Letters from the Far East

Contents Letters from the Far East 1933 1934 “...And let my thoughts develop in you...” The last five years of the earthly journey of P. A. Florensky, a priest who “has not removed his rank,” is a martyr’s way of the cross for a Christian, reminiscent of the way of the cross and the Acts of his Heavenly Patron, the Apostle Paul. The Apostle spent more than four years before his execution in prison and transfers, from where he sent the Epistles that became. part of Holy Scripture. They contain greetings and good wishes to mutual acquaintances, the Apostle’s joy for the successes of the disciples, concern for their health, physical and mental: “Until I come, engage in reading, instruction, teaching” (I Tim. 4:13 “From now on, drink more than just water, but use a little wine, glad for your stomach and your frequent ailments” (I Tim. 5:23). Between the lines is concern about books: “When “You will go, bring the phelonion that I left in Troas with Carpus, and books, especially leather books” (2 Tim. 4:12). “Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ…” begins the Apostle’s letter to Philemon (Phil. 1:1). “Prisoners of Jesus Christ” were quite recently and filled the prisons and camps with tens of thousands of lay people, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops. In addition to letters and interrogation reports, the defendant P. A. Florensky wrote in prison the work “Proposed State Structure in the Future” 1, reminiscent of Capanella’s “City of the Sun”, also created in the dungeon after torture. P. A. Florensky was repressed in “Case No. 2886 about k. – j nationalist fascist organization,” allegedly calling itself the “Party of the Revival of Russia.” In the case, in the judicial conclusion, P. A. Florensky comes first: “Florensky Pavel Aleksandrovich, professor of theology, minister of cult (priest), a native of a noble noble family, an extreme right-wing monarchist by political convictions, author of printed works on theology, in which his monarchical convictions are openly expressed (“Defense of the Divine”, “Pillar and Establishment of Truth”, etc.). In 1928, he was arrested by the OGPU and sentenced as an active participant in the church-monarchist organization to 3 years. Since 1928, a researcher at the VEI. Ideologist and hand driver of the center k. – r. organization, in the past was a member of the k.-r. "Platonov's organization". In the above “objective”, much is correct, except for the existence of k. - r. organizations and noble nobility. The GPU included people who did not even know each other into the “Party for the Revival of Russia”. Nevertheless, the existence of the organization was recognized by all those under investigation. The real reason for the arrest was “failure to defrock oneself.” The Higher Will, as Florensky conventionally called God in his censored letters, was predetermined that he would not remove his rank and would not renounce. Unlike many other martyrs for the faith, he was not faced with such a choice. Long before his arrest, on April 11, 1919, in Sergiev Posad, he was given the responsibility of secret service to the Church. If we speculatively combine the places where P. A. Florensky visited: Germany, where he traveled as a child, the Far East - the beginning of the Way of the Cross, Transcaucasia, where he was born and turned to God, and, finally, the Solovetsky special purpose camp, you will get a cross. And if you mentally lift it, leaning it on the foundation - the Far East, then the resting place of a Christian will be designated, facing the east, so that, standing on the day of the Last Judgment, you will see the cross as a sign of the Resurrection and the cross - an imprint of earthly life. And at the intersection of the lines, where the heart is, Sergiev Posad will be the place of heroism. Calculating the years of life of P. A. Florensky according to the law of the Golden Section, we obtain the first special point (term of P. A. Florensky. - Ed.): 1900 - turn of the century. The main special point was 1918/1919: the martyrdom of the Emperor, the end of old Russia. So, the convergence of the main node in time and the main point in space - Sergiev Posad, 1918/1919. Soon after the victory of the October Revolution, a campaign of atheists began to “reveal the relics” of the Pleasers of God: the holy relics of many were destroyed. It was necessary to preserve at least a small part of them from desecration and destruction as the basis for future church construction. The discovery of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh was also announced in April 1919, on the eve of Lazarus Saturday, before Holy Week. Therefore, with the blessing of the abbot of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, Archimandrite Kronid, members of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra - priest Pavel Florensky and Count Yuri Aleksandrovich Olsufiev, Sergei Pavlovich Mansurov and Mikhail Vladimirovich Shik (who later became priests), perhaps also Count Vladimir Alekseevich Komarovsky secretly went to the Trinity Cathedral, They opened the shrine with the relics and reverently took the Head of the Reverend, placing in its place the head of Prince Trubetskoy, buried in the Lavra. A vertebra was attached to the Head of the Reverend, and it was separated with a liturgical object - a copy. The mark from the copy and from the attached vertebra is evidence of what happened. The participants bound themselves to a vow of silence and kept the secret strictly for decades. The shrine was initially located in the sacristy of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. By decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of April 20, 1920, the Lavra was closed. Therefore, Yu. A. Olsufiev moved the Head from the sacristy to his house on Valovaya Street, and the remaining relics were on display in the museum until the end of the Great Patriotic War... In the spring of 1928, in Sergiev Posad, mass arrests of the “former” took place, when both P. A. Florensky and Yu. A. Olsufiev’s niece E. P. Vasilchikova were arrested. The head in an oak casket was buried in the garden of the Olsufievs' house. In 1937, a new wave of arrests began, and the Olsufievs left Sergiev Posad. The chapter was moved to the vicinity of the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery, near the Lyubertsy station. Pave. Alexandrovich Golubtsov (later Archbishop of Novgorod and Starorussky Sergius). After demobilization, he moved the Heads to Moscow, to the house of Ekaterina Pavlovna Vasilchikova, the niece of Yu. A. Olsufiev. On April 21, 1946, on Easter, the