Aleksei Losev

For footballer, see Aleksei Anatolyevich Losev.

Aleksei Fedorovich Losev (Russian: Алексе́й Фёдорович Ло́сев) (September 22 [O.S. September 10] 1893, Novocherkassk – May 24, 1988, Moscow), a Russian philosopher, philologist and culturologist, one of the most prominent figures in Russian philosophical and religious thought of the 20th century.

Biography

Losev graduated from two departments—of classical philology and philosophy—of historical-philological faculty of Moscow University in 1915. In 1919, he became a professor of classical philology at the University of Nizhni Novgorod; and then (1920) at the Moscow Conservatory. From 1942 to 1944 he taught in Moscow University and from 1944 on at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute.

In works written in the 1920s, Losev synthesized ideas of Russian philosophy of the early 20th century, of Christian Neo-platonism, dialectics of Schelling and Hegel, and phenomenology of Husserl. In The Dialectics of Myth (1930) Losev rejected dialectical materialism. For his "militant idealism", Losev was sentenced to labor camps at the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal, where he almost lost his vision, and to subsequent exile.

Losev was suddenly released in 1932. After returning to Moscow, he was allowed to pursue his academic career and to teach. Ancient philosophy, myth and aesthetics became his "inner exile": he was able to express his own spiritualist beliefs. He published some 30 monographs between the 1950s and 1970s. With regards to Western philosophy of the time, Losev criticised severely the structuralist thinking.

In the USSR, his works were censored while he was praised as one of the greatest philosophers of the time. He was even awarded the USSR State Prize in 1986 for his 8-volume History of Classical Aesthetics, two years before his death.

Personal life

As a young man Losev proposed to the famous pianist Maria Yudina, but was refused. He subsequently portrayed her in an autobiographical novella in slanderous terms, as a deviant living in fornication with three men.

Losev and his wife Valentina were secretly Orthodox-ordained monks in 1929, and wore hair shirts under their everyday garments. They took monastic names Andronicus and Athanasia.

Controversies

At least three of Losev's publications contain noted misogynistic, Аntisemitic and anti-Judaic passages. In "Essays on Symbolism and Mythology in the Antiquity" Losev writes:

• "Judaism, which is able to combine hysteria, formalism, neurastenia and the Romal law, with robbery, bloody lust and Satanis, with the aid of cold and dry whoring of politico-economical theories".
• "There is no such thing as Woman's Dignity. Similarly there cannot be a notion of Jew's Dignity".
• "A real Jew, like a woman, lacks individuality, and therefore lacks any self-worth. He is not anti-moral, he is amoral. That's the reason he is not afraid of demons". A significant number of other antisemitic citations by Losev (mostly from manuscripts that were not published during Losev's lifetime) are discussed by Sergey Zemlyanoy in his article "Clerico-conservative mythological dysthopia:Alexey Losev"

Konstantin Polivanov suggests that Losev's antisemitic (and thus anti-revolutionary and anti-Marxist) sentiments are likely to derive from Otto Weininger's writings, and they later influenced Stalin's own philosophical development in the direction of Russian Imperial idea that paved the way to the repressions of the 1930s that largely purged Jews from the Soviet government. Leonid Katsis and Dmitry Shusharin similarly accused Losev of complicity in Stalin's repressions.

Bibliography

• Losev, A. F. The dialectics of myth (translated by Vladimir Marchenkov). New York: Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0-415-28467-8.
• Losev, A. F. Twelve theses on antique culture (Translated by Oleg Kreymer and Kate Wilkinson). In Arion, 2003, vol. 11, no. 1.
• Aesthetics of the Renaissance (Эстетика Возрождения. 1978)
• Ancient Cosmos and the Contemporary Science (Античный космос и современная наука. 1927)
• The Dialectics of the Artistic Form (Диалектика художественной формы. 1927)
• Sign, Symbol, Myth (Знак, символ, миф. 1982)
• Vladimir Solovyov (Владимир Соловьев. 1983)
• The History of Classical Aesthetics (История античной эстетики, 8 volumes. 1963–1988)

• Khoruzhii, S.S. A Rearguard Action. In Russian studies in philosophy. Vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2001–2002), pp. 30–68.

Volume 35 of the Russian studies in philosophy was the first volume entirely dedicated to A. F. Losev.

• Kline, George L. Reminiscences of A. F. Losev. In Russian studies in philosophy. Vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2001–2002), pp. 74–82.
• Postovalova, V.I. Christian motifs and themes in the life and works of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev: Fragments of a spiritual biography. In Russian studies in philosophy. Vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2001–2002), pp. 83–92.
• Seifrid, Thomas. The word made self: Russian writings on language, 1860–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005 (ISBN 0-8014-4316-4).
• Gasan Gusejnov. The Linguistic aporias of Alexei Losev's mystical personalism. – Studies in East European Thought (2009) 61: 153–164.

External links

• Losev home page.