All thoughts

Letters to family from camps and prisons, 1933–1937. P.A. Florensky is often called the “Russian Leonardo da Vinci.” It is difficult to list all the sectors of activity to which he contributed. These are mathematics, physics, philosophy, theology, biology, geology, iconography, electronics, aesthetics, archeology, ethnography, philology, hagiography, museum studies, not counting poetry and prose. Moreover, Florensky did a lot to develop a universal worldview based on the comprehension of these sciences. In this area, he made such discoveries and obtained results, the importance of which was appreciated only recently (for example, in cybernetics, semiotics, antiparticle physics). He himself wrote that his works will be in demand no earlier than in 50 years. They say that a poet in Russia is more than a poet. Continuing this thought, we can say that a scientist in Russia is more than a scientist, a philosopher is more than a philosopher, especially who lived in times of deep crisis that his country and the whole world were experiencing. Father Pavel Florensky performed priestly service throughout his entire way of the cross, leading to Golgotha, and further to the heavenly world, from where now and forever he encourages and supports us with his prayers, living in the world below. The life of such a personality is undoubtedly of great interest not only for understanding his work and his time, but also in order to understand our time and ourselves. If we speculatively connect the places where P.A. visited. Florensky: 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 get a cross. And if you mentally lift it, this cross, resting it on the base - 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 - the seal of earthly life. At the intersection of lines, where the heart is, Sergiev Posad will be - the place of heroism. Calculating the years of life of the priest Pavel Florensky according to the law of the “golden section”, we obtain the first “special point” (P.A. Florensky’s term): 1900 - turn of the century. The day before, during the summer holidays of 1899, which high school student Florensky spent with his family in the village of Kvishekhty on the banks of the Kura, something happened that he would describe in the chapter “Collapse” of his memories - the collapse of the scientific positivist worldview, which would be the beginning of the path to faith. In 1904 Florensky entered the Moscow Theological Academy, and in 1910 he was ordained a priest. Second special point: 1918/1919 - the martyrdom of the Sovereign, the end of the former Russia. So, the convergence of the main node in time and the main point in space is Sergiev Posad 1918/1919. What happened during these years and became the mediastinum of life and the beginning of the path to Golgotha. Pavel Florensky? “Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky, professor of theology, minister of religion (priest), a native of a noble noble family, author of works on theology, in which his monarchist beliefs are openly expressed (“Defense of the Divine” (sic! – Ed.), “Pillar and Ground of Truth,” etc.). In 1928, he was arrested by the OPTU and sentenced as an active participant in the church-monarchist organization to 3 years. Since 1928, a researcher at the VEI. Ideologist and head of the center organization, in the past was a member of the c.-r. "Platonov's organization" In the rather extensive “objective” of the OGPU, much is correct, except for the “noble” nobility and the existence of “K.-R. organizations." The OGPU included people who did not even know each other into the “church-monarchist organization”. The real reason for the arrest was the “failure to defrock” that was emphasized in the sentence to capital punishment. By the Higher Will, as Florensky called God in censored letters from his imprisonment, he was given the priesthood, and he did not remove his rank and did not renounce the Lord. Sentenced in 1933 to 10 years in the camps, he was sent first to the East Siberian Svobodny camp, and then to the famous SLON - Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. On November 25, 1937, by a resolution of the special troika of the NKVD for the Leningrad Region P.A. Florensky was sentenced to capital punishment and executed on December 8, 1937 in Leningrad. Having learned in Paris about the death of a friend, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov wrote: “Life seemed to offer him a choice between Solovki and Paris, but he chose his homeland, although it was Solovki, he wanted to share his fate with his people to the end. Both he himself and his fate are the glory and greatness of Russia, although at the same time its greatest crime.” To these tragic and bitter words spoken by a distant friend and like-minded person, we can now add that even if life gave a choice about. Pavel Florensky, already known by the time of his last arrest in 1933 as a scientist and philosopher: he was offered asylum by monarchs and presidents of many countries, he could have sailed to foreign shores on a “philosophical ship”, as many of his comrades did - then Good Will