Somewhere between prophets and philosophers

Vasily Rozanov as.a Philosopher

Heinrich A. Stammler

DURINGHIS LIFETIME Vasily Vasilievich

Rozanov (1856-1919) was one of the most
controversial, most admired, and most
reviled Russian authors of modern times.
He stood in the crossfire of all the big guns
of opinion in his time, from right to left,
from religious to resolutely secular, from
Christian and Orthodox to neo-pagan and
cosmic-vitalistic. He has also been considered, appreciated, and analyzed as one
of the outstanding innovators of Russian
creative prose, as the authentic Russian inventor of the interior monologue, the
stylistic pioneer. For him, in the words of
Victor Shklovsky, the sujet, the subject
matter or substance of what he wrote, was
a mere phenomenon of style and mode of
expression.
In addition, as a thinker of considerable
unconventionality, originality, and, as was
often believed, scurrility, he has found his
niche in the annals of Russian theoretical
thought. Authoritative voices speaking in
the name of the history of Russian
philosophy, such as Vasily Zenkovsky,
Nicholas Lossky, Nicholas Berdiaev,
Nicholas Arseniev, and others have
testified to this endeavor. But their utterances are occasionally colored by
polemic and their attempts to fit him into
some scheme of classification of the
histoire des idbes en Russie have failed or
gone astray. He could not be regarded as
either liberal or conservative. Nor is it

possible to label him an erring Christian or

a triumphant neo-pagan: he oscillated between monotheism and pantheism. His
thought has been defined as mystical pantheism, but a closer examination of his
writings reveals that this is also a
misnomer.
Thus philosophers and criticsaesthetic, political, religious, metaphysical, social-have
always encountered seemingly insurmountable
obstacles in assigning him his rightful
place in the Hall of Fame of Russian
thought and letters. In the introduction to
The Apocalypse of Our Time, the Rozanov
anthology published in 1977, Robert
Payne says: Above all, Rozanov was a
poet-a poet who wrote from the edge of
the abyss. But when a poet writes at the
edge of the abyss-and I believe there is
some truth in this statement (one could
even go further and say that he wrote
most of the time suspended above the bottomless pit)-what he sees welling up from
the deepest recesses of darkness will suffuse his visions, situating him between the
prophets and the philosophers.
It might therefore be useful to consider
that philosophy as a discipline-no matter
from what methodological, intellectual, or
spiritual perspective-is a very young
branch on the tree of knowledge in Russia.
The entire cultural history of Russia
demonstrates no direct connection with

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the theoretical and speculative thought of

classical antiquity. For the Byzantines
transmitted the Gospel and Scripture,
liturgics, homiletics, hagiography, selective patristics, and the canon law, but no
Aristotle or Plotinus. So there is no
scholasticism, no tradition of philosophical, academic schools of thought.
The Renaissance, the Reformation, the r e
birth of scientific philosophy under Bacon
and Descartes were of only tangential
significance for Muscovite Russia. True,
the thought of the Age of Reason, the
Enlightenment, flooded in on mighty
waves. Rationalism, empiricism, sensationalism, the critique of dogmatic
religion, and the first stirrings of what
could be called scientism made themselves felt, contributing to the emancipation of thought from the traditional
theology of revealed religion. But all this
was taken in receptively and imitatively
rather than creatively, almost as a witty
and elegant parlor game for the upper
stratum of a society involved in the progress of rapid Europeanization, in the
absence of a firmly established heritage of
systematic and speculative thought.
The same could be maintained, mutatis
mutandis, about the profound impression
made by German speculative idealism.
Significantly, only a modest degree of interest in Kant developed. Even the
authentic philosophical enthusiasm evoked by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and eventually Schopenhauer did not immediately
conduce a more disciplined, original Russian way of thought. Only during the second half of the nineteenth century did
something like a native philosophical
tradition begin to emerge. It was sup
ported, in part, by promising experiments
made in this direction by some theological
academies and seminaries. The most important representatives of this trend were
Boris Chicherin-a Hegelian, one of the
very few disciples who succeeded in further developing some of the masters ideas
in a truly creative fashion-and Vladimir
Soloviev-regarded as Russias greatest
systematic and speculative thinker.
Original philosophical thought in Russia

