Sex, God, and a Petty Demon

On the Russian thinker and writer Vasily Rozanov

“There are people born ‘well made’ for the world and others who are not born ‘well made,’ ” wrote Vasily Rozanov in Fallen Leaves, promptly adding he belonged to the second category. He was not wrong. Touchy, venomous, and conflicted, Rozanov (1856–1919) certainly had a deformed personality; he had much more besides. You wouldn’t know it from the bare-bones Wikipedia entry put together for English-speaking readers, but Rozanov was one of the more prominent figures of the Russian Silver Age. At once the epoch’s bellwether, symptom, and avatar, he expressed its gauzy exhalations, diaphanous reveries, and fin-de-siècle ferment, arousing controversy as much for the extremeness of his views as for their quicksilver changes. Rozanov was spiritually and intellectually misshapen; so were the times. For all its extraordinary cultural fecundity, the belle époque carried a toxin in its bloodstream. The overall mood seemed to be one of optimism and wonder, but also of bewilderment and discombobulation. The air was redolent of sex, psychopathology, and spiritual bizarreries; ostensibly enlightened people amused themselves with table-turning, spirits, and the likes of Helena Blavatsky (“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante”). Rasputin poured his mystical bunkum into the tsarina’s ear. Of charms I suppose there were many — decadence, Jacques Barzun wrote, is the best of times when it isn’t anxious — but Russian society was nothing if not hyper-nervous. Nor was this a phenomenon specific to Russia. A wave of suicides swept over Habsburg Vienna at the turn of the century and, with the double suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera, not even the royal court was spared. There was a palpable awareness European civilization was galloping towards the abyss. In Russia, the poems of Alexander Blok, the novels of Andrei Bely, and the music of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, along with the work of other artists, captured the bubbly light-headedness, effervescent hopes, and apocalyptic forebodings of the Russian Silver Age.

So did Rozanov, in Russian letters and thought. A thinker, literary critic, polemicist, and intellectual, Rozanov was a writing machine, a fantastically prolific writer who churned out philosophical treatises, essays, articles, Op-Eds, and book reviews. He experimented with formats too, in his later years switching to a highly personal style of unfiltered navel-gazing, a style that would be instantly recognizable to the modern consumer of blog posts and other social media. There were also lengthy epistolary exchanges, intense and copious, rich in interesting insights into Rozanov’s private life and mind. Yet the man remained a riddle, a walking paradox no one could resolve. A vicious anti-Christian with monks and priests for close friends, a monarchist enemy of cosmopolitanism who was allergic to patriots and nationalists, a philosemitic anti-Semite, a reactionary in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution — would the real Rozanov please stand up? He never did, not in a way that would have appealed to any camp eager to claim him as one of its own. Ideas, views, and allegiances were for him like tour buses that you can hop on and off ad libitum. It’s not that the man lacked principles; he just didn’t know when to stop.

This made him a slippery eel, and opinions about both Rozanov and his work were consequently highly polarized. The eminent philosopher Aleksei Losev called Rozanov a “decadent anarchist” who would say anything to cause a sensation, and he accused him of being a “proselytizer of Satanism,” along with Nietzsche and Konstantin Leontiev. For the well-read and highly literate Trotsky, Rozanov’s place in Russian letters was that of a wriggling worm. The Silver Age writer Leonid Andreyev likened Rozanov to a mangy dog in so degraded a state no one wants to throw a stone at it lest the stone be sullied. On the other hand, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who knew an outstanding personality when he saw one, had this to say in his autobiographical masterpiece Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography: “Rozanov was one of the most extraordinary, one of the most original people I have ever met in my life. A most unique individual . . . I have read him with pleasure. His literary talent was spellbinding, the greatest talent in Russian prose. His words were full of magic.” Mikhail Gershenzon, an outstanding scholar of Jewish origin, held Rozanov’s literary talent in high esteem, and Rozanov’s anti-Semitic invective never got in the way of his praise. Even Rozanov’s detractors had ambivalent feelings. Losev, for example, claimed Rozanov was a genius — in the same paragraph in which he called him a proselytizer of Satanism.

In some sense, Rozanov’s contradictory views were a function of a complex, introspective personality forever in search of a lagoon to cast its anchor. The lagoon was never discovered. Rozanov remained a party of one, unable to find a club of which he wanted to be a member. Intellectually, he was a loner incapable of making common cause with anyone for any meaningful period of time. He would disembark on many a hospitable-looking shore, but nowhere would he feel truly at home. In Solitaria (Uedinennoe), one of his mature works, he recounts how he came to a church to pray; instead, unmoved and feeling out of place, he heard nothing. This led him to conclude, much to his chagrin, that his lot was that of a perpetual foreigner, regardless of the hour or place. “Everything is alien to me . . . No matter what I am doing, no matter whom I am seeing, I cannot merge with anything . . . All of this I expressed with the word ‘foreigner,’ whispered by me as the greatest condemnation, greatest lament . . .” In another text, Fallen Leaves (Opavshie list’ya), he similarly bemoans his inability to be at one with the world: “I was a ‘foreigner,’ an admiring Anacharsis, in politics as in, alas, everything else.”

In politics as in, alas, everything else — yet there were non-negotiable points. One was Rozanov’s staunch monarchism. Another was religion — however virulent his attacks on Christianity, Rozanov was deeply spiritual throughout his life, spirituality in those days meaning a bit more than having Instagrammable characters with a “special meaning” tattooed into one’s arm. He stayed loyal to his belief in physical love as a divine manifestation, and he never wavered from his anti-Westernism. Rozanov’s distrust of democracy and liberalism was unshakeable. So was, despite numerous attempts to sanitize it, his anti-Semitism, which flared up in later years like a chronic condition. For all his contradictoriness, it would be wrong to take Rozanov for some quixotic idealist on a relentless quest for truth. He was also a cynic who enjoyed being provocative and who never considered the implications of his ideas. He reveled in his intellectual promiscuity. He freely admitted he could write an article for the Black Hundredists and one for the Socialist Revolutionary Party on the same day and with equal sincerity. After all, there is a small Black-Hundredist dose in social-revolutionary thought, and vice versa. That is Rozanov’s excuse, not mine. Berdyaev had a less flattering explanation. In his review of Rozanov’s The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival (Voina 1914 goda i russkoe vozrozhdenie, on which I will have more to say further below), Berdyaev argued that Rozanov’s nature, like that of Russia, was essentially feminine; he submitted himself to events and ideas, allowing them to seduce and master him. Unable to put up resistance, he was easily swept away by power and by the current of historical forces. Berdyaev was onto something.

One’s nature is shaped by one’s childhood. Rozanov’s began in the provincial town of Vetluga, and it was not a happy one even by the standards of those lean days. Rozanov’s father died early on, leaving his wife, a woman of noble lineage, saddled with abundant progeny and all the financial cares that came with widowhood. Rozanov would remember his mother as “always irritable, always dejected, so tired, so terribly tired.” It appears she was also lonely. That is why, as Rozanov would explain in a letter to the literary critic (and Rozanov’s future biographer) Erich Hollerbach, his mother took a young seminary student as her lover. According to Rozanov, the man was a godless nihilist who exploited his mistress, played the martinet with her children, and probably kept the locals busy with gossip. One can only speculate on the indignities the young Rozanov may have been privy to. When Rozanov’s mother was struck by a terminal illness, the lover disappeared, and it fell upon the adolescent Rozanov to take care of the dying woman. The boy was spared nothing; years later, Rozanov would write graphically about his mother’s physical decay, mentioning to Hollerbach her blood- and urine-soaked pelvis and unspecified gynecological troubles. In his biography of Rozanov, Hollerbach wonders if Rozanov’s ministrations didn’t have something to do with his subsequent interest in, and adulation of, genitalia. As for the seminary student, some biographers believe it was the age gap between his mother and her lover that led Rozanov to blunder into his first marriage.

Apollinaria Suslova had once been Dostoevsky’s mistress, but by the time Rozanov proposed to her, she was well past her prime and sixteen years older than the groom. Members of the “Viennese delegation,” as Nabokov called anyone who transacted in Freudianism, might find it significant that the age difference was a reverse mirror image of his mother’s relationship. Others believe that marrying Suslova was his way of bonding metaphysically with the great Russian writer, though there is actually no evidence Rozanov knew Suslova had been intimate with Dostoevsky. Besides, it is unclear who married whom: by his own admission, Rozanov was the kind of man who was led and had little will of his own. Suslova might have chosen him, and not the other way around. Whatever the truth, by all accounts — though mostly, those are Rozanov’s accounts — life with Dostoevsky’s former lover was not much fun, and it overlapped with a dreary teaching job at a gymnasium in some backwater. Unpopular with students and with what passed for the local intelligentsia, unrecognized in places where recognition mattered, stuck with an aging harridan — little surprise his mood during that period was one of despair. At times he even contemplated suicide. By the late 1880s, Rozanov had separated from Suslova, but the marriage continued to haunt him. When Rozanov met the second love of his life, the widowed Varvara Butyagina, and decided to marry her, Suslova would not agree to a divorce. The divorce laws being what they were in tsarist Russia, she had the law on her side. Rozanov went ahead and married Varvara anyway, in a secret ceremony performed by a priest happy to look the other way. He did so at least in part to appease the religious sensibilities of Varvara’s mother, though it’s unclear how these matrimonial adventures were an immediate improvement on the previous situation. Bigamy had legal consequences, not to speak of social ones; any future progeny was condemned to illegitimacy. To avoid gossip, the newlyweds moved to another backwater, where Rozanov’s literary gifts were just as cheerfully neglected. Suslova remained intransigent. For someone with a delicate mental fabric, the circumstances must have been daunting.

