Vladimir Solovyov wanted to fuse every idea into one, and died a pauper
Vladimir Solovyov was Dostoevsky's confidant, a likely model for two of the Karamazov brothers, and a thinker who dreamed of fusing every philosophy, and even Eastern and Western Christianity, into a single whole. By 1900 he was apparently homeless and broke, his health wrecked by relentless mental work.
Born in Moscow in 1853, Solovyov came from a literary family: his father was a historian, his elder brother a historical novelist and his sister a poet. As a teenager he abandoned Orthodoxy for nihilism, but his dislike of positivism drew him back toward the Church. His 1874 attack on the positivists argued that reason reaches only the outward appearance of things, while their essence is grasped through intuition, with consciousness working as one organic whole.
His life's project was reconciliation. Using the Slavophile idea of sobornost, an organic unity arising through integration, he tried to find common ground between clashing concepts and peoples and merge them. That led him to favour healing the split between the Orthodox and Catholic churches; he accepted papal primacy, and there is evidence he joined the Catholic Church in a ceremony in 1896. He also learned Hebrew and during the 1880s campaigned harder than anyone in the empire for equal rights for Russian Jews, even appealing abroad through a letter to The London Times, and reportedly praying for the Jewish people on his deathbed.
His syncretism mixed Plato and Plotinus, early Christianity, Kabbalah and Gnosticism with his own mystical encounters with Sophia, a feminine figure of divine wisdom. Parts of the Orthodox world later condemned Sophiology as unsound, although the theologian David Bentley Hart has argued she is essentially a biblical figure from the Wisdom literature. His book The Meaning of Love coined syzygy for close union and fed into Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata.
Not every turn was generous. Having once studied Asian cultures eagerly, he came to dismiss Nirvana as mere nothingness and spent his last years fearing an invasion of Russia from the East, a theme of his Tale of the Antichrist in 1900. He never married, pursued idealised loves including two women named Sophia, and lived for months without servants, working into the night. Critics such as Janko Lavrin found no epoch-making work in his output, yet his thought shaped the Symbolist poets of Russia's Silver Age. He is buried at Novodevichy Convent.
Source: Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)
