov'ev conceived from religious writings and mystical visions in another part of the same great library.