Vasilii Vasil'evich Rozanov: "My Soul Is Woven of Filth, Tenderness, and Grief"

V.V. Rozanov belongs to the older generation of the "new religious consciousness" in Russia. He was born in 1856 in Vetluga, Kostromskaia province, to the family of a collegiate assessor. Rozanov passed his early childhood in Kostroma, and his secondary-school years in Kostroma, Simbirsk, and Nizhnii Novgorod. In secondary school he was attracted by positivism and revolutionary and democratic writings, especially those of V.G. Belinskii. In 1878 he entered the History and Philological Department of Moscow University, completing it with a diploma of teacher of history and geography. He then left to take teaching posts in the provinces (Eletsk, Briansk, and the Bel'skaia professional high school in the Smolensk province).