opening of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra took place. When the relics of St. Sergius were returned to the Church from the museum, E. P. Vasilchikov also returned the Head. With the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy G, the shrine was placed in place. “I took... blows for you, that’s what I wanted and that’s what I asked for the Supreme Will,” wrote P. A. Florensky to his wife and children (18. GN. 1934). He also suffered for preserving the Secret. He protected one of the few undefiled shrines of Russia. Perhaps this was the church service entrusted to him in the main place and at the main moment of his earthly path. Perhaps this gave strength to endure what was happening and. internal right to outwardly move away from church affairs into science and technology, to come to terms, on the one hand, with those who condemned him for this departure, and on the other, with those who attributed his participation in the revolution. organization: he really violated the requirements of the authorities, protecting the shrine. In the light of what has been said, the actions of P. A. Florensky become more understandable, especially in the last years of his life. Priest Pavel Floresky spent 57 and a half months in the prison camp through the looking glass, from February 26, 1933 to December 8, 1937. These periods (camp terms) are divided by special points of the Golden Ratio. The first special point is the happiest and at the same time one of the most difficult events in the camp biography: the arrival in July-August 1934 of Anni Mikhailovna with her three youngest children - Olya, Mika and Tika - in Skovorodino, the last meeting and, in fact, farewell to the family. On the eve of their departure, convict Florensky was taken by convoy to Svobodny, and then on September 1, 1934, he was sent to Solovki. The main special point of the Way of the Cross was June 7, 1936 - a real sign of continuation of the family, the birth of the first grandson named after him, the first of twelve. Perhaps P. A. Florensky also knew about the expectation of the second - Ivan, born on November 30, 1937. Letters from the camps represent an extremely solid and complete work. Compositionally, as a literary work, they have a pronounced plot, a slowly developing plot and a tragic ending. However, a classical literary work, by definition, is a thing in itself, with its own space-time, not addressed to anyone, not intended for anyone, which lives on its own, has clear boundaries, it begins and ends. Correspondence is part of real life, in living space and time, which have no end, no beginning, no boundaries. When 60 years have passed since the last letter was written, the specificity of the space-time of letters and their foreignness in reality are unnoticeable. However, with its flickering instability, the correspondence gives the impression of a living organism, which is characteristic of true works of art. And the absence of contours makes it look not like one organism, but like the biosphere or a piece of it—a biotopstation—a forest, an ocean, a savannah with herds, a swarm of bees or an anthill. Such a comparison is not accidental: P. A. Florensky himself called his thinking organic or round and, perhaps, outlined its specifics in the most detail in the introduction of “Paths and Centers” to his fundamental work “At the Watersheds of Thought”: “The structure of such mental tissue is not linear, not a chain, but a mesh, with countless nodes of individual thoughts in pairs, so that from any starting point of this network, having made one or another roundabout and having captured along the way any combination of other thoughts, moreover, in any or almost any sequence, we return to it” 2. The understanding of the unity and complete perfection of the correspondence became especially clear in the final stages of preparing the letters for printing. Until now, we have published several letters and saw that they did not become excerpts, pieces from the text, but, on the contrary, organized a surprisingly harmonious composition: one, three, five—and each time the publication left a feeling of completed material. Correspondence without cuts or abbreviations makes a special impression. Integrity both in style and in the development from letter to letter of individual plots, right down to phenological observations, and even in the unity, as in classical drama, of place, time and action. Its integrity is also in the complex system of mentions of people and concepts, which is so noticeable when compiling notes and an index. And similar or the same thoughts, repeated to different addressees, at different times and in different contexts, give the text a heterophonic structure, characteristic of the polyphony of Russian folk songs. This is “complete freedom of all voices, “composing” them with each other, as opposed to subordination.” “It is not the relation to the immediate preceding and immediately subsequent statements that motivates the given, but the relation of this latter to the whole, as is generally the case in all living things, while the property of a mechanism is to have parts that depend only on the nearest adjacent ones directly connected to it” 3 Correspondence is like a fabric, the basis of which is made up of seven threads - the recipients: mother, wife and five children, and on the basis lies a weft that continuously curls from a shuttle, like Parka's yarn - a thread that passes from one letter to another, from addressee to addressee. Its thickness changes, colors vary, and the fabric turns out to be denser, sometimes less dense, colored with different meanings and contents. Fragments can be pulled out of the fabric of correspondence. Thus, the poem “Oro” and the algae problem were prepared. And they turned out to be compositionally harmonious structures, but they have a solid beginning - a foundation, structure and a natural, but formally unfinished ending. However, in general, the correspondence has a tragic ending, right down to summing up the results and the painful desire to convey as much as possible to the children in the remaining pages. Such close attention to the composition of letters is not accidental. In letters to his children, P. A. Florensky emphasized that one can understand a work only by discovering the law of its composition. The text, divided into separate fragments connected by consonances and echoes of themes, is generally characteristic of Florensky. This is how, for example, the work “At the Watersheds of Thought” and the famous “Pillar and Ground of Truth” are constructed. In the latter case, a remarkable