The Icon and the Axe

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 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.