In 1956, policy and religion determined Russian studies in North America. The publication of Carl Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy offered “the general model of totalitarian dictatorship and of the society which it has created.”Footnote 1 In Martin Malia's piquant phrase, it amounted to a general theory of the Third Reich's and the Soviet Union's “perverse modernity and degenerate democracy,” in which totalitarian societies were assumed to be politically impotent against centralized political authorities.Footnote 2 This book also marked the ascendance of the “Cold War university,” which subordinated social science to Washington's foreign-policy ambitions. Ironically, this conceptual apparatus came from Weimar German émigrés, who isolated historians in general and Russian émigrés in particular, from the production of knowledge about the Soviet Union.Footnote 3 Although Friedrich's collaborator, Merle Fainsod, demonstrated continuities between late imperial autocracy and Soviet Russian dictatorship under the totalitarian banner, Harvard-trained historians from the time recalled that the concept had no great influence on their work.Footnote 4 Moreover, Fainsod's appreciation of the “upwardly mobile” citizens of the early Soviet state (vydvizhentsy) indicates that he never completely denied Soviet citizens social or political agency to the degree that Friedrich and Brzezinski did.Footnote 5 And the Russian émigrés’ tendency to maintain separate cultural networks only increased their isolation. However apt the so-called “revisionist” school's critique of totalitarianism's cultural essentialism, their great bête noire was a man of straw.Footnote 6 The more Russia was politicized, the more Russia's past was obscured by culture and power.
Independent of the Cold War university, some members of the Russian emigration developed a religious narrative of Russian history that resonated with the totalitarian theory. Others, however, continued to debate the political viability of Russia after the introduction of representative government in 1905. The process of how these narratives were articulated, developed, and diverged can be seen in the “posthumous career” of Vladimir Solov′ev (1853–1900), often described as Russia's greatest philosopher, from the emergence of Russian modernism in the 1890s through revolution, war, and emigration to Europe and North America in the early Cold War.Footnote 7 Solov′ev counted the elder Russian novelist and journalist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) among his friends. And some of Solov′ev's contemporaries even regarded him as the model for both Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov in the eponymous novel, both of whom dramatize the moral dilemmas of secularizing religious values.Footnote 8 Whereas contemporaries regarded Solov′ev as a complicated mixture of the brothers Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, the leading voices of the emigration regarded Alyosha's mysticism as the sole true Solov′ev to the detriment of Ivan's secular rationalism.Footnote 9 The politics of Solov′ev's reception among the Russian emigration—how his legacy was narrowed to fit the Symbolist conceit's narrative—does more than show how the historical record came to be distorted. It also sheds light on the politics that shaped visions of Russia in Europe and the United States during the interwar and Cold War eras.
Perhaps nothing dramatizes the end of this process more clearly than the deafening silence that greeted Fyodor Stepun's (1884–1965) two-volume study of late imperial Russian and early Soviet culture and politics that also appeared in 1956. Stepun was deeply engaged in the late empire's cultural and political circles that intersected with late imperial German universities, Russia's experiment with representative government, World War I, the February and October Revolutions in 1917, civil war, Weimar and Nazi Germany, and the postwar United States occupation.Footnote 10 Only Stepun's publisher, the émigré and Harvard historian Michael Karpovich, reviewed it in the Russian-language émigré Novyi Zhurnal (New Journal), chiding Stepun for discounting the viability of late imperial Russia's political culture and institutions.Footnote 11 Throughout the early twentieth century's tumult, the legacy of Vladimir Solov′ev remained a lodestone for Stepun's activity in, not flight from, politics. By 1963, however, Solov′ev had become the avatar of the Russian contribution to a transnational ecumenical movement that was deeply suspicious of secular democracy and fiercely anticommunist. In that year, Nicolas Zernov (1898–1980) turned Solov′ev into a mere forerunner of the “Russian religious renaissance,” which seemingly heralded the ecumenical movement he championed after learning about its custodian, the YMCA's John Mott, at a conference in Helsinki in 1926.Footnote 12 Stepun, however, had no effect on this issue for an English-speaking audience since he wrote about the “Silver Age,” an alternative to Zernov's narrative, in German for Germans.
Although Stepun's Solov′ev was a mystical inspiration to the Silver Age's Symbolist poets, Stepun was careful to note that mysticism was the feature of Solov′ev's legacy that the poets apotheosized.Footnote 13 Stepun even wrote to Zernov that he thought they were both “working on the same theme” but were writing “very different books.”Footnote 14 If, as Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, the Russian émigrés took “everything they [could] lay hands on” as they left Russia, how had Solov′ev's legacy become narrower than his contemporaries remembered?Footnote 15
One answer to the question of Solov′ev's legacy can be found in the entanglements of culture and power embedded in the politics of Solov′ev's reception from the assimilation of his work into modernist programs in the 1890s up to the early Cold War.Footnote 16 I do so by reading the way the conceit's authors appropriated Solov′ev's legacy chronologically and by understanding them contextually against the social, political, and “intimate contexts” of the private life that shaped the authors’ public activity.Footnote 17 Ultimately, the origins of this purely mystical Solov′ev lie in Russia's modernist moment in 1892 when avant-garde poets programmatically “replaced tradition with myth” by eschewing the historical for the transcendent.Footnote 18 A trio of Symbolist poets, Andrei Bely (1880–1934), Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921), and Vladimir Solov′ev's nephew Sergei Solov′ev (1885–1942) first articulated what I call the Symbolist conceit—the “mythopoeic method” for interpreting Solov′ev as an inveterate mystic.Footnote 19
I do not intend this concept to replace either of the canonical narratives. Rather, the term highlights the political motives and aesthetic ideals behind the hermeneutic principles of at least two major intellectual movements that are not usually treated as part of the same intellectual universe. Retrospectively the advocates of Symbolist poetry and idealist social philosophy, particularly Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) and Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), appeared to represent diametrically opposed intellectual tendencies. But they inhabited the same intimate context in which they did not see these distinctions clearly.Footnote 20 These figures turned the Symbolists’ “aesthetic revolt” into a political one directed against both the autocracy and radical socialist and conservative movements.Footnote 21 In late imperial Russia, Berdiaev and Bulgakov were best known as contributors to Vekhi (Signposts), a controversial collection of articles published in 1909 that criticized the divisiveness of politics in the Duma, imperial Russia's parliament. Having experienced the violence and bloodletting of mass politics since before the 1905 Revolution, the contributors also eschewed any police or violent means of enforcing political unity.Footnote 22 Contemporaries perceived the diverse collection of articles as united only by criticism of the radical left parties in the first three Dumas (1906–12) for promoting labor and peasant unrest against center and right parties as well as the autocracy and its bureaucracy.Footnote 23 The volume's contributors, collectively known as the vekhovtsy, scorned the intelligentsia as too radical and leftist. That anti-intelligentsia discourse, as well as the commitment to nonviolence as a political tool, would be their lasting contribution to posterity.
