ONE the Making of a Metaphysical Historian

ONE The Making of a Metaphysical Historian 1. Prelude: Who was Lev Karsavin? Already in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, that is, from the 1970s onwards, both Russian dissidents and foreign scholars were beginning to rediscover the legacy of Russian religious philosophy. Since then, books, articles, monographs and conferences have been devoted to the heritage of thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Nicolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky and others.1 Interest among Russians peaked in the nineties: this was the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR when these thinkers, so long forbidden by the Soviet regime, became permitted reading again, supplying many answers for Russians seeking to deepen an identity that had been oppressively flattened by Soviet ideology. Outside of Russia, interest still continues as the appearance of new translations and monographs shows: for non-Russians, Russian religious thought continues to be attractive as it seems to reveal fascinatingly different paths to those trodden by contemporary Western philosophy and theology and to suggest alternative answers to the ones settled on. The author of this study is very much convinced that Russian religious thought still has much to say to contemporaries, both Russians and non-Russians. It focuses on one Russian religious thinker, Lev Karsavin, who has been somewhat neglected to date, both inside and outside of Russia. However, the author believes the time is ripe to reconsider his life and work. For a start, Karsavin trod a slightly different path to men like Bulgakov and Berdyaev: while they became leading lights of the Russian exile and so known to the West chiefly in that capacity, Karsavin was exiled from Russia along with them, but then ended his life a Soviet citizen, and indeed died in a Soviet gulag. From the geo-political point of view, then, his life is kaleidoscopic: he was born and flourished professionally in Imperial Russia; 1 The literature is too extensive to list here: one of the earliest Western treatments of Russian thought was Rowan Williams’ 1978 doctoral dissertation on Vladimir Lossky: interestingly, in 2009 it was translated into Russian, demonstrating how Russian and foreign interest is now overlapping, and also how long it has taken for this overlap to occur (Williams, 2009). Another book indicative of the level of contemporary interest is Avril Pyman’s biography of Pavel Florensky (Pyman, 2010). As regards Russian interest, an indicative example would be Fr. Alexander Men’s book on Russian religious philosophy, which grew out of lectures given to parishioners in the 1970s and 1980s (Men, 2003). 2 Dominic Rubin then he lived in Bolshevik Russia until the end of the Civil War. His next years were spent in the classic loci of Russian exile, Berlin and Paris, at a time when most were expecting the Bolshevik experiment to collapse. However, Karsavin then moved to a more obscure location, Lithuania. Finally, when Lithuania was swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1940, he re-entered the country that had exiled him for good. Falling foul of the ideological police once again (this time not Lenin but Stalin), he was exiled again, but eastwards to Siberia, where he spent his last two years in a gulag, producing, incidentally, some highly interesting work there. Along the way, Karsavin also managed to attract to himself the sobriquet, “the Plato of Lithuania,” so fruitful was his time in that country both for himself and his adopted co-citizens. All this is to say that Karsavin is a little unusual even by the standards of Russian religious philosophy: most of his fellow Russian thinkers who have attracted attention are interesting partly in that they preserved pre-Revolutionary Russian ways of thinking, often its religious heritage. Karsavin, however, added to his range Lithuanian sage and Soviet academic (albeit of a troubled sort)—and, truth be told, to begin with, he was not a religious thinker at all but an academic scholar of the Western Middle Ages. If we add to this mix the fact that he spent several years in the twenties as the chief theorist of the Eurasian political movement, perhaps the most viable alternative among Russian exiles to Soviet ideology, it becomes clear that Karsavin is a unique figure who repays attention on several fronts. Finally, of course, all this makes him a perplexing figure, for as this brief sketch has already shown, the strings in his bow are not, it would seem at first glance, compatible: academic scholar of the West versus neo-Slavophile advocate of Russia’s Eastern destiny; supporter of the Catholic Lithuanian republic’s independence against Soviet irredentism versus “left-Eurasian” supporter of Bolshevism’s “usefulness” for Russia; pluralist academic versus Russian Orthodox mystic: one could go on, for once one starts digging into Karsavin, the paradoxes start to flow freely. Now in addition to all this, one discovers that Karsavin was highly fascinating and interesting as a man, as a personality. His life very much informs his philosophical work, and his essays in particular are a sort of “carnivalistic,” dialogic performance—to use the key-words of his younger Petersburg contemporary, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose discovery of the carnivalistic in literature owes much to the spirit of the times he lived in. Karsavin was a representative figure of these times, which in retrospect have been dubbed the Silver Age of Russian culture. He distills many of the intellectual trends of his environment, so much so that a contemporary Russian critic (Khoruzhy, 1994c) has compared Karsavin to Pasternak’s epochal Yuri Zhivago in his ability to manifest the tensions of his age. Often it is difficult to tell where Karsavin is being original and where he is simply restating what others have said before. However, the entire blend of his life .

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