ABSTRACT
In this article dedicated to Lev P. Karsavin’s creative path, I focus mainly on the evolution of the thinker’s religious–philosophical ideas. I consider the reasons that prompted the professional historian to choose the path of a free philosopher, defending an argument about the interrelation of Karsavin’s historiosophical ideas and the key provisions of his metaphysics. The article assesses the philosopher’s legacy in the context of the problem of Russian religious metaphysics as an independent and significant intellectual tradition that has shaped Russian cultural history among other spiritual–intellectual practices. In denoting the perspective of Karsavin’s activity, the author suggests key tasks in studying the philosopher’s work. These include, on the one hand, revising the corpus of Karsavin studies, and on the other hand, polemicizing with already existing interpretations of his work in Karsavin studies both in Russia and abroad. This strategy allows the author to conduct reinterpretations of Karsavin’s personological, onto-epistemological, and cultural–historical understandings that constitute the theoretical core of his religious metaphysics.
The anniversary year of Russian philosopher, historian, and religious thinker Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952) coincides with another noteworthy date in the history of Russian philosophy: the departure of the “philosophers’ steamers” that forced the intellectual flowering of the Russian nation into emigration in the fall of 1922. Sergey S. Horujy, author of the “philosophers’ steamer” metaphor that has been so solidly inscribed in the dictionary of modern history of philosophy, put a great deal of effort into collecting and studying Karsavin’s legacy.Footnote1 An eminent Russian philosopher, Karsavin has been recognized by all historians of Russian thought as the legitimate heir to the religious metaphysics of Vladimir S. Solovyov’s all-unity,Footnote2 which compels us to discuss the role of Russian philosophical thought and religious metaphysics as an independent and significant intellectual tradition among other spiritual–intellectual practices that have shaped the public space of Russian society both in its history and in its present stage. Addressing Karsavin’s legacy poses several intertwined tasks for the authors of this anniversary issue: on the one hand, revising the corpus of Karsavin studies, and on the other hand, replenishing the theoretical stock of philosophy of Russian history and culture, metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology, those areas of philosophical knowledge within which Karsavin’s original understandings—personological, onto-epistemological, and cultural-historical—predominantly took shape.
These tasks raise the bar of research high: The positions expressed by the authors of these articles should both be novel and have the properties of scientific objectivity and verifiable results. Given that, the authors are entitled to expect these articles to renew discussion on the key topics and concerns of Karsavin’s philosophical work. In that context, it is not only interpretation of biographical facts and artifacts of his creativity, but also critique or polemics with existing interpretations that have developed in Karsavin studies, both in Russia and abroad, that represent an important research procedure. This strategy would appear to expand the possibilities for researchers to find new semantic aspects in interpretation of Karsavin’s key philosophical, historical, artistic–philosophical, and publicistic texts, including those that already have a tradition of interpretation.
Let us highlight the thesis that unites the research positions of the authors of these articles: Karsavin’s works over various periods of his activity are inwardly, semantically connected and demonstrate the logic of the origin and development of the central ideas of his metaphysical system. To verify this, let us first direct our attention to the biography of Karsavin, to the fact that the thinker decided to redirect his creative destiny, which is both characteristic and symptomatic for the tradition of Silver-Age Russian thought. Karsavin’s case is nothing like the evolution of ideas of former Marxists and social revolutionaries, as designated by Sergei N. Bulgakov’s capacious formulation “from Marxism to idealism.” Unlike those who participated in the collection Problems of Idealism (1902), Karsavin’s intellectual–creative shift was related to a reorientation of the medieval historian’s professional interests toward the field of philosophy. The initial object of his interest was philosophy of history, within which framework problems of personhood, culture, state, church, and God received a metaphysical development before becoming more self-sufficient. Karsavin combined these concepts into a kind of metanarrative of All-Unity, which gestures toward two philosophical systems: Nicholas of Cusa’s understanding of the Absolute as an All-Unity (a unity or coincidence of oppositions),Footnote3 which was the more authentic of the two for Karsavin’s worldview, and Solovyov’s All-Unity, which Karsavin interpreted as “God is All-Unity, while all creation is nothing.”Footnote4
