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."

But, on the other hand, it was impossible for him to comprehend what was happening outside the religious approach, religious categories. The modern theme led to the religious theme, the second of the new themes mentioned. Turning to it was also facilitated by the fact that in the new Russia the church from the former half-mentioned institution immediately became oppressed and persecuted. Karsavin was a freedom-loving and rebellious man, ready to resist any dictate, always preferring to move against the current. And if before, while accepting the foundations of the Christian worldview, he at the same time called himself a freethinker and seemed to be far from the role of a theologian and preacher, then after the revolution he became a professor at the Theological Institute and read sermons in Petrograd churches. At the same time, he published his first work not on the topics of history, giving it the deliberately pious title "Saligia or... soul-beneficial meditation on God, the world, man, evil and the seven deadly sins" (Petrograd, 1919) and from the very first lines choosing the style of spiritual conversation: "Dear reader, I turn to you in the hope that you believe in God, feel His breath and hear His voice speaking in your soul. And if my hope is not deceived, let us think together about the thoughts I have written down..." There was a challenge here – and it did not go unnoticed. In the journals "Press and Revolution", "Under the Banner of Marxism" and others, reviews of Karsavin's works appeared, leaving nothing to be desired in terms of a crushing rebuff to ideological intrigues.

"A medieval fanatic", "a learned obscurantist", "a sweet-mouthed sermon of priesthood", "gibberish", "meaningless theories"... – such assessments are met by Karsavin and his work in these reviews. And in the light of this subtle criticism, we are not surprised by Karsavin's report in one letter that he wrote in the summer of 1922: "... I foresee the imminent inevitability for myself to fall silent in our press." The foresight expressed here was very soon justified with interest: in the autumn of the same year, Karsavin had not only to "fall silent in our press", but also to leave the borders of his homeland. Together with a large group of 150-200 people, which included the most prominent representatives of non-Marxist thought and non-Bolshevik society (such as Pomgol, the cooperatives, and the independent press), he was deported to Germany.

The event of the expulsion of scientists is still waiting for its analysis. It would be very necessary today to restore its details and assess the full scale of its consequences for Russian culture and for the public atmosphere. Here we will only say that for Karsavin, as for most of the deportees, the exile was a heavy blow. He was a principled opponent of the act of emigration and, once in the West, did not cease to emphasize: "... the history of Russia is taking place there, and not here." He also spoke of the senselessness and desolation that émigré existence brings with it; and long before "The Flight", M. Bulgakov cited as their symbol and the most striking example the organization of cockroach races in Constantinople.

His life in exile followed a typical émigré geography — Berlin, then Paris — and took place in no less typical émigré ordeals (among which was an episode when Lev Platonovich tried to be an extra at a film studio, and the director who saw him immediately offered him the role... professor of philosophy. His appearance was very reminiscent of Vladimir Solovyov, by the way). Circumstances changed in 1928, when the University of Kaunas in Lithuania invited him to take up the chair of world history. Lithuania became his home, where he remained until his arrest in 1949.

Meanwhile, in the turbulent and tense twenties, even before the acquisition of relative stability in Lithuania, he managed to develop his philosophical system in its entirety. It is important to look into its origins, into the soil on which it arose, and this will explain to us to a large extent its peculiarities. As we have already said, Karsavin approached philosophy from historical problems, which were constantly evolving in his depths and breadth, from the study of concrete phenomena to reflections on the structure and meaning of history. Invariably and firmly, these reflections were built in his religious vein, on the basis of the Christian worldview. Therefore, it is quite natural that his first significant philosophical work was the experience of the Christian philosophy of history. Immediately after his exile, he published in Berlin a large monograph "The Philosophy of History", written in Russia.

In the system of philosophical views, the philosophy of history is one of the particular sections; the central, core section is ontology, the doctrine of being and the Absolute. Nevertheless, certain ontological positions also clearly emerge from Karsavin's book. They clearly show that his philosophical thought is moving in the mainstream of the Russian metaphysics of all-unity, the foundations of which were laid by Khomyakov and Vladimir Solovyov.

The metaphysics of all-unity is the main, if not the only, of the original philosophical currents that arose in Russia. Following Khomyakov and Solovyov, the most prominent of the Russian philosophers, the creators of independent philosophical systems, belonged to it; E. Trubetskoy, P. Florensky, S. Bulgakov, S. Frank, N. Lossky. Their systems are very different and do not at all form one narrow school; But what they have in common is that they all have as their basis the concept or, rather, the symbol of all-unity. The essence of this concept is not so easy to convey in a popular article. What is all-unity? It is a certain ideal order or harmonious mode of being, when it is arranged as a perfect unity of a multitude: in the totality of its elements, each is identical with the whole, and hence with every other element. Clearly, this description is contradictory: how can a part be identical with the whole? That is why all-unity is not an ordinary concept that can be given a complete, logically correct definition. It is an inexhaustible object of philosophical reflection, in which, like in other fundamental realities of philosophical experience, philosophy thinks endlessly, reveals it in new terms and main aspects, but cannot fully express its antinomic nature. Beginning with antiquity, when philosophical reason wanted to convey the mode of organization, the principle of the structure of perfect being, it invariably came to all-unity; and Russian religious philosophy is an organic continuation and creative development of this ancient tradition.