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HISTORY, SOPHIA AND THE RUSSIAN NATION |
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Part Two: Case Studies In this part of my research, I conduct a historical analysis of Solov'ev's interventions in five widely debated issues in his time, namely the Polish, Jewish, and Old Believers questions, the tsaricide in 1881, and the famine of 1891-1892. This analysis hereby covers all concrete issues and debates to which Solov'ev committed himself in the Russian context. [1] On the one hand, this historical approach aims at placing the publicist's texts in the context in which they were written, published, and reacted to, and addresses the following questions: the knowledge of the issue displayed by him, his position within the ongoing debates, his addressees, and the perception of his interventions by his fellow countrymen. On the other hand, from a perspective internal to his work, I apply the results of Part One in an analysis of the three registers of history as they manifest themselves in these interventions. In these five case studies, I shed light on Solov'ev's efforts to create the conditions for Russia's development as a Christian nation, as a first step towards the practical incarnation of Sophia in free theocracy. He believed that the implementation of free theocracy should, initially, take place in Russia. Significantly, all his interventions address issues related to the development in Russia of the third pillar of his theocracy, namely society. Solov'ev untiringly exhorted his fellow countrymen to develop that what today some would call a 'civil society', and in his own terms, a harmonious, organic or integral society. [2] Not only did he exhort educated society to gather around a (Christian) unifying principle, but he also called for more solidarity between educated society and the peasantry for the building of society as a whole. [3] This permanent factor shows to what extent this ideal whole, which forms the core of his social commitment as a prophet, departed from his concrete perception of late tsarist society. In this sense, the case studies bring to the fore an image of Solov'ev as a man of his time, whose thought, however idealistic it may sometimes appear to the reader, was nurtured by the observation of social groups. The lack of cohesion, in particular between its urban and country components as well as between the religious communities, prompted him to fiercely react. Having his ideal of a Russian society in mind, Solov'ev intervened on certain issues in a characteristic manner, in which we can discern some tensions. These show how challenging his mission was as prophet, namely to translate a higher truth into the concrete situation of Russia. The tensions concern his approach to the issue, his position with respect to religious minorities, and his treatment of history. First, his approach is a primarily religious and moral, Russo-centric and future-oriented perspective, and is only in exceptional instances factual and directly practical. Challenging in this respect is the definition that Solov'ev gave of himself: 'as a publicist, for whom it is not that, out of which certain phenomena form themselves and how they occur, but that to which they lead (cui bono?), it was necessary for me to emphasise the practical result.' [4] The five cases offer a wide scale of positions between a practical approach and a speculative interpretation, with each case showing a different balance between the two. In the second place, a tension can be discerned in his treatment of religious minorities, which forms the core of three of the five case studies, namely the Old Believers, the Jews, and the Catholic Poles. Solov'ev had an ambivalent relationship to these religious minorities, which on the one hand consists of respect, but on the other hand demonstrates no real understanding of their position. Finally, his treatment of history is characterised by a tension between his belief in progress and his universalism (PH), and his 'Christiano-centrism' (TH), reinforced by the conviction that progress can only consist in sophianic development (SH). I will show how for each issue his original combination of the three registers of history caused a misunderstanding on the part of his fellow countrymen. Within the framework of my research focused on Solov'ev, I have limited my historical investigation of Russian public opinion to a highly restricted field, namely the same genre, place and period of publications as Solov'ev (publicislika in St. Petersburg and Moscow journals 1880-1900). [5] I have classified the publications according to their political adherence and sketched general tendencies with respect to each issue. For this purpose I base myself on the following, inevitably reductive, but commonly accepted classification of Russian public opinion into conservatives (monarchists ranging from the Slavophiles to clerical and nationalist conservatives) and progressives (liberals, legal and revolutionary populists, and socialists). I try to assess Solov'ev's interventions by confronting his statements on the debated issues with those of his fellow countrymen. Considering his statements on history within his texts as 'intersubjectively understandable and verifiable', I also address them on the basis of three modes of verification: pertinent sources and actual state of research; optimal integration of all available historical data; and rigorous, consistent and non-contradictory explicit and implicit models of explanation. [6] The two former criteria are especially relevant for assessing the arguments of a historian. But are these criteria, which were indeed initially defined in order to be applied to historical research, also relevant when applied to a philosopher's writings on history? I can only try to give a cautious answer on this point. Of course, Solov'ev was not an expert, for instance, on the facts of the Polish question in the way a historian was or is. But the fact that he claimed to know the essence of the Polish question allows us to take this claim seriously and examine on what arguments he bases his conclusions. Therefore, the third criterion in particular is applied, while the former two are applied more generally. In order to address the abovementioned questions, I have structured the case studies as follows:
_______________ Notes: 1. My objective is to unravel how Solov'ev positioned himself within existing social debates. To issues like the 'Eastern question', namely the relationships with Turkey, Solov'ev only devoted a few passages. He also dealt with nationalism and church reunion, but these issues fall beyond the scope of this research for the following reasons. His treatment of nationalism mostly remained theoretical, and when it touched upon concrete issues, these are the religious minorities analysed in my case studies. As far as the debate about church reunion is concerned, it is religious rather than social; besides, it did not exist until Solov'ev himself un lashed it. 2. For an analysis of Solov'ev's position in the light of 20th-century discussions on civil society, see Machiel Karskens, 'Free Theocracy and Civil Society: Some Reflections on Solov'ev's Justification of the Good', in: van den Bercken et al. 2000, pp. 447-460. 3. These two motives appear quite clearly in a text written in 1884. 'Evrejstvo i khristianskij vopros' (S. 1989 1. pp. 206-256: p. 246). 4. 'Zamecanija na lekciju P.N. Miljukova' (S. 1989 2. pp. 492-496: p. 494 [italics mine]). 5. I hereby leave two main problems to the cultural historians. Firstly, the problem of a sociology of reading in pre-revolutionary Russia, shedding light on the question of the modes of encounter between the world of the text (newspaper, government report or statute) and that of the reader. The second, related issue is that of a history of representations in pre-revolutionary Russia. The multiple sets of cultural points or reference, values, and beliefs, according to one's social group, place, political conviction etc., contributed to shape one's representation of such issues as the famine of 1891-1892. 6. These criteria come from Wolfgang J. Mommsen, 'Social Conditions and Social relevance in Historical Judgments', History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 17 (1978), 4, pp. 19-35: p. 33.
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