Karsavin’s path to constructing an original metaphysics seems “sui generis” in the intellectual history of the Silver Age, despite a trajectory outwardly similar to those of other representatives of the religious–philosophical renaissance. A brilliant graduate of St. Petersburg University (1906), Karsavin was retained at the Faculty of World History to continue his research and prepare for teaching and professorial duties. Karsavin completely immersed himself in academic studies of medieval European history at a time when Russian intellectuals who had previously been part of the Union of Liberation and lived through the drama of the first Russian revolution were looking for ways to improve Russian life politically and spiritually, in parallel with the initiators of the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society in Memory of Vladimir Solovyov, which began its active work in 1906 with the participation of Vladimir F. Ern, Sergei N. Bulgakov, and Prince Evgenii N. Trubetskoi. For long periods, Karsavin worked in the libraries of Paris, Rome, the Vatican, and Florence,Footnote5 resulting in several historical works on religiosity in medieval Italy,Footnote6 mystical practices of the Middle Ages,Footnote7 and the unique features of medieval thought.Footnote8 As a continuation of his master’s thesis Essays on Religious Life in Italy in the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries (which allowed Karsavin to obtain an appointment as professor at the Historical-Philological Institute in 1913, and the next year as an inspector at the same institute), the young scholar wrote his major work Fundamentals of Medieval Religiosity in the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries, Predominantly in Italy (1915). In 1916, Karsavin presented and defended this monograph as his doctoral dissertation, in accordance with what was then the practice for conferring scientific degrees.
Karsavin’s academic career at the university had taken shape even before the revolution and appears to have been quite successful. By 1920, he had a reputation as a promising medievalist representing the Petersburg historical school, led by his teacher, Professor Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs (1860–1941), the recognized authority in the field. What happened in those early years of the 1920s, when Karsavin’s pen issued his first philosophical–historical texts The East, the West, and the Russian Idea (1922) and Philosophy of History (1923), as well as his artistic–philosophical essay in rhythmic prose, Noctes Petropolitanae (1922)? All these texts, along with his monograph Culture of the Middle Ages. A General Essay (1918), Saligia, or a Very Short and Soulful Reflection on God, the World, Man, Evil, and the Seven Deadly Sins (dedicated to the “first and last things”), and his Introduction to History. A Theory of History (1920), where Karsavin articulates his understanding of world history as a cultural and holistic history, a “total” history (we can find some key approaches to this understanding in his early historical works), demonstrate a change in the author’s discourse, a shift in focus from the historical to the philosophical.
A key fact is that, unlike many of the Russian intellectuals who found themselves exiled with him, Karsavin did not appear in any way in the sociopolitical field before the March 1917 revolution. He remained seemingly aloof from the questions that so disturbed the Petersburg and Moscow authors of the circle that included Struve, Frank, Berdyaev, and Trubetskoi. Significantly, Karsavin took no part in any of the well-known collections Problems of Idealism (1902), Landmarks [Vekhi] (1909), or From the Depths (1918) that Russian historiography customarily attributed to the “Vekhist” tradition.Footnote9 This speaks to a certain distancing on his part from the cultural–political agenda that so agitated the liberal democratic intelligentsia. It turned out that the massively important topic of the self-knowledge and historical repentance of the Russian intelligentsia, which continued a historiosophical discourse on Russia that originated in Karamzin, Pushkin, Viazemskii, Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, Herzen, and Solovyov, was not especially relevant to him. The October coup brought great changes to the public side of Karsavin’s life, after which his entrée into the Petersburg philosophical milieu, and later the Petersburg–Moscow religious–philosophical milieu, became active and noteworthy.
The first convergence took place in 1918, when Karsavin found himself among the founders of the Brotherhood of St. Sophia, an association of lay intellectuals who wanted to address issues related to organizing church life.Footnote10 Karsavin could discuss these issues as an expert, above all on the Western Christian tradition, facilitated not just by his scholarly interests but also by his experience as a teacher. We know that Karsavin taught not just the basic course “History of Religion” at Petrograd University in 1919, but also the seminars “History of Christian Dogma and Philosophy,” “Medieval Heresy,” and “Medieval Mysticism,” topics considered immediately within the framework of history of Christian spiritual culture and thought. All this suggests that although Karsavin was within the disciplinary framework of historical studies, the main subject of his professional research and study by the end of the 1910s was concentrated on the spiritual state of medieval society, on revealing the deep worldview structures of its life. This experience of grasping the spiritual and intellectual history of medieval Europe led his thinking toward an even greater metahistorical generalization, into the fields of philosophy of history and hermeneutics of culture.