As a result of the Bolsheviks’ decision to exile nonconformist public intellectuals in 1922, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and others carried the Symbolist conceit abroad as a key commodity on the Western European market in Russia's “soul for export,” which Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets russes had done so much to create before World War I.Footnote 24 In Europe and North America they became the nucleus of “Russia Abroad,” an imagined community which saw itself as the custodian of a true Russian culture against the Soviet Union.Footnote 25 Konstantin Mochul′skii (1892–1948), a regular of Berdiaev's circle in Paris and pillar of Russia Abroad, did the most to develop the Symbolist conceit into a formidable narrative. In his classic biography of Solov′ev, which was dedicated to Bulgakov, Mochul′skii insisted that “one cannot penetrate into [Solov′ev's] ‘secret’ without believing the authenticity of his mystical experience” and of his “visions of the Eternal Helpmate” to understand “the meaning of his doctrine of ‘positive all unity,’ Sophia, and Godmanhood.”Footnote 26 From Parisian exile in late 1946, Mochul′skii could view his works on the “Symbolists” as an entire “epoch” in Russian culture and thought, a vision partially “inspired” by Berdiaev and fostered by his “intellectual and spiritual” support through his salon at Clamart near Paris and his clout with the YMCA.Footnote 27
Members of another group of émigrés amplified this judgment. After 1922, Waldemar Gurian, who did the most to translate the polemical concept of totalitarianism from Weimar Germany to the United States, promoted Berdiaev and Bulgakov as “the great representatives of Russian intellectual life in the twentieth century.”Footnote 28 Paris and Berlin converged in post-World War II America.
This chronological and contextual reconstruction of the Symbolist conceit means putting its authors’ works in dialogue with the social and political histories that shaped them but from which, until recently, they have been isolated.Footnote 29 It means recovering how some no less perceptive members of Russia Abroad—like Alexandre Kojève, who wrote a dissertation on Solov′ev's theory of history under Karl Jaspers's supervision—dissented from the Symbolist conceit, the nature of Solov′ev's work, and the implicit verdict it laid on the moral viability of late imperial Russian culture, politics, and society, as well as the Soviet government.Footnote 30 This intellectual excavation is no simple task. Nor is it trivial, for it complicates a number of recent developments in the history of the idea of modernity, the self, and Russia's place in Europe.
Indeed, this story complicates the chronological and geographical boundaries of social, political, and intellectual problems taken to be hallmarks of interwar Europe: mass politics, mass culture, and violence.Footnote 31 In the 1890s, the inundation of Russian cities with peasants from the countryside and its attendant political unrest led the future vekhovtsy to reconsider their metaphysical and ethical assumptions about social and political liberation. Bulgakov's experience of mass politics and violence while teaching economics at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute pushed him to look for ways of disciplining what Carl Schorske famously called “politics in a new key.”Footnote 32 In response to what the vekhovtsy perceived to be mortal flaws in the theory and practice of liberation in Russia, they turned to idealism and theology for resources to conduct the “politics of the self.” The post-French Revolutionary idea that freedom pertained to the individual as much as to the collective, and the claims for a qualitatively new source of autonomy for the self, raised issues of where in the self or what part of the self should be the source of that autonomy.Footnote 33 These politics could entail an infinite, mystical, and diffuse self, common to nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Or it could entail a recoil from the featureless infinite and root the self in some concrete context, whether religious, political, or social.Footnote 34 Berdiaev acknowledged the importance of this schema of the self when he conceptualized the problem of understanding these two impulses in Solov′ev's work as the determination of the relationship between the “daytime” rationalist philosopher and the “nighttime” poet and visionary.Footnote 35 The authors of the Symbolist conceit rarely agreed on the nature of the self, but they all acknowledged its political significance, and they all fell within this spectrum of the self. While their answers were neither politically liberal nor socially bourgeois, the questions they thought meaningful and the range of answers they considered acceptable put them within the broad family of the modern and the enlightened.Footnote 36
Explaining how and why these intellectuals enlisted Solov′ev for various offices in his posthumous career also complicates the political legacy of the Russian emigration, where Berdiaev and the circle of intellectuals around him added their own voices to interwar theological debates on the possibility of recovering familiar forms of morality—that World War I seemed to shatter—on the basis of Christian personalism.Footnote 37 Tracing how and why this small but vocal cohort of thinkers conducted the politics of selfhood through the creation of the Symbolist conceit in late imperial Russia and interwar Europe complicates Russia's place in the secularization of Europe as well as the nature of Russian liberalism and conservatism.Footnote 38 It also extends the chronological and geographic scope of interwar Europe's struggle with mass politics, culture, and violence. Chronologically, it extends both back to the last decade of the nineteenth century and forward to a transatlantic fear of liberal democracy's fragility, as well as to the creation of Cold War conservatism and the Cold War university with the intellectual resources of Weimar German émigrés.Footnote 39 These details may even shed light on contemporary foreign-policy concerns. Solov′ev and Berdiaev have been invoked to explain contradictory phenomena: a Russian historian of Duma politics republished Signposts in 1991 as a potential guide to the role of the “personality” in post-Soviet “civil existence” and the “renewal” of Russia. At the same time, Solov′ev and Berdiaev are supposed to explain Putin's revanchisme and authoritarianism.Footnote 40 This present starts in the 1890s.
The Russian Politics of Selfhood: Mass Society, “Solov′evianism,” and the “Academic Intelligentsia,” 1892–1904
The story of the Symbolist conceit begins in a small apartment in Moscow's old Arbat neighborhood, where Moscow's university faculty and cultural elite lived. In the 1890s, Boris Bugaev (1880–1934) grew up in a “small professorial apartment” with his father, the mathematics professor Nikolai Bugaev (1837–1903), and his mother Aleksandra Dmitrievna (1858–1922). Some forty years later, Bugaev recalled that the positivism, neo-Kantian idealism, and constitutionalism that suffused the “academic intelligentsia's way of life” suffocated the creativity of that intelligentsia's “sons and sonnies.”Footnote 41 Bugaev singled out the Moscow Psychological Society as the main institution where men like the Moscow University professors of philosophy Prince Sergei Trubetskoi (1862–1905) and Lev Lopatin (1855–1920), and the Saint Petersburg-based philosopher Ernst Radlov (1854–1928) socialized. Here, these philosophers rubbed shoulders with positivist sociologists Maksim Kovalevskii (1851–1916) and Nikolai Kareev (1850–1931), both of whom taught the Annales school to look at the origins of the French Revolution in peasant bread riots.Footnote 42 For Bugaev, the generational authority of the positivists turned their culture of disembodied facts and mechanical processes into an intellectual and social problem of the self, while the philosophers threatened the self with dogmatism.
