Vasily Rozanov: Russia’s first philosopher‑blogger

Vasily Rozanov is little known beyond Russia, yet his influence on Russian philosophy and literature is extraordinarily profound. Some of his contemporaries despised him for his lack of ideology and the physical nature of his style, while others called him a genius but no one remained indifferent to him. On 2nd May, the 170th anniversary of the birth of the original thinker was marked, a man whom many believed had foreseen the future.

Rozanov: pro et contra

Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov was born in 1856 in the town of Vetluga, in the Kostroma Governorate, into the family of an official in the Forestry Department. His childhood was a difficult one: the large family lived in poverty, and his parents died early. In fact, his upbringing was undertaken by his elder brother Nikolai and his brother’s wife. Vasily studied at the Simbirsk Gymnasium, where Nikolai taught, and later continued his education in Nizhny Novgorod. At the age of twenty-two, the young man entered the Faculty of History and Philology at Moscow State University, where he attended lectures by Vladimir Solovyov, Vasily Klyuchevsky, and Fyodor Korsh, and also began writing his first philosophical works. He was passionately interested in literature, particularly in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

After completing his studies, Vasily Rozanov married a controversial figure of the era – Apollinaria Suslova, the former lover of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was considerably older than Rozanov. The marriage proved an unhappy one: Suslova left the writer, yet at the same time refused to grant him a divorce. The true companion of the writer‘s life became Varvara Butyagina (née Rudneva). They were secretly married in 189: the priest agreed to violate church regulations. Rozanov’s five children were unable to bear his surname and were considered illegitimate because the Church did not recognise the marriage.

During his lifetime, Rozanov was widely regarded as a scandalous figure. He quarrelled and even fought with others, was challenged to duels, and was criticized in the press. His contemporaries were sharply divided in their judgements. Leonid Andreyev, in a letter to Maxim Gorky, described Rozanov as 'a mangy dog hopelessly lost in swinishnessbestiality'. Rozanov’s close friend, who repeatedly offered support to him and his family, Father Pavel Florensky, once remarked: 'Rozanov is like a jellyfish, shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow while in the water. But pull it onto dry land – and there is nothing but slime.' Also noteworthy is the assessment of Nikolay Berdyaev, who acknowledged in Rozanov 'a writer of great gift and great vital significance', yet at the same time observed: 'The genius physiology of Rozanov's writings is staggering in its lack of principle, its unscrupulousness, its indifference to good and evil, its faithlessness, its complete absence of moral character and spiritual steadfastness.'

The polarisation of public thought is a phenomenon characteristic not only of Russia, but of any country; both then and now, it has been entirely commonplace: left and right, Westernisers and Slavophiles, traditionalists and liberals – the list could go on endlessly. Only a few individuals are capable of existing on both sides of such a divide, and Vasily Rozanov was one of them. He regularly published in both the conservative newspaper Novoye Vremya and the liberal Russkoye Slovo. Incidentally, this daily work on short articles accustomed him to the brief, aphoristic form that would later find expression in his book Solitaria (Uedinyonnoye).

Naturally, he was often reproached for ideological spinelessness. Reflecting on the philosopher’s extraordinary admiration for Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev believed that Rozanov resembled Dostoevsky’s own characters: 'Within him was the whole diversity of the Karamazovs. There was the lust of Fyodor Pavlovich, the passion and fire of Dmitry, the intellect and reason of Ivan, the prayerfulness and religiosity of Alyosha – and the baseness of Smerdyakov as well. Everything was fused together in this man. And yet he himself was such a little red-haired, frail, inconspicuous figure. But all of that was combined within him.'

Our contemporary, Alexey Varlamov, the author of a biography of Rozanov, has observed that studies of the philosopher are every bit as contradictory as his own creative work. Therefore, anyone studying Rozanov should be prepared for the fact that each new author sees him in his own way, often in complete opposition to the previous one. Rozanov himself wrote of his own nature: 'My soul is woven from sadness, filth, and tenderness.'

Literary Legacy: from philosophical criticism to the genre of the “solitary”

Rozanov’s literary legacy paradoxically combines academic erudition with intimate candour. And, of course, he was a superb stylist of the Russian language; his talent bordered on genius. True renown was brought to him by his study The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor of F. M. Dostoevsky (1891), which opened new horizons in the interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov and became one of the first examples of Russian philosophical criticism.

Yet before he began to write Fallen Leaves, he travelled the long road of an academic philosopher. His debut book, the treatise On Understanding (1886), met with no success. It was a monumental work in which he attempted to construct a universal science concerning the limits and nature of the human mind. The book failed, but it was precisely this failure that later compelled him to abandon scholastic heaviness and discover his own intimate, 'domestic' literary genre.

