Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/251



AVING dealt with the defenders of official theocracy we have now to consider the theorist of "free theocracy" Vladimir Sergěevič Solov'ev, the most influential teacher of the recent searchers after God and the leading representative of the Russian philosophy of religion.

Solov'ev was born at Moscow in the year 1853. A gifted lad, he found much to stimulate his literary and philosophical faculties in his home and among the family acquaintances. Sergěi Solov'ev, the father, is already known to us as liberal historian and professor at Moscow university; the mother was also a person of active intelligence; whilst the Solov'ev family had lively traditions of the remarkable philosopher Skovoroda, to whom the mother was kin. The family talent is further signalised by the fact that Vladimir Solov'ev's elder brother was a writer of novels, whilst one of his sisters attained reputation as painter and poet.

Before leaving school, Solov'ev had already shown keen interest in philosophical and religious questions. In the middle and late sixties, when the representatives of the radical trend of Černyševskii and Pisarev were being persecuted, Solov'ev, at the age of fourteen, became an enthusiastic nihilist. Until his seventeenth year he was faithful to positivism, materialism, and atheism, regarding Pisarev as the greatest Russian philosopher, and Spinoza as the greatest philosopher the world had ever produced. Further, Solov’'ev was an enthusiast for Buddhism, and his pantheistic inclinations were fostered by the study of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Entering the university in 1869, he devoted himself to the study of natural science, but transferred two years later, to the philosophical Rh