Rozanov’s subsequent guerrilla warfare against Christianity, waged on paper for most of his life, is often explained in the light of his impossible family situation: he could never forgive Christian laws for standing in the way of his domestic bliss. An unsatisfactory explanation. Sporadic ceasefires notwithstanding, Rozanov’s attacks on the Church continued well into his final years, by which time the status of his second marriage and that of his offspring had long since been resolved. As with his other hobbyhorses, there must have been more deep-seated reasons for his animus — untamed passions that poured from the cauldron of his psyche into his texts. In The Apocalypse of Our Time (Apokalipsis nashego vremeni), Rozanov writes that there is more theology in a bull mounting a cow than in a seminary. The sentiment can be taken as his life’s credo. He was obsessed with matters of the flesh and the “sexual question,” and the roots of this obsession might have been buried in the idiosyncrasies of his sexual constitution. Rozanov was racked with doubts about his manliness, something he never bothered to conceal in his writings. He confessed to being weak-willed. In Solitaria, he reports that his teenage niece told Rozanov the only manly thing about him was his trousers. Rozanov finds the comment surprising: if his clothes are his only attribute of manliness, everything else about him must be feminine, and women ought to find him attractive. They did not, and their antipathy was a cause of anguish “since my school days.” He had misgivings about his appearance and described his mien as miserable. More significantly, he harbored concerns about his sexual adequacy, at least at one point in his life. According to a letter he wrote to the theologian Father Florensky, with whom Rozanov enjoyed an incontinent correspondence, he was afflicted with sexual impotence when he met Varvara. It is unclear whether the impotence was physical, since the first time he mentions the malaise in the letter, he uses quotation marks around the word “impotent” and suggests the problem is emotional: “my illusion, my dream, my ‘fear.’ ” But further along, there are indications there may have been a physical, possibly psychosomatic dimension to the condition as well. An entry in The Last Leaves, Year 1916 (Poslednie list’ya. 1916 god) is devoted to the strife of impotent husbands unable to satisfy their wives — three decades later, this was still a topic of interest. However he experienced it, Rozanov used his impotence as a trump card to speed up the courting process. He needn’t have worried — the couple would go on to have six children (though the first one would die in infancy). But I wonder whether his impotence, whatever its form, doesn’t hold some vital clues to Rozanov’s obsession with the sexual question. For a man, every sexual act is a test to be passed, a battle to be won. Men with a robust sexual makeup hardly give it any thought; those cursed with an overly sensitive one are forced to accept the world on different terms. A study of the role that sexual inadequacy, real or imagined, has played in the lives of great men and the creation of artistic masterpieces has yet to be written. Admittedly, the sexual inadequacy of a man who impregnated his wife six times should not be overstated, but in this area self-perception is no less important than actuality. Rozanov might have suffered from a double helplessness: one imposed by family law and the other by the unreliability, feared or otherwise, of his own flesh. The helplessness was projected on his religion.

There was also the matter of his sexuality. Rozanov was not “confused” about it — “confused” is a term I loathe in this context, and Rozanov, whatever his weaknesses, was never confused about anything. All the same, he recognized he was not born well made for the world, and while he did not have sex in mind when he wrote this, the gnawing awareness that he wasn’t like the rest may have applied to his sexuality as well. While not homosexual, Rozanov wasn’t quite absolutely straight either. He certainly had bisexual leanings. In The Last Leaves, Year 1916, Rozanov describes an encounter with a seventeen-year-old attendant who washed him during a visit to a public bathhouse. The attendant, a seventeen-year-old youth named Ivan, had his penis in full view of Rozanov’s face, and it would occasionally get close or graze him. Ivan himself was virile and muscular, and the size of his member made an indelible impression on Rozanov. Ivan was due to be conscripted the following month and would most likely be killed in action; the thought, Rozanov writes, filled him with pity — Ivan, after all, would have made many fair maidens happy. Given the amount of space Rozanov devotes to Ivan and his awe-inspiring sex organ, perhaps not only fair maidens. Nor is it any coincidence that Rozanov dwells on the topic of Ivan’s imminent conscription. Rozanov saw raw power, symbolized by the military, as phallic; the army, Rozanov believed, had strong sexual overtones that aroused the civilian population (such is the conclusion to Rozanov’s The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival, but I keep on getting ahead of myself). In speaking for the civilian population, Rozanov was only speaking for himself. But there is far more conclusive proof than his slobbering over Ivan. In a letter to Florensky dated December 30, 1908, Rozanov confesses to having partaken in sodomy, though, he hastens to add, only on an experimental basis. The experience confirmed for Rozanov he had no taste for it. Subsequent letters to Florensky cast uncertainty on how far the experiment had gone and, as with the question of his impotence, the reader is left guessing whether Rozanov’s homosexual experience was literal or “metaphysical.” But if the act was not physical, it is unclear why Rozanov was so concerned about Florensky’s opprobrium. Florensky would not have castigated Rozanov for same-sex love; as long as it stayed chaste and platonic, he was a devotee himself. If Rozanov was worried about Florensky’s reaction, we needn’t trouble metaphysics.

The hypothesis that I advance — that Rozanov projected his own sexual peculiarities on Christianity — may be far-fetched, though I don’t see how it is more far-fetched than the reduction of the matter to the recalcitrant Suslova. The fact remains that, at various points in his life, Rozanov expressed a strong dislike of Christianity for what he considered to be its aloofness to the real world and, most of all, to sex. The best text to explore Rozanov’s view of the Christian faith is the two-volume In the Dark Rays of Religion (V temnyh religioznyh luchah), a post-Soviet reincarnation of the original two-volume Christian Metaphysics, suppressed in its time by tsarist censors. The work is a frontal attack on Christianity and the “black” (i.e., celibate) clergy — for Rozanov, these are one and the same thing. Although the idea that the flesh came from the devil was confined to the Manichean heresy, Rozanov believes the entire Christian faith is permeated with it. Christianity is otherworldly; as he says in a chapter called Quiet Abodes (Po tihim obitelyam), his charming account of a visit to the famous monastery in Sarov, monastic asceticism is the only possible form of true Christianity. Christ can only be found within the walls of a monastery; outside those walls, paganism rules supreme. The non-monastic world is essentially pagan. Contrary to what Tertullian wrote, every human soul is pagan too; it becomes Christian only by imposing upon itself the kind of renunciation found in a monastery. Rozanov bristles at terms such as “Christian society” or “Christian state,” dismissing them as amalgams of styles. Only the monastery is stylistically consistent. Efforts by “Christian humanists” to bridge the chasm between Christianity and the real world are doomed. Christianity will triumph once man has overcome his basic instincts — like those of ownership and possession, for example. Property is one of the tangible attributes of the real world, and Christianity is viscerally opposed to it: “ ‘My own wife! My own children! My own house!’ All that is a hoary renunciation of Christianity . . . outside the Christian orbit, it is an ancient paganism that retains the loyalty of man, who is unable, and partly unwilling, to be unfaithful to it.” This is not to confuse Christianity with communism, Rozanov warns. Communism merely seeks to rearrange ownership of property, otherwise acknowledging it; Christianity denies property any validity and so negates it. People who think in terms of property are basically pagans. Christianity presupposes renunciation of one’s possessions and all earthly bonds. Rozanov points to Christ’s words about sowing division (Luke 12:49–53) as the ultimate goal of Christianity: to break the link between us and everything that defines our life here on earth, be it people or goods. Only in the monastery can this kind of division be accomplished, and those who argue against the monastery argue against Christ. That is just about everyone including Rozanov himself, who admires the aesthetics of monastic life at Sarov but is relieved to leave it. Aesthetics, for Rozanov, is orgasmic; he compares it to ecstasy — for all its power, or perhaps because of it, aesthetics cannot be continuous. One cannot have an aesthetic life, only an aesthetic death. The relationship between Christianity and death, only prefigured here, is made much more explicitly elsewhere in the text. For Rozanov, the famous words “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” are an exhortation to die. True faith is in the coffin; any attempt to ditch the coffin — by means of reproduction, for example — is a sin. Life itself must be sinful, leading to the conclusion that “satan is life; God is death.” Thus Rozanov.

