On a Typology of the Wholeness: Vladimir Solovev and François Rabelais

Abstract

Vladimir Solovyev possessed many different talents and capacities. He was philosopher and sceptic intellectual, journalist and mystagogue, master of obscene jokes and sophiologian, theologian and eccentric newsmaker. The heterogeneity of interests and skills was typical of thinkers and artists of the Modernist epoch, it even can be considered as a Modernist version of the wholeness of identity. Vassily Rozanov and Andrei Bely, Alfred Jarry and Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and André Breton worked in different artistic and scientific fields, and they were quite successful as multidisciplinary intellectuals. François Rabelais, like many representatives of the Renaissance, was also known as a prominent figure of various creative spheres. Taking into account that Solovyev and Rabelais both believed that the game was inextricable linked to the very nature of intellectual activity, the comparison of these two thinkers/writers can help us in understanding Vladimir Solovyev in his creative wholeness, “estranging” his well-known image. Like one of the classics of Russian philosophy (unlike he was its founder), like one of the leaders of the Russian religious Renaissance, Solovyev undoubtedly was and is a key figure of the Modernist epoch. Meanwhile, taken together with François Rabelais, he becomes less familiar and much closer to his authentic personality. Thanks to this comparision, the thinker, known by his contemporaries as an unsurpassed speaker, the ironical interlocutor and incorrigible joker, can be perceived as a skillful writer reinvented language like an individual creative method. Even in his classical works (Three Talks, Panmongolism) Solovyev now is transformed into a Modernist thinker whose intellectual wholeness consists of mystical experience, brilliant writer’s and speaker’s skills, historiosophical insights and peculiar inexhaustible humor.