Lev (Leo) Platonovich Karsavin (; ; 13 December 1882 – 17 or 20 July 1952) was a Russian religious philosopher, historian-medievalist, and poet.
Biography
Early years
Lev Platonovich Karsavin was born into the family of Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin, a ballet actor at the Mariinsky Theatre, and his wife Anna Iosifovna, née Khomyakova, the daughter of the cousin of Aleksey Khomyakov, a famous Slavophile. He was the brother of the ballerina Tamara Karsavina.
He was a student of Ivan Grevs, graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of Saint Petersburg State University. From 1909 he taught at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology (professor since 1912, inspector since 1914) and at the Bestuzhev Courses. He was the Privatdozent of the Saint Petersburg Imperial University (from 1912), then professor (from 1916).
His Master's thesis is a monograph entitled Essays on religious life in Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries (1912; defended 1913). His doctoral thesis is The foundations of medieval religiosity in the 12th to 13th centuries, mainly in Italy (1915; defended 1916).
He was a member of the Petrograd (1918–1922). He was one of the founding members of the (1919–1924). In 1920, he became one of the founders of the and one of the founders and professors of the . In 1921 he was elected professor of the Social-Pedagogical and Legal Departments of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Petrograd University, and chairman of its Social-Pedagogical Department.
In August 1922 he was arrested and sentenced to exile abroad without the right to return. He was released shortly before the expulsion.
Emigration and Eurasianism
Karsavin was expelled in November 1922, together with a group of forty-five scientific and cultural figures (Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, Ivan Ilyin and others) and their family members to Germany (see Philosophers' ships). In Berlin, he was elected deputy chairman of the Bureau of the Russian Academic Union in Germany, and became one of the organizers and a member of the . He was a co-founder (together with Nestor Kotlyarevsky) of the Obelisk publishing house. From 1926 he lived in Clamart near Paris. Karsavin joined the Eurasian movement: he headed the Eurasian Seminar in Paris and was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Eurasia (1928-1929) and its leading author, he also participated in Eurasian compilations.
Lithuania
At the end of 1927, Karsavin was invited to take up the chair of general history at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. He lived in Kaunas from 1928. From 1928 to 1940, he was professor of general history at the university (from 1929 he taught in Lithuanian). After Lithuania became part of the USSR, he stayed. With the transfer of the university's Faculty of Humanities to Vilnius in 1940, he became a professor at Vilnius University. From 1941, he simultaneously taught at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. For a short time, he worked at the National Museum of Art.
While living in Lithuania, he edited academic publications and published his own books in Russian, On Personality (1929) and A Poem on Death (1931). He also published works in Lithuanian. These included Theory of History (1929), a fundamental five-volume study The History of European Culture (1931–1937), and several dozen articles on medieval philosophy and theology in the encyclopedia Lietuviškoji enciklopedija and magazines.
Arrest and death
In 1944, the Soviet authorities suspended him from teaching at the Vilnius University and fired him from the museum. In 1949, he was fired from the Academy of Arts as well. Karsavin was arrested and accused of "participating in the anti-Soviet Eurasianist movement and preparing to overthrow the Soviet state". In March 1950, he was sentenced to ten years of labour camps by the Ministry of State Security. He died of tuberculosis in the Abez camp, a special camp for the disabled in the settlement of Abez, Komi Republic.
Commemoration
In 1989, the burial place of Lev Karsavin was found in an abandoned camp cemetery near the village of Abez. This happened thanks to the personal archive of the widow of , a disciple of Karsavin, which preserved a photograph at the grave marked П-11, as well as the testimony of former prisoners of the Abez camp. In 1990, the leaders of Sąjūdis in Lithuania had the idea of transferring Karsavin's remains to the capital, but Karsavin's daughters Susanna and Marianna spoke out against the idea. In 1990, Abez resident Viktor Lozhkin installed a cross on the grave, and Lithuanian NGOs erected a monument to the repressed in the form of a torn metal sheet on a pedestal with a tear in the shape of a cross.