clarification is given in the subtitle - “The Experience of Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters” 4. Sometimes letters modified by Fr. Paul, turned into chapters of his works. For example, the introduction “On Makovets” to the work “At the Watersheds of Thought” grew out of a letter to V.V. Rozanov 5 Many works by Fr. Paul's works are essentially letters; they are filled with intimate inner light, playing on the edges of the composition, and are addressed to the reader-friend. Florensky’s word is a symbol, that is, it is always something else. This “something” must be revealed, and revealed to those who, to one degree or another, are similar to the author in their worldview - hence the appeal to the individual, the person, and not to the average individual, the abstract public. Therefore, we can expect that the central symbol of a particular period of life, which shapes its specific deep intuition, will not be felt immediately in correspondence and will only subsequently take shape, connecting with past and present experience, becoming saturated with a variety of overlapping, complementary meanings. The last period of P. A. Florensky’s work can only be judged by letters from the camps. Therefore, the features of the composition of the correspondence, on the one hand, and the network of the most important symbols characteristic of this stage of creativity, on the other, are so important for understanding Florensky’s entire life. In the 30s, Florensky existed in the man-crushing space-time of the Gulag, where remaining oneself meant preserving and strengthening one’s inner space-time, resisting destruction. Even earlier, in his memoirs addressed to children, P. A. Florensky wrote that since childhood he had been thinking about the problem of the symbol 6. Therefore, the internal, deeply hidden features of the correspondence can be grasped by identifying the symbols in which Florensky’s experience was extremely focused, and the paths to their design in his mind. His stay in the Far East was one of the brightest, tragically happy periods in the life of P. A. Florensky. “In general, lately I have been so tired of Moscow and work has been going so frantically that if it weren’t for the constant worry about you, I probably wouldn’t have any objections to staying here,” wrote Fr. Pavel to his wife (12–16. XI. 3Z). Upon arrival at the Panyorinsky Experimental Permafrost Station, Florensky was able to use his assumptions and the experience of previous work in materials science and electrical engineering to uncover the phenomenon of permafrost. Most importantly, it turned out to be possible to touch the permafrost closely both in laboratory experiments and during observations in nature. Permafrost was revealed as a mystery—attractive, exciting, exciting. It was this sense of mystery that Florensky valued most. It testified to the accuracy of getting into one or another focus of converging and diverging paths and thereby gave support to his thought and responded to it. A lot was done in a short period of time: experiments, articles, reports, expeditions. The abundance of Florensky’s plans that never came to fruition is striking. The creative upsurge was so great that after a long break, he again began to speak in poetry. Here the poem “Oro” was born, which Fr. Pavel dedicated it to his youngest son Mika 7 However, from the letters of that time one can feel how close much was still connected with Moscow, with work at VEI - the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute. Florensky transmits orders for former employees at the institute and takes care of publications. He has not yet fallen out of the thick of Moscow affairs and concerns, from the bustling Moscow space. In the Far East, after a tragic break, he seemed to have partially returned to the same activities as in the capital. When, after the hardships of the stage, Florensky gets the opportunity to do research, in the first letter, where Fr. Pavel mentions permafrost, speaks of the “extreme importance” of studying it “for all areas of the national economy and for the general understanding of the world”: “Even at the present moment, although I have not started working, I imagine some practical consequences of this work, the use of permafrost in the field of the electrical industry, which may. very important with the upcoming electrification of the region” (28. ХІ. ЗЗ). There was a recognition of a loved one, a recollection, to use Plato’s term. Permafrost is still something external, and only in one phrase to my son Mick is something completely different visible. He writes to the boy about very beautiful ice waterfalls, “like in the Sleepy Kingdom” (27.11.33). And this is what the permafrost looks like four months later. We are talking about the structure of ice just in a small frozen pond: “The result was fabulous caves made of the purest crystal ice, radiant ice, fibrous, white ice, and below – red-brown, but completely transparent […]. I can’t describe how beautiful it is, nor can I draw it. Someday you will see a series of sketches of columns and other details, but these sketches do not even remotely convey the beauty of these caves. I doubt that the artist will be able to convey it truly; this is too difficult a task. The best thing to do is read fairy tales. But even this is weak: “Before him, in the sad darkness, a crystal coffin sways, and in that crystal coffin the princess sleeps in a dead sleep.” How small, how poor, compared to the pond we found in a pond with a diameter of only 8 meters and a depth of 1.60 m, i.e. not far from a puddle” (8.IV.34). Permafrost lives on ice, “gets close” to human habitation, “gradually conquers territories and quickly grows in breadth and height.” Permafrost is symbolic, it is not only permafrost, but also something else, it is fraught with many other meanings. Consonance of the internal structure of Fr. Pavel is surprised by the mystery of permafrost and clearly testifies to some deep intuition of Florensky, for the expression of which permafrost was a very precise symbol. Lines that long preceded Skovorodino were written about this in the work “At the Watersheds of Thought,” on which Florensky worked in 1917–1922: “In the primary intuitions of philosophical thinking about the world, first boilings, rotations, vortices, whirlpools arise - they are not characterized by rational planning, and it would be false to disguise them as a system, unless in fact such is always a vaticinium post eventum 8, broadcasting after the thought event itself; but, not being orderly distributed, countably folded, these effervescences of