In the eighties and early nineties of the last century Vladimir Solovëv, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was engaged in an extensive journalistic polemic against nationalism in general and Slavophilism in particular. One of his main targets was the philosophy of history of Nicholas Danilevskij, the Panslavist theoretician. In the light of the doctrines of world Christian unity enunciated by Solovëv, his strong reaction to Danilevskij's denial of the possibility of an ultimate world historical synthesis and to his espousal of a kind of cyclical interpretation of history is entirely understandable.
Solovëv addressed himself especially to Danilevskij's division of history into mutually independent civilizations or “cultural-historical types.” In particular, he criticized Danilevskij's claim that Slavdom constituted a cultural-historical type separate from “Europe.”