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272 sensuality ("impurity"); he recognises the religious spirit of the poet, and ascribes to him the mystical faculty of so-called second sight, for Lermontov is supposed to have foreseen the circumstances of his death. For Solov'ev, this alleged talent of Lermontov seems a confirmation of his own mysticism.

The third category comprises the poets of harmonious thought, and to this class belong Tjutčev and Aleksěi Tolstoi. Lermontov's disintegration has been overcome; negation has given place to positivism. In Tolstoi, moreover, there has been superadded the factor of the will, of the love of struggle, impelling towards activity. Solov'ev recalls the satire directed against the St. Petersburg officialdom, published in Černyševskii's periodical during the fifties and sixties, and reissued in book form in 1883. The work was professedly written by a certain Kozma Petrovič Prutkov, but was really composed by A. Tolstoi and A. Žemčužnikov. Solov'ev had an affection for Prutkov, whom he imitated; whilst he wrote a brief but sympathetic article concerning A. Žemčužnikov.

It isinteresting to note that Solov'ev's literary and aesthetic studies were exclusively concerned with the lyric poets. The only novelists to whom he referred were Dostoevskii and L. Tolstoi, but with them he dealt, not from the aesthetic outlook but from that of the philosophy of religion. The consequence was that he treated of the development of nihilism no more than casually and in brief annotations. He was as little interested in Turgenev's Bazarov as in Oněgin, and the only novel to which he gave detailed attention was Lermontov's A Hero of our own Time. To Černyševskii's What is to be Done he made no more than a passing allusion, as an attempt to outbid Fathers and Children, whilst artistic appreciation was expressed for Gončarov’s Oblomov as a universal Russian type. He frequently mentioned Tolstoi; that author's literary judgments were quoted on occasions; and Tolstoi's psychological analysis met with Solov'ev's approval. But on the whole, Solov'ev's interest in Tolstoi concerned only the latter's philosophy of religion, and it was Solov'ev's dissent from that philosophy which ultimately led him into conflict with Tolstoi.

Dostoevskii was not merely congenial to Solov'ev, but was elevated to the rank of a prophet. Proof of the prophetic function was found in the fact (for Solov'ev) that in Crime and Punishment the murder committed by a Moscow student was foreseen, whilst in The Devils the Nečaev trial was fore-