awakened with Peter Chaadaev and

Prince Vladimir Odoevsky. Characteristically, it was ignited not by purely abstract
problems, but by eminently practical questions posed by the philosophy of history,
ethics, aesthetics, and also the philosophy
of religion. It is significant that Kants
famous three Critiques were neglected in
favor of Hegel as, first and foremost, the
philosopher of history (see Alexander
Herzens much quoted dictum that the
algebra of revolution is contained in
Hegels dialectics), as well as in favor of
Schelling as the philosopher of art and
religion and, last but not least, of Fichte
with his primacy of the moral will. A further distinctive trait of Russian thought is
that realists or idealists, Slavophiles or
Westernizers, philosophizing country
squires, writers, journalists, literary critics,
theologians, frustrated politicians and
reformers, publicists and private scholars
were dominant over the holders of university chairs of philosophy. The professors,
often conscientious and well-trained, were
basically uncreative and dependent on
thought imported from abroad.
To all of these thinkers one could apply
Dostoevskys assertion that, although he
had not been a philosopher (in the
academic and technical sense of the term),
throughout his entire life he had been passionately enamored of philosophizing. Not
the Logos, but philosophical Eros provided
the main stimulus to their thinking. Thus
the late Fedor Stepun once remarked that
Schopenhauers influence among the Russians, though enormous, was deplorable,
because it prevented them from seriously
studying Kant; and Kant is the only practical means to hone, sharpen, and
discipline the thought processes.
A further representative trait of
philosophical thought and reflection
among Russians seems to be a complete
lack of temerity with respect to the Absolute. Methodological considerations concerning logics and epistemology do not
easily satisfy. A politely reticent, wellbalanced skepticism, or agnoticism, in
metaphysics, ethics, or in the philosophy
of history or religion has seldom met with

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sympathy among Russians. Positivism and

materialism were immediately pressed into service in the revolutionary struggle
against the traditional authorities in State,
Church, and Society-this in a much more
uncompromising manner than, for example, that of the German Social Democrats.
And when atheism, advanced by the
radical wing of the European Enlightenment and the Hegelian left, obtained entry
into the minds of the Russians, they were
not content to declare with chilling objectivity that there was no more need for the
hypothesis called God. Immediately
they adopted positions of militant antitheism (one thinks of Bakunin). And consider that a Russian vocable signifying
atheism is bogoborchestuo, or fight
against God. Even here we perceive the
striving for ultimate, incontrovertible certainties: a frame of mind quite distant from
scientifically cultivated aspects of s k e p
ticism. It is dogmatism; it is combative
agnosticism. To it can still be applied what
Stepun-originally a neo-Kantian and a
student of Rickert and Windelband-said
in one of his philosophical essays:
And so we arrive at the result that in
philosophy (scientifically conceived)
there is no room for ultimate Truth.
Does this mean, however, that the
bond between philosophy and ultimate
Truth has been definitely cut? That, I
think, would be a rash conclusion. Even
though ultimate Truth cannot be incorporated in the organism of philosophy,
it must be understood as that atmosphere in which this organism
unalterably must breathe and develop.
At this precise moment Rozanov was to
appear on the stage. He, too, was no
philosopher in the technical sense of the
word. He never held a university chair of
philosophy. Nor did he strive to establish
philosophy as a strict science (strenge
Wissenschaft). He probably would have
applauded Lev Shestovs polemics against
Edmund Husserls insistence upon the exclusively scientific character of all
philosophic research could he have had a

chance to learn about it.

