01 — Life and Formation

Odessa, 1893: a doctor’s son who began in medicine, moved to mathematics, and was commissioned into the artillery in 1915; four years of war and civil war; evacuation from the Crimea in 1920; and then, from 1921, a second and unplanned life as a theologian in Belgrade and a schoolmaster in Skopje. Nothing in the first twenty-eight years predicts the theologian, except the habit of mind — the mathematician’s taste for a single clean axiom — that his own colleagues would later say marked everything he wrote.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Files in This Section

File Description
Odessa, the Artillery, and the Evacuation Birth and family, Novorossiysk University, the Sergievskoe artillery school, the World War and the civil war, and the evacuation of 1920
Belgrade and Skopje The Belgrade theological faculty, A. P. Dobroklonsky, the Brotherhood of St. Seraphim, the degree of 1925, marriage, and five years teaching in Macedonia

The Discipline of This Section

Two rules govern the biography.

Dates in the range, not collapsed. Two reference works give his birthday differently, and the Russian émigré convention of Julian dating is part of the reason; the same applies to the year in which his Belgrade work counted as a completed degree. Where the sources disagree, both are given with a [Disputed: ...] note.

The civil war reported plainly. He served as an artillery officer in the Imperial army and then on the White side in the Russian civil war, and was evacuated with Wrangel’s forces from the Crimea. That is documented, it is not concealed, and it is not made into either a heroic or a political credential. It is the reason he spent the rest of his life outside Russia.

See Also