Christianity, then, sets itself in opposition to life and, therefore, to sex, a topic Rozanov has a lot to say on. He inveighs against what he sees as Christianity’s morbid asexuality and purge of eroticism. Rozanov juxtaposes Christianity with Judaism and finds it is nothing like its Hebraic antecedent. The Old Testament is sultry and poetic, a grand celebration of flesh. God’s command that people go forth and multiply epitomizes the spirit of the Old Testament; God’s covenant with the Hebrews is a procedure that involves the male reproductive organs. Men “go in unto” women, there is polygamy, and at the critical moments demographic considerations supersede everything else (as when the absence of suitable males impels Lot’s daughters to commit incest with their father). Sensuous and febrile, the Old Testament is an ode to fertility. Christianity is the antipode of all that. Where in the New Testament does one find the Song of Songs, a David dancing before the Lord, or a fair Shulamite? The birth of Christ involves no sexual intercourse, and though Jesus may eat, drink, and bathe, there is one thing His kenosis precludes: going in unto a woman. Circumcision is replaced with noninvasive baptism, and the male sex organ is de-emphasized. By expunging all traces of the flesh from its matrix and leaving the faithful to gaze upon the virginal vestments of the priests, Christianity has pitted man against his very nature, planting the seeds of disease, misery, and sexual perversion. Rozanov mentions cases implicating members of the clergy in sexual debauchery, corruption of youth, and what we would today call child abuse. In Rozanov’s analysis, these are all quintessentially Christian phenomena. There seems to be nothing Rozanov is not willing to lay at Christianity’s door, including VD; he makes the claim that sexually transmitted diseases did not obtain during the biblical times, because, lacking Christian hang-ups about sex, the Hebraic world sent its healthiest, most robust women to please men as prostitutes, while in puritanical Christian societies only the most wretched (and, consequently, the weakest physically) sell their bodies.

If Rozanov is scathing of the Christian institution of marriage, it is because Christianity, he wrote to Florensky, is scathing of marriage. Christianity supplants the body with the spirit and the tangible with the intangible; to make sure the faithful get the message, it makes marriage difficult and divorce almost impossible. In In the Dark Rays of Religion, he compares the first connubial night to bestiality. There are no prefatory stages to help the couple get acclimatized to each other, no moments of tenderness and adoration to build sufficient trust and attraction. Instead, once the union has been appropriately sanctified, the groom takes possession of his bride, who is brought to the marital bed like a horse. The thing to do, Rozanov maintains, is to leave the newlyweds in the church so that they can spend their first nights there; far from sacrilege, their sexual congress in God’s abode will be the execution of God’s command to reproduce. But the Church will never grant its imprimatur; Christianity recognizes passion only when it is channeled through religious zeal. A true Christian cannot partake in earthly pleasures as those are inherently sinful; he cannot be passionate about food, art, or anything else that is not of Christ. “In saying this,” Rozanov writes, “in Christianity I separate products from smuggled goods. The arts, muses, Gogol, a good spread, and jam were all smuggled into the Christian world.” For Rozanov, the New Testament is joyless; there is neither music nor poetry. The central event of the New Testament is the crucifixion of Christ, and where Christians see salvation, promise, and the beginning of a new life, Rozanov only sees the cult of death. The New Testament is not a reworking of the Old Testament, then, but its negation; in its abnegation of sex, it is a negation of life itself. Ultimately, death is the loftiest Christian ideal; Christianity is a religion of death. He concludes one of the texts in In the Dark Rays of Religion by writing, “The Church has always considered Christ to be God and, eo ipso, she has been obliged to consider the whole world, our entire being, and birth itself, not to mention the arts and sciences, as demonic, as ‘lying in sin.’ And that was how she acted. But not in the sense that something should be improved, but simply that everything must be destroyed.” In The Last Leaves, Year 1916, a much later work, Rozanov writes it is not love of one’s neighbor that is at the heart of Christianity, but “shame as an indicator of sin,” and a rejection of coitus and parturition. “The greatest [Christian] virtue in the world is impotence.” Impotence — there is that topic again.

Rozanov’s ideas about Christianity went hand in hand with his theory of sexuality, developed in “People of the Third Sex,” one of the key chapters of In the Dark Rays of Religion. The sexual constitution of every individual can be plotted somewhere along a very arbitrary scale of +8 to -8. At +8, a man will exhibit the strongest features of his gender and demonstrate pronounced heterosexual tendencies — your typical alpha male, more or less. Likewise, a woman at +8 is extremely feminine and will feel a strong attraction to men. At this end of the scale, we find the vigor of the sun at its highest intensity. But people are different, of course, and, as one gets closer to zero, the sexual temperature falls; one’s conformance to the sexual behavior of his or her gender weakens. At zero, one is basically asexual; sexual attraction is either suppressed or not experienced at all. Attraction to one’s own sex is experienced on the negative side of zero; the higher the negative value, the stronger one’s inversion. Those hovering about zero or somewhere on the negative side of the scale are the third sex — or, to use Rozanov’s poetic term, people of the moonlight. Rozanov seems to have conflicting feelings about them. On the one hand, he is clearly sympathetic, and a lot of what he says about the sexually unorthodox is strikingly broad-minded and daring, considering the man’s reputation and his time. Citing lengthy fragments from case studies, Rozanov never associates the third sex with immorality. What’s more, he argues human civilization owes the third sex an incalculable debt. The innate qualities that arise from sexual idiosyncrasies (tenderness, dreaminess, melancholy) have been the driving force of human civilization, contributing disproportionately to artistic creativity. Rozanov believes the third sex is a metaphysical phenomenon; according to his statistics, for every ten same-sex couples, only one will engage in sexual penetration. Where Rozanov obtained those numbers, he doesn’t say. Probably from the same source that informed him even the closest of friendships between two people of the same gender are always seasoned with a soupçon of sodomy, and so there is a little bit of moonlight in everyone, if only a pinch. For a reason that is never elucidated, no distinction is made between asexuality and homosexuality; Rozanov simply conflates them. As he also equates Christianity with asexuality, it follows that Christianity is synonymous with homosexuality — if not literally, then certainly spiritually. Thanks to this bizarre sleight of hand, Rozanov feels justified to call Christ and St. Paul “spiritual sodomites,” and Christianity a religion of sodomy and onanism, one that is by its very nature opposed to traditional family life. The Church that has shaped and molded Western civilization is, as Rozanov wrote to Florensky, solely responsible for “every drunkard in the street, for every lecher in the brothel, for every suicide, for every gambler” because all sin is caused by either being in a dysfunctional family or having no family at all. Since people of the moonlight have always been at the helm of the Church, Rozanov feels they are a threat to family life and the health of human civilization. And there, one suspects, Rozanov’s tolerance comes to an end.

What to make of all this? Reading Rozanov is a constant labor of separating the wheat from the chaff; the parts are always greater than their sum. As a thinker, Rozanov relied on intuition and inspiration more than on logic and reason, and it shows. He was, of course, a product of his times and so prey to its assumptions — aside from the silly assertions about the nonexistence of venereal disease in the biblical times and the asexuality of homosexuals, he also claims masturbation among young men is a sexual irregularity (“porok”). Much of his sexual theory must have been influenced by Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, a pseudoscientific work that was in vogue in the early 20th century. Rozanov was acquainted with Weininger’s text and regurgitated some of its theses. (The theatrical suicide of the tormented Weininger at age twenty-three bestowed upon him the very dubious honor of being the only Jew described as honorable by, depending on which source you trust, either Hitler or Dietrich Eckart, who found Weininger honorable not because he had killed himself, but because he had done so at least in part on account of his Jewish origins). Today Rozanov’s theory might be interesting as a literary landmark, but not much else. His asinine conflation of homosexuality and the Christian faith is idiotic and an insult to both. He denies the monastery (for him, a metonym of Christianity) powers of fecundity and accuses it of enervating European civilization, yet the flowering of European civilization would have been impossible without the Middle Ages, an era that was powered by the twin engine of knighthood and monasticism.

