Vladimir Solovyov

Vladimir Solovyov (Moscow, 1853 – Moscow, 1900) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet and literary critic whose work shaped Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the nineteenth century and fed the spiritual revival of the early twentieth. Drawing on Plato, German idealism and the Orthodox tradition, he tried to reconcile reason, intuition and faith, and his ideas reached Russian Symbolism and later theology.

The son of the historian Sergey Solovyov, he grew up in an intellectual household. After a religious crisis in his teens that pushed him towards a kind of nihilism, he studied at Moscow University, where he read Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. His first major work, The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (1874), faulted positivism for confining itself to phenomena and called for an integral knowledge in which reason was completed by intuition. Further writings on the same theme followed, forming a loose trilogy on the theory of knowledge.

Between 1875 and 1876 he travelled through Europe and to Egypt. In London he had an experience that he understood as a vision of Sophia, divine wisdom, a figure that would stay at the centre of his later thought. In 1878 he gave public lectures on Godmanhood in St Petersburg, attended by figures such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. His friendship with Dostoevsky was close, and he spoke at memorial events after the novelist's death. In 1881, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, he asked the new tsar to spare the killers from execution. The gesture cost him his university post and left him in precarious finances, moving from hotel to hotel.

In his last years he took an interest in Judaism, defended the civil rights of Jews in tsarist Russia, and drew closer to Catholicism, hoping for a reconciliation of the Eastern and Western churches. He also wrote mystical love poetry, and his apocalyptic tale The Tale of the Antichrist expressed his fear of Asia. He died in 1900 at the estate of a relative and was buried at Novodevichy Convent.

His influence reached Russian Symbolism, later Orthodox theology, and literature: he is often considered one of the sources for Dostoevsky's Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov. He left no single work of striking philosophical originality, yet his thought remains one of the most ambitious syntheses of Russian religious philosophy.