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Abstract. The article is devoted to the consideration and comparative analysis of two key ideologems of Russian religious and political thought – the “Byzantine heritage” and the “Third Rome” – via three temporal snapshot: Middle Ages, the 19th century and present day. It is shown that the domestic specificity of such a global trend as “medievalism”, which is understood as the actualization of medieval narratives, ideas and images, is connected, firstly, with the predominant interest in the topic of continuity between Russia and Byzantium, and secondly, partly repeats a similar surge of public interest in the Byzantine heritage (“Byzantism”) in the 19th century. The author focuses on two texts that echo each other, embodying the highest achievements of the Russian intellectual tradition of the Middle Ages and the 19th century as “golden age of Russian literature and thought”: on the one hand, the theory formulated by the Pskov monk Filofei “Moscow, the Third Rome” (1523), which was the result of the centuries-old evolution of the idea of the “Byzantine heritage”, on the other hand, V.S. Solovyov’s essay “Byzantism and Russia” (1896), the semantic core of which is the interpretation of Filofei’s theory. The subject of an idiosyncratic dialogue through time between two thinkers is a reflection on the mission of the Third Rome as a historical edification that Russia should extract from the fate of Rome and Byzantium. At the same time, both of these texts reflect the path of the formation of the historiosophical tradition twice traversed by Russian thought as a peculiar way of comprehending history in its inseparability from eschatology and soterilogy through a paradoxical combination of immersion in it and at the same time contemplating history in a metaposition toward it.
Keywords: Byzantine heritage, Byzantium, “Moscow, the Third Rome”, Philotheus, historiosophy, eschatology, soteriology, metaposition.