Initially, Bugaev found aesthetic and moral refuge in the household of Vladimir Solov′ev's younger brother, Mikhail (1862–1903), his wife Ol′ga, and their son Sergei. In a domestic environment suffused with Vladimir's poetry, Mikhail dubbed the young Boris Bugaev “Andrei Bely.”Footnote 43 In another recollection, the coincidence of Aleksandr Blok's arrival in this coterie in 1900 with Vladimir Solov′ev's death marked a turning point. They poured over Solov′ev's spiritual Meaning of Love (1892–4), his poetry, manuscripts, private papers, and mediumistic writings in “the quest to realize ‘Solov′evianism’ as a living path and to illuminate the divine principle of Divinity,” which distinguished them from “the philosophers (Radlov, Tsertelev, Lopatin, Luk′ianov, and Prince [Evgenii] Trubetskoi)” of the Moscow Psychological Academy, who, Bugaev alleged, looked “very little into the disturbing meaning of Solov′ev's appearance before the world.”Footnote 44 The Symbolists’ interest in Solov′ev's “manuscripts dotted with notes in the margins,” a piece of automatic writing signed “Sophie,” “a mediumistic letter with the signature ‘S’ and ‘Sophie’” which, in Bely's recollection, “looked like a love letter,” distinguished Bely's “Solov′evianism” from that of Vladimir's personal friends and intellectual allies.Footnote 45
Bely's recollections reveal as much as they conceal about both his own artistic development and his relationship with the world around him. Obviously Bely struggled for a private self, individuated from his family and his father's cultural milieu. But personal experiences in the very first years of the twentieth century retrospectively made Vladimir Solov′ev's legacy a potent symbol to dramatize his preexisting aesthetic revolt as a social and cultural one. In 1901, according to Bely's memoirs, the eminent chair of Moscow University's department of philosophy and friend of Solov′ev's, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, refused to preside over the reading of a paper on aesthetics that Bely published in 1902 as “Forms of Art.”Footnote 46 For Bely, this incident crystalized the link between aesthetic and cultural revolt through Solov′ev's legacy. In early 1903, Bely characterized the philosophers’ attitude toward Solov′ev's poetry and other writings as “a hypothesis of design and not a dogma.”Footnote 47 The gulf separating the Symbolists’ attitude toward Solov′ev's unsystematic writings on Sophia and the “philosophers” rested not only on generational differences, but on aesthetic and moral ones as well, which gave birth to the Symbolist conceit. Bely's praise of French Symbolist poetry and Solov′ev's denigration of it illustrate the nature and depth of this difference.Footnote 48
The difference centered on two radically different conceptions of the self, rooted in what Gerald Izenberg has called the Romantic movement's vision of “impossible individuality.”Footnote 49 Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Heinrich Heine made their autobiographical artistic works a deliberate and self-conscious description and justification of their contradictory impulses to both “the finitude of the unique individual, inviolate in his or her self-contained individuality” and their equally powerful impulse toward “the individual's infinity and fusion with the cosmos in the one great life.”Footnote 50 In fin de siècle Russia, Symbolists were partisans of the infinite self. By contrast, Solov′ev was a partisan of the finite self, for which idealism provided conceptual and rhetorical resources. As Charles Taylor has argued, Platonic idealism has been an intellectual resource for a finite self, free from the world around it but disciplined and constrained by a self-mastery connected up to a transcendent realm of absolute value.Footnote 51 The Symbolists’ infinite self, by contrast, was ecstatic and expressivist, asserting itself on the basis of the power of the imagination to create improved alternatives to both the material world and spiritual dogma. Its exemplars in Europe, as well as in Russia, were the prophets of non-conformism and the avant-garde: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Schopenhauer.Footnote 52 Bely promoted the expressivist self. This difference in the politics of the self should not be drawn too sharply, however. Their disagreement was based more on tactics than on strategy, for both Solov′ev and the Symbolists sought a self that was free from the conventional moral world. Stepun, who had been a member of that intellectual community, appreciated the psychological appeal of the “freedom granted by mysticism” to freely create the moral world without submitting one's vision to “binding dogma.”Footnote 53 Solov′ev always recoiled into dogma, while the Symbolists embraced the ephemeral transcendent, unbounded by any forms of cultural or political institutions. And Bely enlisted Solov′ev's legacy in his own project.
Bely deliberately drew philosophical and cultural authority for his aesthetic profession de foi from Schopenhauer and Vladimir Solov′ev in order to make his aesthetic revolt a social and cultural revolt. In Bely's controversial 1902 treatise on art, he appropriated Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's aesthetic considerations on art to develop a case for the “solidarity of art with science” in which the two spheres of knowledge provided methods and objects of investigation along two distinct but complementary paths leading “to cognition of the universe.” Following these German authorities, Bely made poetry the form of art in which time and space were united and music the representation of an amoral will animating the universe. Echoing French Symbolists, Bely cited Verlaine's “Art poétique” and Solov′ev's “Les revnants” and “To a Friend from Youth” as evidence that modern culture was evolving toward a future in which “the remaking of reality ends in symphonic music.”Footnote 54 The unconventional and potentially antinomian implications of Bely's aesthetic revolt, dramatized by his 1901 experimental poem Symphonies, caused a shudder among the Moscow University and Moscow Psychological Society set. And Blok's innovations on the eternal feminine in his 1901–3 Verses on a Beautiful Lady, some of which explicitly invoked Vladimir Solov′ev and his family members, aroused the same disquiet among Moscow's respectable cultural elite.
But there was also a social and political context to Bely's narrative of fin de siècle Russia illustrated by Vladimir Solov′ev's ridicule of Valerii Briusov, an early Russian Symbolist and admirer of Mallarmé.Footnote 55 The early adopters of French Symbolist and expressivist aesthetics were outsiders to Moscow University and Moscow Psychological Society culture. Solov′ev's revulsion at the moral implications of their aesthetics hinted at the links between the urban cultural elite's anxiety about national politics. And it also illustrated some differences between the political uses of aesthetics between Parisian and Muscovite Symbolists.
