1. Stammler, Heinrich, “Vasily Rozanov as a Philosopher,” Modern Age : A Quarterly Review 28, nos. 2–3 (1984): 143–51.Google Scholar

2. Hare, R., Portraits of Russian Personalities between Reform and Revolution (New York : A. Knopf, 1967)Google Scholar.

3. Sukach, V. and Lominadze, S., “V. Rozanov—literaturnyi kritik,” Voprosy literature 4 (1988): 176–200.Google Scholar

4. Shklovskii, Viktor, Rozanov. Siuzhet kak iavlenie stilia (Petrograd : Opoiaz, 1921 Google Scholar.

5. Crone, Anna Lisa, Rozanov and the End of Literature (Wurzburg : Jal-Verlag, 1978), 126 Google Scholar.

6. Segal, D. M., “Literatura kak okhrannaia gramota,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 5–6 (1981): 183.Google Scholar

7. For the concept of framing in literature, see especially Uspenskii, Boris, A Poetics of Composition : The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form (San Diego : University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

8. Many Remizov stories of the prerevolutionary years (“Emaliol,” “Neuemnyi buben,” “Krestovye sestry” and others) typify this approach.

9. Rozanov, Vasily, Izbrannoe (Munich : A. Neimanis, 1970), 3 Google Scholar. All further citations from Rozanov's works are taken from this edition, with page numbers given in parentheses in the text. The collection includes Solitaria, Fallen Leaves (I and II), The Fleeting (Mimoletnoe), Apocalypse of Our Time and Letters to E. Hollerbach. Though some critics have (justifiably) seen fit to point out subtle differences in substance and style between these works, they will generally be treated as a unity for the purposes of this essay. The precise work from which individual quotations are taken will be indicated only if the context demands it.

10. For Paul Ricoeur's concept of “care time” see his Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984).

11. Bakhtin's notion of literary chronotope—the particular interrelationship of space and time that pertains in a work of literature—is explained in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 392.

12. Rozanov's hostility to such phenomena, of course, hardly squares with his own urge for subversive verbal mischief, the overturning of conventional hierarchies, etc. Perhaps the concepts of “carnival” and “laughter” should not be limited to the public square. Rozanov's writing seems to suggest that both the private and the public are generative and subversive in the Bakhtinian sense.

13. Thus, chapters 5 and 22 of the Domostroi are respectively entitled : “Kak tsaria ili kniazia chtit' i vo vsem im povinovat'sia” and “Kak detiam liubit' i berech' ottsa i mat', i povinovat'sia im … vo vsem.” See V.V. Kolesova, ed., Domostroi (Moscow : Sovetskaia Rossia, 1990), 111–12. Writing of the unquestionable authority and infinite goodness of the tsar (Rozanov sees these two qualities as interconnected) and of the fact that Russia has, to its detriment, deviated from that belief in recent years, Rozanov comments : “to love the tsar … is the first duty of every citizen … all our history has been a detour [from this] … ‘We have taken a wrong turning’ and ‘haven't found our way home'” (112–13).

14. In one of his most perceptive critical articles Osip Mandel'shtam designates his own, classically derived term for home-centered literature ( “Ellinism “). Among the features of Ellinism that he characterizes is its temporality : “Ellinism is the warmth of the hearth … [it] is a system in the Bergsonian sense of the word, one which a person unfolds around him, like a fan of phenomena liberated from temporal dependence, subordinated only to an inner connection made through the human ego.” See Mandel'shtam, O., Slovo i kul'tura (Moscow : Sovetskii pisatel', 1987), 64 Google Scholar.

15. Lotman, Iurii, Universe of the Mind : A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1990, 20–35 Google Scholar.

16. As T. V. Tsiv'ian has written, the svoi/chuzhoi opposition in Russian history is a particularly important bearer of cultural meaning, one with significant differences from self/other structures in other cultures. See “K strukture inostrannoi rechi u Dostoevskogo,” Semiotics and the History of Culture, ed. K. Pomorska et al. (Columbus : Slavica, 1988), 424–37 (425).

17. There are a number of detailed expositions of the importance of sex in Rozanov's religio-philosophical theories. Of particular value is the section on Rozanov in Kline's, G. Religious and Anti-religious Thought in Russia (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1968, 55–72 Google Scholar.

18. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow : Sovetskaia Rossiia), 265–76Google Scholar.

19. Rozanov's common-law wife, Varvara Rudneva, was chronically ill from early in their marriage. In Solitaria and Fallen Leaves, Rozanov's confessional outpourings, expressions of grief and affection and agonizing over the various erroneous diagnoses made, constitute one of his major “themes.” Moreover, many of his generalizing aphorisms are arrived at “in the clinic,” giving limited support for Shklovskii's claim that the story of his wife's sickness and how it affected Rozanov come close to providing a skeletal plot for the works. The writer himself, referring to his wife's suffering and its connections with his publishing career, comments that “everything grew out of that one pain” (389).

20. This is the argument made by Siniavskii, Andrei in “Opavshie list'ia” V. V. Rozanova (Paris : Sintaksis, 1982), 118 Google Scholar.

21. As Dimitrii Maksimov has pointed out, the excessive use of quotation marks was something of a fashion in early twentieth century Russian literary-critical discourse. He links this to a loss of faith in the authenticity and exactitude of language. See Maksimov, D., Poeziia i proza Bloka (Leningrad : Sovetskaia literatura, 1981 Google Scholar.

22. For analysis of the generalizing function of the aphorism see Zdorovov, Iu. A., “K voprosu o sviaznosti teksta,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam, VI (Tartu : Uchenye zapiski TGU, 1973, 464–70Google Scholar.

23. Bakhtin, too, argues that the “self for itself” can contemplate death only for the completed other, and thus links death with the objectification necessary in the creation of artistic characters : “Death is the form of the aesthetic completion of personality,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow : Iskusstvo, 1975), 122.

24. See Lotman, 11–19.

25. Though in the first stages of his career Rozanov gravitated towards symbolist and decadent literary circles (he was a frequent visitor at the Merezhkovskii's), he developed a hostility to much of what they stood for as early as 1896, the year that he published his article “Dekadenty” in Russkii vestnik, no. 4, 271–82.

26. The function of uniting singular to universal is viewed by Didier Coste and others as a vestige of fiction's origins in myth. Mythic cultures, he argues, make no distinction between singular and general and therefore have no knowlege or need for the “rift of [fictional] representation.” See Coste, Didier, Narrative and Communication (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 133 Google Scholar.

27. It is largely for this reason that, as Heinrich Stammler has perceived, sex is so important to Rozanov's “philosophy” of cosmic vitalism: “It is … in the erotic encounter that man … experiences and conceives of himself as an organic part of a god-created, god-permeated cosmos” (Stammler, 150).

28. Rozanov's treatment of love and the self both parallels and contrasts with that of Solov'ev. For Solov'ev, true individuality, as opposed to mere egoism, can only be gained in communion with another. The sacrificial act of love is the ultimate means of acquiring the wholeness that such individuality confers on a person : “The meaning of human love in general is the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism.” See “The Meaning of Love” in Russian Philosophy, eds., J. Edie, J. Scanlon, M. Zeldin, eds., (Chicago : Quadrangle Books, 1965), III : 85–98 (87). For Rozanov there is no unifying concept of individuality which transcends self and other and breaks the circular process by which self can surrender to other in love, but only by first appropriating that other, domesticating it on its own home territory.

29. It is appropriate to view in the same context Rozanov's translation into the language of the self of the term rukopisnost'—an item borrowed from the literary vocabulary of the other. Though now “domesticated,” it is the retention by the term of a portion of the generalized meaning it bore within literary language which enables it to act as such a powerful reinforcement of the Rozanovian self.

30. Thus he is able to both revere and despise Tolstoi. Even Dostoevskii, to whom Rozanov owes so much, is at one point dismissed as being like a hysterical old lady with his alarmist warnings about the dangers inherent in the activities of the nineteenth century Russian radicals.

31. Renato Poggioli gives details of the history of the publication of Apocalypse of Our Times, including the fact that the only reason it could be published at all in Russia was the revolutionary abolition of ecclesiastical censorship. See Poggioli, R., Rozanov (New York : Hilary House, 1962, 23–30 Google Scholar.

32. Siniavskii, 76.