Aleksey Khomyakov’s unknown essay on the Austrian Slavs (1845) and his poetry: the interplay of historiosophical ideas and poetic prophetism

Abstract

The paper introduces a conceptually important, but previously unknown essay by the Russian poet, theologian and philosopher Aleksey Khomyakov. This essay, “The Slavic and Orthodox Christian Population of Austria,” was discovered in two versions: an original, previously unpublished manuscript and a later anonymous 1845 text. The author reveals an aesthetic function that certain structural elements perform in Khomyakov’s essay, encouraging the interaction between historiosophical ideas and literary creativity. The essay is emphatically philosophical in its style, as its very composition embraces the classic Hegelian triad of “Being—Nothing—Becoming.” This notion overlaps with Khomyakov’s historiosophical idea of the European Slavdom that flourished in the first millennium B.C., and that then lost its sovereignty being under German rule, and finally enjoyed a renaissance in the 19th century. The paper also shows that the distinctive feature of Khomyakov’s poetry is its prophetism. The contrastive analysis was carried out to identify the affinity between the thematic-figurative patterns of Khomyakov’s early poetry (up to 1845) and his essay on the Austrian Slavs, which revealed how the poetic thought had been accumulating and what aspect it had taken on within a philosophical and historical discourse. The author of the article puts forward the hypothesis that the difference in depicting Peter the Great in the two versions of Khomyakov’s essay can be attributed to his dispute with Konstantin Aksakov’s poem “To Peter.” This polemic between two fellow-Slavophils was driven by their diverging approaches to the problem of the ethical dilemma of ends and means.