Briusov's intervention is another example of the Symbolist conceit as a deliberate reconfiguration of Solov′ev's legacy. In the 1890s, Briusov had begun to privilege Vladimir's poetry as the source for the true meaning and intent of all of Solov′ev's works based on a special theory of poetry. According to Briusov, “poetry is always a confession” in which the poet “explains to himself his own thoughts and transports” just like hypothetical “primitive man, when the creative work of his tongue was still alive, constructed a word to understand a new subject.” “For that reason,” Briusov asserted, “true poetry cannot but be authentic” as an expression of the poet's true, inner self. Having defined poetry as the primeval genre disclosing the truth of the self, Briusov articulated a hermeneutical principle for interpreting all of Solov′ev's work by privileging poetry over his prose as the motivating center of all of Vladimir's creative work so that prose had to be assimilated back into poetry.Footnote 56
But Solov′ev's open ridicule of Briusov indicates that Solov′ev feared the social and cultural implications of such an aesthetic program. Briusov and the other Symbolists who appeared in his collection did not belong to Moscow's cultural elite. As politics in the Russian Empire became national, Moscow's cultural elite recoiled against the claims made by figures in the provinces, the peasants, and the lower classes, who flooded Moscow along with their forms of sociability and culture. The elite were frightened by what they perceived as disorder from benighted or unruly elements of Russian society.Footnote 57
Members of Moscow University and the Moscow Psychological Society linked aesthetic taste with social and cultural problems that could threaten or support order. Bely appreciated their unease with his work and sought other avenues of support. In 1901, Bely began an anonymous correspondence with the merchant magnate Margarita Kirillovna Morozova (1873–1958), whom he vaguely associated with Sophia.Footnote 58 Morozova opened the door to the wealth and cultural aspirations of merchant Moscow not only for Bely but also for a host of other figures. She provided these men with a physical and cultural space insulated from the empire's social transformations where they drew out the cultural and political implications of the Symbolist conceit. Ironically, they shared the same unease with popular politics as supporters of autocratic statehood; they only differed in who should wield that authority and for what purpose.
Merchant Moscow, Signposts, and the Politics of the Self in War and Revolution, 1903–1922
Whereas the Symbolists deliberately appropriated Solov′ev's heritage in the service of his own expressivist project, Sergei Bulgakov halfheartedly appreciated the contradictions of impossible individuality. As one of the paragons of the so-called “Russian religious renaissance,” however, the texture of Bulgakov's self-conscious struggle over the self has been glossed over by his own tendency to present his development in rigidly teleological terms as a movement around 1903 “from Marxism to idealism” to the Orthodox Church that mirrors his autobiography written in bitter exile in 1922.Footnote 59 Despite Bulgakov's ostensible rejection of the Russian intelligentsia, he remained a public intellectual (intelligent) his whole life. Paradoxically, Bulgakov professed the moral freedom of selfhood guided by spiritual principles, but he linked this agenda to radical social transformation through a series of collectives and institutions. Indeed, Bulgakov did not so much move from Marxism to idealism as bring secular reformist ideas first into socialism then into the Church.Footnote 60
The heady intellectual and cultural atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Moscow underwritten by a culturally and politically ascendant merchant class introduced Bulgakov to the political spectrum of the self that he would distill in 1909’s Signposts.Footnote 61 The merchant whose gold underwrote publishing ventures and cultural institutions from journals, to salons, to MPs was Bely's patroness, Margarita Morozova, a member of what Stepun called the “Maecean merchantry”—a reference to Russia's merchant magnates who patronized modernist art in competition for cultural capital with the gentry. Intentionally drawing an unfavorable comparison between the cultural “Golden Age” of the 1840s and the fin de siècle’s “Silver Age,” Stepun also characterized Morozova as a “Princess Elagina of the twentieth century,” a reference to the mother of the early Slavophiles Ivan and Peter Kireevskii as well as a salon host in her own right.Footnote 62 Although Bulgakov's concern with human personality (lichnost′) pre-dated his life in Moscow, it was in that milieu where Bulgakov met Bely, Pavel Florinskii, Lev Lopatin, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, and a host of other idealist thinkers.
In this Moscow, Bulgakov extrapolated on the social and political implications of Kiev's 1890s mass politics. Beginning in 1900, Bulgakov criticized the Marxist theory of progress as social conflict leading to the triumph of the morally unfree proletariat spawned by capitalism.Footnote 63 In 1903, Bulgakov made the development of “a free personality” one of the main planks of the Liberation Movement's platform on the agrarian question.Footnote 64 This movement worked toward a constitutional and democratic order in Russia and traced its origins to the 1864 Zemstvo reform, which granted provincial representative institutions an official role in local government. From his position as a professor at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, which had a reputation for radicalism among its students and faculty as well as, paradoxically, close ties to Russia's leading capitalists, Bulgakov organized banquets for the Liberation Movement in 1904. From here, Bulgakov also witnessed the spectacle of the potentially explosive and destructive forces of capitalism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and mass politics.Footnote 65
These events frightened Bulgakov and convinced him that what he had termed “evolutionary positivism,” which provided Marxism and a very specific sort of English liberalism rooted in Herbert Spencer's epistemology and his scheme of historical development, could be wrong. Friedrich Engels declared that link connecting Marxism and liberalism at Marx's graveside in 1883: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”Footnote 66 It explained social phenomena as moving along an inexorable path of development toward different ends—Herbert Spencer's “industrial society” of the liberal, individualistic, and rational bourgeoisie or Marx's communist, collectivist, and rational proletariat. Both discourses presented the ideal individual as perfectly adapted to his or her civilization and, therefore, free from the coercion of nature or social institutions. The latter were regarded as alien within this horizon of human understanding. The individual self within this scheme did not act or freely choose actions or policies—he or she merely accommodated to a narrowly economic vision of civilization.Footnote 67 Because this secular scheme of progress was deemed normative, all social phenomena that did not fit within it were deemed aberrant, perverse, and illegitimate. And yet, within the horizon of evolutionary positivism's vision of progress, a basis for morals had to be found, but on radically secular grounds. As Spencer put it in the 1870s, “Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative.”Footnote 68 For Bulgakov, Kiev presented striking evidence that this scheme and the radically secular basis of ethics could be wrong.
