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.

Karsavin's philosophy was created by the last of the systems of the Russian metaphysics of all-unity. As for any great thinker, such a position for him did not mean an advantage (the ability to move in the beaten path, relying on the ideas of his predecessors), but, on the contrary, a source of difficulties, because there was a danger of becoming secondary, dependent, and unoriginal. And like any great thinker, he managed to overcome these difficulties. Karsavin's system is distinguished by its bright independence, introducing a number of fundamentally new aspects into the tradition. From the very beginning, Karsavin approached the solution of the initial problem of any system of all-unity in a new way, in his own way: where can we see the basic prototype, so to speak, the basic model of all-unity, as a certain principle of the organization of existence? His predecessors—Solovyov, Florensky, and others—considered the "world in God" as such a model: nothing other than the ancient "world of ideas" of Plato's philosophy, adapted to the concepts of the Christian era, interpreted as the totality of the Creator's plans for all things and phenomena. Karsavin, on the other hand, is looking for other models, more concrete, closer to the local reality. In addition, the very intuition about all-unity receives a significant development and enrichment in him. The principle of all-unity characterizes reality in its static aspect, as a kind of abiding. Karsavin, as a historian, has always been characterized by seeing reality dynamically, under the sign of development, process; and these aspects of it were not sufficiently reflected in the principle of all-unity. Therefore, in addition to this principle, he introduces another, the universal principle of becoming, of changing reality. This principle is the "trinity," or the totality of three consubstantial but mutually ordered stages, which Karsavin usually calls "primordial unity—separation—reunion," and which are described as a certain (any) unity, having passed through self-separation, reunites itself. The reader here will immediately recall Hegel's famous triad of dialectics: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. The convergence of the two triads is quite legitimate, but it should be clarified: Hegel's philosophy is only the final link in an ancient chain of philosophical systems based on the principle of the triad as a universal principle of existential dynamics, coming from antiquity, from the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. And in this chain, Karsavin brings his concept of the trinity closer not so much to the Hegelian triad (as most Russian philosophers, beginning with Khomyakov, he felt alien to himself Hegel's pathos of self-sufficient abstract thinking), but to the ideas of one of Hegel's main predecessors, the famous Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). But the more important point is the connection between the two principles. Karsavin subordinates all-unity to the triunity, including it in the three-stage process of separation-reunification: for him, all-unity is, as it were, a "momentary slice" of the triunity, the principle of the structure of the disuniting-reuniting unity at any stage, "at any moment" (although it must be remembered that the entire three-stage process does not necessarily take place in time).

As a result, Karsavin's philosophy turns out to be no longer just another of the "systems of all-unity". It is based on a richer, tightly knit ontological structure of two interrelated principles: the principle of triunity, which describes the dynamics of reality, and the principle of all-unity, which describes its statics. It is for this integral structure that he finds the "basic model" of which we have spoken above; and it is not surprising that it turns out to be different from the "world in God" of previous systems. The final solution was not found immediately. Karsavin's three main philosophical works—The Philosophy of History (1923), On the Elements (1925), and On Personality (1929)—reflect the three stages of his search.

Naturally, in the Philosophy of History he applies his philosophical intuitions to historical reality and finds here that the principles of trinity and all-unity are subject to the historical process, and along with it the psychic process, the element of the life of consciousness. Then the scope of application of the principles expands: in the On the Elements, both fundamental subjects of metaphysics, the Absolute (God) and the created world, are already described on their basis. Cosmos. In this book, Karsavin for the first time presents his views as a new integral system of religious philosophy. But the application of the principle of all-unity, as well as the principle of the triad, to the doctrine of God and the world in itself was not something new and did not provide any original "basic model" of ontological structure. Such a model was put forward by Karsavin only at the next stage, in his book "On Personality". This is his main work, the final synthesis of his philosophical thought. The book is based on the key idea: the ontological structure of the trinity-all-unity is realized in the personality, describes the structure and life of the personality. Thanks to this idea, the metaphysics of all-unity accepted and placed at the forefront the concept of personality; and this transformation of it into a philosophy of personality is the most important thing that Karsavin introduced into our old tradition of all-unity.

Of course, here we have a Christian philosophy of personality. In accordance with the dogmas of Christianity, Karsavin's concept of personality is applied primarily not to man, but to God. Man is a personality only imperfectly, rudimentarily; but the purpose and meaning of his life consist in communion with the fullness of divine being, and consequently in becoming a true personality, "personification", as Karsavin writes. It is easy to catch the consonance of these ideas with our habitual ideas about personality. Karsavin shrewdly notes that, according to these ideas, personality for a person is an object of aspiration rather than an aspiration. possessions: that which I and everyone else would like to be, but, alas, we may not be. In this way, our today's concepts betray their religious source: the desire of the worldly man to be a person is a fading reflection of the Christian ideal of deification, the striving and duty of man to become God. And all this circle of Karsavin's thoughts and constructions, without a doubt, still retains value and interest, constituting an actual, even topical, part of his philosophical heritage. The problem of personality today is one of our key spiritual problems.

In conclusion, let us return to the personality and fate of the philosopher. In 1940, he moved from Kaunas to Vilnius following the university and resumed teaching there after the end of the war. In 1945-1946, he was allowed to teach the only course, aesthetics, and then he was completely removed from teaching. For two years he still worked as the director of the Art Museum in Vilnius - and then he was arrested. After the investigation and trial, in the autumn of 1950, he was transferred to Abez, a disabled camp near the vast complex of Inta camps: in the remand prison, he began to have a tuberculosis process.

Peering into the fate of a real thinker, one always gets the impression that its features bear the imprint of his spirit, the external is subordinate to the internal. Karsavin was a thinker of a paradoxical bent. He was drawn to paradoxes, and he generously filled his philosophical constructions and his conversation with them. This was clearly conveyed to his biography - it is full of paradoxes no less than his virtuoso "spirals of thought" (his favorite expression). The last, tragic period is no exception. Imprisonment in a lager brought an outburst, the rise of his creativity - isn't it a paradox?! In less than two years in the barracks of Abezi he created at least ten works, including an exposition of the essence, the quintessence of his philosophy in the form of... wreath of sonnets and the tercine cycle. Of course, these works are not large, but the depth and acuteness of thought in them do not betray him in the least. And one more thing, no less surprising. The camp was also the period in his life about which we know more and most of all. The main reason for this is this: in the camp he met the Apprentice.

A. A. Vaneev (1922–1985) was far away· not an ordinary person. A talented engineer who came to the camp at a very young age and became a believing Christian there, he ardently devoted himself to spiritual learning and, having found it with Karsavin, forever remained faithful to his teacher and his system. "I have never met a person who would be so immersed in the world of his teacher's ideas," writes a former fellow prisoner, an Austrian philosopher, about him. "Karsavin was his mentor in history, philosophy, religion, in Latin and Greek... and Plato's Academy itself could not have had a more grateful student... He could read Karsavin's camp writings by heart for hours. But at the same time, he was not only full of his word, read or heard; after Karsavin's death, he continued to develop his thoughts, to complete his metaphysical system." A. A. Vaneev left his camp memoirs "Two Years in Abez". However, only a few meager phrases speak about the author himself, about his life. In the center of memories is Lev Platonovich Karsavin. So, the word to the Disciple.