thought, this urgently needed, for they are the very origins of life. It is from them that solid theses are subsequently frozen out - it is necessary to study the emerging whirlpools of thought as they really are, in their immediate echoes, in their frank pre-scientific, pre-systematic nature" 9 The element of water symbolically expresses the intuition underlying the work “At the Watersheds of Thought,” the very name of which is connected with water. In the foreground are the boiling thoughts on which the author’s gaze is fixed, only then do “solid theses”, crystals of thought, crystallize (“freeze out”) from them. It is about crystallinity, crystallization that Florensky often speaks in his camp letters on a variety of occasions: “I remember my and your childhood, childhood experiences, and I feel how holistically everything is crystallizing, probably isomorphic crystallization” (12.V.35). “What is absorbed at this age will become […] a form of world perception, the seeds of crystallization of all subsequent experience” (17. X. 36). It would be naive to expect from Fr. Paul provides literal explanations regarding these changes, but it is not difficult to read about them in the introduction to the poem “Oro”, written already on Solovki: After the deadline, a new deadline slides. But I knew: I shouldn’t grumble. As links of internal victories. Humbling myself again and again, I froze the blood in my veins, Walled up in an ice hummock. So thoughts are a fiery surf, Cooled down, chained by itself. The first, direct way the permafrost revealed itself to Florensky was through its internal sculpturality and architectonics. His letters contain drawings depicting various ice formations. The description of the photograph sent explains how a complex “force field” configuration is formed into a visible image, reflecting the characteristics of ice crystallization. Florensky himself is amazed at the richness and diversity of ice formations and writes an article about it. In the permafrost o. Pavel saw a symbol of the region that had become so close to his heart. Moreover, permafrost symbolizes not only the nature of the Far East, but also nature in general. Nature, to which a person turns and which can respond to this appeal both favorably and destructively if a person destroys it: “The gold hidden in the permafrost turns into a golden fire, destroying the property of the Orochons - the taiga and the moss that disperses the game - the source of their life” 10. The next layer of Florensky’s impressions is his acquaintance with the people of the permafrost region - the Orochons. He writes a lot about them and even at first calls the poem “Orochons.” Florensky dreams of creating a grammar and dictionary of the Orochon language and persistently asks to send him a dictionary and grammar of the Tungus language. In one of his letters, he admits that he feels close to the Orochons’ way of thinking. He is close to their deep connection with nature and ancient beliefs. In the permafrost, Florensky saw a symbol in which three channels of his activity, three areas of his interests merged. In the preface to the poem, he writes this, explaining the purpose of the poem: “Permafrost as a triple symbol - nature, people and personality.” In what way did he see this unity? “Permafrost is destroyed when it begins to be “inhabited” and “developed.” Hence the “don’t touch the permafrost” of the Orochons. But the same is about the soul. Covered by permafrost, bitterness, grievances and sad observations of the past lurk in it. But there is no need to delve into its depths. Frozen vigor gives the strength to cope with the destructive forces of chaos" 11. Permafrost turns out to be such a capacious symbol that it holds back the forces of chaos with its crystal sculptures. Florensky's attitude towards the forces of chaos is antinomic. On the one hand, they must be restrained so that “bitterness and resentment” do not surface; on the other hand, it is in these forces of chaos that the source, the original element of creativity lies. Without passions, a person ceases to be a person, but passions must be overcome by humility. The weight of the experience and the long-standing attitude towards chaos, which is also good, are combined in the image of permafrost. It was she who turned out to be close to Florensky’s worldview. “Permafrost is Hellenism,” Florensky writes in the preface to the poem, and later, from Solovki, explains to Kirill: “...You don’t notice (I believe the author is to blame for this) the cheerful tone given by the size and rhythm, and the cheerful ideology, which is revealed in overcoming the opposite worldview, and not in simply not noticing everything that can weaken the spirit and lead to despondency. This is the ancient Hellenic understanding of life, tragic optimism. Life is not all holiday and entertainment, there is a lot of ugly, evil, sad and dirty in life. But, knowing all this, one must have harmony before one’s inner gaze and try to realize it” (7. XI 1.35). In the Far Eastern letters one can see another, hidden from the censor, the most important meaning of the multifaceted symbolism of permafrost: “All this time I suffered for you and wanted and asked that it be harder for me, if only you were spared from grief, so that the burden of life would fall on me instead of you” (23–24. III.34). Chaos in Florensky’s worldview is the basic law of the world, the law of entropy, but Chaos is opposed by Logos-ectropy, which fights against world equalization. Creativity itself, not enlightened by the Logos, can be destructive. In Florensky’s Far Eastern letters, the Logos comes to the fore primarily as the Highest Will; permafrost is also a symbol of the volitional principle standing above the world, the Highest Will, whose Name is God. Ho, dressed in snow and light, Above the chain of Tukuringra mountains. In the permafrost o. Paul saw the unity of many things he had worked on in his life. The most diverse channels of his thoughts were united in this focus. And Florensky’s enthusiasm was so great that in the preface to the poem there was a further biography of his hero, which, apparently, was also intended for Mick’s son. O. Pavel already felt the presence of children nearby: “We are making broad plans for expanding the OMC (Experimental Permafrost Station. - Ed.) and its work. It is planned to publish (albeit in glass form for now) the “Compulsory Medical Insurance Bulletin”, create various courses, and organize a museum. If the latter happens, then we will mobilize everyone, including Mika and Tika, to collect collections. In general, work here is in full swing and