To his credit, Rozanov’s defense of carnal love was also an attack on social strictures that condemned so many people — young women especially, if Rozanov is to be believed — to what we now call involuntary celibacy. He extolled the virtues of sound family life, which were meant to free society of its lonely and childless legions. From a footnote in the text: “The ultimate ideal, however, is a complete restoration of the biblical family, biblical plenitude of offspring, its smoothness and tranquility.” This is not at all a bad ideal, though Rozanov’s prolix expositions of pairing men and women, whether of a similar age or the May-December variety (sexual unions between younger men and older women were something of a bee in his bonnet), have the off-putting interest of a breeder. But the ideal itself is nice enough. Natural life, though, does not run on abstract ideals. While the dismantling of Christian strictures and taboos — a prerequisite for Rozanov’s biblical family — has taken place, the restoration never came about. Rozanov’s theory ignores the possibility that some social strictures are necessary. Strictures, provided they are not too constrictive, heighten creative powers, including those of fecundity. When all constraints are removed, energy tends to dissipate. Modern Western society is hyper-sexualized, but it couldn’t be further from Rozanov’s ideal; far from helping people pair and spawn a plenitude of offspring, it has made many even lonelier and certainly a lot more childless. According to statistics, the young today are less sexually active than previous generations, and the private life of many people, men especially, is a sexual Sahara (according to a 2019 article in The Washington Post, the number of American men under thirty who do not have sex had tripled in the previous decade). Statistics might lie, but the demographic situation in the West is a shambles, birth rates are lackluster at best, and social scientists are busy studying the so-called incel and child-free movements. In the modern sexual landscape access to, and distribution of, pleasure seems to be highly unequal; as with the economy, the situation tends to be increasingly characterized by “winner-takes-all” outcomes. Lifted out of the shadows by the climate of permissiveness, its greatest beneficiaries appear to be those who, according to Rozanov’s theory of sexuality, have sex in no more than ten percent of all cases.

More interesting and worthy of discussion is Rozanov’s identification of Christianity with the monastery. In one of his essays, Isaiah Berlin identified two 19th-century attitudes towards literature and the arts in general — the French and the Russian one. In the French tradition, the artist was divorced from the individual. What the artist did in his personal life was irrelevant; there was a Chinese wall between the artist’s works and the artist’s “real” life. If the artist’s deportment was unseemly, this in no way compromised his work. This kind of compartmentalization did not exist in the Russian tradition. The artist’s work influenced his real life and vice versa; the two were inseparable. Berlin shielded himself with the usual disclaimers, but there is an element of truth in his observation, and I am convinced the same two attitudes apply to Christianity. When I was a teenager, I attended Sunday service at a Lutheran church for a while. Though a few kilometers away, it was the only church within walking distance, and I would navigate the snow-padded streets every Sunday morning for worship. The parishioners were friendly, polite, and proper. They were also very established in life, showing up for church in Cadillacs and Audis, and it seemed to me that a Maginot line lay between their dominical itinerary and the rest of the week. At the risk of gross generalization — like Berlin, I must shield myself with appropriate disclaimers — one is a lot less likely to find this kind of compartmentalization in Russian Orthodox churches. Affluence is less common among the Orthodox, and when present, it is normally downplayed. One explanation might be that those Western countries where Christianity still plays an important role have enjoyed an uninterrupted tradition of worship, and the religious in the West also tend to be, on the whole, better off. In Russia, religion was suppressed for nearly three generations during Soviet rule, and little religious sentiment was left by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. After some seventy years of enforced atheism, there could be no easy return to the bosom of Russian Orthodoxy, and many of the born-agains had been encouraged by external developments — typically, adverse events in life. Not in all cases, certainly, but in many. Those fortunate enough to have been catapulted to affluence would have felt little need or time to embark on a spiritual journey. But to explain the otherworldliness of Russian Orthodoxy merely in these terms won’t do. Not for nothing was Russia, that land of Holy Fools, conceived as Holy Rus’; not for nothing was Moscow thought of as the Third Rome; not for nothing the most famous exponents of 19th-century Russian literature were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in their own ways intensely religious men. For historical and cultural reasons, Russian Orthodoxy is more monastic than the Western branches of Christianity, in the sense that it is more at odds with modernity. The Western branches of Christianity have integrated into, and found a modus vivendi with, the modern world. Russian Orthodoxy has not, and when it allows itself to be touched by modern life, it tends to turn into a parody. The Pope looks natural enough in his Popemobile, but there is something incongruent about the sight of the Russian Patriarch gliding through the streets of Moscow in a ritzy-looking motorcade with a holy icon, the way he did in April 2020 in a bid to stave off the pandemic (and with uninspiring results). Permanent immutability in a fast-paced, rootless world is beguiling; it also runs the risk of rendering faith archaic. On the other hand, the risk of accommodation with the lay world, for the Western branches of Christianity, is that they might be absorbed by it, and perhaps they already have been. This is more or less what Rozanov meant; in Christianity, there can be no compartmentalization. Christianity is not like a pair of dentures worn during the day and thrown into a glass before going to bed. One must choose between the monastery and paganism.

Or must one? For all of Rozanov’s claims about property being pagan, nothing in the New Testament precludes the improvement of one’s material standing, and indeed, you can argue that the virtues embedded in a pious way of life (self-discipline, frugality, avoidance of vice) are conducive to one’s financial betterment. While Christ did say it was hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, this might be interpreted as a condemnation of avarice and of those who use illicit means to make fortunes, and not a condemnation of affluence as such. Yet there is something decidedly unChristian about wealth. I am reminded of My Conversion and Life on Mount Athos, a text by Konstantin Leontiev, an important 19th-century Russian thinker and one of Rozanov’s pen pals. Leontiev dismisses the idea that the faith of a man wearing rags in a church is stronger than of one who prays beside him in an elegant frock-coat, making a sign of the cross with one hand while holding a French glove in another. One can be pious and fashionably dressed, and I have no trouble picturing Leontiev, a renowned aesthete, praying in an elegant frock-coat during the Divine Liturgy on Sunday. What I can’t imagine is his playing the stock market the following day. Doing so would be, in Rozanov’s words, an amalgam of styles. To use another example, I recently came across an American financial institution called Christian Community Credit Union (CCCU); this mixing of commerce and faith is unthinkable in Russian Orthodoxy, and were it not, it would be risible. To the extent that any Christian is consumed with the pursuit of personal gain, he is, in a way, a pagan.

Yet Rozanov is wrong to equate Christianity with the “black” clergy. If God is truly everywhere, as Christianity teaches, there is no reason why one should retire to a monastery to find Him. A magnificent crimson sunset, the glistening snowy peaks of a mountain range, the calm of a verdant forest glade, a Beethoven sonata — God is present in all of it. Beauty is godly. So is ugliness, one might say, insofar as it is also a manifestation of humanness. You can take that argument quite far, and some do. Recently an intelligent Russian Orthodox acquaintance, devout but exceptionally latitudinarian, told me that God could be found in an assignation with a prostitute. I doubt that even the most enlightened Orthodox priest would countenance this view. But Rozanov would have found the remark congenial. Commenting on Leontiev’s occasional tendency to yield to temptations of the flesh, despite Leontiev’s otherwise unassailable piety, Rozanov proposed that passion and eroticism be excised from all moral considerations, forever and for all of humanity. He never abandoned this belief and, however flawed or contentious, it showed a broad understanding of human nature.

No discussion of Rozanov can be complete without mentioning the “Jewish question.” The pianist and orchestra conductor Daniel Barenboim was once asked if, as one of Germany’s high-profile Jewish residents, he’d been on the receiving end of anti-Semitism. Barenboim responded with a Jewish joke about the definition of an anti-Semite as someone who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary. To continue with this joke, which is not much of a joke, Rozanov hated the Jews more than was absolutely necessary. It is a stain that will never wash off, though there are those who keep on looking for a good detergent. Rozanov turned anti-Semitic later in life. Not only was there no trace of any anti-Semitism in his writings before 1910, but much of what he wrote about the Jews, when he sat down to write about them, was exceedingly complimentary, so complimentary that the title of one treatise on Rozanov is called “The Anti-Semitism of a Russian Judeophile.” As mentioned, Rozanov praised the sensuousness of the Old Testament and clearly preferred the mores of the Hebrews to the sexual conservatism of Christians. In one text (In the Dark Rays of Religion) Rozanov even wrote that “[t]he Jew is the soul of humanity, its entelechy.” This is not something any anti-Semite would care to write, and it is very far from what Rozanov would himself write a decade later. But at a certain point, a change came about. According to a letter he wrote to Gershenzon, that point was the murder of Premier Stolypin in 1911 by a young Jew. One has to take Rozanov at his word, though I personally wouldn’t (and nor did Gershenzon — I will get to that later). Recounting the events that followed his wife’s stroke in 1910, Rozanov wrote to Florensky that he’d been initially unable to locate any of the doctors he knew, and so the concierge had to find two doctors in the streets of the city, while Rozanov was finally able to summon a third doctor by phone. Rozanov then felt it appropriate to mention that the three doctors were all Jews; the words he used was “zhid” and, worse, “zhidok” (the corresponding English terms would be “yid” and “yid-let,” respectively). While the term “zhid” was considered acceptable in Russian language, and widely in use, until the end of the 19th century, by the 1900s it had acquired derogatory connotations, and those who cared about such matters did not employ it. Rozanov not only employed it, he savored it. The letter was dated September 1910, a full year before Stolypin’s assassination.

