01 — Life and Formation

The making of Vladimir Lossky: an intellectual household in Petrograd, the expulsion of 1922 that ended Russia for him at nineteen, the Prague interval, and a quarter-century in Paris as a medievalist, a layman of the Moscow Patriarchate, a resistant, and finally the author of the most influential Orthodox book of the century.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What This Section Covers

Two files carry the biography.

The first follows Lossky from his birth at Göttingen in 1903 — his father Nikolai Lossky was then a young philosopher of the St. Petersburg school — through a Petrograd boyhood, two years at the university under Lev Karsavin and Ivan Grevs, the revolution, and the November 1922 deportation of the Russian intelligentsia known as the “philosophers’ ships,” on which the entire Lossky family left Russia forever.

The second follows him from Prague to Paris: the Sorbonne, Étienne Gilson, the medievalist’s training that produced the Eckhart thesis; the Confrérie Saint-Photius and the jurisdictional choice that set him apart from most of the Russian emigration; his marriage; the war, the flight of June 1940, the Occupation and the Resistance; the Institut Saint-Denys; the return to Russia for seventeen days in 1956; and the sudden death in February 1958 at fifty-four.

Both files hold to the repository’s rule for modern biography: what is documented is reported with its source, disagreements between sources are recorded rather than smoothed away, and nothing is inflated.

Files

File Description
Göttingen, Petrograd, and the Philosophers’ Ships Birth, the household of Nikolai Lossky, Petrograd University, Karsavin and Grevs, the execution of Metropolitan Benjamin, and the deportation of November 1922
Paris, Gilson, and the Medievalist’s Training Prague and Kondakov; the Sorbonne and Gilson; the Eckhart thesis; the Confrérie Saint-Photius and the Moscow Patriarchate; marriage and family; the war years; the Institut Saint-Denys; the 1956 journey; death

See Also