Introduction: On the Ninetieth Birthday of A. F. Losev

Abstract

Abstract This issue of Soviet Studies in Literature is the first in a series of special numbers of the journal to be devoted to major Soviet literary scholars, critics, and teachers, both living and dead. In beginning this series, I find it especially fitting to dedicate its first issue to A. F. Losev, whose adult intellectual life spans the entire course of Russian literary history in the postrevolutionary period, whose scholarly oeuvre encompasses not only classical philology in the broadest sense of the term but also literary and linguistic theory and philosophy, and whose pedagogical activity has formed an integral part of his career since its inception. In 1950 the émigré intellectual historian V. V. Zenkovsky wrote, "We have essentially no information about A. F. Losev (b. 1892)—with whom he studied, where he is now, or even whether he is still alive."1 More than thirty years later, A. F. Losev, who observed his ninetieth birthday in 1983, is still alive and residing in Moscow. Although he has lost his sight, he continues to write with the help of two secretaries and his wife, the classicist A. A. Takho-Godi; and his bibliography, which comprised only thirteen entries at the time Zenkovsky wrote, now numbers over 400 items, including more than twenty large books.2 In addition to the eight books Losev brought out between 1927 and 1930, his works include the multivolume History of Classical Aesthetics, the basic Soviet textbook of classical literature, the important Aesthetics of the Renaissance, recently issued in its second edition, countless articles, many of them on extremely difficult subjects, and extended encyclopedia articles. Most recently, Losev has published a study on Vladimir Solov'ev, which at this writing has not yet reached the West. It is A. F. Losev who brought Plato to the Soviet people, not to mention Plotinus, Proclus, Nicholas of Cusa, and numerous other important figures of the classical and postclassical period. By his sheer longevity alone Losev has made a place for himself in Soviet letters; the bulk of his scholarship was created at an age when many people have ceased their active productive life or died. Finally, in A. F. Losev the vital intellectual currents of early twentieth-century Russian thought still reverberate for the late twentieth-century reader. As is true of many of the most important figures in Soviet literary criticism, and as Zenkovsky's remarks indicate, the details of A. F. Losev's personal biography and scholarly and pedagogical activity are little known in the West, and the present essay will therefore acquaint the reader with the essential facts of his childhood and scholarly career and attempt briefly to place the works translated below in the context of his early formative influences and larger outlook.