In the early stages of his activities as an
author Rozanov had tried to set up shop as
a technical philosopher, possibly
nourishing hopes for an academic career.
His first major work was an ambitious
philosophical venture entitled 0
ponimanii [About Understanding](1886).
It propounded a theory of the knowability
of things, attempting to present science as
an organically structured, comprehensive
Corpus scientiae, in opposition to the
anorganic, the mechanistic and analytical
methods of positivism. But this book did
not receive favorable response, either
from the influential neo-Leibnizians at
Moscow University, or from the numerous
(and often uncritical) adherents and
devotees of positivism and scientific
materialism. Hardly anyone paid attention
to it; it was bypassed in silence. Nor did his
essays and articles on philosophical problems, such as the goal of human existence, the meaning of beauty in nature,
or the significance of scientific explanations of phenomena, create any sensation.
He had to bury his hopes of joining the
university professoriate. It must also be
added that his frank criticism of the dry
and stereotyped methods of instruction at
the Russian secondary schools at that time
did not endear him to the bureaucrats in
the Imperial Ministry of Education, even
though his criticism disclosed a genuine
interest in problems of pedagogy.
Significantly, the publication which
made him famous almost overnight in the
world of letters and scholarship was a
series of essays (later collected in a book
[1891]), printed in the journal Russkij
Vestnik [The Russian Herald], devoted to
commentary on Dostoevskys Legend o f
the Grand Inquisitor. This was a real
breakthrough from provincial obscurity
into the center of the literary stage
brilliantly illuminated by footlights of the
press, high-level commentaries, and
academic discourse. So he worked as a
publicist and journalist, a highly talented
feuilletonist, engrossed in the ideological
feuds agitating Russian public opinion in
the years around 1900. In effect he

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became a literarily, politically, morally,

and religiously controversial figure.
Nonetheless, he produced voluminous
literary achievements in the fields of
criticism, pedagogy, religious philosophy,
and social questions. And finally, his
aphoristic and strongly autobiographically
colored reflections, observations, and
fragments, published in the books
Uedinennoe [Solitaria] (191 l), and Opaushie List)a [Fallen Leaoes] (1913-15),surprised and even stupefied his contemporaries. These writings fascinated the
reader with their uncommon stylistic
brilliance, raciness, and charm. They also
provoked violently negative reactions.
What Rozanov felt was his uncompromising honesty with himself, with God, and
with his surroundings, was regarded as
cynical exhibitionism. The unconventionality of his reflections, especially those
on his metaphysics of sex, sexuality, and
procreation, shocked some of his readers,
who suspected him of either sensationmongering scurrility or total immoralism.
Still he cultivated a stance as a thinker
reflecting upon his own inner life, the infinite dialectics of his own thought processes, and the vast and incalculably
ramified play and counterplay of his
psyche-the po&te de la contemplation
solitaire, as his competent and sympathetic French commentator, Jacques
Michaut, called him.
As far as his philosophizing is concerned, he increasingly desisted from all
the speculative, normative, a n d
systematic designs he had tried to project
in his earlier years. It becomes evident
that his thought increasingly proceeds
from what was to be called Existence.
And his isolation as a thinker and writer
(but not as a man, for he was basically
very sociable in his personal life), is thus
explicable. He was one of those persons
who, in their deep interior lives where no
other creature can enter, are cut off completely from the rest of the world and are
ultimately confronted only with
themselves. Their thoughts, ideas, and attitudes are derived not so much from the
objective givenness of things, as they are

146

from a personalist bias. Rozanov did not

know Kierkegaard. But, like his whole
generation, he had read Nietzsche with
bated breath, and then, above all,
Dostoevsky and Konstantin Leontiev;
Blaise Pascal must also be cited in this context. It does not matter very much that the
Dane had been a stranger to him. For
what Kierkegaard has in common with
Dostoevsky, namely that he could grasp
truth only in terms of an individually experienced reality, was also one of
Rozanovs decisive intuitions largely
determining his own outlook, his
Weltanschauung.
Rozanovs philosophizing also focuses
upon the individual who experiences, suffers, feels, thinks, and makes deliberate,
often spontaneous decisions in a concrete
historical, social, natural, and moral situation. This individual, Kierkegaards
Einzelner, is essentially Man asking questions. He feels himself thrown back onto
the primordial facts of life, suspended between an unwilled birth and an inexorable
death; he hurls his queries into the face of
infinity, in the midst of anguish (Angst),
worry, care (Sorge), certainty of extinction, constituting the tormenting presence
of what one of Rozanovs precursors in the
realm of Russian thought, Prince Vladimir
Odoevsky, called the indissoluble contradictions of Being. Answers, if there are
any, are revealed to him not so much
through the operation of discursive
reason, but in religious experience, or in
the encounter with Eros and all its works,
or in great art, in creative literature,
poetry, and music.
Thus does Rozanov appear before his
audience, which he sometimes pretends to
despise. He plays the part of the learned
connoisseur and critic, as well as the
apocalyptic prophet with all the appropriate gestures and imprecations. He is
affected with the specifically modern urban melancholy, the inner emptiness of an
age of anxiety, and yet he smacks his lips
with the sensuality of a Faun. He falls
down on his knees to worship the phallic
deities of the ancient Orient-Apis, the
Great Bull, Isis and Osiris, Tammuz and

