The Heart of Reality

Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics

Vladimir Sergeyevich Soloviev, Vladimir Wozniuk

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780268108939, 9780268030612
• eBook ISBN: 9780268108946
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Vladimir S. Soloviev (1853–1900), moral philosopher, social and literary critic, theologian, and poet, is considered one of Russia's greatest philosophers. But Soloviev is relatively unknown in the West, despite his close association with Fyodor Dostoevsky, who modeled one of his most famous literary characters, Alyosha Karamazov, on Soloviev. In The Heart of Reality, Vladimir Wozniuk offers lucid translations, a substantive introduction, and careful annotations that make many of Soloviev's writings accessible for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Soloviev worked tirelessly in the name of the mystical body of the Universal Church. The vast bulk of his writings can be construed as promoting, in one way or another, the cause of ecumenism. His essays also display the influence of Platonic and German Idealism and strands of Thomistic thinking. Wozniuk demonstrates the consistency of Soloviev's biblically based thought on the subjects of aesthetics, love, and ethics, while at the same time clarifying Soloviev's concept of vseedinstvo (the unity of spiritual and material), especially as applied to literature. Containing many previously untranslated essays, The Heart of Reality situates Soloviev more clearly in the mainstream of Western religious philosophy and Christian thought.

1

Three Addresses
in Memory of Dostoevsky

FOREWORD

In these three addresses, I occupy myself neither with Dostoevsky’s personal life nor with the literary criticism of his works. I have in view only one question: What was Dostoevsky devoted to, what idea inspired all his activity?

To dwell on this is all the more natural since neither the details of his private life nor the artistic virtues or deficiencies of his works in themselves explains the special influence which he had in the last years of his life, and the extraordinary impression left by his death. On the other hand, the bitter attacks to which the memory of Dostoevsky is still subjected are not directed at the aesthetic aspect of his works at all; for everyone alike acknowledges in it a first-order artistic talent, rising sometimes to the level of genius, even if not completely free from serious shortcomings. But, rather, the idea to which this talent was devoted strikes some as true and salutary, and others as spurious and unhealthy.

A definitive appraisal of all Dostoevsky’s activity depends on how we view the idea that inspired him, in what he believed and what he loved. “And he loved before all else the living human soul everywhere and in everything, and he believed that we all are of divine origin; he believed in the infinite power of the human soul, triumphant over any external coercion and over any internal depredation. Having taken into his soul all life’s evil, all the burden and blackness of life, and having abolished all this by the infinite power of love, Dostoevsky proclaimed this victory in all his works. Having learned the meaning of the divine power in the soul piercing through every human frailty, Dostoevsky came to a knowledge of God and Godmanhood.¹ The reality of God and Christ was opened to him in the inner power of love and all-forgiveness, and he preached this allforgiving, abundant power as the foundation also for the outward realization on earth of that kingdom of truth which he thirsted for and toward which he strived all his life.”^*

It seems to me that it is not possible to look upon Dostoevsky as a typical novelist, as upon a talented and intelligent literateur. There was something greater in him, and it is this “something greater” that constitutes his distinctive particularlity and explains his effect upon others. It would be possible to introduce very many pieces of evidence in corroboration of this. I will limit myself to one that is worthy of special attention. Here is what Count L. N. Tolstoy says in a letter to N. N. Strakhov: “How I would like to be able to articulate all that I feel about Dostoevsky. In describing your feeling, you have expressed a part of mine. I never knew this man and never had relations with him directly; and suddenly, when he died, I understood that he was to me the closest, most dear and indispensable person. And it never entered my head to compare myself with him, never. Everything that he did (the actual good that he did) was such that the more he did, the better for me. Art calls forth in me envy, intellect does the same, but a matter of the heart—calls forth only joy. I so much counted him as my friend, and did not think otherwise than that we would see each other; but it did not happen, and this was my loss. Suddenly I read that he died, and I for some reason lost my bearings. I lost my head, and then it became clear how dear he was to me, and I cried and I still cry. Some days before his death I read The Insulted and the Injured and I was moved.” And in a previous letter, “A few days ago I read House of the Dead. I had forgetten much, reread it, and do not know a better book from all of modern literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the tone, but the point of view that is remarkable: sincere, natural, and Christian. A good, edifying book. I enjoyed the entire day yesterday as I have not enjoyed a day for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.”^*

Those heartfelt qualities and that point of view to which Count Tolstoy refers are closely tied to the principal idea that Dostoevsky carried in himself all his life, but which only toward the end began to exercise complete dominion over him. My three addresses are dedicated to the elucidation of this idea.