From at least 1896, Bulgakov turned to idealism to bring transcendental morals into socialism as a supplement to positivism's ethical poverty. By 1903, he clearly placed his own intellectual agenda within the problem of secular ethics posed by socialist evolutionary positivism. In the preface to From Marxism to Idealism, Bulgakov constructed a thumbnail sketch of the role that “positivism” played in the development of Russian Marxism in the 1890s: it provided a sense of scientific rigor, objectivity, and even optimism that the old “subjective method” of 1880s Russian populism lacked. But positivist objectivity came at a price. “Having advanced the idea of the iron laws of social development and scientific objectivity,” Bulgakov insisted “it did not stop at denying the role and significance of the selfhood in history, completely ignoring the ethical problem and disdaining any ‘ideologies,’ including art, philosophy, and religion.”Footnote 69 Whereas socialism's evolutionary positivism provided optimistic reassurance of the right path in the 1880s, developments in the 1890s started to contradict that picture of progress. For public intellectuals (intelligenty) like Bulgakov, idealism provided an alternative philosophical system that was modern, rigorous, and scientific. Above all, it assigned the individual a role in morally assessing the world around him and setting a course, under the banner of some transcendent principle, for moral renewal. Hence Bulgakov's invocation of Heinrich Heine's stanzas “What Does Man Mean?” and a genealogy of idealists from Plato and Plotinus to Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Vladimir Solov′ev.Footnote 70 Hence, too, his invocation of Solov′ev as the author of a “Christian theism” that aimed to give rational reasons for religious, and thus moral, beliefs.Footnote 71
Solov′ev's theistic idealism provided Bulgakov with the conceptual resources to address positivism's ethical problems; however, he was ambivalent about reason's preeminence over faith and that relationship's implications for the finite self bounded by the rational. Whereas Symbolists like Bely and Blok celebrated Sophia as the emblem of the expressivist, ecstatic self, Bulgakov promoted the rational, disciplined, and finite self. At times, though, Bulgakov doubted the preeminence or sufficiency of the rational. Bulgakov's work with the pre-1905 Liberation Movement and the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) in support of the party's political platform pushed him to focus on the dilemmas of impossible individuality and to reject what he called in 1905 and 1906 “Christian politics” or “religious participation in society.”Footnote 72 On the eve of the 3 June 1907 dissolution of the Second Duma, Bulgakov had lost a great deal of faith in the possibility of mass politics in Russia. Along with three other Kadets during the Second Duma, Bulgakov secretly met with Prime Minister Petr Stolypin in order to protect the democracy that they thought was threatened more by the people than by the state.Footnote 73 Toward the end of these meetings, Bulgakov confided his political disenchantment to his friend, Aleksandr Glinka, by invoking the Black Hundreds, an ultranationalist movement that fiercely supported the Romanov dynasty: “I'm politically independent, I have really set myself straight (I call myself a Black-Hundreds Kadet), I have once again been terribly disenchanted in myself and my powers: what the adventure with the ‘People’ and the Duma teach is the humility that flows from the consciousness of my impotence that I experience.”Footnote 74 If politics seemed futile, culture was not.
As Bulgakov incorporated idealism into his Christian politics, he made Solov′ev's texts do a great deal of unusual work. From at least 1896 through his contributions to Problems of Idealism in 1902, Bulgakov used Solov′ev as a resource for language that could present a convincing ethical vocation for individuals to achieve through solidarity with the Russian nation in support of the state.Footnote 75 In particular, Solov′ev gave Bulgakov language to depict goals that human beings ought to pursue in history whose source was presented as transcendent and which humans were connected to via the soul. Beginning with From Marxism to Idealism in 1903, however, Bulgakov began to use Solov′ev as a resource for an expressivist conception of the self. Bulgakov invoked Solov′ev as the inspiration for very different agendas before and after the Revolution of 1905.
By Signposts in 1909, Bulgakov's Solov′ev was a great systematic philosopher, but after 1909 his Solov′ev became a mystical lyricist. Bulgakov's footnotes in From Marxism to Idealism already indicate that he may have doubted Solov′ev's subordination of faith to reason.Footnote 76 Bulgakov made these doubts explicit in 1905. In a private letter, Bulgakov compared his role in the Union of Liberation's political activity to Solov′ev's collaboration with the socially engaged journal Herald of Europe, as a “temporary political room you just can't do without.”Footnote 77 The implication was that secular politics was bankrupt. Before learning about the practice of party politics, Bulgakov already argued that citizens in particular, and humans in general, had other interests besides the strictly material and political. But after this experience, Bulgakov's tone sharpened and he focused narrowly on religion as the source for these other interests. In order not to condemn democratic representation, Bulgakov focused on the “revolution” of 1905 that “put in question the very viability of Russian citizenship and statehood” because it revealed a deep, personal “spiritual crisis.” By 1909, the revolution “turned out to be something like a spiritual mirror for all of Russia and especially its intelligentsia.”Footnote 78 Despite this obvious condemnation of the intelligentsia, Bulgakov did not countenance violence as a means to maintain unity since violent police measures were a feature of autocracy. As he put it, “Autocracy was the police, the gendarmes, jail, exile, courtiers, receptions and parades that no one needed or was interested in, and the murderous cruelty toward the people.”Footnote 79 Bulgakov invoked the “religious thinkers” Solov′ev, Sergei Trubetskoi, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi as sources for solutions to the spiritual crisis.Footnote 80
Bulgakov placed these religious figures within a polemical intellectual genealogy that pitted a disciplined, theistic selfhood originating in the Reformation against an undisciplined and infinite selfhood that emerged from French materialists and atheists during the Enlightenment that he called “Mangodhood” (chelovekobozhestvo). According to Bulgakov, “our intelligentsia accepted the dogmas of the religion of Mangodhood” that had been “developed by the Western European Enlightenment” and above all its “faith in the perfection of man in endless progress realized by the forces of man, in the mechanical understanding of him.” This conception of man explained all “evil” simply “as the external disorder of human conduct,” which cannot be solved by “guilt” or “personal responsibility” but solely by “external reforms.” This mechanical vision of history and mankind denied “Providence and any primordial plan realized in history,” but also, illegitimately according to Bulgakov, led human beings to put themselves “in place of Providence” so that they see their “savior” in themselves. Bulgakov diagnosed this false image of contemporary mankind's powers as deriving from several causes: their “epoch of cultural ferment that felt the power of man,” “the feeling of the aggrandizing bourgeoisie's cultural self-satisfaction,” and “European philisitinism—in socialism and individualism equally.” This philistinism's “disgusting smugness” dulled “consciousness” of the socioeconomic order and “domesticated” and “pacified European socialism,” which was made “powerless to shatter the labor foundations of European culture.” The West's accidental “centuries-old tradition and historical discipline of labor” stemmed “the disintegrating influence of self-deification.” In Russia, however, the “religion of Mangodhood and its essence—self-deification—were accepted not only with youthful zeal, but also with adolescent inexperience of life and its forces; they received almost delirious forms. Inspired by it, our intelligentsia felt called to play the role of Providence in respect to its motherland.”Footnote 81 For Bulgakov, the social problems associated with labor and capitalism were religious problems.
