Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/299

Rh shadowed. Dostoevskii did not merely look around but looked ahead; he possessed a philosophic understanding of the movement of Russian society; he deduced from this movement its inevitable consequences, and passed the right judgment upon them. As a revolutionary, Dostoevskii grasped while in Siberia, and recounted in The House of the Dead, that he had erred, and how he had erred; he came to understand that Russia could be saved in no other way than by a moral rebirth. Solov'ev discovered in Dostoevskii his own theocratic ideal. Dostoevskii's speech at the Puškin festival, with its reconciliation of slavophils and westernisers, had really formulated the program of the reconciliation of east and west in the church universal.

Solov'ev was on terms of personal friendship with Dostoevskii. In 1878 the two were together on a visit at the monastery of Optina Pustyn. It is remarkable that Solov'ev gave no account of Dostoevskii's attitude towards Catholicism, but Solov'ev had no understanding of Dostoevskii's real nature.

Like Homjakov, Solov'ev occasionally expounded his ideas upon the philosophy of religion in metrical form. His poems convey an impression of truth, and some of them are excellent. Apart from these verses on the philosophy of religion and others of a more directly religious nature, distinguished by their sincerity are the biographical sketches wherein the poet endeavoured to give a psychological description (affective in its colour for the most part) of his feelings at the time of writing. In Solov'ev's philosophy, above all in his theosophy but also in his ecclesiastical history, we trace the poet. His translation of Plato was to some extent the outcome of an artistic impulse. It was the same impulse, doubtless, which led him to translate part of Dante's Vita Nuova and the before-mentioned work by Hoffmann.

Solov'ev carried on a vigorous campaign against the decadents and the symbolists. This is psychologically noteworthy, seeing that he himself was a great symbolist, and seeing that the general impression he produces on our minds is that he was a decadent struggling towards regeneration. The pathological aspects of his mysticism and asceticism, the fondness he displayed for the mysterious, the attempt to transcend Kantian

Rh