The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2375-2475
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophical and Historical Studies
ResumoVladimir Soloviev. Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, and Ethics. Ed. and trans. by Vladimir Wozniuk. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2003. xviii, 244 pp. Index, cloth.In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solov'ev was a towering figure in Russian intellectual life, comparable in many ways to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Today, however, Solov'ev is little known in the West, partially because little of his work is available in English. Vladimir Wozniuk is trying to change that. Yale University Press published his Politics, Law and Morality: Essays by V. S. Soloviev in 2000 and now his new anthology samples Solov'ev's aesthetic and literary studies.Wozniuk has organized this new volume around four on and love, sandwiched between Solov'ev's three addresses on Dostoevsky from the early 1880s on one side, and essays on the poets Pushkin, Lermontov and Mickiewicz from the late 1890s, on the other (p. xii). An Appendix contains Solov'ev's short piece defending Dostoevsky against Konstantin Leontiev's criticism, and three reviews in which Solov'ev sarcastically panned early works of Symbolist poetry.The coherence of the volume rests on the core essays, and the two, Beauty in Nature and The Universal Meaning of are certainly central to an understanding of Solov'ev's aesthetics. Readers who see Solov'ev as a mystical writer will be surprised by the essay on nature, which is concerned with concretely sorting out why some animals are beautiful and some ugly. Solov'ev relied here heavily on Darwin, whose historical approach to natural phenomena he found attractive. Solov'ev's conclusion that beauty exists objectively in nature leads to the essay on art, which Solov'ev sees as the connecting link between the beauty of nature and the beauty of the Ideal life to come. Art is a kind of inspired prophecy which captures flashes of eternal beauty in the present and anticipates the beauty of the future. In the third core article, First Step toward a Positive Aesthetic, Solov'ev rejected the arts for art's sake notions of the 1890s in favor of a position which values art for contributing to humanity's progress toward the Kingdom of God. Another surprise awaits the reader here, because the first step to a positive aesthetics praised by Solov'ev turns out to be a book by the left-wing critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who defended the idea, central to Solov'ev's aesthetics, that artistic activity must serve the common goal of humanity. final and longest core essay, The Meaning of Love, seems out of place here, especially since it is already available in English translation in a paperback edition. Motivated by the publication of Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, Solov'ev argued that heterosexual love was an essential part of the process of human salvation. …
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