ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Orthodox critic of the contemporary arts, literature, who, expelled from the fledgling Soviet Union, lived most of his life in the West. The mysterious character of his origins belies the lucid nature of his ideas. Vladimir Vasil'eviĉ Weidlé was born to unknown parents on March 1895 in St Petersburg. As a child he was adopted by a German Lutheran banker, originally from Tübingen, and his wife who was an Orthodox from Baltic Russia. The twentieth century has witnessed the interference in the novelist's art of kinds of thinking that are, to Weidlé's mind, invincibly hostile to imagination. Though concern with subjective conditions and absorption in technique may seem mutually exclusive strategies for an artist, Weidlé argues they are really complicit options. In the visual arts, Impressionism, which exemplifies the first, leads to Cubism, which embodies the second, and in a comparable fashion, in literature Proust and Musil lead to Joyce.
