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War, Progress and the End of History
1900 · translated from the Russian · 220 pages
War, Progress and the End of History
by Vladimir Solovyov
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 147 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full Russian text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of War, Progress and the End of History, which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Solovyov threw his icons out of the window as a teenage materialist and came back to faith at nineteen; he became the major religious philosopher Russia produced. This, his last book, casts its argument as three conversations between a general, a politician, a prince of Tolstoyan views and a mysterious Mr Z — on war, on progress, and on what history is actually heading toward — and closes with the Short Story of the Antichrist.
The convert behind the argument
Solovyov lost his childhood faith to the materialism fashionable among Russian students in the 1860s — the icon-throwing episode belongs to that period — and recovered it at about nineteen, going on to study for a year at the Moscow Theological Academy and to become the most important religious thinker of the Russian nineteenth century. He was a friend of Dostoevsky and is generally taken as one of the models for Alyosha Karamazov.
Summary
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.
Who was Vladimir Solovyov?
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 about nineteen.
He took his degree in history and philology, studied for a year at the Moscow Theological Academy, 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.
Which translation of War, Progress and the End of History is this?
Alexander Bakshy’s English translation (University of London Press, 1915) is free at Archive.org, with a biographical notice by Hagberg Wright. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of that translation.
This edition follows Alexander Bakshy’s English translation of Soloviev’s last book, published at London by the University of London Press in 1915 under the title War, Progress and the End of History, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. The Russian original was written in 1899 and 1900 and published in the year the author died.
The text has been set again from a scan of the 1915 printing held by the University of Toronto — the copy our book page links to, so that a reader who wants to check us can check us against the same pages we worked from. A second scan of the same printing, held by Cornell University, was used as a collation witness: where one scanner misread a word and the other did not, the reading that is a word has been taken. Two scans of one printing are two readings of the same ink and not independent evidence of what the printer set, and nothing more than that is claimed for the collation here.
What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the translator. Running heads, page numbers, signature marks and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. The spelling, the punctuation and the wording are Bakshy’s. His transliteration of Russian names has been left as he wrote it, and so has his Anti-Christ, hyphenated, which is how the 1915 title page has it.
Soloviev’s three discussions are conversations, and they are set here as conversations: each speaker’s turn begins a new paragraph, as in the printed book. Verse quoted in the text is set as verse.
Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.
Common questions
- What is the Tale of the Antichrist?
- The short story that closes this book: a portrait of a coming world-ruler who is humane, philanthropic and universally admired, and who unites everyone except those who will not give up Christ himself. It is the most famous thing Solovyov wrote.
- Was Solovyov a convert?
- He lost the faith of his childhood to the materialism fashionable among Russian students in the 1860s and returned to it at about nineteen — a return rather than a first arrival, which we note plainly.
A note on the text. War, Progress and the End of History is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 1.3 errors per 1,000 characters. What our edition adds is the typesetting, not a rescue: one clean file, in the formats above, without the archive boilerplate.
Related reading
The position he argues against
A Confession
Leo Tolstoy · 1882
Tolstoy’s own testimony. Solovyov’s third discussion is aimed squarely at the Tolstoyan reading of the Gospels — read the target in Tolstoy’s own words.
Also by Solovyov
Чтения о богочеловечестве (Lectures on Divine Humanity)
Vladimir Solovyov · 1878
His central work — the twelve St Petersburg lectures on Divine Humanity, delivered to packed halls two decades before this one.
From the same language
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Also translated from the Russian.
More like this
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