The twenty-volume "Library of Spiritual Revival" will open to the Russian reader a wide panorama of the ideological and philosophical searches of Russian thinkers of the early 20th century.

This volume includes selected works by L. P. Karsavin (1882-1952), covering all topics and periods of the work of this original thinker: from early medieval studies to the last religious and philosophical works of the camp. Most of them are published in their homeland for the first time. Along with philosophy, there are articles on the history of culture, on the church and Orthodoxy, on Russia and the revolution.

ru Trushova If you found a mistake in the book, write to saphyana@inbox.ru ExportToFB21, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 06.05.2013 OOoFBTools-2013-5-6-15-30-31-766 1.0 Compositions "Rarity" 1993 ISBN 5–85735–013–1

Compositions

Lev Platonovich Karsavin

Of all the great Russian thinkers who created their own philosophical systems, Lev Platonovich Karsavin, perhaps, to this day remains the most unfamiliar figure in his homeland. For a phenomenon of such magnitude to be so unknown, even in comparison with other philosophers whose work was also not allowed to reach us, say, Florensky or Berdyaev, good reasons are needed.

All this is true, and yet the study of Karsavin's work can no longer be postponed. Returning seriously and for a long time to the heritage of Russian thought, we must ponder the intricacies of Karsavin's path and be able to see in them the result of the philosopher's relationship with his time.

This work is not easy to understand, and many would probably prefer something simpler to it: to read about the life of our philosophers, about the flowering of Russian culture and its subsequent defeat, about the disasters of emigration... But this, alas, is not enough today. The spiritual revival that we hope for Russia, which this philosophical series is called upon to serve, requires a real deliverance from the old dogmas, requires effort and labor. Last but not least, we now have to revive dangerously weakened, undermined skills of independent thinking. And there is hardly anything more useful for this purpose than a thoughtful reading of the works of Lev Platonovich Karsavin, a Russian philosopher born in 1882 in the city of St. Petersburg, who died in 1952 of tuberculosis in the circumpolar camp of Abez, near Inta.

Unlike many of his senior colleagues in Russian religious philosophy (Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank, and others), Karsavin did not experience a radical change of beliefs, a deep crisis or a turning point. In his youth, he did not have, it seems, even a short period of enthusiasm for social and political activities, although until recently it was almost impossible to avoid such a period among the Russian intelligentsia. The social atmosphere was changing. Science and culture acquired a new attraction, where a powerful rise was born in many areas at once. Karsavin's generation included participants in the symbolic movement, the creators of new painting, philosophers who from the very beginning strove not only (or even not so much) to preach certain truths, but also to master the method, to sophisticated professionalism: Florensky, Ilyin, Shpet, Stepun. And his own inclinations from an early age were directed to the scientific field.

"Already in the senior classes of the gymnasium, a future scientist was clearly visible in him," his famous sister, the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina, writes in her memoirs. (These memoirs, "Theater Street", written by her in English, were published in our country in translation in 1971, although, alas, most of the references to her brother were released at the same time). Brother and sister were the only children, and there was a clear separation of the paternal and maternal lines in the family. Tamara, Tata, was "daddy's girl", the object of her father's special attention, who followed in his footsteps: Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin (1854-1922) was a famous dancer of the Mariinsky Theater, a student of the luminary of the St. Petersburg ballet Marius Petipa. And Lev "followed his mother": she was inclined to reflection, serious reading, kept French notebooks of her "Thoughts and Sayings", and what is even more important, she was a cousin of A. S. Khomyakov, the famous philosopher and founder of Slavophilism. This glorious kinship meant a lot to her, she believed and hoped that Lev had inherited something from the gifts of her great kinsman through her and would be his successor in the future. These expectations were justified: Karsavin's philosophy is indeed connected with Khomyakov by many strong threads...

After graduating from the gymnasium with a gold medal, then from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, Karsavin became a historian-medievalist, one of the large galaxy of N. M. Graves' students, "the most brilliant of all", as he later said. His domain is the religious movements in Italy and France in the late Middle Ages. Having received a two-year business trip abroad after graduating from the university, he was engaged in painstaking research in the libraries and archives of these countries - on the history of Franciscan monasticism, as well as the heresies of the Waldenses and Cathars. The results of these studies were two large works: Essays on Religious Life in Italy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1912) and Foundations of Medieval Religiosity in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Mainly in Italy (1915). But if the first of them fully corresponds to the usual type of a major historical monograph, then the second in no way fits into this type. Today we would say that this work, as well as Karsavin's articles adjoining it, belongs not to history, but to cultural studies. Although here too we have before us an abundance of facts, living concrete material, all this now occupies the author not in itself: his problem is the reconstruction of medieval man and his world. Revealing and analyzing the structures of the medieval way of life, thinking, and psyche, he strives to use them to see the picture of the past not flatly and factographically, but voluminously, in its internal logic. And on this path, he largely anticipates both the approach and the conclusions of future culturology, for the first time introducing into consideration those layers of material and problems that would become the subject of acute interest of researchers around the world half a century later, in the 60s and 70s. All this pioneering activity of his is unjustly forgotten today, and the republication of his most important historical works is clearly the duty of our historians.

At the same time, culturology is only an intermediate stage in Karsavin's creative evolution. The farther he went, the more strongly the philosophical turn of his thought was expressed; and, constantly expanding the horizon of his reflections, he turns to the general problems of historical knowledge and method, to the philosophy of history, steadily approaching the realm of pure metaphysics. At the same time, two more important themes arise in his works to stay for a long time - religious and national. Their appearance is associated with both internal and external factors. There is no doubt that even earlier, before they had yet become themes of his work, they were present in the circle of Karsavin's reflections: for these are constant themes of Russian thought, and first of all the themes of Slavophilism, the themes of Khomyakov, with the memory of whom, "in the shadow" of which Karsavin grew up from childhood. When the fateful revolutionary years began, the theme of the fate of Russia naturally came to the surface, and in its modern guise, as a theme of the meaning and prospects of the revolution, it became one of the most pressing working themes. Already in the first of the works devoted to it, "East, West and the Russian Idea" (Petrograd, 1922), Karsavin asserts the creative and popular character of the revolution, sarcastically polemicizing with the pessimists who were singing the country's funeral, among whom was Gorky at that time: "Does or does not await us, Russians, a great future? I, contrary to the competent opinion of the Russian writer A. M. Peshkov, believe that yes, and that it is necessary to create it."