ABSTRACT
The young friends were soon to seek, however vainly, solutions to certain basic Slavophil problems in Hegelianism. In spite of F. Samarin rising self-assertiveness in his relationship with Konstantin Aksakov, during the two and a half years that followed A. N. Popov’s departure from Moscow in April 1841 the two young future Slavophils held together. Denial of the dialectic in the development of the church is basic to both Popov’s and Aleksey Khomiakov’s point of view. The questions that Samarin and Popov raised would eventually be reduced to the elusive, millennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason, between man’s intellectual powers and divine revelation, between philosophy and religion, and between anthropotheism and theism. In showing disappointment that Popov might have put the Balkan Slavs in place of German philosophy and Hegelianism, Samarin writes as one who has made a determined turn toward Hegelianism.
