Lev Karsavin's view of the emigration

Abstract

The article examines L.P. Karsavin's attitude to the Russian emigration in general. By education, by mentality, Karsavin was a Western man. The exile, and before that the revolution, forced him for the first time to think about the specificity of the historical fate of Russia and to comprehend in a different way his own fate as an historian in connection with the tragic events that befell his homeland. Asserting, following Lossky's intuitionism, the unity of subject and object in the process of cognition, Karsavin thereby emphasized that he considers the forced break with the cultural environment that gave rise to him as a fatal groundlessness that doomed his historical research to a certain inevitable part of arbitrariness. Moreover, the central place occupied by self-denial in his conception of time was exacerbated by the influence of exile, and led him to a denial of his past self, especially clearly expressed in his Eurasian works. But unlike many exiles, Karsavin was given to restore real links with his homeland when he got into the camp, when a small audience of loyal friends gathered around him, including Anatoly Vaneev, who preserved his teachings and passed on his legacy to those Russian people who could give it its due resonance.