SOURCE: “On the Works and Thoughts of Vasili Rozanov,” in The Phoenix and the Spider: A Book of Essays About Some Russian Writers and Their View of the Self, Harvard University Press, 1957, pp. 158-207.

In the following essay, Poggioli provides a personal and professional account of Rozanov's life and work.

I

The students of Vasili Rozanov have concentrated their attention on his strange biography and morbid psychology, on the novelty in form and content of his literary work, on the most picturesque and suggestive intuitions of his asystematic philosophy, on his contradictory political opinions and social views, finally, and most extensively, on his paradoxical, and even shocking, views about religion and sex. All these aspects of Rozanov's personality and writings are extraordinarily important and interesting, but the task of this essay will be rather to attempt to isolate the substance, both common and unique, underlying all the different...