As a number of scholars have noted,Footnote11 Karsavin’s research strategy was in many ways not unlike the methodology for studying the history of mentality that would be developed by authors of the Annales school. However, Karsavin rushed past this possible fork in his path—remaining a historian—to other creative horizons, not only because of his remarkable human-science erudition, but also because of his inclination toward an artistic-figurative, if not poetic, perception of reality, as well as his increasingly apparent mystical inclination. This experience of personal withdrawal inward mixed with mystical and even gnostic practices becomes constitutive for him during this period. The spiritual–existential modulation of his soul and mind was also related to the philosopher’s falling in love with one of Grevs’s students, Elena Cheslavovna Skrzhinskaia. Karsavin, a father of two daughters at the time, confessed his love to her.Footnote12
In this complex drama of love, in the ascendant phase of developing feelings that was of an unusually strong and inspiring nature for Karsavin, we can see a historical, biographical, and metaphysical parallel with the medieval knight’s love for the Beautiful Lady, with the visionary meanderings of Solovyov on the trail of St. Sophia, and with Blok’s gaze at the symbolic appearance of the poet’s Unknown Woman: all these images that an already mature thinker found embodied in the personal hypostasis of an earthly woman. The totality of external circumstances intertwined with the intentions of his life reveals why Karsavin became an independent thinker rather than a mere academic researcher and historian. His motives for creation were defined by a context of internal changes in his existential sense of life and by the very means of his reflective attitude toward it. In this new experience of spiritual and creative sublimation of his mind and feelings, the intellectual product—knowledge—becomes predominantly philosophical and religious knowledge.
We should highlight another important fact that sheds light on Karsavin’s departure from the practice of historical scholarship, namely, the quarrel with his teacher, I.M. Grevs. This was compounded by the disappointment of his colleagues, who, following Grevs’s lead, preferred to see O.A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia (who, as we may recall, acted as the opponent in both of Karsavin’s defenses) in a regular position in the department rather than him, a rejection that greatly pained the philosopher. In the regard, we should note that a detailed familiarity with the biographical details of Karsavin’s quarrel with his closest Petersburg historians reveals that the philosopher’s own role was far from unambiguous, nor was his behavior within his professional circle.Footnote13 Apparently, the increasing difficulty of relations with Grevs occurred gradually and only entered its acute phase after the defense of his doctoral thesis, which elicited serious controversy over the scientific (predominantly methodological) foundations of the research Karsavin conducted.Footnote14 We can say with great certainty that Introduction to History (A Theory of History), which assigns pride of place to the problem of methodology of historical–cultural research, acts as a kind of response to Grevs’s doubts about the way his talented student’s doctoral dissertation correlated scientific methods with methods of unfolding historical narrative.
However, this lasting, latent conflict with Grevs did not stop Karsavin from being appointed an extraordinary professor at Petrograd University (1918) and, at a critical turning point for Russia, taking, albeit for a short time, an upper administrative post as first vice-rector of the Pedagogical Institute (formerly the Institute of History and Pedagogy) at Petrograd University (1919) and later rector of that same institute (1921). In that sense, there were no obstacles, at least on the part of the university community, to his continuing an academic career. Consequently, the reasons prompting Karsavin to deepen his philosophical inquiries were different, somehow connected with his inner need for a philosophical questioning of life, with a breakthrough to meaning, to an understanding of the metaphysical foundations of history, culture, and human existence.
The fateful turning point for Karsavin, as well as for many other representatives of Russia’s educated class who would, in the early 1920s, be seen by the Bolsheviks as the bearers of an old and therefore hostile worldview, occurred in the summer of 1922. Karsavin was arrested in mid August by the authorities and released from custody on October 24 to be sent to Germany with his family via the second “philosophers’ steamer.” There he joined up with Berdyaev and Frank, who were expelled from the country a month earlier for similar reasons of “anti-Soviet activity” and the incompatibility of their convictions with the prevailing ideological mindsets of the builders of communist society. Karsavin made no secret of his attitudes toward the October Revolution and Bolshevik political practice.Footnote15 This development of events proved extremely difficult for him, but given the logic of the Bolsheviks’ intensifying political struggle for the new state, it was a predictable one.
