He saw a woman made of light three times in his life, once in a London reading room and once in the Egyptian desert, and he spent the rest of his days trying to explain her to people who had not. Vladimir Solovyov was the strangest and most generous mind that nineteenth-century Russia produced: a philosopher who befriended Dostoevsky, begged a tsar to spare his father's assassins, gave away his money until he had none, laughed a laugh that frightened strangers, and devoted an enormous intellect to a single impossible task. He wanted to put the world back together.

Faith and knowledge, Rome and the Christian East, reason and revelation, the individual and the whole, the living and the dead, beauty and use, the desert and the seminar room: everywhere Solovyov looked he saw something that had been torn in two, and he could not stop himself from trying to mend it. He called the goal "all-unity," and he pursued it through metaphysics, through love, through ecclesiastical diplomacy, through poetry, and finally through a terrifying little story about the end of the world. Almost none of it worked. The Church suspected his mysticism, the rationalists thought him a dreamer, the empire he tried to advise ignored him, and the union of churches he longed for never came. And yet a century later we are still listening to him, because the wound he tried to close is the one we live in now.