About Vasily Rozanov As a Publicist. Review on: «“Rozanov was not hypocritical, he was two-faced...”: Vasily Rozanov as Publicist and Polemicist» by Natalia Kazakova (Moscow, 2022)
Keywords:
History of Russian social thought, Russian journalism of the early 20th century, Russian conservatism, Silver Age philosophyAbstract
The essay examines the latest book by Natalia Yurievna Kazakova «“Rozanov was not hypocritical, he was two-faced...”: Vasily Rozanov as Publicist and Polemicist», published in 2022 by Russian State University for the Humanities. Kazakova's book is both a study of insufficiently explored aspects of Vasily Rozanov's journalistic work and a survey (with the aim of providing an initial introduction to the subject) of his persona as a journalist, and also includes a carefully commented publication of Rozanov's letters to S.P. Kablukov, dated October-November 1918 (and now preserved in the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University, New York). In addition to the appendix (in which the letters to Kablukov are published), the book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and four chapters. The first chapter deals with general characteristics of Rozanov as a journalist; the author presents a kind of «parallel biography» of Rozanov and A.S. Suvorin, and describes Rozanov's relationship with the editors of “Russkoe Slovo”, the second major national newspaper after “Novoe Vremya”; Rozanov was associated with “Russkoe Slovo” for a long time, but not publicly (unlike his cooperation with “Novoe Vremya”). The following two chapters are organized chronologically: the second chapter analyzes the significance of his ideological predecessors for Rozanov (A.S. Khomyakov, N.N. Strakhov, and K.N. Leontiev) and Rozanov's first great debates (with N.K. Mikhailovsky and V.S. Solovyov), and in the third chapter the author considers Rozanov’s polemics with his contemporaries, where Rozanov appears as an «equal value». The final chapter is devoted to Rozanov's interpretation of various themes related to 19th-century Russian literature and describes his general perception of Russian classical literature and its complete image that Rozanov creates. The book concludes with a brief thoughtful analysis of Rozanov's “Apocalypse...”, in which he summarizes the main themes of his entire publicist and philosophical