For Russian intellectuals expelled from their homeland on fear of execution, the life that began in exile was full of concern for elementary physical survival and linked to the enormous spiritual and intellectual task of preserving national-cultural identity. The basis of this was to be the tradition of Russian religiosity. Karsavin was already fully prepared for this task, and he found completely natural entrée into the public space of debates and polemics where the religious–philosophical discourse about Russian history and Russian religious consciousness as a factor of politics and culture was already being actively developed by leaders like Berdayev, Bulgakov, Struve, Frank, and Vysheslavtsev. In Berlin, he became a professor at the émigré-organized Russian Scientific Institute and also took part in the work of the Religious-Philosophical Academy established by Berdyaev.
By the time of his forced emigration, which Karsavin felt as a tragedy, his way of seeing history as a process that necessarily included the events of the Russian revolution had already taken shape. Karsavin brought with him to Germany his nearly complete Philosophy of History, where the concept of metaphysics becomes ontologically and epistemologically significant, his book Giordano Bruno, and his unfinished Metaphysics of History. It is significant that Karsavin’s “On the Essence of Orthodoxy” appeared in the landmark collection Problems of Russian Religious Consciousness, published in Berlin in 1924, in which Russian émigrés attempted to continue the “Vekhist” tradition of collections on topical issues that made up the main spiritual and intellectual agenda of the Russian intelligentsia. It would be fair to say that The East, the West, and the Russian Idea, which appeared earlier, Philosophy of History, and this text constitute a historiosophical microcycle in which he examines the national religious experience not just historically but also metahistorically. These texts present readers with the basic idea of historical providentialism, which Karsavin articulates with increasing clarity.
His interpretation of history receives a metaphysical perspective. In his late 1920s works, Karsavin begins interpreting its dynamic essence, or its way of unfolding and self-realizing, through the author’s own concept of the “symphonic person,” turning a historiosophical metaphor into the key metaphysical concept.Footnote16 Its philosophical basis is the Solovyovian concept of all-unity, which allows us to imagine the complex interrelationship of the reality of culture and history with the Spiritual Absolute, or God. Karsavin thus establishes his philosophical relationship with, and as successor to, the Russian religious metaphysical tradition. If we attempted to define the understanding of culture that Karsavin actively developed in his works of the late 1910s through early 1920s, we could interpret it as the value-semantic content of the historical process as represented in forms of collective and individual consciousness, whose source of development is the spirit. The connection between history developing in the immanent forms of determinate being (social, cultural) and the ideal world, or transcendent reality, is most clearly revealed in religious practice, the basis of which is intellectual–mystical practice. From Karsavin’s point of view,
Culture is most fully understood in its religious qualitation, because this is where it is most fully actualized: without religious qualitation, it remains indefinite, rudimentary. And since the relation of culture to all-unity and, consequently, to all other cultures is a given in religiosity, the analysis of the religious should provide principles for classifying cultures and their groups for a “place” of each in time and space.Footnote17
Karsavin considers religious cultures as these kinds of historical persons, which are superior in relation to cultures as such.Footnote18
In its radical expression, the religiosity that gives qualitative characteristics to culture can go as far as both denial of God and, in its revolutionary impulse, the destruction of that very same culture. Karsavin’s analysis of the spiritual nature of Russian revolution is in fact based on this philosophical premise. The spirit of the people manifests itself in historical reality in the form of a “symphonic person” that has an empirical form of individual and collective embodiment (“historical moments-qualitations”) that can be man, the state, and the Church. This explains much about Karsavin’s attitude toward the new Soviet regime, which at this stage he considers the manifestation of the metaphysical logic of Russian history, understanding as well that full knowledge about the development of the “symphonic person” is available only to God, in Whose presence and by Whose direct participation (or will) all the various forms of individual and collective consciousnesses, positive and negative, are sublimated into a meta-personal history, into a “symphonic person” that realizes itself in the complex dialectic of internal social, spiritual, and intellectual interactions.
