Vasilii Rozanov and the Creation: The Edenic Vision and the Rejection of Eschatology

Introduction Chapter 1 Rozanov's God: Creation and Eschatology Chapter 2 Rozanov and Christ Chapter 3 Rozanov and Ancient Egypt Chapter 4 Rozanov and the Jews: Creation and the Everyday Chapter 5 The Aesthetics of Creation Chapter 6 Putting Creation into Practice: Rozanov's Opavshelistika Conclusion Paradise Lost: Rozanov and the Philosophy of Life

Adam Ure completed his PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, in 2009, on the religious philosophy of Vasilii Rozanov.

"One of early 20th Century Russia's most important and original thinkers, Vasilii Rozanov has undergone a revival in Russia since the fall of communism and his impact continues to resonate amongst Russian intellectuals of all persuasions. Adam Ure's meticulously researched new book is the first substantive work in English on Rozanov. Its hugely impressive merit is that, unlike previous scholarship which has tended to treat the writer in purely literary mode, or in his philosophical context, it offers a holistic interpretation capable of unifying Rozanov's philosophical, political, theological and aesthetic activities within a single system: that of his theory of Creation. It is this that allows Ure convincingly to account for Rozanov's influence on Russian intellectual discourse more broadly, and on literary modernism in Russia and elsewhere. Rejecting conventional assumptions regarding Rozanov's associations with apocalypticism, Ure lays emphasis on this unique figure's abiding commitment to the vitality and dynamism of the human spirit. This enables him to restore Rozanov to his rightful place of prominence in the rich canon of Russian heretical thought. Ure's achievement will be of compelling interest to scholars and students of European literature, religious philosophy and intellectual history alike." -- Stephen Hutchings, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Manchester, UK, and author of Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge University Press, 1997) "Adam Ure offers a much-needed and exceptionally well-grounded insight into the dogmatic thrust of this fragmentary, apparently contradictory and much-misrepresented author's thought. As his title suggests, Ure shows us a man passionately opposed to the modern world's trend towards 'virtual reality' and dedicated, through the sustained creative effort of his writing, to propagating the 'true coinage' of the personal and material creation at the expense of what he sees as loveless