A Jewish man I knew once told me he was suspicious of people who professed to admire the Jews, even if they were perfectly sincere. The dial of admiration, he said, could easily be turned to hostility, and the best kind of interest in the Jewish question was its complete absence. Reading Rozanov, I could see what he meant. Stolypin or not, by 1912 Rozanov’s musings on the Jewish question would not have been out of place in the Volkischer Beobachter. The erstwhile indulgence had morphed into vituperative bigotry. The philoprogenitiveness that Rozanov had once lauded in the Old Testament was now a demographic menace — as the Jews were, according to Rozanov, better at procreation than Christians, they could be expected to overtake the Russian population. These sentiments are on prominent display in Fallen Leaves, a compendium of thoughts, observations, and reminiscences written in 1912, and one that is typical of his mature works. Throughout the text, he complains that the Jews are everywhere and have squeezed Russians out of all lucrative positions; a day will come when they will have devoured all of Russia, leaving nothing but bones. In one entry, he describes, rather matter-of-factly, having gone into a Jewish-owned pharmacy and yelled at its Jewish owners that the Jews had taken over everything. In another entry, he writes about some “antediluvian sweat” that the Jews still can’t get rid of, hinting at a metaphysical lack of moral hygiene. In a number of back-to-back entries, Rozanov bemoans the recent entry of Jews into Russian literature, that temple of Russian soulfulness; he claims the Jews can’t write, but since they are skillful at commanding people, they will get ethnic Russians to do it for them. He compares the Jews to a spider that has entrapped flies in its web; pogroms, he claims, are the flies’ reaction against the spider and, however cruel and lamentable, a form of self-defense. In a 1913 letter to Florensky, he dispenses even with those minimal qualifications: “There is nothing I thirst for so much as for a pogrom and looting: ‘Out, out! Out! Get out and go wherever you want.’ There can be no other solution to this question” (the italics are Rozanov’s). Rozanov was wrong there. Florensky was more creative; in a letter to Rozanov written in October 1913, he opined that the Jewish question could only be solved by sterilizing all Jews if “we, Aryans” were to be saved, though the connection between Florensky and Aryans might not be immediately evident to anyone looking at extant photos of the man (his mother was from the Caucusus). Florensky did add the caveat that his idea was impossible since it would mean the renunciation of his Christianity — he must have remembered he was a priest after all. Three decades later, an Austrian-born degenerate free of scruples, Christian or otherwise, came up with a solution that out-solved them all.

Selective reading of Rozanov might lead one to believe that Rozanov distinguished between the Hebrews of the Old Testament and the Jewish diaspora in tsarist Russia. That is not the case (not that it would have been much of an excuse). While Rozanov still has a few good things to say about the Old Testament in Fallen Leaves, confessing to have always loved reading the Old Testament and the New Testament not at all, in The Last Leaves, Year 1916, even the Old Testament is under attack. Accusing the Jews of “infecting” European civilization with bourgeois values, Rozanov buttresses his “argument,” if that’s what it is, by pointing out the Bible, especially the Jewish part of it, is full of bourgeois motifs: the discovery of gold by Adam in paradise, the sale of Joseph into slavery, the betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, etc. Like Dostoevsky in A Writer’s Diary, Rozanov claims the Jews have a congenital relationship with gold. “They are all ‘golden,’ ‘gold-laden,’ ‘gilded,’ Goldenbergs’ ” — nothing like Christian Europeans, who, according to Rozanov, are moved not by bourgeois values but by “minnesingers, poetry, and ‘eternal gravity.’ ” But of course. At times, what he writes is not only offensive but also stupid. In the same text, he proposes to make it illegal for the Jews to consume sturgeon, since Russians do not consume “Jewish pike”; those who break the law ought to be sent to a Pale of Settlement that has no access to coastal areas. Maybe this was Rozanov’s idea of being funny.

In 1911 Russia was rocked by the so-called Beilis Affair, its own version of the Dreyfus saga in France. The affair amounted to little more than a case of the blood libel. The trial of the Jewish man wrongly accused of a ritual murder of a Christian boy took place in 1913; Rozanov sided with the prosecution and wrote a book about an ostensible connection between ritual murder and the Jews. Rozanov’s apologists sometimes point out that while Rozanov did believe in the blood libel, he did not fault the Jews for it — ritual murder was the kind of tribal manifestation that always attracted him. I doubt this is a defense either Beilis or the maligned Jews would have much cared for; many of those who had previously turned a blind eye to Rozanov’s penchant for controversies certainly did not, and Rozanov found himself shunned and ostracized by old friends. For a man who believed he had carte blanche to write anything that entered his head, this must have been a blow.

One of the people who indulged him stoically, for much longer than Rozanov deserved it, was the Jewish Mikhail Gershenzon, and their correspondence makes for a fascinating read. The two men became personally acquainted in 1909 and started writing to each other that same year. This being Rozanov, the Jewish question surfaced early on, and Rozanov’s attempts to moderate his tone and explain himself are a study in deception and self-deception. For the benefit of his Jewish correspondent, Rozanov takes great pains to declare his love for the Jews. If he does have reservations, it is only on account of the pitiful state of ethnic Russians and of his concerns for Russia’s destiny (as if the Jews were somehow responsible for the pitiful state of ethnic Russians and denied Russia its magnificent destiny). He is full of reverence for the Jews’ singular ability to preserve their faith and their resistance to dilution among other peoples. If he has a bone to pick, it is with the Jewish apostates who convert to Orthodoxy and all those Jews who have swapped the grandeur of their biblical mission for the undignified minutia of “the Russian tavern and Russian journalism,” where, Rozanov says explicitly, they create unnecessary competition and crowd out ethnic Russians. If only they could stick to their knitting! In the event, the preeminence of Jews among lawyers and bankers is asphyxiating for Russians; as Rozanov writes to Gershenzon, “We can’t breathe!”

The wish that the Jews give ethnic Russians breathing room by conforming to what Rozanov had decided to be their historical mission, a wish he may have considered flattering, was only an exhortation for the Jews to “stay in their lane.” What was Gershenzon — a Jew who had stormed Russian literature, that great cathedral of the Russian soul — to make of Rozanov’s injunction to leave Russian life to Russians? Reading the letters, one senses Gershenzon’s mounting exasperation as he vainly tries to reason with unreason. Gershenzon knows he is a Jew, but he wants to be seen as a scholar or, failing that, as a human being; Rozanov sees, first and foremost, a Jew, and he never lets Gershenzon forget it. According to Rozanov, this is just as it should be; a good Jew is one who stays a Jew. A non-Jewish Gershenzon is a bad Jew, something that Rozanov is ready to “pardon for the sake of the Jewish masses, who are good, virtuous, and wish Russia happiness.” For Rozanov, an assimilated Jew was probably just another “amalgam of styles.” Bearing in mind some of the things Rozanov wrote elsewhere at the time, his proclamations of good will towards the Jews look like a callous game he is playing with his Jewish correspondent. Even Rozanov’s compliments seem offensive and cruel. Ultimately, though it is never spelled out, this is a correspondence between a man who wants to be accepted and another who is in a position to dictate the terms of acceptance. Rozanov does not bar Gershenzon from Russian literature or from its life; Gershenzon is free to stray into its Slavic landscape of birch trees and endless steppes — just not too far. There is always that lane Gershenzon will always need to come back to, that invisible Pale of Settlement; its borders might be adjusted, depending on the fulfillment of this proviso or that, but they will always be there. In a short letter dated April 1913, Gershenzon thanks Rozanov “heartily” for sending him a copy of Fallen Leaves. Gershenzon writes he believes it to be a very important book, one of a handful of works that have best conveyed the “essence of the Russian spirit.” An editorial footnote explains the reference is to Fallen Leaves, Volume I. The bit about pogroms must have appeared in Volume II; otherwise, Gershenzon’s praise might have been less effusive. Gershenzon probably received the next installment shortly after — their correspondence broke off abruptly not long after this letter of thanks. It resumed only in 1918, and Rozanov’s last published letter to Gershenzon was an acknowledgment of Gershenzon’s role in helping Rozanov, by then destitute and virtually forgotten, receive badly needed funds from Maxim Gorky. The irony of that coda was rich and, at exactly two thousand rubles, easily quantifiable.