The Solovyovian leaven in Karsavin’s historiosophical constructions and their clear reference to the idea of Godmanhood, not to mention his increasingly Orthodox-marked religiosity during the period of the Bolshevik coup, allowed the key figures of the religious–philosophical movement in Russia to identify Karsavin as a spiritually similar Christian thinker and to include him in their intellectual milieu. That said, Karsavin’s convergence with the circle of Berdyaev, Frank, and Bulgakov was neither strong nor lasting. Here we should add some extra brushstrokes to our intellectual portrait of Karsavin. We know that a rather large circle of Russian intellectuals who were closely connected with one another by multiple threads of professional, friendly, and familial relationships apparently did not accept some of Karsavin’s character traits, not to mention certain features of his moral style, which became especially marked in emigration. We can only imagine the feelings of the venerable author and scholar on finding himself rejected by the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in 1925. Even though A.V. Kartashev played the role of mediator by petitioning for the philosopher to receive an appointment at the institute, it preferred to take G.V. Florovskii, who was not only less well known and clearly inferior in professional merit, but only had a master’s degree at the time. Florovskii, not Karsavin, was appointed as a teacher in its Department of Patrology.Footnote19 This reflected the preference of the dean, S.N. Bulgakov, whose recommendation turned out to be decisive against S.L. Frank’s recommendation of Karsavin. It was not just Bulgakov’s administrative weight that proved decisive in this episode, but mostly likely his personal opinion about Karsavin, which took shape under the impression of the philosopher’s messy familial and amorous relationships. Nor had anyone forgotten Karsavin’s questionable behavior toward his teacher Grevs, which violated principles of hierarchy and respect for one’s teachers, principles that were important for the Orthodox Church’s self-perception.
This was a major reason for the weakening of Karsavin’s ties with the Paris–Berlin circle of Russian religious philosophers, and it made his own biographical and philosophical trajectory more independent, not to mention more arduous. The self-sufficiency that essentially led Karsavin to break with the large Russian diaspora in Western Europe was primarily associated with his participation in the Eurasianist movement. On the one hand, his convergence with the Eurasianists contributed to his move from Berlin to Paris in 1926, when Karsavin became a key player in the Eurasianist field. On the other hand, by taking on the role of movement ideologist and even editing the journal Eurasia for one cycle, he moved further away from the intellectual mainstream of Russian emigration.
At first glance, Karsavin’s infatuation with Eurasianism may seem like a strange ideological deviation on his creative path, but if we understand Eurasianism as immanent in the line of development of Karsavin’s metaphysical historiosophy, then it no longer appears a foreign aspect of his philosophy of history, which Karsavin urged us to understand only as metaphysics and to comprehend in an Orthodox way.Footnote20 Eurasianism follows logically from Karsavin’s philosophical evolution and acts as a necessary element in his religious interpretation of history and his teleology of culture that is built into the reference frame of the metaphysics of all-unity. All of his Eurasianism rests on several cornerstones of a long-held system of ideas for which we find the conceptual framework in Solovyov and his Slavophile predecessors. In general terms, we can represent this sequence of Karsavin’s cultural–historical arguments as follows: Russian culture is the result of Russian history, the perfect-personal embodiment of Russia in the world historical process. This culture is based on Orthodoxy, which in civilizational terms is the Eastern version of the Christian tradition that guides both Eastern European and Asian regions. The keeper of Orthodoxy’s historical territory is Rus’/Russia, whose mental constitution is not fully identical with that of Western European civilization, which took shape on the basis of the Catholic spiritual–intellectual tradition and sociopolitical structures that developed in the Middle Ages, then largely under the influence of Protestantism in the modern era. In that vein, Karsavin’s Eurasianism becomes a civilizational opposition to Western Christianity and synonymous with the concept of the Orthodox East. Karsavin also considers it important to indicate the specific historical form of Orthodoxy’s state-territorial existence. From his perspective, Russia represents an Eastern Orthodox alternative to the West, an alternative that includes Asia in its Christian ecumene. This is its development as a “historical collective individuality,” “a subject of historical development” that, in the philosopher’s own words, strives toward perfection by perfecting its imperfections. Characteristically, Karsavin introduces the central concept of his anthropologically interpreted metaphysics of history, the “symphonic person,” in a work of his Eurasianist period, “Church, Personhood, and State” (1929), which he developed in more detail in his treatise On Personhood (1929). While writing his work on personhood, where the personalistic version of his metaphysics takes on a conceptual form, Karsavin left the Parisian suburb of Clamart and resettled in Lithuania, obtaining a professorship at the University of Kaunas (1928). Thus begins the Lithuanian period of his life.
