Vladimir Solovyov’s “Sins of Russia,” “Protest,” and “Obituary for Joseph Rabinovich”: Historical (and often neglected) texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition with contemporary comment and reflection

Abstract

Vladimir Solovyov’s “Sins of Russia,” “Protest,” and “Obituary for Joseph Rabinovich”Historical (and often neglected) texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition with contemporary comment and reflection Gregory Yuri Glazov (bio) Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s analogue to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman, also emerged in the early 1880s as the leading voice in defense of Judaism and Jewish civil rights. The present article serves to introduce some of Solovyov’s lesser-known works on Jewish-Christian relations and to encourage the reader to delve more deeply into this part of his oeuvre.1 Family and friends traced Solovyov’s affection for Jews to his contemplation of Christ as a Jew and to his early disgust for Jew- hatred as un-Christian. His father, one of Russia’s greatest historians, also bequeathed to him a universal worldview that freed him from the judeophobia afflicting many of his contemporary Russian patriots, [End Page 132] influenced as they were by Pan-Slavism, an ideology of action and politics, popularized by Nikolai Danilevsky (1822–85). Danilevsky’s book Russia and Europe proposed that the Slavic peoples were in the process of forging history’s eleventh civilization thanks to their multifaceted, all-assimilating universal humanity. Solovyov satirizes Dostoevsky’s praise for the book as the “future coffee-table book of every Russian,” by calling it “the Koran of all scoundrels and fools.” He further intimates the key difference between his own patriotism and that of the Pan-Slavists in a telling criticism addressed to Strakhov, Danilevsky’s chief exponent in the 1880s: “You regard history as a Chinese Buddhist, and for you there is no sense in my Jewish-Christian question: is the present intellectual climate beneficial or harmful for the divine-human task on earth, in the present historical moment? And by the way, how can Danilevsky’s theory explain that the pure Russian (since it is Orthodox) national culture which we share does not prevent you from being Chinese, and me a Jew?” The italicized words in this excerpt highlight that, for Solovyov, history presents people, individuals, and nations alike, all with divine callings that sanctify not just a life span or an age, but the present moment. In the final question, more difficult to understand, Solovyov emphasizes the failure of Danilevsky’s nationalist determinism to explain how Strakhov and Solovyov can both be Russian Orthodox but subscribe to such different philosophies—Strakhov to what Solovyov deemed a synthesis of Western decadent mechanism and Buddhist passivism, and Solovyov to a biblically rooted belief in the human need to discern a divine calling at every present moment and cooperate with it.2 Solovyov’s conception of the nations and their histories was rooted in the biblical tenet that the peoples of the world are a family of nations for each of whom, he said, adapting Gen 2:18, “it is not good to be alone.” Guided further by his Christian understanding of God as Trinity and Love, Solovyov held that national vocations necessitate fraternal cooperation and love of the other—the other who, being a brother, is necessarily a rival and potentially difficult to live with. [End Page 133] But just as the prophet Isaiah envisioned that the divine task of blessing the earth would be fulfilled through Israel’s cooperation with its traditional enemies Egypt and Assyria (Is 19:24), so Solovyov argued that Russia, as a Gentile Orthodox nation, should develop its messianic vocation by cooperating with Israel, God’s chosen people, and with her Western Catholic brothers, represented by Poland. Only such cooperation, he said, would enable each of these to fulfill their messianic mission to heal the schism between East and West, between spirit and flesh, between the universal and the particular. Consequently, as also explained by Nikolai Bakst, chemist, rabbi, and member of the Pahlen Commission, Solovyov’s wonder about Israel’s perennial cultural receptivity was rooted in his “active and living, rather than abstract and formal, Christian faith which did not permit him to fail to respect other confessions which grew on the same foundations.” Solovyov’s friend Rabbi Faivel Getz also confirmed this evaluation in recalling that Solovyov often characterized Jewish...