Gershenzon was convinced that, far from having anything to do with Stolypin’s assassination, the source of Rozanov’s anti-Semitism was deeply psychological. In January 1913, at a time when tensions between the two had started to rise, he had this to say in a letter to Rozanov: “Your meditations on the Jews are so unreal that I have not a moment’s doubt of this: the spring underpinning your deportment cannot be found in your logic, but in something psychological. And if you made an effort to go deeper, you would find this psychological knot, and then your attitude towards the Jews would be unmade.” The shrewd Gershenzon may have put his finger on it. What was that psychological knot? Rozanov often wrote that the nature of the Jews was feminine — as mentioned above, he had been influenced by Weininger’s pseudo-scientific rubbish more than he cared to admit. Aside from the absurdity of this notion, it also contradicted the views he had set out in In the Dark Rays of Religion: if Christianity was a religion of, and for, people of the moonlight, and Judaism was its exact opposite, then the Jews had to be virile. But then again, Rozanov was never a logical thinker. In Fallen Leaves, he concludes an entry by writing that “the feminine nature of the Jews is my idée fixe” (Rozanov does not actually use the word “feminine” but the cruder “bab’ya,” which can be translated as “haggish”). Elsewhere, with the typical ghoulish offhandedness he wears so lightly, he explains that the Jews are pogromized for the same reason that Russian mujiks beat their wives — because they are women. But, as I have already written, Rozanov himself was anything but masculine. When he compared the politeness of Jews — according to Rozanov, a tactic to insinuate themselves into advantageous situations — to the way women tempt men, he might have been writing about himself; his own letters could be ingratiating, obsequious, and saccharine, as if he sought to seduce his correspondents (see the first letters to Leontiev, for instance). He wrote gushingly of symbols of power and felt a need to submit to them. His own relation told Rozanov his trousers were the only sign of his manliness. Bearing in mind that we hate others for what we most hate in ourselves, I wonder if this was the psychological knot Gershenzon referred to, yet another instance of projection. All speculation, of course. One’s psyche is off-limits, and the big question of “why,” the question Gershenzon struggled to answer, goes well beyond his correspondence with Rozanov. It straddles centuries, millennia even, its echo reverberating over historical vistas, and perhaps the explanation of that ancient hatred, that primordial evil, should be sought on some metaphysical plane. It is a metaphysical hatred — a hatred of God, of the divine, of cosmic laws. Absent metaphysics, we are left with the answer given to Primo Levi upon his arrival at Auschwitz: “Hier ist kein warum.” Which, of course, is no answer at all.

Not that we need to delve into metaphysics to explain this side of Rozanov — or any other, really. For all the originality of his mind, there was a smallness of stature about him that made even his hatreds seem petty and banal. Petty, banal, and also inexcusable. I do not buy the assertions that the man was too complex to be held to account for the views he expressed at any one point and that his intricate nature deserves a more nuanced approach. I recently read “Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide,” an essay by Simon Leys from his anthology The Hall of Uselessness. Like Rozanov, Gide was also a very complex man: in Leys’s little ABC, “A” is for “anti-Semitism.” Leys (the pen name of the Belgian-born Australian scholar Pierre Ryckmans) first mentions a litany of Gide’s lifelong anti-Semitic outbursts, which includes making offensive comments on the Jewish character to an amanuensis who had lost her Jewish husband in the Second World War. An unpleasant man, but Leys is a partisan of the nuanced approach. It would make as much sense, Leys writes, to call Gide an anti-Semite as it would to call him “a Stalinist Bolshevist, an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist, a Christian, an anti-Christian, a defeatist advocate of collaboration with Hitler, an anti-Nazi sympathiser, a libertarian, an authoritarian, a rebel, a conformist, a demagogue, an elitist, an educator, a corrupter of youth, a preacher, a débauché, a moralist, a destroyer of morality . . .” Leys quotes a close friend of Gide’s, who, while noting yet another malodorous remark uttered by Gide, nevertheless wrote that it meant nothing since Gide thought “by proxy.” For his part, Leys acknowledges the proxy comment is “flat” and unlikely to satisfy most readers, though he qualifies it by adding Léon Blum, a French prime minister of Jewish origin who was an old friend of Gide’s, would have certainly endorsed it. (The registries of complex men with complex views often contain a token Jew to help apologists with the whitening process. Gide had Blum, and Rozanov had Gershenzon, although I very much doubt Gershenzon would have endorsed an explanation that Rozanov thought “by proxy.”) But Leys’s conclusion is ambiguous: “[I]t would be very easy to compile a damning record of first-hand evidence on Gide’s anti-Semitism; most probably, it would also be misleading.” Misleading for whom? For the victims of Babi Yar and Sobibor? Or for the louts who recently overran the airport in Makhachkala looking for Jews to kill? Current events have, once again, shown the limits of equivocatory, compromising attitudes. (Incidentally, Gide’s last name has a jarring effect when pronounced in Russian: not only is it a perfect homonym of the anti-Semitic slur mentioned earlier, it is also spelled the same way, giving rise to offensive puns; unamused by Gide’s mixed account of his visit to the Soviet Union, Stalin reportedly helped himself to one.)

History is full of puddles, potholes, and all sorts of traps. Two groups of people are particularly prone to fall into them: mobs and intellectual libertines like Rozanov. The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival, a collection of articles Rozanov penned in the first months of the conflagration, vividly shows what happens to intelligent people who get infected with the propaganda virus. To be sure, Rozanov was far from the only European intellectual to cheer for the war — many, if not most, cultural figures in Berlin and Paris had turned jingoistic and bellicose. The prewar atmosphere must have been so charged that when war was finally declared, many were simply relieved that something had finally happened. Intellectuals, who often fail to grasp things at critical moments, had succumbed to the general mood. Some of them hadn’t even drawn the right conclusions by the time the war had ended; Thomas Mann wrote his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in 1918, and it would take a few more years for Mann to sober up. But Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, however problematic, is an interesting read; Rozanov’s pamphlet, a xenophobic slog trafficking in populist tropes and caricatures, is not. One hardly needs to venture further than the title; readers who do will meet a very different Rozanov. The prurient anti-Christian hurling his exegeses into church windows has undergone a Damascene conversion; the new Rozanov is a zealous Russian patriot, an earnest Slavophile, an eager champion of Uvarov’s Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. The thinker who mostly venerated the phallus has rediscovered Holy Rus’. He seems to have forgotten about the Jews; Germans are the target of the hour. In their homeland, they are potbellied savages, pedantic and arrogant, lacking a soul and any claim to saintliness. In Russia, they have turfed the indigenous Russians out of all lucrative professions and abused the hospitality of the host population. They are intellectually sluggish, spiritually dead, and dumb. Goethe was an anomaly. The Russian people, on the other hand, are full of virtue, though they seem to need the far-seeing tsar to maintain it. The rest of the text is just variations on the theme and, with a few adjustments, the theme should be quite familiar to the modern reader. A fifth column hostile to any form of Russianness had monopolized Russia’s cultural discourse in the seven decades preceding the war. Seizing the levers of culture and public opinion, this fifth column — liberally minded Westerners — had attempted to annihilate the country and its people. But the Teutonic menace had made short work of the aspirations of those Russophobic Westernizers. The entire country had rallied behind the tsar to put the impertinent Teutonic in his place. The time of genuflection was over; the Russian nation was at last ready to reassert itself, domestically and abroad, in its crusade against the Germans.

Unlike the senseless war it is prosecuting now, Russia did not instigate the First World War. That extenuating circumstance aside, The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival is riddled with glaring inconsistencies, like any good, or rather bad, propagandistic work. It is unclear how Rozanov’s potbellied, intellectually sluggish, soulless Germans had managed to build a powerful state at home, create a first-rate culture, and, by Rozanov’s own admission, occupy all the top spots in Russia (ironically, Russia’s last tsar had barely a trace of Russian blood; mostly he was of Germanic ancestry, but Rozanov never let facts get in the way). Rozanov’s claim that Russians are exceptionally open to foreigners and treat minorities nicely does not square with his own calls to pogromize some of them. Rozanov bristles at the Western explanation that the word “Slav” originated with “slaves,” but the sacralization of the tsar he advances in the text, a nearly divine figure who sees far and wide, and who always knows best, implies the Russian people are not made to be free. While his observation of Europe’s spiritual death in the wake of the Enlightenment project is not without merit (he judiciously notes that by the time German cannons destroyed the Reims Cathedral, it had already become an empty shell through disuse), the man who had lashed out at Christianity so relentlessly would have done well to remember his own contribution to secularism. He is not entirely wrong to blame Russian literature for its inability to create real heroes, as he does in the text, since much of Russian literature is indeed short on positive role models (to wit: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a foppish salon lizard; Gogol’s Chichikov, a sketchy wanderer; Goncharov’s Oblomov, a feckless lazybones; Turgenev’s typical protagonist is the superfluous man; Dostoevsky’s typical protagonist is a madman; Chekhov’s typical protagonist is a pathetic man, etc.), but Rozanov forgets he himself was something of a character out of a 19th-century Russian novel. The text ends with a homoerotic flourish. Rozanov recounts how once, years before, he saw a group of terribly ugly soldiers, but as they passed him by, he felt something feminine stirring inside him. It wasn’t so much fear as a desire to obey, to give in, to submit. Rozanov realized he had fallen in love. Such is the beauty of raw masculine power. The essence of the army, he concludes, is its ability to turn people, everyone, into “quaking, weak women embracing the air.” The pattern ought to be familiar: by rendering his personal feelings demotic, Rozanov once again transposes them to entire groups. The Russian army on the march, that demonstration of Russian power, was the great revival Rozanov envisioned in 1914, and it had his unequivocal blessing. He should have known better. In the meticulously researched The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, James Billington noted that great wars have a tendency to exert an unsettling influence on Russian thought and culture. The schism in the 17th century and Peter’s reforms were outgrowths of the First and Second Northern Wars, respectively; the Decembrist uprising, a result of Napoleon’s invasion; the revolutionary populism of the 1880s, of the Russo-Turkish War in the mid-1870s; the Revolution of 1905, of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Unfortunately, Rozanov was too busy reminiscing about the marching soldiers he’d seen to learn the lessons that count. Less than four years after Rozanov had published his pro-war text, tsarist Russia was no more.