FIRST ADDRESS

In humanity’s primitive days, poets were priests and prophets, the religious idea controlled poetry, and art served the gods. Then, when life became more complex, when civilization based on a division of labor appeared—art stood apart and was separated from religion, just as was the case with other human activities. If earlier artists were servants of the gods, then art itself now became a deity and an idol. There appeared priests of pure art, for whom perfection of the artistic form became the chief concern, apart from any religious content. The two-fold spring of this liberated art (in the classical world and in modern Europe) was sumptuous, but not everlasting. We have seen with our own eyes the end of the flowering of neo-European art. The blossoms have fallen off, but the fruits are yet only budding. It would be unjust to require from a seed the qualities of ripe fruit: one can only guess in advance what these future qualities will be. It is necessary to relate to the status of art and literature today precisely in this manner. Today’s artists cannot and do not want to serve pure beauty, to create perfect forms; they search for content. But alien to the previous religious content of art, they turn wholeheartedly toward current reality and put themselves in a slavish relationship to it doubly: first, they attempt to copy phenomena of this reality slavishly; and second, they attempt just as slavishly to serve the topic of the day, to satisfy the public mood of a given minute, to advocate a popular ethics, thinking to make art useful through that.² Of course, neither the one nor the other of these goals is attainable. In the unsuccessful pursuit of only apparently real^* details, the actual reality of the whole is lost; and the striving to join extrinsic instructiveness and utility with art, to the detriment of its intrinsic beauty, transforms art into the most useless and unnecessary thing in the world, for it is clear that poor artistic work with the best intention will teach nothing and can yield no utility.

It is very easy to articulate an absolute condemnation of the contemporary status of art and its prevailing tendency. A general decline of creative work and particular infringements on the idea of beauty are much too striking—and yet condemnation of all this would be unfair. In this coarse and debased contemporary art, beneath this dual image of a slave, tokens of divine greatness are hidden. The requirements that art serve contemporary reality and have direct utility, nonsensical in their crude and dark application of today, allude, however, to a lofty and profoundly true idea of art which neither the representatives nor the expounders of pure art have yet approached. Not satisfied by the beauty of form, contemporary artists want more or less consciously for art to be a substantive force, elucidating and regenerating the entire human world. Previously, art distracted man from the darkness and rage that rule the world; it carried him away to its serene heights and entertained him with its pure images; today’s art, on the contrary, attracts man to the darkness and spite of the humdrum with a sometimes obscure desire to illuminate this darkness, to calm this rage.

But where will art take this enlightening and regenerative power from? If art must not be limited to the distraction of man from the evils of life, but must correct the evils themselves, then this great goal cannot be achieved by the simple reproduction of reality. To configure does not yet mean to transfigure, and unmasking still is not improvement. Pure art lifted man above the earth, carried him off to Olympic heights; new art returns to earth with love and compassion, and not in order to be plunged into the darkness of earthly life.³ We do not need art for that, but rather for the healing and renewal of this life. For this it is necessary to be in communion and to be close to the earth, to have love and compassion; but something greater still is also necessary. To have a powerful effect upon the earth, to turn it around and to recreate it, it is necessary to attract and apply unearthly forces to it. Art, having separated itself and kept itself aloof from religion, should appear together with it now in a new and voluntary connection. Artists and poets should once again become priests and prophets, but now in another, yet more important and elevated sense: the religious idea will not just reign over them, but they themselves will direct it and consciously control its earthly incarnations. The art of the future, which after long suffering will itself return to religion, will not at all be that primitive art that earlier had not yet become detached from religion.

In spite of what is—to all appearances—the antireligious character of contemporary art, a keen scrutiny will be able to distinguish within it the indistinct features of the future of religious art, namely in a concurrent two-fold aspiration: first, in aspiring toward a full embodiment of the ideal in the most paltry material details, approaching fulfillment in a merger with present reality; and second, in the aspiration to influence real life, correcting and improving it in agreement with certain ideal requirements. True, these requirements themselves are still rather base and efforts suggested by them are rather unsuccessful. In not acknowledging the religious character of its mission, realistic art rejects the lone solid foundation and sturdy lever for its moral effect in the world.

But all this coarse realism of contemporary art is only that tough membrane behind which, for the time being, the winged poetry of the future is hidden. This is not only an idiosyncratic aspiration—positive facts lead to it. Artists are now appearing who achieve religious truth out of the reigning realism, connect the tasks of its work with religious truth, draw their social ideal from it and sanctify their social service by it, all the while remaining in significant measure on its base soil. If we see in contemporary realist art something like a prophecy of a new religious art, then this prophecy is now beginning to be realized. There are as yet no representatives of this new religious art, but already its precursors are appearing. And Dostoevsky was one such precursor.

According to the character of his activity, belonging as he does to the ranks of artists-novelists—and though inferior to some of them in one respect or another—Dostoevsky has a chief advantage over them all in that he sees not only around himself, but also far ahead of himself. . . .