In the 1930s, Karsavin’s main efforts were concentrated on his grandiose History of European Culture, written in Lithuanian. The Eurasianist theme gradually recedes to the periphery, and Karsavin himself seems to abandon his own philosophical studies due to their, to use Karsavin’s expression, “lack of resonance” to his developed system of metaphysics.Footnote21 In 1940, the Lithuanian University moved to Vilnius. The outbreak of the Second World War led to a period of trials and tribulations for Karsavin, who categorically rejected German fascism and believed in Russia’s victory from the outset. It was this internal, ongoing connection with his homeland, aggravated by a constant feeling of longing for Russia, that prompted his decision to stay in Lithuania after it became part of the Soviet Union as a result of the war. This choice, extremely risky and with quite predictable consequences for his loved ones but profoundly justified by the philosopher himself, led to Karsavin’s tragic end. It is difficult to say what determined his decision, whether the illusions of a Russian intellectual and the modest hopes of a scholar for the opportunity to be useful to his people, who achieved victory for all humanity at the incredible cost of millions upon millions of people, or whether he, like the apostle Peter, who fled Rome after the persecution of Christians began, saw the Lord and heard that He Himself was going to Rome, and decided to follow his Divine Teacher back to take up the cross. “Quo vadis, Domine?”
Karsavin’s attempts to integrate himself into Soviet society failed, and he also failed to establish professional relationships with university corporations in Leningrad and Moscow. In the spring of 1948, his daughter Irina was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the camps. All the efforts of the sick, elderly father to save his daughter led nowhere. A year and a half later, on July 9, 1949, Karsavin himself was arrested and imprisoned in Vilnius Prison no. 1. His sentence was announced in March of the following year. He stood accused of participating in the “counter-revolutionary organization of Eurasianism.” The “even-handedness” of Soviet justice was confirmed by application of the standard lethal judgment for that political–ideological situation. The professor was charged with “perverting Soviet reality” and “anti-Soviet agitation.”Footnote22 The Soviet regime demonstrated its “humanity” by sending the philosopher, who was suffering from tuberculosis, to an invalid camp in Abez’ in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where he ended his earthly journey in the camp’s Central Hospital.
This period of imprisonment involved a final intellectual upsurge and was incredibly productive for Karsavin, who wrote about twenty works of philosophical content in various stylistic manners, both verse and prose. As he deteriorated from tuberculosis, Karsavin perceived with Christian humility and courage his unfortunate circumstances as a time for summing up the results of his work and preparing for life everlasting, demonstrating the qualities of a true philosopher-sage and Christian believer: He gathered around him any interlocutors interested in the humanities like himself and fulfilled his final role as a teacher-mentor for the young engineer A.A. Vaneev, who, after Karsavin’s death, repaid his debt by preserving his teacher’s legacy.Footnote23
No matter how carefully they consider it, the complexity of the actual circumstances that accompanied all periods of the philosopher’s life, the power that inexorable historical events and twists of fate held over him, and moments when his actions did not always seem to correspond to the fullness of Christian ideals give the biographer or the philosopher–historian no right to make moral assessments that “judge” the author of On Personhood. The Russian thinker’s life can only be presented in its fullness, to paraphrase Karsavin himself, as a path of cognition of the Perfect, which is completed in the act of “perfecting.” We must consider this path from the position of the ordeals he accepted in Abez’, a sentence that occurred due to the evil will of a regime at war with any manifestation of free thought, all the more so if that thought was religious, Christian thought. Karsavin himself would have seen a profound providential meaning in this dramatic trajectory of fate, when he, a medieval historian who studied the nature of social consciousness of the Middle Ages through the prism of the consciousness of the “average” manFootnote24 as it manifested in various heresies and religious wars, was deprived of his rights and subjected to camp trials by the descendants of the Bolsheviks. For Karsavin, this was a religious sect that defeated a historical Russia broken by the First World War and built a new socialist country on its ruins, a state that, at that particular moment in history, pulled together all the contradictory and tragic moments of Russian life and became, to use Karsavin’s own terminology, a “symphonic person” made up of the negative qualities of the national history. This “higher personhood,” personified by the collective subject of Russian history—the Soviet regime and its demiurgical incarnations, Lenin and Stalin—raised the banner of atheism and declared a very real religious war against Russian Orthodoxy, Christian thought, and freedom of conscience and religion. The “new Middle Ages” of twentieth-century mass society, as Berdyaev described it, had arrived.