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Ishtar. He camps, so to speak, in the tents

of the biblical patriarchs, with their wives
and herds, their children and childrens
children, Abrahams seed which came up
as numerous as grains of sand on the
seashore.
And yet Rozanov never extirpated from
his soul the monastic piety of Byzantium.
He practiced a lifelong cult of marriage as
the consecrated altar of procreation and
fecundity, even though he reached the
point of absurdity when he exclaimed:
According to my innermost self, my God,
oh my God, there has always stood a
monastery in my soul! But this confession
by no means abrogates the seriousness he
infused into an adoration and resuscitation
of the pre-Christian Baals and Astartes. He
was an ardent sun-worshipper whose conscience was always troubled by night and
cross, Gethsemane and Golgotha. He was
an anarchist and yet a nationalist; an antisernite and at the same time a profound,
fascinated admirer of primeval Judaism.
He despised and berated his own Russians,
but he was a passionate advocate of Russianism. As a man he vacillated between a
contempt and deification of his own self.
Those knowing Rozanov only in his role
as political and social critic, conservative
as well as liberal, will misunderstand him.
For-a
typical paradox for him-the
underlying reason for the occasional
shrillness with which he expressed his
shocking or provocative, cynical political
and social views was his basic hostility to
all politics. If one defines him above all as
a vitalistic philosopher, a cosmic erotic, an
apostle of a sexualized religion of generation and child-bearing, one will overlook
the man immersed in prayer, bowed
under the cross, disturbed to desperation
by sorrow, suffering, and death, the eternal sting in his own breast. The enthusiastic glorifier of a god who was the
great solar demiurge and cosmic protector
of fertility and the nuptial bed, is also a
man characterized by the sickness unto
death.
But in the philosophy of life and cosmic
religion he also was a tragic dialectician
since the dialectical process did not mean

to him, as it did to the Hegelians, a mere

logical operation, by means of which the
mind finally arrives at the stage of sublation and synthesis after leaving behind the
stations of thesis and antithesis. Rozanov
was not very much concerned with this
synthesis. In general, his problem was not
so much theoretical or logical, but rather
existential. It was the abrasive confrontation of thesis and antithesis within his own
mind, within the thinking and feeling self,
that interested him. The intellectual
operation set in motion inside his mind
was, therefore, not the action of an
abstract thinking consciousness, or a
speculative I. It was an indissoluble involvement of his own individual person
deep in meditation or crushed by suffering, or forlorn in prayer to a but halfbelieved-in God, rejoicing in the gifts of
life; a person, unique, unrepeatable, throbbing with all the juices of existence in the
flesh, and media vita in morte. What D.H.
Lawrence (in so many respects akin to
Rozanov in spirit and outlook) said in his
study of Thomas Hardys novels about
dialectics enlivening the creations of all
true artists, may be applied to him: a work
of art must contain the essential criticism
on the morality to which it adheres. And
hence the antinomy, hence the conflict
necessary to every tragic conception.
Rozanov, however, adhered to simultaneous moralities; dialectical positions remained within his mind, each in its own
right. Which one might be the more resistant, the more cogent, was not a logically
foregone conclusion. And in this respect
he approaches Dostoevsky, his adored
master.
Rozanovs writings on the philosophy of
nature, metaphysics, the theory of
knowledge and science, and pedagogy accorded him a temporary reputation as
the greatest Russian thinker of the present time. In view of the achievements of
thinkers such as Nikolaj Berdiaev, Sergius
Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, Ivan Iliin,
Nikolaj Lossky, Lev Shestov, Boris
Vysheslavtsev, Lev Karsavin, Sergej
Askolidov, and others, this was an inflated
encomium. He did not excel in purely