To wish someone to live in interesting times is supposedly a Chinese curse. To live in the months and years that followed the Russian Revolution was to experience the most interesting of times. The old world, the only world Rozanov had ever known, had collapsed, and The Apocalypse of Our Time, a series of articles begun in November of 1917 and continued into 1918, was Rozanov’s attempt to grapple with the myoclonic jerk of the Revolution. Colored entirely by the prevailing political and social anomy, it is a threnodic text. It is also Rozanov’s last. Rozanov here is at his most honest; the usual grimaces and posturing are virtually absent. For anyone with a religious mindset — and Rozanov, however lapsed a Christian, had always been religious, in his own way — the dawning new world must have looked like the coming of Antichrist. Rozanov marvels at how quickly tsarist Russia folded, in just a few days; not even a newspaper could fold so quickly. Of the old Russia there was nothing left except a “depraved people” (“podlyi narod”) who had discarded everything that had once been sacred. Rozanov returns to the theme of the bankrupt Russian literature and its noxious effect on Russians; instead of doing, Russians contemplate and wax poetic. They are not, he argues, meant to dominate anything; having succeeded in dominating one-sixth of global landmass, they have ruined it. Now, the planet has retaliated. “The planet, and not the Germans,” he intones. Rozanov sees the failure of tsarist Russia as a failure of Christianity, but his anti-Christian broadsides are less vitriolic than mournful. Christianity, Rozanov writes, cannot arrange human affairs; it cannot feed men; it cannot provide succor and warmth. Only the sun can. The sun predates Christianity; man can live without Christianity, but he can’t live without the sun (Rozanov expresses similar pantheistic/pagan sentiments elsewhere; in another text he suggests that a good test of divinity would be to try crucifying the sun). In that case, says Rozanov, we should perhaps worship the sun. Towards the end of the work, Rozanov claims that “in all of Christianity, in the history of Christianity . . . there lies some evil,” and even the “flowers” of Francis of Assisi are of little help. Of all the texts in the New Testament, Rozanov singles out the Book of Revelation as the key one — because of what he sees as its intrinsically anti-Christian thrust. It has nothing of the meekness and mercy of the Gospels; the day of reckoning that it prefigures, the day when the Christian message will have been revealed urbi et orbi, is a day of reckoning for Christianity and not for human life. Far from signifying the triumph of Christianity, the apocalypse depicted in the Book of Revelation heralds its death. The conflation of the death of tsarist Russia and the Christian faith here becomes absolute. But the apocalypse is almost always personal. Perhaps Rozanov had intimated that the world had not come to an end; only Rozanov’s world had. He died soon after, in 1919.

Rozanov is said to have left the world a Christian, having made peace with the faith he’d always excoriated. It is true he never renounced Christianity completely. He once said that, his anti-Christian writings notwithstanding, he was more Christian than many self-proclaimed Christians. In 1911 he wrote that the Church remained the last remaining refuge of warmth, and that he hurried to seek shelter in its bosom, fleeing from the glacial cold of the positivists. Rozanov rejoiced when one of his daughters had decided to take the vows. One literary critic, a contemporary of Rozanov’s, considered him “a pagan within the Christian fold,” an apt description left unopposed by Rozanov. He seems to have felt that, in the final analysis, paganism only takes you so far. There is an old expression in Russian to the effect that there are no atheists in the trenches — in extremis, man needs God. Since Rozanov was no atheist, he would have probably claimed there were no pagans in the trenches, as he suggests in Fallen Leaves: “In sadness man is a natural Christian. In happiness, man is a natural pagan . . . The left hand heals and ‘demands ancient gods.’ The right falls ill and looks for Christ.” When all goes well, when one is in rude health, the gods and deities of ancient mythology are entertained, with their capers and caprices. But when calamity hits, these gods disappear. Your back gives out, and you call for Christ to help you, to grant you relief. Two pages later, Rozanov makes a curious confession. He was a pagan once, for about twenty years, when he was happy. He reiterates that it is as natural for a happy person to be pagan as it is for a child to be silly, cute, and simple. But a child grows up eventually, and so did Rozanov. Elsewhere in Fallen Leaves, he calls for Christ: “I need only comfort, and I only need Christ,” adding that Judaism and paganism could not be further from his mind. But, shortly after describing his spiritual maturity, he proceeds to flummox the reader by allowing that he might yet return to paganism, as if it were just a matter of changing trains. Nothing in The Apocalypse of Our Time, his last work, suggests its author reconciled himself with Christianity. On his deathbed he received extreme unction from Father Florensky, but Berdyaev wrote that Rozanov had visited him in Moscow about a month before his death. Poorly and incoherent but still capable of flashes of brilliance, he’d whispered in Berdyaev’s ear: “I pray to God, but not in your way; [I pray] to Osiris, Osiris . . .” So which one was it? Osiris or Christ? Or was Rozanov tormented by incertitude until he drew his last breath? In the end, the question of how Rozanov faced the afterlife is unresolved, and perhaps, for a man so trenchantly inconsistent in everything, it is best to leave the matter shrouded in mystery.

The Apocalypse of Our Time is remarkable for its tone of atonement. Disillusioned with the Russian people, whom he has come to despise, he attempts to make peace with the Jews. Rozanov admits to having succumbed to Jew-baiting during the Beilis affair and writes the Jews have always been touchingly affectionate towards Russians. “Culturally the Jew is first in Europe,” he says, adding that the Jews are the most refined people in the continent. As for Europe, that land of minnesingers and poetry, it is now “uncouth, vulgar, and in ‘humanity’ does not understand anything except socialism.” This is the same Rozanov who accused the Jews of depriving him of oxygen and contaminating Europe with the spirit of the bourgeoisie. Some have questioned the authenticity of this olive branch, suggesting that his rapprochement with the Jews was a tactic for the impoverished and broken Rozanov to curry favor with the new Bolshevik regime, which counted a number of prominent Jews. Yet in one place in the text, he refers to the Revolution as “stinking” and has few good things to say about socialist ideology. In the last pages, Rozanov bestows a blessing on the Jews, and for once, the reader is willing to believe that, in the end, his heart was in the right place.

In the laudatory fragment of his spiritual autobiography mentioned earlier, Berdyaev writes he always thought Rozanov sprang from Dostoevsky’s imagination. Rozanov reminded Berdyaev of a Karamazov père who goes on to become a brilliant writer. This was meant as a compliment, but it’s a dubious one. Father Karamazov is a satyr with a criminal bent, a social chancre, an immoralist who, rumor has it, violated a mentally feeble girl (Smerdyakov’s mother). The kind of despair and doubt that plagued Rozanov at various points of his life would be utterly foreign to a bon viveur of Karamazov’s caliber. If anything, Rozanov had more in common with Eduard Limonov, the late-Soviet-era enfant terrible of Russian literature. Unlike Rozanov, Limonov was a hooligan, but there are some striking similarities between the two men. One of them is stylistic. They were both fond of writing about themselves in the third person with an egocentric self-contemplation, not to say self-adoration. Their self-aggrandizement could be pathological. In The Last Leaves, Year 1916, Rozanov writes that he is only interested in those readers who always have Rozanov on their mind, who seek Rozanov’s counsel in their thoughts, and who govern themselves the way Rozanov would. He maintains his works contain more lyricism than the works of any other 19th-century Russian writer, Dostoevsky excepted. Similarly, Limonov often claimed, in interviews and in his writings, that he was a great Russian writer and a ruler of people’s minds (vlastitel’ dum). He liked to say he’d brought up a generation of new barbarians who looked up to him for guidance; he was their spiritual ayatollah. Many of Rozanov’s texts are short and fragmentary, ideally suited for blog posts; in the last years of his life, Limonov had his own blog on LiveJournal. Like Rozanov’s, his musings were often disjointed, raw, and incendiary. They both expressed ideas that were meant to épater les bourgeois, and one of Rozanov’s proposals — allowing teenagers to marry — would be repeated by Limonov virtually word for word, though Limonov saw it not as a celebration of the carnal vigor of youth but as a tool to address Russia’s bleak demographic situation. As a photo of Rozanov in his later years shows, with his hair closely cropped, the two men even looked like one another. Rozanov was without a doubt one of Limonov’s progenitors.

