Tag Sergei M. Soloviev

Domovoys and farfadets

Prince Platon Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1790-1853) served as Nicholas I’s minister of education in 1850-53, during some of the darkest years of that reign. Disturbed by the European revolutions of 1848-9, Nicholas succumbed to a sort of reactionary paranoia that debilitated all…

Letters from Brussels

Sergei M. Soloviev, the great Russian historian, visited Brussels in 1842 (possibly 1843) as a young graduate of the Moscow University. He wrote of Belgium with great warmth: … and the cities – with their heroic medieval history, their blooming…

From riches to rust

The Belgium that Sergei Soloviev admired in the 1840s was mostly Francophone or aspiring to fluency in French. At that time, Wallonia was the dynamic, industrialized, fast-growing part of the country while Flanders was less advanced and more agricultural. More…

Frugally, in Saxon fashion

Another extract from Sergei M. Soloviev’s Notes for My Children and for Others, If Possible concerning the historian’s sojourn in Europe in 1842-44. (Earlier selections: on Belgium, on alternating bald and hairy rulers; on Count Uvarov, the author of the A-O-N triad.)…

Brussels in 1842

Sergei M. Soloviev (or Solovyov; 1820-1879), the prominent Russian historian, graduated from the Moscow University in 1842 and spent the next two years traveling in Europe. The journey was made possible by his employment as the tutor to the children…

The price of classics

Count Sergey S. Uvarov, the inventor of the official triad, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”, was a renowned classicist and the founder of the classics-based gymnasium system in Russia. For more than twenty years Uvarov corresponded with Goethe, who predictably influenced the younger…

False roots

Maria Snegovaya, a Columbia University doctoral candidate in political science, writes on The WaPo‘s Monkey Cage blog: Putin’s favorites include a bunch of Russian nationalist philosophers of early 20th century – Berdyaev, Solovyev, Ilyin — whom he often quotes in…