Vladumir Solovyov and Russian symbolism: Aleksei F. Losev’s concept and current analysis practices

The problem of “Vladimir Solovyov and Russian symbolism” is considered in the article through the “prism” of the judgments of one of the last “Solovyov’s follower” of the twentieth century – Aleksey Fedorovich Losev (1893–1988). During the analysis, it was revealed that for an exhaustive understanding of Losev's judgments about symbolism and Solovyov in the late 1980s, when the thinker created the book “Vladimir Solovyov and his Time”, it is necessary to take into account the entire corpus of Losev's texts, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s (about Neoplatonism, name-glorification [imiaslavie], Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas of Cusa, etc.). It is shown that the development of Solovyov's legacy and Russian symbolism is conducted by Losev from the point of his own antinomic-dialectic system, which allows him to outline the dialectic of Solovyov's antinomic-synthetic symbolism more clearly and demonstrate both convergence and fundamental differences with contemporaries and followers – philosophers (Lev Lopatin, Eugene Trubetskoy, Ernest Radlov, Losev himself) and symbolists (Akim Volynsky, Vycheslav Ivanov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, etc.). Losev's point of view on the “specificum” of Solovyov’s dialectic – his doctrine of Sophia and “all-unity”, mystical in spirit and symbolic in structure – is analyzed. The specificity of Losev’s approach to Russian Symbolism is determined by his dialectic of the symbol, which turns out to be the correlate by which Losev diagnoses the degree of closeness or distance to Soloviev’s ideas of specific Russian Symbolists. Losev's approach to the problem-thematic field associated with antinomianism can be used in modern practices of analyzing the role of antinomianism in the discourse of Russian symbolism in its two versions – literary and philosophical.