In reflecting on Karsavin’s philosophical experience, the authors of these articles have turned to the central themes and subjects that most clearly reveal his historiosophical, philosophical–anthropological, and onto-epistemological thought. In Aleksandr L. Dobrokhotov’s “Lev P. Karsavin on the Phenomenology of Revolution,” Karsavin’s philosophy of history is thematized by his concept of the “symphonic person,” which becomes key for the philosopher’s analysis of the revolution, leading him to assert the possibility of the rebirth of an old historical person into a new one through revolution. Alexei A. Kara-Murza’s “Lev Karsavin: Russian Religiosity and Russian Revolution” reveals Karsavin’s understanding of the relationship of structures of the Russian mentality with the historical forms of national culture and the specific features of their political expression in Russian history. Alexei P. Kozyrev’s work, “The Seductions of Gnosticism: Lev Karsavin and Gnosis,” considers the Gnostic modus of Karsavin’s philosophy and its intellectual relationship with the Gnostic tradition of early Christianity, which ultimately allows us to identify Karsavin’s type of philosophizing as Christian Gnosticism, as the thinker himself did. The article by Olga A. Zhukova, “The Concept of Perfection in Lev Karsavin’s Religious Metaphysics,” is dedicated to Karsavin’s most important metaphysical understanding, the concept of perfection and the perfect person, which develops throughout the entire period of his philosophical work and, as the main structural element of Karsavin’s system, turns out to be the cementing core of both his philosophy of personhood and his metaphysics of history. The article by Inga V. Zheltikova, “Variants of Images of the Future in the Work of Lev P. Karsavin,” explores the futurological aspects of Karsavin’s philosophy of history, revealing the principles of the emergence of images of the future in the philosopher’s ontological perspective.
Of course, one can argue against the authors of these articles, their positions, and the ideas they put forth; they are open to dialogue and have expressed a hope that these studies of Karsavin’s work will perform the necessary function of providing semantic material for the modern historical–philosophical process.
Notes
Notes have been renumbered for this edition.—Ed.
1. S.S. Khoruzhii’s [Horujy] summarizing editorial and research work on Karsavin is a collection of scholarly articles published in the series Philosophy in Russia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. See Lev Platonovich Karsavin, ed. S.S. Khoruzhii (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN), 2012).
2. V.V. Zen’kovskii puts particular emphasis on the influence of Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood on Karsavin. See V.V. Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii: V 2 t. (Leningrad: EGO, 1991), vol. 2, part 2, p. 147.
3. N.O. Losskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2011), p. 396.
4. Ibid., p. 400.
5. A.A. Kara-Murza has devoted many years to working on the topic of Karsavin’s time spent in Italy. See A.A. Kara-Murza, Znamenitye russkie o Florentsii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ol’gi Morozovoi, 2016), pp. 347–352.
6. L.P. Karsavin, Ocherki srednevekovoi zhizni v Italii XII–XIII vekov (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M.A. Aleksandrova, 1912).
7. L.P. Karsavin, “Mistika i ee znachenie v religioznosti srednevekov’ia,” Vestnik Evropy, 1913, no. 8, pp. 118–135.
8. L.P. Karsavin, “Simvolizm myshleniia i ideia miroporiadka v Srednie veka,” Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal, 1914, no. 2, pp. 10–28.
9. “Vekhist” comes from “Vekhi”, the Russian title of Landmarks, and was later used by the Bolsheviks as a label for their ideological enemies.—Trans.
10. By all accounts, Karsavin’s first meeting with representatives of the religious–philosophical milieu involved his participation in a gathering of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society in April 1913, where I.D. Kholopov delivered his paper “The Absolute Nature of Christianity.”