should be even more in full swing in the future. The phenomena with which we have to deal are so little studied that every day brings something new, unknown in literature and explaining natural phenomena” (8.1 V. 34). And now Mick himself, with his mother and two sisters, Olya and Tika, find themselves in the region of permafrost, to visit their father. The scenario of Opo's future life remained a bare scheme that did not take on flesh. The poem was not finished, although Florensky worked on it for several more years. The forces of chaos, breaking out, broke everything in their path: “Everyone has their own grief and their own cross. Therefore, do not complain about yours. During this time, I saw so much grief around me in all kinds and for all sorts of reasons that my own was distracted by this” (111/23–24/34, to wife). Staying on Solovki was different from life in the Far East. It became nothingness. What could be harder for a person whose whole meaning of life was “to be closer to the life of the world,” to joyfully be surprised by the reality of the world and affirm it? Everything stopped instantly. On the way to Solovki Fr. Pavel barely managed to give news to his family: “Upon arrival (in Kem. - Ed.) he was robbed in the camp during an armed attack and sat under three axes […]. Everything is going hopelessly hard, but there’s no point in writing” (13. X. 34). Everything turned out to be difficult, not only because of the very conditions of camp life on Solovki. The essence of this sense of self lay much deeper. Contemplation of nature has always given Fr. Pavel feels inner peace, but with the world of Solovki, not only human, but even natural, Florensky cannot find intimacy in any way. He notes with some surprise: “I feel deep indifference to these ancient walls...” (14. ХІІ.34). The ghostliness, unreality of Solovki, the randomness of their composition—this theme comes up again and again in letters. The first feeling from Solovki is chaos, human and natural: “...the local nature, despite the views that cannot but be called beautiful and unique, repels me: the sea is not a sea, but something either dirty white or black-gray, stones all brought by glaciers, hills, hills themselves, alluvial, from glacial debris, in general, everything is not indigenous, but came from outside, including people. This randomness of the landscape, when you understand it, is depressing, as if you are in a clogged room. So are people; all contacts with people are random, superficial and not determined by any deep internal motives. Just as the crystalline rocks that make up boulders are interesting in themselves, but become uninteresting in their isolation from the underlying deposits, so the local people, who are significant in themselves and on average much more significant than those living in the wild, are uninteresting precisely because they were brought from the outside, today here, and tomorrow they will find themselves in another place” (14. XII. 34). In the chaos of the Solovetsky camp it is difficult to find oneself, there is nothing to cling to, nothing to find support in: “Not for a minute, neither day nor night, you are not left alone, and even at least among silent people. In the streams of words, you cannot find your own word that I would like to say to you,” writes Florensky to his wife (16.1.36). The lines about natural and human chaos, the chaos of the landscape once generated by the movement of a glacier, are a remark not only from a person who found himself in the camp against his own will, but also from a natural scientist, an observer of nature. However, further the feeling from Solovki, their nature and the camp itself is already balancing on the brink of reality. The motif of the ghostliness of the island, life in the camp as a dream, the emptiness, although completely filled, sounds more and more often: “... everything here is somehow empty, as if in a dream, and I’m not even quite sure that it really exists, and is not seen as a dream” (24–25.1.35). “...The weather here is so vile that it determines the whole mood. Sulfur, dim, the sun rarely shines, and when it shines, it’s liquid and ghostly […] What’s the difference with the light-filled Far East (Far East - Ed.), where the light is tight and elastic, where everything is filled with light, both in summer and winter” (25. V.35). In a world where the sun and stars are not visible for a long time, what is happening seems unreal, a feeling of physical emptiness arises: “Do you remember “A Trip Around the Moon” by Jules Verne? That’s how I feel, especially in these last days: as if I’m flying in a core among airless spaces, cut off from all living things, and I only remember you incessantly...” (2.V.35). The feeling of emptiness is aggravated by the abundance of things to do. He is at work day and night, teaching mathematics classes, participating in the production of local newspapers, etc., and all this in order to distract himself, forget himself, and think less about his loved ones, whom he cannot help but think about. But because of this “fullness” of day and night, time itself turns out to be as empty as the airless (soulless!) “completely filled” space. “My life is monotonous, one day is like another, or rather, I have lost the rhythm of days and nights and all the time it stretches in one continuous and uninterrupted strip” (24. ХІІ.36). Life has lost its rhythm (only occasionally did Florensky manage to catch it again for a short time), and therefore time turns out to be not internally inherent in activity, as Florensky usually thought of it, but as an external foreign shell. That is why Florensky speaks, for example, about the cluttering of time with petty work and vanity. In other words, activity in this space-time is fragmented, almost devoid of purpose, “all in small lines and dots, painstaking and poorly formed.” Paradoxically, in this monotonous, rhythmless life, time does not exist, because time, conceived by Florensky everywhere in unity with space, has a form, presupposes direction, and in activity - goal-setting. Referring to the Schellingian difference between the concepts of Geschichte and Historie, Florensky sadly complains that what he received was not Historie, a sequence of “events that unfold some immanent plan, an idea,” but Geschichte—“simply being (Werden), a sequence of events not directed in a certain direction.” In the latter case, there is precisely no perception of time: “So, I live in Geschichte in prehistoric time...” (24. ХІІ.36). This period really echoes the emptiness of Solovki. The work in Skovorodino, which Florensky remembers and yearns for, remains