It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between two people's intellectual attitudes than those of Vladimir Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky: the idealistic philosopher of a harmonious view of the world versus the existentialist, wrestling with human irrationality; the Christian cosmopolitan versus the religious Slavophile. Yet, in the second half of the 1870s, Solovyov and the more than thirty years older Dostoevsky were spiritual friends.

They were kindred spirits, a fact which they hardly mentioned but which can be reconstructed from sources from their surroundings. It can also be gathered from Dostoevsky's literary portrait of Solovyov as ‘Vladimir Karamazov’, and from Solovyov's ‘Three speeches on Dostoyevsky’, that he gave on the occasion of the commemorations of Dostoevsky's death. But these references to each other are ambivalent: in The Brothers Karamazov, young Solovyov appears both in the character of the religious Alyosha and in the rational, irreligious Ivan; and Solovyov's praise of Dostoevsky in his memorial speeches, highlights those aspects of the writer that are the least characteristic of him, but very much of Solovyov himself.

In any case, there was a general religious relationship between the two thinkers, ‘based, above all, on the universality of a Christian world vision in a period in which the majority of the Russian intelligentsia was attracted by materialism and atheism’. But there was more. Both were particularly preoccupied with the figure of Christ, a specific view of the Godman and a Christian anthropology that that entailed.