Whatever the intellectual differences between Bulgakov and Bely, Bulgakov's post-1909 texts indicate a new interest in the role of Sophia, the Symbolist emblem of the ecstatic and expressivist self, in Solov′ev's life and thought. Bulgakov exhibited a willingness to bend facts to fit his own ideas of Solov′ev's meaning, which became more prominent when Bulgakov began to participate in Morozova's publishing venture, The Way [Put′], and partake of the cultural life she patronized where he began to focus on Sophia in dialogue with Pavel Florenskii, an Orthodox theologian immortalized in Mikhail Nesterov's 1917 painting Philosophers, and Andrei Bely.Footnote 82 Though Bulgakov's interest in Sophia was new, he linked it with his commitment to a Russian national idea.Footnote 83 He also continued his cavalier attitude toward Solov′ev's texts, nowhere more evident than in his article “Vladimir Solov′ev and Anna Shmidt.”Footnote 84 Written between 1911 and 1915, it testifies to the trauma Bulgakov experienced in the midst of what one historian has called “the common European deluge (1914–1921).”Footnote 85 This article was ostensibly a review of the sixth edition of Vladimir Solov′ev's humorous poems that appeared in 1916 and was edited by his nephew, S. M. Solov′ev. Arguing for the “enormous influence” of Vladimir Solov′ev's poetry on contemporary poets, Bulgakov repeated Briusov's argument for the preeminence of Solov′ev's verse over his prose. As Bulgakov put it, “Solov′ev's poetic influence is more elusive and subtle, but at the same time deeper and firmer than his pure philosophical influence.” Further echoing Briusov, Bulgakov treated Solov′ev's poetry as a source for a type of expressive individualism:
unconditional originality belongs to his poetry so that one may, and even must, verify his philosophy by his poetry. Therefore, whatever is not in his poetry must, in his philosophy, be considered artificial, scholastic, accidental: thus, there is no equivalent in poetry for Solov′ev's deductions, schemas, and categories (which, to a significant degree, had been borrowed from Germans), there is no biased and somewhat opportunistic polemic with Slavophiles, there's no multi-storied and rational “justification of the good.”Footnote 86
Having privileged Solov′ev's poetry as the “motivating center” in Solov′ev's life and work, Bulgakov placed Sophia at the center of the philosopher's entire body of work. As Bulgakov asserted, “Solov′ev as a mystic with a peculiar, rich, and original mystical experience is more significant, more original, and more interesting than Solov′ev the philosopher.”Footnote 87 As evidence of mysticism's centrality to Solov′ev, Bulgakov presented what he called the “mystical meeting” between Anna Shmidt and Vladimir Solov′ev as the secret workings of Sophia through two people.
To support this argument, Bulgakov made some mendacious interpretations of Solov′ev's letters to Shmidt in order to present the alleged mystical encounter as an actual, almost material, fact. Whereas Bulgakov developed ingenious ways of interpreting Solov′ev as a mystic, Symbolist poets embraced their deliberate invention of the myth of Sophia in Solov′ev's works.Footnote 88 Bulgakov found a hermeneutical principle that allowed him to interpret all of Solov′ev's work as a continuous mystical expression in what he called a “mystical passport.”Footnote 89 Bulgakov assumed that Solov′ev and Shmidt shared a special gift, which Solov′ev expressed obliquely, that allowed access to a mystical, noumenal world. Solov′ev, so Bulgakov argued, hid the “mystical secret” of this “withdrawn man” that had to be discerned by “reading between the lines.”Footnote 90 It is difficult to see how this last characterization could have been taken seriously given how outspokenly Solov′ev criticized these expressivist tendencies in the Symbolist poetry of Briusov. The key to all of this, according to Bulgakov, was a group of poems, including Three Encounters, that he various called the “Sophianic–Erotic cycle” or Solov′ev's “poetic diary.”Footnote 91 All of this presumes a real, yet secret, Solov′ev to be worked up from texts completely divorced from the contexts that shaped them and to which they responded.
Conclusion: The Symbolist Conceit in the Early Cold War, 1922–1956
Formally exiled from the nascent Soviet Union at the end of 1922, Bulgakov took these exegetical methods for presenting Solov′ev as an inveterate mystic abroad. He moved from Crimea to Istanbul to Prague and Berlin and ultimately to Paris, where he found a home at the Russian Orthodox St Serge Theological Institute.Footnote 92 In Paris, Bulgakov's appropriation of Solov′ev's legacy in the service of his modernist theological project was systematized by Konstantin Mochul′skii, Bulgakov's protégé at the Institute. In Mochul′skii's biography of Solov′ev, he codified the Symbolist conceit. Mochul′skii also explicitly linked his work with Bulgakov's theological project dedicating the biography to him. Like Bulgakov, Mochul′skii insisted that “one cannot penetrate into his [Solov′ev's] ‘secret’ without having believed the authenticity of his mystical experience” or his “visions of the Eternal Helpmate” to grasp “the meaning of his doctrine of ‘positive all-unity,’ Sophia, and Godmanhood.”Footnote 93 Mochul′skii institutionalized his method of interpreting late imperial Russian culture through the Symbolist conceit in Paris supported by the institutional, financial, and moral backing of Nikolai Berdiaev and the YMCA. Despite this support, however, Bulgakov's modernist project embodied in his development of the figure of Sophia out of Solov′ev's works provoked a reaction from conservative figures among leaders of the institutional Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.Footnote 94
Solov′ev's legacy served as a banner for modernist theological culture among the Russian emigration spearheaded by Bulgakov's development of sophiology, institutionally supported by the YMCA through Berdiaev, and codified by Mochul′skii. Although Mochul′skii intended his narrative to highlight the spiritualist narrative of Russian history as radically different from secular movements—whether liberal, conservative, or socialist—it ironically reveals some fundamental identities with its polemical enemies. These figures maintained their commitment to social transformation in ways that made them public intellectuals in spite of themselves. And Bulgakov continued to develop his understanding of Solov′ev's Sophia in publishing and teaching activities throughout the interwar period. They remained committed to the modernist theological project to accommodate religion to the world even as avant-garde theologians rejected it, most famously by Karl Barth in his Der Römerbrief (1919), which went through a second edition in 1922.
