Nikolai Danilevsky and Vladimir Solovyov on the concept of Christian unity
摘要
This article reconstructs and analyzes the controversy that arose in 1885 between Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Danilevsky in the journal Izvestija Sankt-Peterburgskogo Slavjanskogo blagotvoritel’nogo obshhestva (News of the Saint Petersburg Slavic Charitable Society). The context of this controversy included the policy of the journal formulated by one of its early ideologues, General Alexander Kireev, as well as a rather extended dispute between Kireev and Solovyov over the national question in Russia and the problem of the unification of Christian churches, which lasted from 1883 to 1887. An important part of this polemic was Solovyov’s critical review of Danilevsky’s book Rossiya i Evropa (Russia and Europe), published seventeen years after the publication of the book itself and three years after Danilevsky’s death, which was included in the second edition of the collection of Solovyov’s articles Nacional’nyj vopros v Rossii (The National Question in Russia, 1888). The ideological context of the dispute between Solovyov and Danilevsky also included Solovyov’s polemic on the national question with the “neo-Slavophiles” Pyotr Astafyev and Nikolai Strakhov, as well as his “Nine Questions” to Archpriest Alexander Ivantsov-Platonov on the union of Christian churches, which were published in the newspaper Rus’ in 1883.