11. M.A. Boitsov, “Ne do kontsa zabytyi medievist iz epoki russkogo moderna,” in L.P. Karsavin, Monashestvo v Srednie veka, ed. M.A. Boitsov (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1992), pp. 5–16; B.E. Stepanov, Stanovlenie teoreticheskoi kul’turologii v trudakh L.P. Karsavina (dissertation toward a candidacy in culturology) (Moscow, 1998), pp. 110–125; A.L. Iastrebitskaia, “U istokov istoricheskoi antropologii v Rossii: L.P. Karsavin,” Istoricheskoe znanie na rubezhe stoletii (Moscow: INION RAN, 2003), p. 114.
12. Karsavin’s declaration of love to Skrzhinskaia took place in December 1920. In 1921, the Karsavins welcomed their own third daughter, Susanna. The relationship between the philosopher and his lover continued, but Skrzhinskaia’s hopes of being legally married to Karsavin never came to fruition.
13. A.F. Sveshnikov, “Konflikt v zhizni nauchnoi shkoly. Kasuz Karsavina,” in Lev Platonivich Karsavin, pp. 108–160.
14. Grevs himself described the phases of this discord in a letter to Karsavin. Addressing the latter as his student, Grevs says that the decline in their relationship occurred after the young scholar’s return from abroad. The dispute with his mentor was the next milestone, while the general spiritual and scholarly discord “was emphasized by the content and direction of your second thesis, and then by your behavior over the last two years.” See Sveshnikov, “Konflikt v zhizni nauchnoi shkoly,” p. 125.
15. The interrogation report shows that Karsavin formulated a loyal attitude toward the Soviet regime without sharing its communist ideology: “I have not been and continue not to be a member of any party. I am completely loyal to the Soviet regime, recognizing it as the only possible and necessary regime for the present and future of Russia, and am completely negative toward any attacks to undermine it from within or without. I consider it my civic duty to cooperate fully and honestly with it, but I do not share its communist agenda. I find it necessary, as I have repeatedly expressed, to declare my disagreements with it openly, as re[gards] working honestly within the limits it has allotted me and that are acknowledged by my convictions.” USFB Rossii po Sankt-Peterburgu i Leningradskoi oblasti, document no. P-88282, pp. 6–8.
16. For more details on the concept of “symphonic person,” see V.I. Povilaitis, Uchenie L.P. Karsavina o “simfonicheskoi lichnosti” kak sub”ekta istoricheskogo protsessa (dissertation toward candidacy in philosophical sciences) (Moscow, 1998); Yu.B. Melikh, “‘Simfonicheskaia’, sovershennaia lichnost’,” in Iu.B. Melikh, Personalizm L.P. Karsavina i evorpeiskaia filosofiia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2003), pp. 189–255.
17. L.P. Karsavin, Filosofiia istorii (St. Petersburg: AO Komplekt, 1993), p. 169. (“Qualitation,” or kachestvovanie, is Karsavin’s neologism for a qualitative instance or actualization.—Trans.)
18. Karsavin, Filosofiia istorii, p. 169.
19. For more on the story of Karsavin and Florovskii’s relationship, see L.-B. Kieizik, “K voprosu istorii vzaimootnoshenii L’va Karsavina i Georgiia Florovskogo,” Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. Istoriia, 2020, vol. 65, issue 3, pp. 950–961.
20. L.P. Karsavin, Filosofiia istoriia (Berlin: Obelisk, 1923), p. 175.
21. S.S. Khoruzhii, “Khronologiia zhizni i tvorchestva L.P. Karsavina,” in Lev Platonovich Karsavin, p. 476.
22. See “Vypiska iz protokola no. 10 Osobogo soveshchaniia pri MGB SSSR ot 04.03.1950 o zakluchenii v ITL srokom na 10 let Karsavina L.P. (available at https://arch2.iofe.center/case/1024).
23. His book has provided invaluable evidence: A.A. Vaneev, Dva goda v Abezi. V pamiati o L.P. Karsavine (Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1990).
24. Literally the “middle” (srednii) man of the “Middle” Ages, a dual meaning lost in translation.—Trans.