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theoretical, philosophical research. But in

the philosophy of religion and culture and
in philosophical anthropology his contribution to the advancement of Russian
thought is significant and important. What
deserves further tribute and attention
is-given the conditions of his own, the
late Victorian, Edwardian, and early
Georgian, times-the astonishing originality of his focus, his unconventionality, and
his timely insight that, temporarily at
least, the construction of imposing, wellbuilt systems in philosophy and theology
had ended. He clung to the Absolute in his
own terms and maintained it for himself,
in the teeth of a more and more
a-religious, anti-metaphysical, and
secularistic Zeitgeist. But it could not
escape his intellectual perception and
socio-historical understanding that life and
thought were fissioning into a multitude of
isolated, organically incoherent processes
and events; that the originally indivisible,
homogeneous human personality was
disintegrating under the magnifying glass
of biology, psychology, and sociology; and
that eventually any transcendent sanction
for the finite existence of man on earth
was under threat of termination. All this
made the validity of the traditional great
and self-contained forms in thought and
letters highly questionable. But it was this
perplexing modernity with all its ambivalence, intellectual and moral flexibility, and openness to all the winds of doctrine which his confreres among the Russian intellectuals could and would not
understand. They were still firmly committed to this or that ideological stance or
creed. For them Rozanov was simply
unreliable, fickle, capricious, cynical, or,
as one of them asserted, morally unaccountable, totally irresponsible-and
this judgment is still upheld in his
homeland.
Because of the very nature and
character of some of his reflections and
speculations, he was regarded as
representative of an irrational, or rather,
transrational, cosmic vitalism and pantheism. This current was alive in Russia
perhaps in the underground of orgiastic

sects, such as the uudi Bozhie (the

Khlysts), but it had not attained the status
of a respectable, intellectual-religious
tradition. Centuries-old education of the
people in the ascetic and otherworldly
spirit of the Byzantine and GraecoSlavonic Church has seen to that. Thus,
Rozanov had admirers and opponents,
friends and ferocious foes, but no
disciples. (In this context I am not referring to his style, his inimitable diction, and
his mode of expression that were to influence Russian creative literature, from
writers of the twenties to Sinyavsky.) But
as far as his metaphysics of cosmism, that
is, his frantic search for the erotic key to
the mysterium tremendum of Being, was
concerned, he was the only Russian protagonist of his time to express this essential ontological aspect of the intellectual,
religious, and moral life of classical antiquity and of modern times.
So it would seem that there is no such
thing as Rozanovs philosophy, if by
philosophy we mean a closely reasoned,
tightly knit, logically consistent system of
thought. Even if we limit the tasks of
philosophy to the treatment of abstract
epistemological, logical, ontological or
meta-physical problems, or the tabulation
and analysis of propositions which must
be logically and experimentally verifiable,
in the sense of a critique of language
which sees its ideal in the unequivocal
symbolism of mathematics, there is no
Rozanov philosophy. Seen from these
points of view, Rozanov cannot be regarded as a philosopher stricto sensu, but at
best only as a talented philosophizing
writer. For his style of thought and reflection is not systematic, but aphoristic. And
here, guided only by the inner needs and
organic tendencies of his own mind, he
followed quite independently and spontaneously the path that, in the opinion of
Karl Lowith, led from Hegel to Nietzsche.
Furthermore, his thinking is not allinclusive, but fragmentary; not logical, but
intuitive and visceral; not consistently
reasoned and linear, but contradictory,
baffling, ambivalent.
For these reasons, it is difficult to

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describe and analyze the intellectual and

spiritual development of this lonely
thinker and visionary. The development
of his metaphysical and religious attitudes
cannot be reduced to a dialectically and
chronologically determined formula. Of
course the same is true of the meandering
course of his musings and speculations in
general. Again and again he thinks of the
counter-position to his original ideas and is
not ashamed to contradict himself, to call
himself to order, as it were. Not without
reason did Berdiaev remark in his
autobiography that Rozanov was constantly changing his views. Nonetheless,
he also remarks that Rozanov always remained the same: when the basic issues
were at stake he was steadfast and
unflinching in his convictions. But these
basic issues were not, as Berdiaev
thought, Rozanovs religious vitalism, nor
his cult of the cosmic forces and powers,
nor his deep-seated aversion to all
arguments, which remains theoretical and
abstract, nor, finally, his opposition to
church and Christ, sometimes reaching
blasphemy. The constant in Rozanov was
his innate ambivalence and duality, the
rift between the cosmic-telluric and the
spiritual, the phallic and the monastic-discords he failed to reconcile to the
very end of his life.
Rozanov was perplexed by his own inconsistencies, his inner dialectics which
found the counter-position to every position or proposition he might take, without
being able to decide which was the
superior, the more deserving of the two.
On the contrary, one often has the impression that he delighted in the multi-colored
scintillation of his mind and its boundless
potentialities. With Bismarck, who once
was attacked for his frequently contradictory thoughts, emotions, and plans, he
could have said: Only an ox is
consistent.
One example of his oscillation between
various poles of thought and attitude will
suffice. Jbzef Czapski, in his excellent
preface to a French anthology of
Rozanovs writings, La face sombre du
Christ, makes this telling observation:

