Vorontsova I.V. To whom does the writer V. Rozanov owe his reputation of an outstanding religious thinker?

Abstract: In 1900–1914, Rozanov’s popularity in Russia was extraordinary due to his books and articles concerning the questions of the Russian Orthodox Church’s renovation, he received an enormous amount of letters from his contemporaries, including young clerics and monks yearning for answers to their religious and moral questions or for his comments on their spiritual works. But the preoccupation with religious reformism led him to confrontation with the Church, and in this confrontation he had had an ally and an advisor in the person of Alexsandre Ustyinsky, whose letters and notes the former used in his journalism. The study was based on unpublished letters of writer Vasiliy Rozanov and orthodox priest Ust’insky, the letters are from two .archival collections in Moscow (RGALI and literary manuscripts department of the Russian Public Library). The article provides the findings of the research on unpublished archival correspondence between V. Rozanov and the Russian Orthodox Church archpriest A. Ustyinsky as to whether the writer indeed was an original religious thinker among ‘neo-Christians’. The examination of unpublished correspondence between V. Rozanov and Novgorod archpriest Alexander Ustyinsky has shown that Rozanov was not independent in his judgments with regards to a range of religious problems which his contemporaries connected to the reformation of the Russian Church, and in this sense the writer’s oeuvre is only yet to be studied.

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