“The old man's teaching completely took possession of me...”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the circumstances of the creation of Lev Karsavin's work “Spirit and Body”, written by him in Lithuanian in the spring of 1952 in a special camp for political prisoners. The article is also about the history of the translation of this work into Russian. The author's manuscript of this work is kept in the archive of the Vilnius University Library. The translation was discovered by the author of the article in Anatoly Vaneev’s personal archive, a disciple and follower of Karsavin. The author of the work “Spirit and Body” found it necessary to add one more part and called it “The author's conversation on “Spirit and Body” with a positivist and a skeptic. This additional part in the chronology of its appearance in print was more than three decades ahead of the main text of the work. This complementary and clarifying part of the manuscript was published in scientific editions three decades earlier than the main text. The letters found by the author of the article in the personal archives of Anatoly Vaneev and Vladas Shimkunas allowed us to see how, under conditions of strict supervision and restrictions of imprisonment in Komi ASSR, Stanislav Dobrovolskis carried out a line-by-line translation of Karsavin's work, and Vaneev made a philosophical revision of this formal version of the translation. The author of the article also established the authorship of the first Russian translation of the second work, explanatory part in relation to the main text of the work, and another work by Karsavin “On Perfection”. For Russian-speaking researchers of Lev Karsavin's works, both parts of the philosophical diptych acquire meaningful completeness only in their interrelation. The publication of the translation is dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the birth of L.P. Karsavin, the 70th anniversary of his death and the 100th anniversary of the birth of A. A. Vaneev