Karsavin to Skrzhinskaya: “You Have Tied My Metaphysics to My Life … ”

Abstract

This article examines the metaphysics of Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952), which absorbed the specific features of the life of this Russian theologian, philosopher, scholar, and poet and his love for Elena Cheslavovna Skrzhinskaya. The most complete expressions of this metaphysics are contained in Karsavin’s works Noctes Petropolitanae (Petrograd, 1922) and A Poem on Death (Kaunas, 1931). The thinker himself considered these his main writings. His metaphysics found its completion in A Garland of Sonnets, Terzinas, and the commentaries on them that the thinker composed while in the Gulag (Abez, 1950).To understand Karsavin’s works, we must separate the mystical revelations, the philosophical speculations, the demonstrations of scientific erudition, and the thinker’s personal, intimate experiences from one another. In Karsavin, Russian philosophy found someone who most consistently approached an understanding of the theme of God’s death and a clarification of the religious meaning of atheism, anticipating many new ideas of theology and philosophy of the twentieth century.The article contains a wealth of newly discovered materials about the life of Lev Karsavin.