predetermined his martyrdom to Golgotha, for Florensky was a hostage, a hostage of his family, his hearth, his Motherland, an ascetic and bearer of a special priestly mission associated with the place where his way of the cross began. So, there was no counter-revolutionary conspiracy. But there was a secret. This secret was taken with them to another world by everyone involved in it. They say that manuscripts do not burn. Thoughts stored in the sphere of the spirit – the pneumatosphere, as P.A. called it – do not disappear without a trace. Florensky. What is this secret that priest Pavel Florensky carefully kept and for which he gave his life? Before naming the name of the secret and its guardians, a few words about the Sacrament - the most important concept of Orthodoxy. The sacraments accompany a Christian throughout his life. Christ once said to the Apostle Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church.” Everything said by the Savior has not only a symbolic, but also a concrete meaning. The cornerstone on which the Church of Christ stands is the apostles and saints. The main Sacrament - the Eucharist, the transubstantiation of wine and bread into the Blood and Body of the Lord, can only occur when the cup with the Holy Gifts rests on a stone - on the relics of the saints of God. The famous St. Petersburg scientist and ethnologist A.N. Gumilyov explained the need for the transubstantiation of the Holy Gifts from the point of view of the law of entropy: “Energy is wasted, everything is destroyed. If there is no Communion on earth, the world will fall apart.” That is why preserving the relics of the righteous is not only a tribute of respect, but also a guarantee of the future existence of humanity, the possibility of the Earth to exist. That is why the destruction of relics is not only blasphemy, but also an act of self-destruction. Now let's go to the lot of one of the most beloved Russian saints, to the house of St. Sergius of Radonezh, guardian of Russia. This is the “heart” of the mystery - the point of intersection of the lines of the cross, which Good Will placed on the shoulders of Fr. Pavel Florensky. In the first years of the Russian hard times, Sergiev Posad near Moscow became truly the spiritual capital of the former Russia. Here, to St. Sergius, in the heart of Orthodoxy, the flower of the nation, representatives of its glorious families, writers, artists, philosophers gathered. What big names: Golitsyns, Durnovo, Ilovaiskys, Shakhovskys, Raevskys, Naryshkins, Rodzyankos, Sheremetevs! Favorsky, Rozanov, Nesterov work here. At one time there even existed the “First Collective Farm of Sergiev Posad”, whose chairman was Count Olsufiev, and the collective farmers were counts and princes. They huddled close to each other, seeking protection, trying to adapt to time and hide behind vocabulary and concepts alien to them, in order to save their families and protect the unquenchable candle of faith. In 1918, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra was created, headed by Fr. Pavel Florensky. In 1920, when the Lavra was closed, the monks of the monastery and adjacent monasteries went to work in the township museums. It was thanks to their asceticism that the treasures of the Lavra were protected from plunder and desecration. On the eve of Easter 1919, rumors spread throughout Sergiev Posad that a decision had been made in Moscow to open the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh in public in order to “expose miracles and put an end to church obscurantism.” What happened next became known only in our days, and information about this for years and generations was collected bit by bit, from scattered memories of those involved in the events and their loved ones. This is what happened. On one of the nights of Great Lent, members of the Commission, probably Fr. Pavel Florensky and Yu. A. Olsufiev, with the blessing of the abbot of the monastery, Archimandrite Kronid, entered the Trinity Cathedral and, having said a prayer, opened the shrine, removed the honorable head of the Reverend, and in its place they placed the head of Prince Trubetskoy, buried in the basement of the Trinity Cathedral. The head of the Reverend was buried in the sacristy of the Lavra and took a vow of silence, which they did not break in all the hardships of life. The rumors circulating around Sergiev Posad were true, and the commissars and atheists staged a Sabbath in the Lavra. The reliquary containing the relics of the Saint was exposed to the mockery of the crowd. It seemed to detractors that such an action should have forever killed the faith in shrines and miracles among the villagers. But a miracle still happened. The head of the Reverend, protected from desecration, was secretly kept in the sacristy until the closure of the Lavra. In 1920, Yu.A. Olsufiev, placing it in an oak ark, moved it to his house on Valovaya Street in Posad, which became Zagorsky. In 1928, the famous “Sergiev Posad case” broke out, and mass arrests began. The ark with the shrine was buried in the garden of the Olsufievs’ house, and none of those involved