Vasiliy Rozanov: the Religious Search as Tragedy

Religion is the dominant aspect of Rozanov’s creativity. The main topics of Rozanov’s spiritual search include: God, the world and man are focused around this dominant. The peculiarity of this topics is the explication of intuition of a single whole. This intuition was realized by means of symbols that belong to the world of traditional religions. Rozanov’s creativity actualizes the opportunity of vision of religion as a phenomenon despite the prevalence of images of material things in his texts. This vision is based on a metaphysical foundation of suggestions, examined in the work “On Understanding”, where he understands religion as a temporal undetermined phenomenon. Contact with the world of religion allows us to explicate the human spirit as unity. Rozanov’s vision moves from a description of religion as unity to the description of single images of paganism, Judaism and the Christianity. Rozanov emphasizes this particular content, but his search is inspired by the doctrine of religion as having a certain potency. The realization of this certain potency is the historical development of religions, that conditions the occurrence of new religion in a cultural vacuum, and appears after the distraction of Christianity. The presentiment of metaphysical emptiness is the culmination of Rozanov’s search for God and at the same time the tragedy. Rozanov conceptualizes this intention as the absolutisation of particular things. The transparency of the religious search and the concentration on religion itself makes Rozanov’s position in some aspects close to the narrative of the classic phenomenology of religion. We study the creativity of Rozanov by means of historical-philosophical reconstruction, using elements of hermeneutic analysis.