The central themes of Vasily Rozanov emerged through his disputes with the Church and society. The questions of sex, the family, and the birth of children became fundamental to his thought. In the two-volume work „The Family Question in Russia“ (1903), he fell upon on Christian asceticism and its indifference towards the 'warm world' of the family. He defended the right to divorce and condemned the stigma of illegitimacy. Around the same time appeared the collections Religion and Culture (1899) and Nature and History (1900), in which he attempted to reconcile a pagan love of life with the religious quest. These books earned him the reputation of a 'Russian Nietzsche' in the eyes of some, and of a heretic in the eyes of others. IIt was from this agonising attempt to defend the 'sanctity of the flesh' against 'soulless dogmas' that there grew that strain of anguished intensity which the reader will find in his principal diaries. Exhausted by scholastic heaviness and by misunderstanding, Rozanov created a genre which scholars would later call the 'solitary' style, after the title of his most important book.

Solitaria (Uedinyonnoye, 1911–1912) is the best introduction to Rozanov’s distinctive manner of writing. It is neither a treatise nor a diary, but a collection of fragments: 'exclamations, sighs, half-thoughts, half-feelings'. As Rozanov himself explained: 'The wind rustles at midnight and carries away leaves… So life tears from the soul exclamations and sighs… which have come directly from the soul, without revision, without purpose, without intention.' He conducts a dialogue with himself, laying bare his peculiarities and weaknesses, thereby creating a striking sense of intimate trust.

Vasily Rozanov anticipated the age of blogs: brief emotional notes “about oneself”, an address to the reader as to a friend, and the blending of the intimate with the public. He rejected the role of the 'great writer' and revealed a living, often unpleasant human being with all his 'unpolished' thoughts. In Solitaria there is no plot – only a stream of fragments, where a thought newly born is more precious than one that has been polished smooth.

If Solitaria is a bold experiment, then Fallen Leaves represents the method carried to its absolute limit. The fragments become longer; scenes with dialogue, descriptions of everyday life, and arguments with himself begin to appear. Irony and shock value gradually disappear, giving way to domestic horror: he writes even more openly about his paralysed wife, poverty, and fear of death, no longer looking back at the reader.

The reaction was staggering. Zinaida Gippius wrote that the book ought to be banned – and Solitaria was indeed seized. Marina Tsvetaeva, then still unknown, wrote to Rozanov: 'I have read nothing else of yours, but you are a genius.' The book also appealed to Maxim Gorky. In this way, it united people who otherwise had absolutely nothing in common.

'The Apocalypse of Our Time'

If Solitaria and Fallen Leaves were diaries turned inward, then The Apocalypse of Our Time was an appeal addressed to a collapsing world. The book was written in 1917–1918, when Vasily Rozanov and his family fled starving Petrograd for Sergiyev Posad. Conditions were harsh: there was no heating, and food was scarce. According to his daughter’s recollections, 'empty cabbage soup was boiled', and there was barely any bread. Varvara Dmitrievna had been partially paralysed for several years, and her condition was only getting worse. Rozanov had lost a lot of weight and become weak.

One cold November day, while returning from the bathhouse, Rozanov fell into the snow and lay for a long time. From that moment on, he never got up again. He dictated desperate letters pleading for help, including one to Maxim Gorky: 'The flat is unheated, there is no firewood; my daughters stare at the last piece of sugar beside the cold samovar… I am perishing, perishing, perishing…' Help arrived, but too late – Rozanov passed away two days later. It was neither the first nor the last tragedy to strike the family. Rozanov’s only son, Vasily, died of Spanish influenza in 1918, while his daughter Vera took her own life out of starvation in 1919. His daughter Varvara survived the chaos of the Russian Civil War, but her life also ended tragically: she died of dystrophy in a forced labour camp in 1943. Varvara Dmitrievna herself outlived her husband by four years…

The Apocalypse' was written in a fragmentary and frantic manner and this is no longer speculation or reflection, but the dying testimony of a man who sees his family, state and millennia‑old civilisation collapsing. Rozanov is merciless towards the Russian intelligentsia and literature, which, in his view, had been undermining the foundations for decades: 'In terms of content, Russian literature is such a vile thing, such a mixture of shamelessness and insolence as no other literature.' He also blames Christianity: it declared the family, birth, sex and everyday life to be sinful, and thereby 'weakened the universe'. Experiencing the collapse of Russia as the death of a 'warm, cosy home', he sees the cause in the fact that people have unlearned to value the bodily basis of existence.

One of the book’s climactic moments reads: 'Rus vanished in two days… There is no Kingdom left, no Church, no army, and no working class. So what is left? Strangely enough – literally nothing.' On socialism he wrote: 'Socialism in the future does not frighten me much. It simply cannot thrive here in its pure form! (…) When it comes to implementing it through disciplinary measures (up to terror), the Russian person will very soon develop an immunity, which will manifest itself as sloppiness, lethargy, and flabbiness.'

To his contemporaries, Rozanov often seemed a man 'not of this world' – his ideas were called strange, his writing style deemed insane, and the philosopher himself was considered to be 'beyond' the familiar. Meanwhile, he created a genre that became the norm a century later: short intimate notes, an equal dialogue with the reader, and a rejection of the mentor’s role. He foresaw that the future belonged to living, 'unpolished' thought, not to polished treatises. He himself wrote in The Solitary: 'A thought is only interesting when it is born. Once born, it immediately grows old and must die' – and today, in the age of blogs and social media, this formula sounds like a prophecy.