revealed the secret during interrogations. At the beginning of the 30s, a new wave of repressions came, Fr. Pavel Florensky. P. A. Golubtsov, who later became Archbishop Sergius of Novgorod and Staraya Russia, was initiated into the townsman secret. Golubtsov moved the ark with the shrine from the Olsufievsky garden and hid it in the vicinity of the Nikolo-Ugreshsky monastery near Lyubertsy. Soon P.A. Golubtsov was also arrested, and from prison he went to the front, where he was a nurse. After demobilization, he moved the oak ark to the house of Olsufiev’s niece E.P. Vasilchikova. The once young Katya Vasilchikova was involved in the “Sergiev Posad case,” but with the help of E.P. Peshkova managed to avoid the camps. E.P. Vasilchikova was the last custodian of the shrine. Ekaterina Pavlovna lived with her family in a semi-basement, in a room with an earthen floor, in the same corridor with a variety of people, including criminals. During these terrible years, the head of the Reverend was together with the people in the same difficult conditions. On Easter, April 21, 1946, the Lavra was reopened, and the head of the Venerable One secretly took its former place in the tomb of the Venerable One. We didn't make a reservation. The relics of the Saint were returned to the Church. The Assumption Cathedral of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra was also returned. The Trinity Cathedral remained under the jurisdiction of the museum. There also remained a silver shrine for relics with a canopy, erected during the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna. The shrine was given to the Church after one of the visiting strangers expressed bewilderment that the shrine and the relics were in different cathedrals. Trinity Cathedral was returned to the Church later. And only then did the relics of the Saint take their place. It was this secret that priest Pavel Florensky kept during all the years of imprisonment and camps. It was as if he was living a double life. One is earthly, with rises and roll calls, with work and short rest. The other is incomprehensible to us, participating in the heavenly world, a different hypostasis. In this secret of his life there was no place for fear, despondency, or despair. From this life, he was able to communicate with loved ones in the way that he continues to do so now - through prayer and the Lord's mediation. “I took ... blows for you, that’s what I wanted and that’s how I asked the Higher Will,” wrote Fr. Pavel to his wife and children (March 18, 1934). But 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 him the strength to endure what was happening and the 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 to him participation in a counter-revolutionary organization: he really violated the demands of the authorities, protecting the shrine. In light of this, the actions of Fr. Paul, especially in the last years of his life. In addition to this special, mystical communication, Fr. Pavel Florensky addressed his loved ones in his letters, which he wrote from BAMLAG, and then from the Solovetsky special purpose camp. Priest Pavel Florensky spent 57 and a half months in the prison camp through the looking glass - from February 26, 1933 to December 8, 1937. These terms (“term” in the camp) are also 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 of Pavel Aleksandrovich’s wife Anna Mikhailovna in Skovorodino in the Far East in July - August 1934 with their three youngest children: Olya, Mik and Tika, their last meeting, in fact, a farewell. The second main special point on the way of the cross was June 7, 1936, the birth of the first of twelve grandchildren named after him, which was a real sign of the continuation of the Florensky family. Father Pavel learned about his birth from letters from his eldest son Vasily and his wife Natalia. Message letters are one of the oldest genres of literature. From letters found during excavations of an ancient state, we learn about a bygone civilization and its people; the messages of the apostles form part of the Holy Scriptures. Letters to family from the camps 1933–1937. can be considered as the last stage of the work of the priest Pavel Florensky. In them, he conveys the accumulated knowledge to his children, and through them to all people, and the main idea of ​​the letters is clan, family as the bearer of eternity, as the main unit of human society. In these messages, the focus of all experiences is the family, or more precisely, the trinity of personality, family and clan. A personality formed, unique, but at the same time connected by thousands of threads with his family, and through it with Eternity, for “the past has not passed away.” In the family, the clan finds a balance of formed personalities, unmerged 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.” Letters 1933–1937 form an integral work, which can be called genodicy - the justification of the clan, the family. 