From St. Petersburg to Paris

Paul Nikolaevich Evdokimov was born in St. Petersburg on 2 August 1901 into a noble military family, lost his father to assassination while still a small child, was educated in a cadet corps, saw the Revolution from Kiev, served roughly two years with the anti-Bolshevik White armies, and left Russia for good in 1923 by way of Constantinople. He reached Paris with nothing, and he never went home. This file follows the Russian years and the flight, and marks where the sources disagree.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Birth and Family

Paul Nikolaevich Evdokimov (Russian: Павел Николаевич Евдокимов) was born on 2 August 1901 (20 July, Old Style) in St. Petersburg, into a family of the Russian nobility with a military tradition (French and English encyclopaedic notices agree on the date and place; Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970)”; Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” citing Michel Stavrou’s 2010 notice in La Croix). His father was an army officer — a colonel — and his mother a noblewoman of pronounced piety.

The father’s death is the first documented catastrophe of the life, and the sources differ on its date and, slightly, on its manner. The account most often repeated is that he was killed while attempting to put down or resolve a mutiny among his own men, shot by a soldier or by a revolutionary assassin. [Disputed: the year of Nikolai Evdokimov's death. Some accounts give 1907 (see, e.g., the theological notice in *Omnes*, "Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon," which places the killing in 1907 and describes him as a colonel killed by a terrorist while dealing with a mutiny); others give 1905, in the revolutionary disorders of that year (OrthodoxWiki, "Paul Evdokimov"). The collection reports the range: Paul was between three and six years old. The manner — a violent death at the hands of men under or against his own command, in the collapse of imperial order — is consistent across the sources.] Whatever the exact year, the boy was fatherless early, and the family’s world was already visibly cracking.

His mother’s response shaped him twice over, and in opposite directions. She placed him in a cadet corps — the standard military schooling for a boy of his class and his father’s profession — and she took him, in the school holidays, on extended retreats to monasteries (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, on the childhood; Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” on the military school and the monastic retreats). The combination is worth pausing over: the boy who would later argue that the monastic vocation belongs by right to every baptized Christian, and not only to those who leave the world, first met monasticism as a layman on holiday from a military academy. He was never a monk and never lived in a monastery as a member of one; he encountered that life from the outside, as a guest, and loved it.

Revolution, Kiev, and the White Armies

Evdokimov began theological study before the Bolshevik seizure of power — an unusual choice for a young man of his caste and schooling, and one that his contemporaries noticed. After the Revolution the family moved to Kiev, and it was there, around 1918, that he took up theological studies in earnest (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” on the move to Kiev and the beginning of theological study in 1918; cf. OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov,” “He began theological studies just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution”). The choice was not a flight from the world: it was made in a city that changed hands repeatedly in the Russian Civil War.

He then served about two years in the White armies, the anti-Bolshevik forces of the Civil War (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”: “He participated for two years in the anti-revolutionary White Army”). [Disputed: the details of Evdokimov's military service. That he served with the White forces is reported consistently in the biographical literature, and it is the natural background to the family's escape from Crimea; but the unit, the front, the rank, and the exact dates are not established in the accessible sources, and this guide does not supply them. Nor is there any evidence in the sources consulted that he was a combatant of note; the service is recorded, not dramatized.]

The escape route is the classic one of the southern Russian emigration: out of the Crimea, the last White stronghold, evacuated in the autumn of 1920, and across the Black Sea to Constantinople, then packed with tens of thousands of Russian refugees (OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov”: “he and his family escaped from Crimea through Constantinople”). In Constantinople he survived, as most of them did, by manual labour (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”). [Disputed: the interval between the Crimean evacuation (1920) and the arrival in Paris (1923). The sources agree on the route — Crimea, Constantinople, Paris — and on 1923 as the year he reached France, but do not agree in detail on where he was in 1921–1922. Some accounts place the flight to Constantinople in 1923 itself. The range is reported here rather than resolved.]

Paris, 1923

He arrived in Paris in 1923, in the great wave of Russian emigration that made the city, for two decades, the intellectual capital of Orthodoxy outside the Soviet Union (OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov”; Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov”). He came, as the phrase in the sources has it, with the clothes on his back.

What he did next is the detail that recurs in every account of him, and that his readers have always found illuminating: he worked nights at the Citroën plant, and also cleaned railway carriages, in order to study by day (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”: “He worked nights at the Citroën and cleaning wagons”; the detail is standard in the biographical literature and is repeated by Plekon, Living Icons, 2002). Citroën’s Paris works — the Quai de Javel and Levallois-Perret plants — were among the largest employers of Russian émigrés in the interwar city; a former cadet on the night shift was not an anomaly but a type. Evdokimov’s later insistence that holiness is available in the factory as much as in the cell was not a rhetorical flourish. He had done the shift.

This is the point at which his life joins that of the whole Paris emigration: the world of the Russian Student Christian Movement, of the cheap rented rooms of the fifteenth and nineteenth arrondissements, of Bulgakov’s lectures, of the improvised chapels — the world in which Mother Maria Skobtsova was at the same time beginning the work of shelter that would make her a saint and a martyr (see St. Maria of Paris). Evdokimov moved in this milieu from the beginning, and two decades later he would be doing work very like hers.

The Refugee Who Stayed a Refugee

One fact from later in the life belongs here, because it is a comment on everything above. Evdokimov was offered a teaching post at the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux and refused it, because accepting would have required him to apply for French nationality, and he wished to remain a Russian refugee (OFPRA, “Paul Evdokimov, theologian,” Famous Refugees gallery). He kept the statelessness. Whatever else this was — loyalty to a Russia that no longer existed, solidarity with the displaced, or simple stubbornness — it means that when he later ran hostels for refugees and wrote about the Christian’s exile in the world, he was not describing a condition he had escaped.

He lost his country at nineteen or twenty and never recovered it. The theology that came out of that loss is not a theology of nostalgia; it is a theology of the world as the place where God is to be found, written by a man who had no other place. [Corrected: it is sometimes said loosely that Evdokimov "emigrated to France in 1917" or that he studied at St. Sergius "from 1922." Neither is supportable: the Institute did not open until 1925, and the accessible sources place his arrival in Paris in 1923.]

References

Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (Birth in St. Petersburg to an aristocratic family; emigration after the Civil War; lay status; doctorate at Aix in 1942; postwar direction of refugee centres.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Birth 2 August 1901; father an army officer killed by one of his soldiers; theological study begun before the Revolution; escape from Crimea via Constantinople; settlement in Paris in 1923; study at the Sorbonne and St. Sergius under Bulgakov and Berdyaev.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (Father a colonel killed in 1907 while dealing with a mutiny; mother’s placing him in military school and taking him on monastery retreats; move to Kiev; theological study from 1918; two years in the White Army; flight to Istanbul; night work at Citroën and cleaning railway carriages; degrees from the Sorbonne and St. Sergius.)
Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA). “Paul Evdokimov, theologian,” Famous Refugees image gallery. (Refusal of the Bordeaux post rather than seek French nationality; wish to remain a Russian refugee.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (The fullest English account of the life.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov,” citing Michel Stavrou, “Paul Evdokimov, un témoin du Ressuscité,” La Croix, 18 September 2010. (Birth date old and new style; noble family; flight to Constantinople and Paris; contact with Bulgakov and Berdyaev.)