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In his teens Solovyov renounced Orthodox Christianity for nihilism though later Solovyov changed his earlier convictions and began expressing views in line again with the Russian Orthodox Church. What prompted this radical change appears to be Solovyov's disapproval of the Positivist movement. In Solovyov's "The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists" he attempted to discredit the Positivists' rejection of Aristotle's essentialism or philosophical realism. In Against the Postivists, Solovyov took the position of intuitive noetic comprehension, noesis or insight stating consciousness, in being is integral (Russian term being sobornost) and has to have both phenomenon (validated by dianonia) and noumenon validated intuitively. Positivism according to Solovyov only validates the phenomenon of an object denying the intuitive reality people experience as part of their consciousness. Much of what Solovyov attempted to do was later achieved epistemologically by Kurt Gödel and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Vladimir Solovyov was also known to be a very close friend and confidant of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In opposition to Dostoevsky's apparent views of the Roman Catholic church, Solovyov has been rumored to have converted to Roman Catholicism four years before his death. It could be said that he did this to engage in the reconciliation (ecumenism, sobornost) between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, a reconciliation that Solovyov outspokenly favored, but Solovyov himself always maintained that he was still a Russian Orthodox believer and that he had never left the Orthodox faith. The rumor that Solovyov converted to Roman Catholicism has been discarded as inaccurate by scholars. Solovyov believed that his mission in life was to move people toward reconciliation or absolute unity or sobornost.

It is widely held that Solovyov was Dostoevsky's inspiration for the characters Alyosha Karamazov and Ivan Karamazov from "The Brothers Karamazov." Solovyov's influence can also be seen in the writings of the Symbolist and Neo-Idealist of the later Russian Soviet era. His book "The Meaning of Love" can be seen as one of the philosophical sources of Leo Tolstoy's 1880s works, "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889). He influenced the religious philosophy of Nicolas Berdyaev, Sergey Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Lossky, Semen L. Frank, the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and also on the poetry and theory of Russian symbolism, viz. Andrei Belyi, Alexander Blok Solovyov's nephew, and others. Hans Urs von Balthasar explores his work as one example of seven lay styles that reveal the glory of God's revelation, in volume III of the "The Glory of the Lord."

IMAGE Portarait of philosopher Vladimir Soloviev by Nikolaj Jaroschenko. 1892.