Fallen Leaves

In 1900, Rozanov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Minsky, and Zinaida Gippius founded a philosophical society, to which Rozanov belonged until 1911. The society boasted several notable members, among whom were Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Dmitry Filosofov. During this period of his life, Rozanov’s research interests largely revolved around family and tradition, art and creativity, and faith and religion, but touched equally on ethical nihilism, sexuality, eroticism, and gender, arguably making him one of Russia’s first queer theorists. It was around this time that Rozanov developed his rather controversial theory of knowledge, which he put into practice for the rest of his literary career, generated polarizing opinions about the author from the rest of society. According to this theory: “It is necessary to have exactly 1,000 points of view on a subject. These are the ‘coordinates of reality,’ and reality is captured only after a 1,000.” He employed this theory in his coverage of the 1905-07 revolution, in which he wrote multiple versions of reports describing events from the various perspectives of individual political parties and movements. For instance, under his own name, he wrote for Novoye Vremya from a monarchist perspective, while at the same time using the pseudonym V. Varvarin to express left-wing, liberal, populist, and sometimes social-democratic views in other publications. No less than 47 such aliases are known, of which the most frequently used are Vasily Varvarin, Vetlugin, and Yeletsky. This “theory of knowledge” demonstrated the extraordinary possibilities of his highly idiosyncratic worldview. Yet he was also understandably criticized for this approach, particularly for expressing sympathy for the Jewish community in some publications while venturing extremely antisemitic opinions in others.

It was not until later in life that Rozanov’s mosaic worldview shed its rough edges and coalesced into a coherent, unique, and influential methodology and writing style. His later books—Solitary (1912), Mortal (1913) and Fallen Leaves (parts 1-2, 1913-1915)—form a philosophical and literary trilogy of essayistic sketches, cursory speculations, diary entries and internal dialogues composed on the basis of chance and “feeling.” The stylistic cornerstones of Rozanov’s published thoughts—personal experience, doubt, and fleeting impressions—became both a new method of philosophy and a new literary genre.¹

This method was crystallized in Fallen Leaves, published between 1913 and 1915. The philosopher and historian Georgy Fedotov ⁠considered the book the most mature of all Rozanov’s writings, stating: here “in anticipation of death, but still adolescently in love with life, with its smallest phenomena, Rozanov reaches the ultimate, metaphysical vigilance.” ⁶

Researcher Polina Ryzhova describes the manner in which the “fallen leaves” were written: often without an overriding purpose, in between walks and daily activities, on scraps of paper, without a system or defined order, and as a result conveying “a sense of the natural flow of life, where the past is shuffled with the present, the high with the low, the important with the trifling.” ⁴

“Leaves” or “paper sheets” are spontaneous lyric-philosophical notes that capture a fleeting state of mind. Rozanov himself refers to these notes as “half-thoughts and half-sighs” and the books “boxes.” These metaphors stress the sporadic structure and non-linear character of the works, which was revolutionary for the time. The reader can access his books from any point, as though grabbing a single leaf from a pile, or a random document from an uncategorized archival box. No text is more important than another, nor precedes or follows another. They all ARE. They all exist at the same time, as though anticipating contemporary concepts of the multiverse and rhizomatic knowledge (Deleuze, Guattari).

The paradoxical course of Rozanov’s thought embraces human nature in its fullest dimension: self-contradictory, the mixture of academic theory and mundanity, highly subjective and utterly imperfect. This, along with his efforts to capture his thoughts exactly as they occur to him, provides sufficient grounds to consider Rozanov prophetic of contemporary views on language and post-modern theory, not to mention the “information fatigue” of the twenty-first century and the birth and reign of internet-driven short-format text, along with the latter’s dominance as a main source of stored knowledge.

In “leaves,” Rozanov is replicating the process of “understanding,” echoing hermeneutics as we know it today. Moreover, he is focused on reproducing the flow of oral speech, understanding and uncovering that occurs through conversation or internal monologue, continuously “capturing” the polyphony of thought, everyday life and ideas, and revealing their inseparable relatedness. This style turned out to be the most appropriate for Rozanov’s work, which always aspired to the quality of experience.

With his embrace of change and subjectivity, Rozanov toys with the very essence of nature, including human nature: impermanence. His employment of polyphony and multivariance is an acknowledgement and reflection of a self-contradicting human existence in an equally complex macrocosm. His mosaic writing style looks incredibly modern to the contemporary reader, with its overflow of information and fragmented quality. And his approach deserves recognition as a research method that paved the way for public intellectuals such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari.

As a writer and an individual, Rozanov was in awe of the world in all its fullness, whereby everything exists all at once—he admired ripe watermelons, human physiology, and the warmth of the sun contemporaneously, and was averse to coldness, repressed sexuality, and death. These inclinations and disinclinations found clearest expression in his last book, The Apocalypse of Our Time, also written in fragments. The work is an attempt to comprehend and thereby somehow “humanize” the pre-revolutionary chaos and disorientation that accompanied the collapse of the Russian Empire. Rozanov’s texts have since gained universal resonance and laid the groundwork for the development of a new research method.