reconcile Judaism and Christianity. Politically, he became renowned as the leading defender of Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s. Solovyov also advocated for his cause internationally and published a letter in The London Times pleading for international support for his struggle. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him as "a friend of the Jews" and states that "Even on his death-bed he is said to have prayed for the Jewish people". Solovyov's attempts to chart a course of civilization's progress toward an East-West Christian ecumenicism developed an increasing bias against Asian cultures - which he had initially studied with great interest. He dismissed the Buddhist concept of Nirvana as a pessimistic nihilistic "nothingness", antithetical to salvation and no better than Gnostic dualism. Solovyov spent his final years obsessed with fear of the "Yellow Peril", warning that soon the Asian peoples, especially the Chinese, would invade and destroy Russia. Solovyov further elaborated this theme in his apocalyptic short-story "Tale of the Antichrist" (published in the Nedelya newspaper on February 27, 1900), in which China and Japan join forces to conquer Russia. His 1894 poem Pan-Mongolism, whose opening lines serve as epigraph to the story, was widely seen as predicting the coming Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Solovyov never married or had children, but he pursued idealized relationships as immortalized in his spiritual love-poetry, including with two women named Sophia. He rebuffed the advances of the Christian mystic , who claimed to be his divine partner. In his later years, Solovyov became a vegetarian, but ate fish occasionally. He often lived alone for months without a servant and would work into the night. Influence It is widely held that Solovyov was one of the sources for Dostoevsky's characters Alyosha Karamazov and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. In Janko Lavrin's opinion, Solovyov has not left a single work which can be considered an epoch-making contribution to philosophy as such. And yet his writings have proved one of the most stimulating influences to the religious-philosophic thought of his country. Solovyov's influence can also be seen in the writings of the Symbolist and Neo-Idealist writers of the later Russian Soviet era. His book The can be seen as one of the philosophical sources of Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). It was also the work in which he introduced the concept of 'syzygy', to denote 'close union'. Sophiology Solovyov compiled a philosophy based on