War, Progress and the End of History

The three discussions are set among Russians at a villa on the Mediterranean, and the disputants are types: a general who has fought, a conservative politician, a prince who holds the Tolstoyan position that evil is to be met with non-resistance, and Mr Z, who speaks for something close to the author.

The real target is the Tolstoyan and progressive assumption that evil is a residue that education and development will dissolve. Solovyov argues the opposite: that the moral seriousness of history depends on evil being real and personal, and that the expectation of smooth progress is the illusion most likely to leave people defenceless.

The book ends with the Short Story of the Antichrist, in which a benevolent, humanitarian world-unifier — vegetarian, pacific, philanthropic — is revealed as the adversary precisely because he offers everything Christianity offers except Christ. It was published in 1900, the year Solovyov died, and has been read as a prophecy ever since.

Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) was the son of the historian Sergei Solovyov and was born into a Moscow academic family. As a schoolboy he went through the militant materialism of his generation — the story of the icons thrown from the window belongs to those years — before returning to faith at around eighteen.

He took degrees in history, philology and theology, lectured to packed halls in St Petersburg, and spent his life on a project of universal reconciliation between the Eastern and Western churches which left him isolated from both. He was close to Dostoevsky, whose Alyosha Karamazov is often said to owe something to him, and he died in 1900, exhausted and poor.