Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle

2. The Meaning of The Meaning of Love: What Is Erotic about Vladimir Solov’ev’s Utopia?

2 The Meaning of The Meaning of Love What Is Erotic about Vladimir Solov’ev’s Utopia? The future Russian philosopher Vladimir S. Solov’ev arrived in Cairo on November 11, 1875, having abandoned his studies of the kabala and Gnosticism at the British Museum in London. We learn from a letter to his mother that he visited the standard tourist sites in and around Cairo, including “a real Sphinx” and local mosques. The reason for his trip, wrote Solov’ev, was to study Arabic. What was Solov’ev doing in Egypt, and why did he suddenly abandon his studies? Contrary to what he wrote his mother, he told M. M. Kovalevsky that a spirit directed him to visit a secret kabalist society in Egypt.1 (Kovalevsky was a well-known legal scholar and sociologist with whom he became friends in London.) Eugene-Melchior Vicomte de Vogué, a versatile writer and author of the first influential European study of Russian literature (Le roman russe, 1886) and onetime diplomat in Petersburg, described meeting Solov’ev in Cairo in the home of another Frenchman: [His was] one of those faces that, once seen, is never forgotten: handsome, beautiful regular features on a thin, pale face that was buried in long, curly hair and taken over by large, wonderful , penetrating, and mystical eyes. . . . [He seemed] the very model that inspired the ancient monk icon-painters who tried to represent the Slavic Christ on the icons—loving, meditative, 57 mournful. In the heat of the Egyptian summer, this Christ wore a long black raincoat and a top hat. He artlessly told us of setting off alone, dressed this way, to the Bedouins of the Suez desert; he was searching for a tribe whose members, he had been told, had preserved certain kabalist secrets and Masonic traditions passed down to this tribe directly from King Solomon. The Bedouins did not provide him any clarification regarding this matter, but they stole his watch and ruined his top hat.2 On November 25, Solov’ev wrote his mother that he was going on foot to the “uncivilized” desert of Thebais in upper Egypt, about two hundred versts away. Two days later, he wrote another letter, telling her that he had almost been killed by Bedouins about twenty versts from Cairo and that he had abandoned his trip to Thebais. “The Bedouins . . . in the night took me for the devil. I had to spend the night on the bare earth [in the presence of jackals], as a result of which I went back.”3 Describing his sojourn in the desert many years later in the poem Three Meetings (Tri svidaniia, 1898), he remarked how funny he must have looked in his coat and London top hat. V.A. Pypina-Liatskaia, the daughter of the populist critic and historian A.N. Pypin, told another version of Solov ’ev’s story about his desert journey. She claimed that he visited the desert fathers, Christian ascetics living like hermits in the Egyptian desert.According to Pypina, Solov’ev told her that he tried without success to induce Christ’s vision of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, imitating the local hermits.4 Whatever its factual basis, Pypina’s memoir is the only evidence we have of Solov’ev’s going so far into the desert. Even though Solov’ev did not refer to Sophia, his mystical lodestar throughout his life, as the primary reason for the trip, he went to Egypt to meet his divine mistress, who represented the emanation of divine light and wisdom in Gnostic mysticism. Solov’ev’s female ideal, she supposedly had appeared to him in the British Museum and arranged a kind of supernatural rendezvous in the Egyptian desert. The presumed visitation in Egypt occurred between November 25 and 27, which corresponds to the dates of his desert sojourn. In all likelihood, the “meeting” took place in the area where he was attacked by the Bedouins. This was Solov’ev’s last meeting with Sophia, as recorded in Three Meetings. Vladimir Solov’ev (1852–1900), Russia’s most important academic philosopher, was also the most influential utopian visionary of his generation ; his writings—influenced by the Christian, Gnostic, and Neo58 The Meaning of The Meaning of Love platonic traditions—helped shape the core of the apocalyptic symbolist ethos. Situated generationally between the positivist 1860s and the symbolist early 1900s, his...