In emigration, Bulgakov ran afoul of the official Orthodox Church for teaching “modernism” at the Theological Institute. The official church, along with mainstream interwar theology, regarded the institute as the iniquitous source of an all too subjective religion that was skeptical of ecclesiastical authorities and traditions. Condemning the ideological agenda of a small but vocal segment of the institute's personnel, Orthodox officials labeled Berdiaev's journal The Way “modern” as a term of opprobrium.Footnote 95 In this sense, Christian theological modernism described an effort to recover the transcendent in the Holy Scripture's myth and revelation. It was a deliberate alternative to nineteenth-century liberal theology's effort to rescue the historical Jesus as a contemporary moral teacher against the metaphysically untenable cosmic Christ. To contemporaries, World War I dramatically demonstrated the bankruptcy of the liberal theological project to recover the transcendent through history, which had already been in decline.Footnote 96 The leader of the Orthodox Church Abroad and a reactionary monarchist, Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii) was suspicious of innovations in the Orthodox Church Abroad and investigated Bulgakov twice for teaching “modernism” at the institute through his sophiology, the last time in 1935.Footnote 97 Berdiaev took the opportunity to dissent from the official church with an editorial in the tenth-anniversary edition of The Way in 1935. He constructed a genealogy of the journal from Margarita Morozova's The Way publishing house in pre-revolutionary Russia to the émigré journal as a tradition of “modernism reposing on Orthodox soil” that represented “a progress outside the categories of traditional and official Orthodoxy.”Footnote 98 In different ways, both Georges Florovskii and Vasilii Zen′kovskii were critical of modernism in theology; hence their decisions to take orders in the Orthodox Church and advance trans-ecumenical movements that endorsed neopatristics and neoorthodoxy.Footnote 99 Florovsky chose this direction in spite of Bulgakov's avuncular attempts to persuade Florovskii of his efforts to continue his work on “Sophia” within the confines of a “clerical journal” that would cover issues “within an appropriate rel[igious]–phil[osophical] spectrum.”Footnote 100 While Berdiaev moved toward philosophical work in interpersonalism and existentialism, Bulgаkov merely transferred the vehicle of his moral vision from society and representative institutions to the Church.Footnote 101 But in both cases, Solov′ev's legacy served as an authoritative cultural lodestone.
But, like pre-Revolutionary Russia, these cultural figures did not represent all of Russia. Having never been a member of that secular community, Metropolitan Evlogii, who was the rector of the St Serge Theological Institute, condemned the “modernist” attempt to fit Christianity to modern secular civilization. At the same time, Evlogii remained committed to the Church's charitable role in the world. Comparing political events from the Second Duma to the emigration, Evlogii lamented the people who “were far from the Church” yet who “in the depths of their souls . . . were also servants [raby] of God” and who “under the influence of some life shock (it would be better to say, as a consequence of the touch of the right hand of God's Providence)” eventually “became good, believing Christians.”Footnote 102 Evlogii's charity extended to all members of the emigration in France, where he wrote letters to the French government on behalf of émigrés resettling in a new country at a time when the French authorities struggled to administer the “rather disparate character of the mosaic of peoples that constitute the Soviet Federation” in France.Footnote 103
Modernism in the Orthodox Church and the character of its engagement with the secular world divided émigrés.Footnote 104 Officially, the St Serge Theological Institute supported a separation; however, Bulgakov was the lone modernist in its midst, partly due to Evlogii's maintenance of the Church as a place for charity. George Florovskii and Vasilii Zen′kovskii shared Evlogii's vision of the Church.Footnote 105 Bulgakov, by contrast, continued to argue for a culture founded on a certain conception of Orthodoxy derived, despite all protestations, from an expressivist understanding of religious faith. His sympathizers who did not take holy orders grouped around Nikolai Berdiaev's Academy of Philosophy and Religion at Clamart.Footnote 106 Berdiaev enjoyed a special relationship with the YMCA and the financing it offered through its main representative in Paris, John B. Anderson, who considered Berdiaev the “most outstanding lay-prophet of Russia today.”Footnote 107 Berdiaev's meetings provided Mochul′skii with the intellectual and material means to codify his narrative of the Silver Age as an epoch defined by Solov′ev.
In the post-World War II and early Cold War period, Nicolas Zernov yoked the Mochul′skii–Bulgakov formulation of the Symbolist conceit to his ecumenical program in a series of books leading up to The Russian Religious Renaissance in 1963. What Bely and Blok had developed in 1892 in service of the self's radical emancipation from the conventional and the physical through art had been turned into a vehicle for a religious program of qualified democracy and anticommunism. Zernov's intervention in the Symbolist conceit transformed Solov′ev from a proto-modernist whose ideas threatened the institutional church, into a proto-ecumenist who promoted the institutional church.Footnote 108 While this narrative did not add substantively to the evidence or analysis of Carl Friedrich's or Merle Fainsod's totalitarianism theories introduced at the beginning of this article, it resonated with totalitarianism. Weimar émigrés enjoyed so much institutional and ideological preeminence over Russian émigrés that the latter played almost no role the early Cold War university or Washington's policy set. For example, the head of Harvard's Russian Research Center (RCC), Clyde Kluckhohn, isolated Harvard's dean of Russian history, Michael Karpovich, from RCC business through the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 109 Stepun played only a minor role in the US Army's programs to reconstruct Germany into a bastion of democracy.Footnote 110 And despite Zernov's strictly ecumenical activity, he shared the Weimar émigrés’ suspicion of the capacity of populations for liberal democracy. Though he did not mention totalitarianism in his canonical book, in retrospect he saw himself advancing it in his own way. As he wrote in his memoirs,
It's no accident that totalitarianism was born in our motherland. I realize how much of a threat the military might of the Soviet Union, which uncontrollably managed a small group of party apparatchiks, was to all of humanity in our time. Therefore, I experienced those traits of the Russia character that favor the monstrous manifestation of our political immaturity especially acutely: our laziness, the ease with which we reconcile ourselves with dishonesty and falseness, in ourselves and in others. We aren't used to freedom, to respect for another person. Our boasting easily turns into abjection and toadying.Footnote 111
Zernov did not contribute directly to the promotion of totalitarianism theory during the Cold War, but his narrative complimented and amplified the Weimar variant. In many ways, Russian religious philosophy only met its fate in emigration, and it was not nearly as tragic as the biographies of its authors.Footnote 112
One major distinction between the Russian and Weimar émigrés, however, was the latter's willingness to sanction violence in the name of democracy, which was a cornerstone of the Cold War's ideological foundation. Although the concept of “militant democracy” was a much more prominent feature of Karl Loewenstein's foreign-policy thinking, Friedrich briefly but seriously considered whether the Soviet Union might be militarily defeated in the same way as Nazi Germany had been, hinting at the importance of that experience as a touchstone for US military confrontation.Footnote 113 Such concerns mirrored a pre-World War I concern with the political consequences of what Gustav LeBon called “the crowd.”Footnote 114 Despite the vekhovtsy’s fear of the crowd in pre-Revolutionary Russia, they remained deeply suspicious of the efficacy of violence for political ends given their experience with revolutionary politics, Premiere Petr Stolypin's Duma administrations, and the Civil War. These men, who included Berdiaev and Bulgakov, had had nearly three decades of intense experience with political and cultural revolutions by the time T. S. Eliot turned modernism against itself in 1922 to show that art could not reconstitute the self or a European civilization. The remnants of Europe's pre-World War I civilization were threatened by the Soviet “hooded hordes swarming over the endless plains” of the Russian steppe. They had already frightened imperial Russian emigrés to a western Europe that was itself disintegrating under the inundation of immigrants, as the figure near the opening lines dramatized: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”Footnote 115 Art could not repair shattered social, political, or national boundaries. That the Russian émigrés’ attitude toward political violence was institutionally isolated from US elite colleges and governing institutions may have been a tragedy of the early Cold War.
