Florensky,PavelAlexandrovich (1882–1937)

Abstract

AbstractPavel Alexandrovich Florensky was one of Europe's greatest polymaths, and for this reason he is often compared to Leonardo, Pascal, and Leibniz. He is also likely to emerge as Russia's most important philosopher. Although not yet widely known in English‐speaking circles, his work is being read by an increasingly large and appreciative audience in the West, especially in Germany where hisCollected Worksare currently being translated in ten volumes. Of Russian and Armenian ancestry, Florensky grew up in the Caucasus Mountains where he developed a mystical affinity for nature that never left him, and which may be taken as a key to his writings, as he suggests in the posthumously published work,To My Children: Recollections of a Youth in the Caucasus(1992, in Russian). A brilliant mathematician, physicist, engineer, and inventor, while at the same time a distinguished linguist (who knew more than a dozen languages). art historian, theologian, and philosopher, Florensky graduated with the highest honors from Moscow University in 1904 with a thesis (“On the Peculiarities of Flat Curves as Places of Interrupted Discontinuity”) so extraordinary that he was immediately offered a position on the mathematics faculty. Instead, he chose to enter that same year the Moscow Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1908, soon accepting a position at the Academy as senior lecturer in philosophy, his first position in what became an illustrious academic career. He was ordained an Orthodox priest in 1911, and insisted on wearing his cassock, cross, and cap while conducting his university lectures and scientific research, even throughout the period of the Stalinist purges. For this, and for his written work, he was arrested and first sent to the labor camps in Siberia in 1933, and eventually to the infamous Solovetsky Islands Gulag on the White Sea, where despite his captivity, he conducted scientific research on the production of agar and iodine from seaweed, while ministering to his fellow prisoners. He was murdered by the KGB in 1937, probably on December 8 at Toksovo, near St. Petersburg, where he was secretly buried in a mass grave, a loss lamented in Solzhenitsyn'sGulag Archipelago.