that bright, frosty, invigorating trace in life, behind which the pain of the 20s seemed to be forgotten, frozen into the frozen state of his soul. But in the “Dedication” of the poem “Oro” to his son Miku, the pain is suddenly revealed again: You saw the light, poor Mick, When I was saved in a dark moment. Your father only lived by running away, Walled up among the graves— Soul graves. Can I name Otherwise, a mental hospital? Tat Stood empty. I got to them. There the air was thick at night Scraps of decayed bodies - Faceless passions, all alive; There the groan of the sufferers did not subside, Although he has already changed the darkness to the darkness of the doctor's prison. In these lines the space of memory, the space of the soul appears visibly. The author is at the same time the owner of the space, or rather, the space is himself, and at the same time he is the one describing this space, contemplating it, wandering in it and wandering through it. The “Dedication” mentions the period that accompanied the birth of Mick (1921) and the subsequent years (“not two, not five”), that is, the very time that began to fade into oblivion for Fr. Pavel on Solovki (“I remember the past like a dream...”). The study of permafrost was the concrete basis for the existence of P. A. Florensky’s farm in the Far East, which was illuminated by his friendship with Pavel Nikolaevich Kapterev. Algae played a similar role on Solovki, the occupation of which was connected with friendship with Roman Nikolaevich Litvinov. Algae, their iodine smell, the aroma of the sea accompanied P. A. Florensky’s childhood in Batum: “I spent my childhood and adolescence years in constant and insatiable, and always insatiable, contemplation of the sea...” “...B the smell of algae, even a bottle of iodine tincture, I smell that metaphysical sea, as I hear its surf in the oncoming and receding rhythms Bach’s fugues and preludes and in the dry ringing noise of stirred heat,” Florensky wrote in 1920–1923. 12 Later, iodine treatment was popular in the Florensky family. “I’m sitting entirely in seaweed. Experiments on algae, algae production, lectures and reports on the same algae, algae inventions, conversations and excitement - all about the same thing, from morning to night and from night almost until morning. Life develops as if there was nothing in the world except algae” (11/23/1936). The letters are not only accompanied by descriptions of experiments and technological experiments, production secrets, but also include discussions on the ecology of algae, vivid descriptions of trips to the islands (business trips) associated with their collection, etc. And what is most unexpected is that color watercolor and pencil drawings appear in them. There are quite a lot of them. At first glance, these drawings seem to have been taken from a good botanical atlas. There is a general view and enlarged fragments of parts of the plant with an exact indication of the scale; on the back of the sheets there is a detailed description of the species. Of course, Florensky tried to instill in children a taste and attention to concreteness, to give them examples of scientific activity not only in the text of letters, but also in drawings. As in the case of the permafrost phenomenon, the role of these drawings is by no means exhausted by what has been said. Later, having lost the opportunity to draw, in one of his last letters, Florensky sadly recalls the inner peace that the process of drawing gave him. In the same period, Florensky reflects on the essence of poetic creativity: “Poetry is thinking in concrete images, which, however, are subject not to the logical law of inverse proportionality of volume and content, but to the dialectical law of direct proportionality of volume and content, that is, the essence of ideas. The semantic meaning of the image is greater than its visual and sensory content. This means that the image of poetry is by its very nature a symbol (any reality that is greater than itself). Poetry gives semantic meaning in specific images, and the more specific it is, that is, the more valuable the poet is, the more creative he is. In other words, the more poetic the statement is, the less it moves away from the concrete image, but at the same time revealing its semantic meaning more fully. The highest level of poetry is the direct contemplation of an image in its entirety, meditation on a rose, for example, that is, when the image is presented with all its sensual power. But this is poetry “for oneself”. Literary poetry m.b. then when the image is reconstructed in words” (29. ХІ.1935). It is these words that most fully explain the meaning of the drawings, with the only difference being that in the latter the image was reconstructed with line and color. Florensky's speculations received plastic expression. In the drawings of algae, the beauty of embodiment is combined with scientific rigor. What gives Florensky strength in the non-existence of Solovki? First, a feeling appears—a reflection, a thought that sows the germ of hope. It appears almost simultaneously with the emerging attitude towards Solovki as something illusory, unreal: “My only hope is for the preservation of everything that is being done: in some way, although unknown to me, I hope you will still receive compensation for everything that I deprived you, my dear ones,” he writes to his son Kirill (24–25.1.35). Again and again in letters to Fr. Pavel repeats his cherished feeling—hope, which connects together many things that he has changed his mind about, that he has experienced and felt over the many years of Solovkov: “...my most cherished feeling is that nothing goes away completely, nothing is lost, but somewhere and somehow it is stored. Value remains, although we cease to perceive it. And the exploits, even if everyone has forgotten about them, somehow remain and bear fruit. That’s why, although I feel sorry for the past, there is a living sense of its eternity. I didn’t say goodbye to him forever, but only temporarily. It seems to me that all people, no matter what their beliefs, in fact, deep down in their souls, feel the same way. Without this, life would become meaningless and empty” (6–7.IV.35). The premonition of Eternity through “the past has not passed” is the tuning fork by which many of the themes of thoughts and feelings of Fr. Paul on Solovki. This feeling is most clearly revealed in thoughts about clan, family, and indirectly, in certain formalized reasoning, and quite literally, symbolically, in dreams. These are primarily dreams about children, brothers and sisters. I dream of deceased loved