Apart from Dostoevsky, all our best novelists take the life that surrounds them just as they find it, as it takes shape and expresses itself in its present concrete and apparent forms. Such are the novels of Goncharov and Count Lev Tolstoy in particular. Both of them reproduce a Russian society generated over centuries (landowners, bureaucrats, sometimes peasants) in the forms in which it existed long ago, now in part outmoded or becoming obsolete. The novels of these two writers, despite all the particularities of their separate talents, are decidedly similar to their artistic subject. The distinctive particularity of Goncharov is a power of artistic generalization, thanks to which he could create such an all-Russian type as Oblomov, an equal to which in its breadth we will not find in any other Russian writer.^* And concerning L. Tolstoy, all his work is distinguished not so much by a breadth of types (not one of his heroes has become a common noun), as by a mastery of detailed painting, by the vivid portrayal of all kinds of details in the life of man and nature, his chief power being in the most subtle representation of the mechanism of psychical phenomena. But even this painting of extrinsic details and this psychological analysis are on the immutable background of a prepared life that has already taken shape, namely the life of the Russian gentry family, shaded still more by the fixed images of simple people. The soldier Karataev is too submissive by himself to put the gentry into the background, and even the universal-historical figure of Napoleon cannot draw back the curtain of this constricted horizon: the ruler of Europe shows himself to be such only to the extent that he has contact with the life of a Russian gentleman; and this contact may be very limited—for example, the famous bathing scene in which the Napoleon of Count Tolstoy worthily vies with Gogol’s General Betrishchev. In this immobile world all is clear and defined, all has become fixed; if there is a desire for something else, a striving to exit from these frames, then this striving is turned not ahead, but back to an even more simple and changeless life—to the life of nature (“The Cossacks,” “Three Deaths”).

The artistic world of Dostoevsky presents a completely contrasting character. All is in ferment here, nothing has been fixed, all is still only coming to be. The subject of the novel here is not the static life of a society, but rather social movement. Of all our exquisite novelists, Dostoevsky alone took social movement for the chief subject of his creative work. Turgenev is usually compared with him in this respect, but without sufficient basis. In order to characterize the general significance of a writer, it is necessary to take his best, and not his worst, works. The best works of Turgenev, in particular “A Sportsman’s Sketches” and “A Nest of Gentlefolk,” represent marvelous pictures, but only of social status, of that same old gentry world that we find in Goncharov and L. Tolstoy—and in no way of social movement. While Turgenev then continually tracked our social movement and in part submitted to its influence, the significance of this movement was not forecast by him, and the novel dedicated especially to this subject (Virgin Soil) turned out to be totally unsuccessful.^*

Dostoevsky did not submit to the influence of the reigning tendencies around him, he did not follow obediently the phases of societal movement—he guessed the turning-points of this movement and passed judgment on them in advance. And he could judge by right, for he himself had a standard of judgment in his faith, which placed him above the prevailing currents and allowed him to observe these currents much farther, and not be carried away by them.⁴ By virtue of his faith, Dostoevsky correctly guessed in advance the higher, further goal of the entire movement, clearly saw its digressions from this goal, and by right judged and correctly censured them. This proper and justified censure related only to the false paths and poor methods of the social movement and not to the movement itself, which was both necessary and desired; this censure related to a base understanding of social truth, to a false social ideal, and not to a search for social truth, not to the aspiration to realize a social ideal. The latter lay ahead even for Dostoevsky: he believed not only in a past, but also in an approaching Kingdom of God, and he understood the necessity of labor and action for its realization. He who knows the true goal of a movement can and must judge deviations from it. And Dostoevsky had a right to this all the more because he himself originally experienced these deviations; he himself stood on that erroneous path. The positive religious ideal that had so loftily elevated Dostoevsky over the prevailing currents of social thought did not immediately come easily to him, but was endured by him in a long and difficult struggle. He passed judgment on what he knew and his judgment was true.⁵ And the clearer the higher truth became for him, the more resolutely he had to censure the false paths of societal activity.

The overall point of Dostoevsky’s entire activity, or the significance of Dostoevsky as a public figure, consists in a solution of the two-fold problem concerning a higher societal ideal and an actual path to its attainment.

The legitimate rationale for a social movement consists in the contradiction between the moral requirements of individuality and the structure of the society that has taken shape. Dostoevsky began from here as well: as narrator, interpreter, and at the same time active participant of the new social movement. A profound sense of social falsehood was expressed in his first tale, “Poor People,” in a most inoffensive form. The social meaning of this tale (to which the later novel, The Insulted and the Injured is also adjoined) is reduced to an old and eternally new truth that in the existing order of things the best (morally) people are at the same time for society the worst, that they are fated to be poor people, insulted and injured.^*

If social falsehood had remained for Dostoevsky only the theme of tale or novel, then he himself would have remained only a man of letters and would not have attained his special significance in the life of Russian society. But for Dostoevsky the content of his tale was at the same time a life’s mission. He imediately p...

Table of contents

• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Three Addresses in Memory of Dostoevsky
• 2. Beauty in Nature
• 3. The Universal Meaning of Art
• 4. The Meaning of Love
• 5. A First Step toward a Positive Aesthetic
• 6. The Fate of Pushkin
• 7. Mickiewicz
• 8. Lermontov
• Appendix A. A Note in Defense of Dostoevsky against the Charge of a “New” Christianity
• Appendix B. The Russian Symbolists
• Supplemental List of Soloviev’s Relevant Writings
• Notes
• General Index
• Index of Biblical References