Russian Studies in Philosophy

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The Metaphysical Path: Lev P. Karsavin’s

Philosophical Experience
Guest Editor’s Introduction

Olga A. Zhukova

To cite this article: Olga A. Zhukova (2022) The Metaphysical Path: Lev P. Karsavin’s
Philosophical Experience, Russian Studies in Philosophy, 60:6, 427-440, DOI:
10.1080/10611967.2022.2155008

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2155008

Published online: 30 Mar 2023.

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RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY
2022, VOL. 60, NO. 6, 427–440
https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2155008

The Metaphysical Path: Lev P. Karsavin’s

Philosophical Experience
Guest Editor’s Introduction
Olga A. Zhukova

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this article dedicated to Lev P. Karsavin’s creative Lev P. Karsavin; Russian
path, I focus mainly on the evolution of the thinker’s philosophy; metaphysics;
religious–philosophical ideas. I consider the reasons historiosophy; personology;
that prompted the professional historian to choose symphonic person; religious
tradition
the path of a free philosopher, defending an argu­
ment about the interrelation of Karsavin’s historioso­
phical ideas and the key provisions of his metaphysics.
The article assesses the philosopher’s legacy in the
context of the problem of Russian religious metaphy­
sics as an independent and significant intellectual
tradition that has shaped Russian cultural history
among other spiritual–intellectual practices. In denot­
ing 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 strat­
egy 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’

English translation © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text, “Put’ metafizika: Filosofski
opyt L.P. Karsavina.”
Olga A. Zhukova is affiliated with the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow),
21/4 Staraia Basmannaia Str., Moscow, Russian Federation 105066. E-mail: logoscultura@yandex.ru.
Translated by Brad Damaré. Published with the author’s permission.
*This article is on output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the
National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).
© 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
428 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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.1 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,2 which compels
us to discuss the role of Russian philosophical thought and religious metaphy­
sics 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 character­
istic 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
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 429

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),3 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.”4
Karsavin’s path to constructing an original metaphysics seems “sui gen­
eris” in the intellectual history of the Silver Age, despite a trajectory out­
wardly 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 comple­
tely 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,5 resulting in several historical works on
religiosity in medieval Italy,6 mystical practices of the Middle Ages,7 and the
unique features of medieval thought.8 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 histor­
ical 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
430 O. A. ZHUKOVA

articulates his understanding of world history as a cultural and holistic

history, a “total” history (we can find some key approaches to this under­
standing 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 see­
mingly 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.9 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–philoso­
phical 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.10
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 frame­
work 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 grasp­
ing the spiritual and intellectual history of medieval Europe led his thinking
toward an even greater metahistorical generalization, into the fields of phi­
losophy of history and hermeneutics of culture.
As a number of scholars have noted,11 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
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 431

creative horizons, not only because of his remarkable human-science erudi­

tion, 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 mys­
tical 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.12
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 meander­
ings 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 phi­
losophical 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.13 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 (pre­
dominantly methodological) foundations of the research Karsavin
conducted.14 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.
432 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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 commu­
nity, 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 metaphy­
sical foundations of history, culture, and human existence.
The fateful turning point for Karsavin, as well as for many other repre­
sentatives 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 incom­
patibility 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.15 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 execu­
tion, the life that began in exile was full of concern for elementary physical
survival and linked to the enormous spiritual and intellectual task of preser­
ving 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
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 433

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.16 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 determi­
nate 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.17

Karsavin considers religious cultures as these kinds of historical persons,

which are superior in relation to cultures as such.18
In its radical expression, the religiosity that gives qualitative characteris­
tics 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
434 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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 manifes­
tation 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 increas­
ingly 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 appoint­
ment 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.19 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
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 435

his participation in the Eurasianist movement. On the one hand, his con­
vergence 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 intellec­
tual 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 meta­
physical 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.20 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 exis­
tence. From his perspective, Russia represents an Eastern Orthodox alter­
native 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 intro­
duces 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,
436 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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.21 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.”22 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 philo­
sophical 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
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 437

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.23
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” man24 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
438 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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 philo­
sophizing 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 histor­
ical–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).
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY 439

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 rela­
tionship 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 dis­
pute 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.)
440 O. A. ZHUKOVA

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.