ones, and Fr. Paul is amazed at how real these dreams are. The images of the dead are felt much more strongly than many still living, they are felt from the inside (and not externally, like images “from literature”). Brothers and sisters dream of being small, at the same age as their own children. In the same dreams, the father or mother of Fr. himself is often present. Pavel. From letters to children: “Quite often I see the little one (that’s what Florensky calls his grandson in his letters. - Ed.) in a dream, under the protection of his father” (17. X. 36). “I saw my mother with the little ones, and the images of my brothers and sisters when they were little merged with yours at the same age” (8-9.1.37). Perhaps only one dream, described by Florensky, seems completely unusual, but this unusualness is seen as an ominous omen: “... then I find myself on a strange island called Chaika. It turns out that this is really a giant seagull, and people live on its entrails, and at times it grabs them with its beak and swallows them, then they return to their place or disappear altogether” (11/23/37). The study of the genus is a specific examination; memories are, first of all, careful introspection. In both cases, they are based on the deep intuition of the inseparability of oneself and the clan, felt by Florensky in his youth. However, this sensation has never before achieved such piercing clarity, evidence and certainty of direct knowledge given by revelation. It was this that provided support in the airless space of Solovki. The feeling of the unity of the race leads to reflections on the relativity of the boundaries of personality and memories of those moments of life when this feeling was most acute, pierced space and preceded time. The first memory is associated with the death of his father, whom P. A. Florensky visited in Tiflis during his illness. When, according to the doctors, the danger had passed, he returned to Sergiev Posad, where he was studying at that time: “Once I was sitting in my room, at a large table in front of the window. It was still light. I am writing. Somehow I lost consciousness of where I was, I forgot that I was far from Tiflis and that I had grown up. Next to me, on the left, dad sits and looks attentively, as was often the case when I was in high school, and says nothing. It was so familiar to me that I didn’t pay much attention, I just felt good. Suddenly I realized that I was not in Tiflis, but in Posad, I raised my head and looked at dad. I see him quite clearly. He looked at me, apparently waiting for me to understand that it was him and that this was surprising, and when he was convinced, suddenly his image turned pale, as if faded, and disappeared - did not leave, did not blur, but began to very quickly lose reality, like a weakened photograph. A few hours later I received a telegram informing me of the death of my father” (4–5. VII.36). The second memory is about a premonition of my wife and children: “I remember the slightest details of the past, about each of you separately. About how I waited for Vasyushka, 3 years before his birth, how I felt that he was already somewhere, although I myself did not know where or how. When he was just born, he looked at me and it was clear that he recognized me. But it was only a few moments, and then the consciousness of the gaze disappeared […]. I remember how I felt Kirill on the train, when I was going home and talking with one young Ryazan resident. I felt you in the summer of 1905, when I was returning from Tiflis and, having caught the wrong train, drove off to the side, so I had to disembark at a small station and wait the whole day for my train in the fields and meadows. It was August 15th. I felt Olechka as coming, as going in place of Vali, Mika as going in place of Misha, and Tikulka as on her own, as my consolation […]. I remember once taking Vasya for a walk in the evening. We were walking along the fence to Bethany and suddenly I was struck by the feeling that I was not me, but my father, and Vasya was me and that it was repeating how my father led me.” And again a touch to Eternity: “I feel all of you within me, as a part of myself, and I cannot look at you from the outside […]. Dear Annulya, the past has not passed, but persists and abides forever, but we forget it and move away from it, and then, under circumstances, it opens up again as the eternal present. Like one poet of the 17th century. wrote: Die Rose, dein aibeg Auge Sieht, Sie ist von Ewigkeit in Gott gebluht “The rose that your outer eye sees, it has blossomed in God from eternity” (2.VI.35). “The past has not passed away, it persists forever somewhere and somehow continues to be real and active. I feel this at every step, the memories stand before my eyes as clear and distinct pictures. And the boundaries are lost, where is my father, where am I, where are you all, where is the little one. The boundaries of personality seem clear only in books, but in reality everything and everyone is so closely intertwined that the separation is only approximate, with continuous transitions from one part of the whole to another. And now, although I am far from you, I am with you always” (22–24 XI.36). In the ghostliness of Solovki, when everything around us is seen as a dream, non-existence, where nature itself seems ghostly, only the memory of childhood, family, and one’s own kind is truly real. Where there is inseparability, there is also non-fusion. On the one hand, there is the conventionality of the boundaries of personality, the feeling of one’s children being part of oneself, one’s “continuation and expansion”; on the other hand, there is a feeling of their otherness, the irreplaceability and uniqueness of each. This feeling is so strong and deep that, as Fr. Pavel, outside question “How many children?” remains unanswered, because “how many and many arise where units are replaceable (this is their homogeneity). And each of the children is irreplaceable and unique, and therefore there are neither many nor few; they are countless” (10–11. XII.36). “Everyone’s heart hurts in its own way,” wrote Fr. Paul. But the boundary of the race and humanity, overcome consciously, is deeply felt internally: “... for the highest human. there is simply no consciousness of “others,” that is, of someone standing outside of me, opposing me, for the Self expands to all being and finds itself in everything. This is for higher consciousness. And for our average one, children are not “others,” but the same “I” (10–11. XII. 36). And yet sometimes the generic feeling overcomes itself without dissolving into the desolation of