There was also an irony in the Russian émigrés’ intellectual universe. Above all, the Symbolist conceit served to reinforce the pro-Soviet notion that the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 represented a decisive break with European social, political, and cultural developments in the same way as the Bolsheviks presented the event, but “with the values inverted.”Footnote 116 It cast the members of Russia Abroad as the custodians of a distinctly spiritual vision of Russian cultural history that resonated with interwar disillusionment with the prospects for democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. Developing a narrative first articulated in 1909 by the Signposts group, the cultural leaders of Russia Abroad cast both the autocracy and the intelligentsia—pathological developments of secular Western European ideas on Russian soil—as the sole culprits for Russia's pathological post-1917 trajectory. In the interwar period, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and Mochul′skii presented this Solov′evian narrative to foreign audiences. Bridging the interwar and postwar periods, Zernov, a younger member of this cohort, spread this story through his work in 1930s Anglo-Orthodox ecumenical movements, his 1942 lectures in Britain on “Russian prophets” of secular catastrophe, his teaching theology at Oxford in the 1940s, and his landmark narrative of the Russian religious renaissance. In a different way, Marc Raeff—Mochul′skii's tutee in Paris and subsequently a dean of Russian studies at Columbia University from the 1960s through the 1980s—codified the secular liberal pendant of the spiritual narrative that condemned October 1917 in his own 1982 Comprendre l'ancien régime russe.Footnote 117 Reviewing George Yaney's history of late imperial and early Soviet government, Raeff underlined the signal importance of October 1917 by criticizing the structural—and therefore morally ambiguous—character of the Bolshevik coup, which only European reviewers noted at the time.Footnote 118
The construction of the Symbolist conceit and its afterlife in emigration also complicate the traditional picture of Russia as lying outside historical norms. Eastern Europe in general, and Russia in particular, have often served as emblems of political, social, and cultural backwardness because of the persistence of autocracy, feudalism, and religiosity. This narrative, which amounts to a Russian version of the German Sonderweg, is based on a very narrow definition of liberal modernity that takes a secular culture undergirding a politically independent civil society and liberal democratic political order as the universal norm of historical development thought to be embodied in Western Europe.Footnote 119 As intellectual, social, and political historians of Western Europe have shown, however, this model hardly corresponds to any actual historical phenomena in Western Europe. Indeed, what Mark Lilla considered a silent “Velvet Revolution” of liberalism in postwar Western Europe was the product of the reinvention of conservatism in the “decade of capitalist restructuring and renovation” after World War I that also set the institutional stage for postwar Europe's stability.Footnote 120 The Russian émigrés who made up a part of Russia Abroad were, therefore, of a piece with Germany's interwar and postwar Christian Democrats as well as Catholic modernists in Britain, France, Austria, and Germany. In fact, religious skepticism of secular liberal democracy and the capitalist civilization of the bourgeoisie characterized the mainstream of European culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 121 The religious or “theistic” dimension ofto late imperial liberal thought that survived in the emigration should, therefore, be seen as a norm of European political and intellectual development.Footnote 122
While it is impossible to fault these exiled communities for maintaining their cultural traditions, they have no necessary claim on the histories of the societies from which they hail. They may obscure as much as they reveal in order to justify particular groups or ideologies that, in a strictly crude political sense, lost out.Footnote 123 Vladimir Nabokov appreciated the self-serving and hermetic nature of Russia Abroad's vision of itself and the Russian past when he depicted Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the hero of his novel The Gift (1938), suddenly realizing that he had “been reciting a fictitious dialogue” with himself when he saw that his interlocutor Koncheyev—who may in fact be an utter figment of the hero's imagination—was no longer beside him.Footnote 124 A properly historical Solov′ev who is no longer part of Russia Abroad's hermetic dialogue could suggest ways of rewriting Russian intellectual history in which the Bolshevik coup no longer casts a long shadow back to the Decembrists. Such an understanding of Russian history matters because it would reveal achievements of past thinkers as well as possible limits for guidance in Russia's present. It would also behoove foreign scholars to know and appreciate Russia's rich intellectual engagement with the outside world. As the Signposts critic and intellectual historian Ivanov-Razumnik noted so long ago, that narrative would place varying conceptions of the self at the center of its history.Footnote 125 Some contemporary historians have moved in this direction.Footnote 126 Such a reevaluation of the individuals making up Russian history would contribute in a new way to the “New Russian historiography” that seeks heroes in a past as much maligned by Western as by Soviet historians.Footnote 127 A fundamental reexamination of Russian intellectual history might be able to suggest ways of looking back at Russia's past with the bemusement and confusion that early Soviet historians experienced when coming to grips with October 1917.Footnote 128 Attention to these transnational groups and processes would certainly enrich our understanding of Russia and the cultural politics that have shaped both Russian self-understandings and attempts by outsiders to understand Russia. It might begin to fully unpack the other more useful things the early émigrés brought with them into exile. It would certainly prevent the intellectual parochialism of the Cold War university at a time when some scholars, journalists, and public officials have conjured the specter of a new Cold War.