Rozanov was perfectly willing to contribute to periodicals which were

ideologically opposed to each other, to
abandon one political camp for the other,
and to laugh to himself about the conflicts
arising therefrom. Quite consciously he
tried to discredit these partisan divisions
and ideological compartmentalizations.
His aim was to draw the attention of the
thinking minds among his contemporaries
to problems which he believed to be infinitely more essential than social and
political issues. He saw religion, the
cosmic solar powers of sexual love, marriage, and procreation as the most sublime
manifestations of the divine creative force
permeating the universe.
It would be erroneous to attribute too
much weight to his cosmic-erotic, neopagan speculations about a revitalization
of the ancient cults of fertility, fecundity,
and patriarchy. Even when he seemed to
be completely wrapped up in the formulation of his ontological and metaphysical
creed-which
he believed was corroborated by ancient Egyptian religion
and its symbolic representation in art-he
confirmed in his correspondence with
Mikhail Spasovsky, the editor of the rightwing student paper Vegnua vody, his deep
attachment to Christian beliefs, traditions,
and forms of worship. He could not escape
the spell of Christianity and his native Russian Orthodox Church.
In this he was like D.H. Lawrence, who
also was never completely successful in
tearing himself away from his sober Protestant, non-conformist background. This
characteristic is made abundantly clear in
Rozanovs conversations and correspondence with Aleksej Remizov and,
especially, with Erich Hollerbach, the art
critic and aesthete, as well as with Mikhail
Spasovsky. In his exchange of thoughts
and impressions with Hollerbach he may
have appreciated the latters lack of prejudice and his aestheticism; but contact
with Spasovsky granted him the opportunity to review his opinions and retreat
into the shadow of the Church. Incidentally, Rozanovs occasional dicta about
literature reveal the same evasive and am-

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biguous, highly problematic equivocation

which he displayed in his attitude toward
religion, philosophy, journalism, and
politics.
It
be wrong to analyze and explain these love ethics and metaphysics
in Freudian terms since his views cannot
be pressed into the Procrustean bed of one
specific theory or doctrine. Rozanov
himself, unlike D.H. Lawrence, was not acquainted with Freudian psychology. But,
like Freud, he had studied the French
neurologists, and also Havelock Ellis,
Krafft-Ebing, and Otto Weininger. And he
had made use of their findings in some indiscreetly whispering studies about sexual
aberration and pathology. What he was
concerned with was not the rational exploration of repression, inhibition, and
guilt, much less the scientific, clinical
analysis and justification of the libido
establishing some inexorable causal
mechanism between the Id, the Ego, and
the Super-Ego or Censor. Instead he was
overwhelmed by the intuitive certainty
that the irresistible urge to beget and to
bear was something which was primordially given, something irreducible that
cannot be explained in terms of rational
concepts. He was not only interested in
the libidinous aspect of sexual love, but
also and always with procreation and
child-birth, which explains his ambiguous,
often negative attitude towards prostitution with its meretriciousness and barrenness.
But it is here, in the erotic encounter,
that man, in a completely pre-rational and
trans-rational manner, experiences and
conceives of himself as an organic part of
a god-created, god-permeated cosmos.
Obviously, this divine element has very little in common with the deity of Christian
theology or the abstract prime mover and
grand engineer of the universe in the
Aristotelian and later deistic understanding. Rozanov scornfully discounted all the
modern assaults upon Christianity,
church, religion, and metaphysics by rationalism, materialism, and positivism in
their full panoply of logic and science.
That which for the Romantics had been

wouid

the philistine, for Baudelaire lesprit

Belge, or for Nietzsche the last man,
was for Rozanov the positivist. In his book
Fallen Leaoes he emphatically declared:

