Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov (Алексей Степанович Хомяков) (May 1, 1804, Moscow – September 23/25, 1860) was a Russian religious poet who co-founded the Slavophile movement along with Ivan Kireyevsky, and became one of its most distinguished theoreticians. His son Nikolay Khomyakov was the speaker of the State Duma.
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Khomyakov's whole life was centered on Moscow. He viewed this "thousand-domed city" as an epitome of the Russian way of life. Equally successful as a landlord and conversatialist, he published but little during his lifetime. His writings, printed posthumously by his friends and disciples, exerted profound influence on the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian lay philosophers, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and Vladimir Solovyov.
For Khomyakov, socialism and capitalism were equally repugnant offspring of Western decadence. The West failed to solve human spiritual problems, as it stressed competition at the expense of cooperation. In his own words, "Rome kept unity at the expense of freedom, while Protestants had freedom but lost unity."[1]
Khomyakov's own ideals revolved around the term sobornost, being the Slavonic equivalent of catholicity found in the Nicene Creed and loosely translated as "togetherness" or "symphony". Khomyakov viewed the Russian obshchina as a perfect example of sobornost and extolled the Russian peasants for their humility.
Khomyakov died from cholera, infected by a peasant he had attempted to treat. He was buried next to his brother-in-law Nikolai Yazykov and another disciple, Nikolai Gogol, in the Danilov Monastery. The Soviets arranged for their disinterment and had them reburied at the new Novodevichy Cemetery.