'A Foggy Youth': Faith, Reason, and Social Thought in the Young Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev, 1853--1881

This dissertation describes and explains the intellectual development of a young Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev (1853-1900) in the late 1860s through the 1870s. Contributing to recent developments in the cultural and social history of late-Imperial Russia, the purpose of this focus is to complicate and revise several standard assumptions about Solov'ev and, more broadly, the intellectual history of the Intelligentsia and its legacy in emigration. Primarily, this dissertation revises the traditional narrative of Solov'ev's life and work, which I call the "Symbolist Conceit." Within the parameters of the "Symbolist Conceit," Solov'ev appears as Russia's first professional philosopher whose entire oeuvre is the product of mystical visions of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of God--what Solov'ev read, thought, and did disappear behind the shadow of this mystical vision. While it is impossible to deny the fact that Solov'ev had mystical experiences, as he himself reported in private correspondence, the overwhelming importance assigned to this experience alone has diverted scholars' attention away from the historically specific problems Solov'ev thought he was answering and the equally historically specific resources on which he could draw to develop such answers.;In contrast to the "Symbolist Conceit," this dissertation argues that Solov'ev's early career was motivated by the attempt to moralize socialism by depicting the development of justice and social equity within a theistic schema of history in which mankind realized these values as freely accepted duties that God called on mankind to realize. The enabling condition for Solov'ev's turn to theism in the early 1870s was what he perceived to be the amoral implications of evolutionary social theory expressed most emblematically in the writings of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In the 1870s, the fundamental feature of Solov'ev's thought was the treatment of social and political problems as religious and moral problems. From such a perspective, this dissertation shows, the young Solov'ev sought to moralize several intellectual arenas in Imperial Russia: Intelligentsia socialism, Imperial expansion in South East Europe, and domestic government. This approach to social and political problems as intrinsically religious in nature places Solov'ev and Russian intellectual currents within European intellectual history.