abstract humanity. This happens when others see their own children, or an internal dialogue is established with those who are similar in nature, regardless of their presence in time and space. Faraday, Vernadsky, Mozart, Pushkin, Tyutchev, entering the mainstream of the thoughts of Florensky and his children, become, as it were, members of his family, but the kinship here is already different - it is a kinship in spirit. Above the ghostly world of Solovki, streams of correspondence take shape as a single space of experience, one’s own experience and the experience of children, based on that saving intuition of the unity of the race that gave strength to Fr. Paul to overcome non-existence. The tragic irreversibility of time is realized by Florensky already on Solovki. In the most difficult moments, he concludes: “The work of my life has been destroyed, and I will never be able and, moreover, I will not want to resume the work of all 50 years” (10–11. III.36). The only thing a father can do now is to pass on his life experience to his children, to confirm in them the worldview he has developed - to write letters to them. And they become the only stream, the stream of love that connects the father with his children, the only way in which he can convey himself. But to say “transmits” is not entirely accurate. He discusses with them topics that concern both the children and him. The experience of life is not cut short, its space continues to expand and strengthen, like experience of all kinds: “My desire, however, is limited by the boundaries of your work, but I don’t want to do anything myself - I’m very tired (and behind) of creating, while I can’t bring anything to the end. The center of gravity of existence has already passed from me to you, and let my thoughts develop in you, in little one, in Mika...” (19.VI.37). What could Fr. give to children? Pavel, being on Solovki? Only your love, the warmth of a living word. But he did not think of this word only as his own word, his own thought. Lines from the “Dedication” to the poem “Oro” are about this too: Alas, in a hungry, terrible year What gift will who find? I was looking all around for something to give Mick - And a gift was found: grace. I wanted God's silence There was a righteous old man, David. My destiny is my reward. In days of extreme sorrow. We have not reached the last days, But the dream said that God is double The Saints will enlighten my mind By the breath of His mouth, what awaits On Solovki, the focus of all experiences is the family, or more precisely, the trinity of personality, family and clan. A personality that is formed, unique, but at the same time connected by thousands of threads with its family, and through it with Eternity, for the past has not passed away. In the family, the clan finds a balance of formed personalities, unfused and indivisible; in the family, the experience of the clan is transferred from parents to children, so that they do not fall out of the grooves of time. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this Shakespearean expression that Florensky recalls when congratulating his eldest son Vasily on the birth of his son: “I am of course very happy that this happened during my mother’s and my lifetime. You, me, my father and grandfather grew up and were born without grandfathers, and besides you, without grandmothers, and as a child I often thought with bitterness why I had neither grandfather nor grandmother. And your son has two grandfathers, two grandmothers and three great-grandmothers (or maybe four? I don’t know). Therefore, there will be someone to pamper, and he will be set into the groove of time, to put it in Shakespearean terms (“Time is out of its groove,” says Hamlet). Being in the groove of time is very important for understanding life and its correct direction” (7.VII.36). Chaos can be resisted only by affirming the personality, absorbing the experience of its kind, listening to it, and the most important link in this is the transfer of experience from parents to children. Being cut off from his family sharply aggravated this feeling, and in order to survive, to preserve himself, Florensky withdrew into his children, through them connecting with Eternity. Gradually, another theme comes to the fore and sounds loudly - the theme of incarnation, and above all, the incarnation of oneself in children and thereby overcoming Time: “Incarnation is the main commandment of life, - Incarnation, that is, the realization of one’s capabilities in the world, the acceptance of the world into oneself and the shaping of matter by oneself” (25.VPG.36). It is through incarnation that non-existence is overcome. Therefore, Florensky writes Incarnation with a capital letter, as well as the previous mention of the Higher Will, recalling the main Incarnation that took place once in the world. In conclusion, let us turn again to the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, which, perhaps subconsciously, priest P. A. Florensky had in mind when addressing his children, just as the Apostle addressed the Children of Christ. “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires they will heap up for themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they will turn away their ears from the truth and turn to fables. But be vigilant in everything, endure sorrows, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. For I am already becoming a victim, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; And now there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all those who loved His appearance. Try to come to me quickly” (2 Tim. 4:3–9). P. V. Florensky, A. I. Oleksenko Priest Pavel Florensky. Works: In 4 vols. M., 1966. T. 2. P. 647–68 Florensky P. L. Selected. Prod.: In 2 vols. M., 1990. T. 2. P. 27. Priest Pavel Florensky. The Pillar and Ground of Truth: The Experience of Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters. M., 1914. Reprint in the book: Florensky P. A. Izbr. prod.: In 2 vols. T. I. Florensky P. A. Izbr. Prod.: In 2 vols. T. 2. P. 370. Priest Pavel Florensky. To my children. Memories of past days. Genealogical research. From Solovetsky letters. Will. M., 1992. pp. 157–159. The poem “Oro” by P. A. Florensky (1934–1937) is mentioned here and further quoted. The first version of the poem was published in Sat. “Among other names” (M., 1990). Prediction after the fact (lat.). – Note. P. A. Florensky. Florensky P. A. Izbr. Prod.: In 2 vols. T. 2. P. 28. Quote from the preface to the first edition of the poem “Oro”, see note. I to letter dated March 7–9, 1935 Priest Pavel Florensky. To my children. pp. 45, 50.