Positivism is the philosophic mausoleum

over a perishing humanity!
Certainly he was one of the most scandalous rebels to raise a voice against
Christianity and pseudo-Christianity in
modern times. But when he rebelled he
didnt act as an advocate of reason, but in
the name of a Dionysiac principle, of the
Old Testament against the New, the
phallic gods of fertility against the
spiritualized and ethicized deity of Christianity. The nickname Hyperborean
Dionysus bestowed upon him by many of
his contemporaries was well earned.
His cosmic piety was deeply in need of
valid mythical archetypes, which neither
Christian monastic asceticism nor the
cosmological theories of modern science
could provide. In his restless quest for
binding mythical symbols he felt attracted
to the ancient Near East and to the valley
of the Nile. Before his mental eye there
arose the primordial cult of the Magna
Mater with orgiastic fertility rites and temple prostitution, symbolic incarnations of
the basic mysteries of all Being. Rozanov
would have approved wholeheartedly of
what Lawrence said in his treatise of 1921,
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious:
True, we must all develop into mental
consciousness. But mental consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-desac. It provides us only with endless a p
pliances which we can use for the alltoo-difficult business of coming to our
spontaneous-creative fullness of being.
It provides us with means to adjust
ourselves to the external universe. It
gives us further means for subduing the
eternal, materio-mechanical universe
to our great end of creative life. And it
gives us plain indications of how to
avoid falling into automatism, hints for
the applying of the will, the loosening
of false, automatic fixations, the brave
adherence to a profound soul-impulse.
This is the use of the mind-a great in-

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dicator and instrument. The mind as

author and director of life is anathema.
It was Rozanovs peculiar genius that he
instinctively found the form of expression
best fitted and adapted to his mode of
thought, spirit, and feeling. For there
could be no reflective or discursive formulation for this type of life-experience,
neither the system in philosophy or
theology nor the conventions of the patterns and paradigms of traditional poetics.
His fame rests on his aphoristic,
autobiographical, and philosophicreligious fragments, observations, and
apophthegms. The substance and structure of these volumes-Solitaria, Fallen
Leaves, and the Apocalypse of Our Time
(1917-18)-demonstrate that, after having
failed to philosophize discursively and
systemically, he had arrived at the conviction that the bell had tolled for thought in
terms of self-contained systems. The
aphorism, the epigrammatic or gnomic
dictum became for him the most appropriate tool for pressing his experiences, insights, opinions, and perceptions into a convincingly terse mold; he
could thereby objectivize, as it were, the
most intimately subjective with the aid of
the most suitable stylistic device.
With all this, his aphorism in most cases
successfully avoids any didactic bias. It is
rather a fragment, in the sense of the German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and
Novalis, an arrangement of thought and
idea which meets the need for a boundless
expansion of the possibilities of thought
and expression, a breaking out of the
limits of what can be said beyond all the

aesthetic and structural vetoes, rules of

taste, and normative delimitations that
were once valid. It reveals the striving for
utter spontaneity, experimentation, and
playfulness in the deliberate use of idea,
texture, and idiom, and openness for all
the vibrations of mood, atmosphere, and
sensibility.
Occasionally a peculiarly lyrical
resonance pervades these aphorisms and
fragments, as if one has heard almost imperceptible tones coming out of the infinite. This impression finds its explanation in the fashion of Rozanovs reflections
and observations, his inner monologue
fading gradually away in a whispered
prayer: an archaic poetic, liturgical element that throws into relief his own personal and existential distress, as well as
the moral and spiritual wretchedness of
modernity. For Rozanovs gnomic and
personal aphorisms and fragments were
also born out of the awareness of the frailty and brittleness of time and reason. Only
this aphoristic form made it possible for
him to reveal himself, his thought and feeling, without any reservations, denuding
himself in an almost cynical fashion, and
yet also camouflaging and veiling the innermost recesses of his essential nature.
Rozanov revealed not only himself but
also his environment and his epoch as
they were refracted in the iridescent prism
of his psyche. Above all, he was to disclose
an autobiographical, religious, and
philosophical diary of a mind engaged in
an incessant dialogue with itself, with a
disintegrating time, and with a God who
was ever more receding into indiscernible
distances.

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