Abstract
For nearly a century, the interpretation of Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev (1853–1900) has been locked in a “mythopoeic method” of the Symbolist conceit rooted in Europe-widefin de sièclecultural developments. Solov′ev's posterity has come to see him as a mystic prophesying the folly of reason and mass politics, whereas his contemporaries saw him as the model for both Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov in Fedor Dostoevskii'sThe Brothers Karamazov—a dramatization of the “politics of the self” within the secularization frame. The story of the gap between these two images reveals the historicity of the Symbolist conceit. More broadly, it shows how the Russian authors of this myth participated in transnational prewar and interwar discourses about mass politics, culture, and violence that expand the typical chronological and geographical boundaries associated with these developments.
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