He looked at me a little guilty.

"It's Sventonis," he said, "who came after confession." He congratulated me and wanted to give me a cross. I did not mind so as not to upset him. Let there be two.

With regard to Karsavin, the East and the West seemed to be ready to remove their differences."

Karsavin died on July 20, 1952. In his last days, two relatives were with him: in addition to A. A. Vaneyev, Vladas Šimkūnas, a Lithuanian doctor who worked as a pathologist in the camp hospital. A striking episode is connected with this last detail, with which we will conclude our story.

"Šimkūnas came because he had a business in mind and wanted me to help him. The point was this. As Šimkūnas said, those who died in the camp are buried in unmarked graves, each with only a peg with a conventional number is placed. Such identification marks are short-lived, and it is impossible to determine later who is buried where. And sooner or later, the time will come when Karsavin will be remembered and, perhaps, they will want to find his remains. There is a simple way for Karsavin's ashes to be identified. When Karsavin's body is autopsied, it is necessary to put a hermetically sealed vial with a note in the insides, which would say who Karsavin is. Šimkūnas wanted me to write this note."

"I did not immediately respond to Šimkūnas, because my feelings seemed to be divided by his words. There was something monstrous in his proposal, in all this thoughtfulness. On the other hand, there was something touching about the same thing. The situation did not allow a monument with a proper inscription to be erected on Karsavin's grave, as we would have liked. Instead of a monument, Šimkūnas proposed that a secret epitaph be written, intended to lie buried with the person to whom it is dedicated... I accepted Šimkūnas' idea and agreed to his proposal.

"I'll write," I said, "but I've got to collect my thoughts." Whether they ever find this note or not, I am responsible for every word at all times."

"With my mental sight and hearing, I recalled my meetings with Karsavin, and his voice, and his words, and our walks along the gorge between the coal embankment and the wall of the hospital barracks. And finally, the last farewell to him this morning in the morgue... What was to be written to me? Words were needed that would express the significance of Karsavin's personality and which would be words of farewell to him. This, as far as I remember, was the secret epitaph. "Lev Platonovich Karsavin, historian and religious thinker. In 1882 he was born in St. Petersburg. In 1952, while imprisoned in a regime camp, he died of milliary tuberculosis. L. P. Karsavin spoke and wrote about the Threefold One God, Who in His incomprehensibility reveals Himself to us, so that through Christ we may come to know in the Creator the Father who gives birth to us. And that God, overcoming Himself through love, suffers our sufferings with us and in us, so that we too may be in Him and in the unity of the Son of God, possess the fullness of love and freedom. And that we must recognize our very imperfection and the burden of our fate as an absolute goal. Comprehending this, we already have a share in the victory over death through death. Farewell, dear teacher. The sorrow of separation from you does not fit into words. But we, too, await our hour in the hope of being where sorrow has been transformed into eternal joy."

"A little later, after I finished writing, Šimkūnas came. I handed him a sheet of text. Šimkūnas read slowly and, apparently, weighing each word in his mind. Finally, he said that, in his opinion, what was written was, in general, what was needed.

He had a dark glass bottle in store. Having rolled the sheet with the secret epitaph into a tight roll, Šimkūnas put this roll into the bottle and tightly closed the bottle with a screw cap in front of me."

"In the act of autopsy, in this act of medical necromancy, the vial... was put into a cut corpse. From that moment on, and forever the ashes of Karsavin have a monument in it, the glass shell of which is able to resist decay and decay, preserving the words of the testimony written — not in gold letters on stone, but in ordinary ink on paper — about the man whose remains are buried in the ground of an unmarked grave."

Let us think about this story: through the gloomy grotesque of camp life, something else shines through here. In Russian philosophers, we often encounter mystical intuition that the fate of the body after death is not indifferent to the fate of a person, carries a mysterious meaning. Both Fedorov and Florensky spoke about this, but perhaps Karsavin spoke most decisively. He taught that there is no separate "soul" at all, that the personality acts as an inseparable wholeness in its entire fate, both temporary and eternal. But what does "secret epitaph" mean? The condensed formula of the philosopher's thought remained merged with his ashes; And the spiritual-bodily unity is in a sense not broken by death. In a truly inscrutable way, Karsavin's death shows confirmation of his teaching: the true death of the philosopher.

"The cemetery where Karsavin is buried is located away from the village. It consists of many mounds on which no one's names are written. Around the cemetery there is flat, monotonous tundra, formless land. Most of all there is sky. Clear blue, with transparently white clouds, envelops you on all sides with the beauty of the heavens, making up for the poverty of the earth."

S. S. Khoruzhiy