Lev Karsavin: Russian Religiosity and Russian Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article examines the unique role of Russian intellectual and émigré Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952) in understanding “Russian communism” as a phenomenon deeply religious in nature. Trained as a historian, specializing in the history of European religiosity, medieval sects, and heresies, the young Karsavin studied the manifold ways in which religious and politics were interwoven. His experience with concrete historical–cultural research helped Karsavin, who became an active figure in Russian Orthodoxy during the First World War, to analyze the origins of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. Finding himself in exile in 1922, Karsavin continued actively developing the theme of the “religious” nature of Russian Bolshevism, believing that this was the only path to overcoming it in the future from an Orthodox Christian standpoint.

KEYWORDS:

• Lev P. Karsavin
• Russia
• philosophy
• religion
• revolution
• Bolshevism
• Orthodoxy
• “Russian northernness.”

Notes

1. See L.P. Karsavin, Monashestvo v Srednie veka (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Brokgauz-Efron, 1912); L.P. Karsavin, Ocherki religioznoi zhizni v Italii XII–XIII vekov (St. Petersburg: tip. M.A. Aleksandrova, 1912); L.P. Karsavin, Osnovy srednevekovoi religioznosti v XII–XIII vekakh, preimushchestvenno v Italii (Petrograd: tip. “Nauchnoe delo,” 1915).

2. O.A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia, “Religioznaia psikhologiia srednevekov’ia v issledovaniiakh russkogo uchenogo,” Russkaia mysl’, 1916, no. 4, p. 22.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

6. K.V. Mochul’skii, “Vladimir Solov’ev. Zhizn’ i uchenie,” in K.V. Mochul’skii, Gogol’. Solov’ev. Dostoevskii (Moscow, 1955), p. 97.

7. Ibid.

8. A.V. Kartashev, “Lev Platonovich Karsavin,” Vestnik RKhD, 1960, nos. 58–59, p. 75.

9. Ibid. In the winter of 1918, after he was freed from Bolshevik prison, Kartashev briefly and illegally lived in Karsavin’s Petrograd apartment.

10. Kartashev, “Lev Platonovich Karsavin,” p. 75. (“Measure the immeasurable”: “ob”iat’ neob”iatnoe,” literally “to embrace (or comprehend) the unembraceable,” i.e., the limitless.—Trans.)

11. Kartashev, “Lev Platonovich Karsavin,” p. 75.

12. I.M. Grevs, “Retsenziia na knigu: Karsavin L.P. Ocherki religioznoi zhizni Italii XII–XIII vekov,” in Lev Platonovich Karsavin, ed. S.S. Khoruzhii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012), p. 97.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 98.

15. Ibid.

16. L.P. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii,” Evraziiskii vremennik, vol. 5 (Paris, 1927), p. 29.

17. Ibid., p. 41.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., p. 29.

20. Ibid., p. 72.

21. L.P. Karsavin, “Religioznaia sushchnost’ bol’shevizma,” in L.P. Karsavin, Izbrannoe, ed. E.L. Petrenko (Moscow: ROSSPEN), p. 200.

22. In this sense, Karsavin’s views come close to the historiosophical concept of “Northernness” developed by the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher P.Ya. Chaadaev, who wrote in his “Philosophical Letters” that Russia “leans with one elbow on China and the other on Germany” (P.Ya. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), p. 329). Chaadaev imagined that “Something enormous hangs over the two-part (East-West) Euro-Asiatic civilized world, with its head … in the North.” (See A.A. Kara-Murza, “‘Severnaia’ identichnost’ Rossii kak predmet tsivilizatsionnoi samokritiki (ot Petra Chaadaeva do Vasiliia Shul’gina),” Filosofskii zhurnal, 2022, vol. 15, no. 2, p. 10.)

23. L.P. Karsavin, “Religioznaia sushchnost’ bol’shevizma,” p. 200. On “Russian northernness,” see A. Kara-Murza, “Gavriil Derzhavin on Russian Civilization: Russia as ‘The North,’” Russian Studies in Philosophy, 2018, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 88–98; A. Kara-Murza, “Boris Pasternak, ‘Winter Man’: On the Cultural Self-Identification of Russian Geniuses,” Russian Studies in Philosophy, 2020, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 300–307; A. Kara-Murza, “Motifs of ‘the North’ in Young Osip Mandelstam’s Philosophical-Poetic Works,” Russian Studies in Philosophy, 2021, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 136–145.

24. Karsavin, “Religioznaia sushchnost’ bol’shevizma,” p. 200.

25. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii,” pp. 72–73. At the same time, Karsavin did not deny Russia’s successes on the path of “Petrine Europeanization”: “National development continued and achieved great success, despite Europeanization. But what it achieved was lesser and not as lasting as it would have been without Europeanization” (emphasis mine).

26. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii,” p. 47.

27. Ibid., p. 47.

28. L.P. Karsavin, “Put’ pravoslaviia,” in Sofiia. Problemy dukhovnoi kul’tury i religioznoi filosofii (Berlin, 1923), p. 59.

29. L.P. Karsavin, “Evropa i Evraziia,” Sovremennye zapiski (Paris, 1923), vol. XV, p. 301.

30. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii,” p. 38.

31. Ibid.

32. See A. Shteinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let (1911–1928) (Paris: Sinktasis, 1991), pp. 194–195.

33. Ibid., p. 194.

34. See L.P. Karsavin, “Vostok, Zapad i russkaia ideia,” in Karsavin, Izbrannoe, p. 47.

35. Karsavin, “Put’ pravoslaviia,” p. 59.

36. L.P. Karsavin, “O sushchnost’ pravoslaviia,” in Karsavin, Izbrannoe, p. 139.

37. M.V. Vishniak, “Opravdanie demokratii,” Sovremennye zapiski, 1923, no. 16, p. 323.

38. Ibid., p. 329.

39. Karsavin, “Religioznaia sushchnost’ bol’shevizma,” p. 192.

40. Ibid., p. 194.

41. Ibid., pp. 194, 195.

42. Ibid., p. 195.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. V. Vaganian, “Uchenyi mrakobes,” Pod znamenem marksizma, 1992, no. 3, p. 45.

46. Ibid.

47. V. Nevskii, “Nostradamusy XX veka,” Pod znamenem marksizma, 1922, no. 4, p. 95.

48. P.F. Preobrazhenskii, “Filosofiia kak sluzhanka bogosloviia,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1922, no. 3, p. 68.

49. The authoritative scholar of Karsavin’s life and work, S.S. Khoruzhii, argued that Karsavin was “fundamentally against the act of emigration” and his expulsion from Russia was “a completely unwelcome event” for him (see S.S. Khoruzhii, “Karsavin i de Mestr,” Voprosy filosofii, 1989, no. 3, p. 80).