But Limonov was a man of his (Soviet) times, completely free of spiritual longings and metaphysical yearnings. To continue in Berdyaev’s vein, if Rozanov is to be likened to a literary character, he was more of a Peredonov who goes on to become a brilliant writer. I cannot lay claims to any originality here; Rozanov himself fielded accusations of peredonovschina (being like Peredonov) in his time. Peredonov is the malignant but ultimately feckless anti-hero of A Petty Demon, a novel by the Silver Age writer Fyodor Sologub. There is something diabolical about Peredonov, but it is a minor kind of evil, born not of metaphysics but of his time and place; more than anything else, it is an evil that is almost impotent. Sologub’s Peredonov, a frustrated schoolteacher in a geographic dead end, enjoys tormenting his students (a typical case of a nonentity endowed with some authority). Rozanov, too, was a frustrated schoolteacher working in backwaters (one imagines Gogol’s provincial town of NN) before he made his name. There are several accounts left behind by his students, none of them flattering, and Rozanov’s own letters suggest he was not especially loved as a teacher. Moreover, just like Peredonov, he might have had a habit of taking out his frustration on his students. In a letter written to his mentor Strakhov in 1888, he complained about his duties that forced him to “go to class to torment and be tormented.” By the end of the novel, Peredonov commits murder and loses his sanity. Rozanov never killed anyone, but he seemed to poison the lives of those close to him. There are good reasons to believe Rozanov was, in a way, responsible for his wife’s physical demise. At least one biographer has proposed that Varvara’s myriad health problems were due to her husband’s work — Rozanov’s second wife was pious, and her husband’s religious irreverence created a conflict that led to serious psychosomatic debilities. Rozanov was certainly plagued by feelings of guilt; in Solitaria he blames himself for having sacrificed his wife to literary stardom (Varvara was alive but seriously ill; she would, however, outlive him). It is noteworthy that none of the five children who had survived infancy had any issue of their own; Rozanov’s dreams of the restoration of the biblical family, with its accompanying fecundity, died with his own children. Rozanov didn’t lose his mind the way Peredonov does, but perhaps, in his last few years, the world around him did, leaving him to wither amid squalor, abject poverty, and infirmity.

What of his legacy? Neglected during the Soviet years, Rozanov has enjoyed something of a renaissance in post-Soviet Russia. I am not sure how to explain it. Curiosity towards anything placed in ideological quarantine by Soviet doctrinaires, possibly. Rozanov is often called a philosopher. If a philosopher is someone who leaves behind a coherent system or school of thought, Rozanov does not qualify. He lacked the intellectual discipline required to become one. The only purely philosophical book Rozanov ever wrote was On Understanding (O Ponimanii). Rozanov penned the text, his first, while still a gymnasium teacher in the town of Bryansk. When the book was published, to virtually zero acclaim, Rozanov gave a copy to a colleague. He was subsequently invited to a party hosted by the colleague for a group of bachelors, where he got into a heated argument with another guest, who, grabbing the book Rozanov had given to the host, shouted, “As for your understanding, Vasily Vasil’evich, here is what it’s worth!” The man then proceeded to unzip his trousers and urinate on the book, to much general laughter. I suspect that this comical episode, almost straight out of a Dostoevsky novel, might be the only memorable thing about Rozanov’s philosophical treatise. Philosophers tend to have followers or acolytes; not being one, Rozanov had none. His only true ideological kinsman might have been the colorful Leontiev, whose theory of the rise and fall of civilizations anticipated that of Spengler’s. Politically homeless, misunderstood by his contemporaries, and generally ignored by the literary establishment, the fringe-like figure of Leontiev no doubt appealed to Rozanov. Though the two men never met, they began a spirited correspondence in the last year of Leontiev’s life (1891). Rozanov was still in his prime and would marry Varvara a few months later; Leontiev had by then taken the vows and was wilting away in poor health at the monastery of Optina Pustyn’, Russia’s most important spiritual center in the 19th century. Rozanov admired Leontiev’s “aristocratic Orthodoxy”; as he described in one of his many articles on Leontiev, the two were at one in their disdain of liberalism. Leontiev believed that the apogee of any society was the point of its greatest complexity, defined by entrenched borders between various classes and estates. As a political doctrine that rendered all such borders fluid or erased them altogether, liberalism was the antithesis of Leontiev’s ideal society, and he despised it. Rozanov was far less prone to Leontiev’s dreams of a renascent Byzantine empire, but he hated liberalism just as passionately. Rozanov loved everything that gave people their color and made them distinct; cosmopolitanism deprived them of it (in a sense, these misgivings about democratization are not inaccurate — one of the curious paradoxes of liberalism, at least in its current iteration, is that, despite its commitment to diversity, it tends to homogenize people). Rozanov also resented the cliquishness of Russia’s liberal establishment, whom he believed to be the unofficial gatekeepers of Russia’s world of letters forever hampering his literary success. Leontiev’s antagonism towards liberalism naturally made him a kindred spirit. Rozanov also admired the originality and hauteur of Leontiev’s mind, the exoticism of his biography, and his vain but dignified struggle for recognition. The two men had much to talk about, and they would have doubtlessly met had it not been for Leontiev’s death later that year. They did meet after death, however — Rozanov’s grave is right next to Leontiev’s at the monastery in Sergiyev Posad. I imagine Rozanov would have been satisfied with his neighbor.

But the comparison should not be exaggerated. Leontiev’s aesthetics was value-neutral; evil could be aesthetic too. Having to choose between aesthetic evil and bland goodness, Leontiev chose the former. This acceptance of evil understandably alienated his contemporaries and even gave someone like Rozanov pause. In “The Late Phases of Slavophilism,” Rozanov opposes Leontiev’s assertions that cruelty and injustice are as indispensable to earthly life as meekness and goodness; if they are indispensable, they are not condemnable, and that is not an idea that Rozanov can accept. He asks: “It may be so, our overly wise friend, but . . . should men pontificate about it?” Monks especially, one might add. Leontiev fled to a monastery to escape what he felt to be the anemic, stultifying bourgeois order of 19th-century Europe; the idea of Rozanov as a monk is almost laughable. At the same time, paradoxically, Rozanov appears to have been the better Christian. In his rejection of the legitimacy of evil as an aesthetic form, Rozanov was much closer to Christian virtue: “So I was in agreement with Leontiev on aesthetics, but not in the acknowledgment of its presence among the rich, but with the poor . . . and [I] was ready to join a struggle, a movement, ‘crusades’ . . . for the protection of the proletariat and not against it.” A typical Rozanovesque contradiction: the monk was with the rich; the libidinous enemy of the Church, with the poor. Nothing illustrates this difference than their disagreement over Vronsky’s character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Leontiev found him sympathetic; Rozanov, disgusting. There is something hyperborean, something forbidding, about Leontiev; Rozanov’s temperature is always high. Leontiev’s sovereign aestheticism placed him above things; Rozanov was always in the thick of things, if never quite of it.

Rozanov, in short — though the preceding paragraphs are anything but short — was not a philosopher, but more of a philosophe in the French sense of the word. He was certainly a thinker, even if much of what he wrote was not what one would expect from a first-rate mind. There may have been flashes of brilliance, as Berdyaev put it; there were also a lot of inanities. The corpus of works he left behind is a testament to his industriousness, yet something feels missing. That something is a signature work. When I originally decided to write about Rozanov, my plan was to review a key work of his. It quickly became apparent that there wasn’t one worth writing about. While some of his earlier writings are on the lengthier side, reading them feels like having work done on your teeth. Turgid and dated, they can only interest scholars. Rozanov was a sprinter and not a runner; he either lacked the will or the ability to write one important book. Rozanov must have realized it himself, for in his later years, he switched to a format that, I imagine, did not require as much time at the writing desk. Perhaps he’d simply tired of it all. In the end, I decided to write not about any one work but about the man himself. The truth is that Rozanov was more of a phenomenon than anything else, a manifestation of Russia’s Silver Age, its barometer and weathervane, a comet that burned its way through the firmament of his times, fascinating onlookers with its radiance before it disintegrated without a trace. He was — though not in the meaning he himself invested in the notion — a person of the moonlight, drifting through Russian letters like a lunar shadow. The moon of course can be quite lovely to look at, but it doesn’t keep one warm. Contemplate it for long enough, and you will start pining for the first blush of dawn. Rozanov’s intellectual verve leaves a certain impression, but it never lingers. At the end of Quiet Abodes, Rozanov writes of his relief at having left the monastery at Sarov. Whatever the charms of monastic life, it is cold; earthly life is warm. Now behind him, the monastery sails away from his memory like a cloudlet one has fleetingly admired. Having had my fill of Rozanov, I cannot improve on this description of relief if I am to describe my own.