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 experience received from parents by children. When reading these letters, the question may arise why Florensky, a priest, scientist, outstanding thinker, living in the “heavenly world” even in his earthly incarnation, in letters to his family never writes cherished words about the heavenly world, does not talk about the Lord. Undoubtedly, it is important that all his letters were censored. In addition, many prisoners did not want to write the whole truth to their loved ones, so as not to increase their suffering. Hence - detailed descriptions of nature, cases not related to prison, retellings of conversations between interlocutors. Sometimes a false impression is created that it wasn’t so bad “there”. Only in “Oro”, in the intense difficulty of the poems, against the will of the author, his condition is revealed. But Father Pavel mastered the language of allegory, and his beloved wife Anna Mikhailovna Florenskaya was his “second self” and could read between the lines the message that her extraordinary husband sent from prison to his descendants, to all of us. In censored letters from Fr. Paul did not name the names of his friends, so as not to endanger them, did not write the word “God”, so as not to write it with a small letter, and when he said “I think,” he meant “I pray,” which is why the secret title of the book is “All Prayers Are for You.” Yes, he was not free. But freedom in the understanding of an Orthodox person is something different than what was proclaimed by the revolutionaries who “stormed the sky”, giving their own lives for it and not sparing the lives of others. This is different from what today’s fighters for all sorts of rights and freedoms stand for, sweeping aside responsibilities before God. Father Paul was free internally because he created with his life “Orthodox experience”, “Orthodox feat”, fulfilling the obligations imposed on him by his rank and carrying his cross to Calvary. It is impossible to verbally convey such an experience either to the prisoners, unless they ask for it, or to their relatives, because they also perform a Christian feat with their lives - the feat of the martyr-witnesses and myrrh-bearing women, who flinch from the blow of the spear inflicted by the guard on the Crucified One, and bleed from the stigmata of faith and suffering. He, the Bamlagov and Solovetsky sufferer, did not renounce his faith. The most direct prayer that goes to the Lord is an intense, silent prayer. Father Paul created it all the tragic years of his asceticism, when he lived, being daily, hourly, every minute ready to appear before the court of the Most High. Such a life, transformed into standing before the Lord, dissolved in love, is living. The letters of priest Pavel Florensky from camps and prisons - from the Far East and Solovki - are already familiar to readers from their full edition in the 4th volume of “Works in 4 volumes” (M.: “Mysl”, 1998) and publications in books and periodicals. In this publication, an extensive selection of letters is divided into sections: “Letters to the Family” - this includes letters to various family members, but most of them are letters to his wife, Anna Mikhailovna, and mother, Olga Pavlovna. This section should present as fully as possible the life of Fr. Paul in the camps. The letter dated April 19–20, 1936 included a letter to Maria Veniaminovna Yudina. This is one of the few camp letters addressed to non-family members. The second section – “Letters to Children”, which are in turn divided into sections: “Letters to the younger children Mika and Tika”, “Letters to the daughter Olga” and “Letters to the eldest sons Vasily and Kirill” - is dedicated, respectively, to each of the children, by age, from youngest to eldest. And the third section - “Letters about the grandson”, like the first, combines letters to different family members - wife, mother, grandson’s parents - son Vasily and his wife Natalia - and covers the time of waiting for the birth of the grandson and the first year of his life. This “distribution” of letters allows us to reveal one of the cherished themes of letters - growth, the formation of a person’s personality in the integral context of the life of a family, clan, history, culture, which in its entirety goes back to life in God - the source of all life and true harmony. Opens the book “Testament” by Fr. Paul, written in 1917–1923. and which is, in fact, the first message to the family in the context of the catastrophe that broke out in Russia, the disastrous consequences of which Fr. Pavel immediately felt prophetically - the first entry in the “Testament” dates back to April 1917. Arrest, camps and martyrdom of Fr. Paul were the inevitable consequence of these events. The circumstances of the last months of life and death of Fr. Pavel are described in the section “A priest who has not been defrocked,” which includes material preserved in the KGB archives about who carried out the execution sentence of prisoner Florensky. All these sections, included in the book in addition to the letters, create the necessary context for their perception. All letters about. Pavel sent to two addresses - to his wife and mother (Anna Mikhailovna: Zagorsk "b. Sergiev" Moscow region, Pionerskaya, 19; Olga Pavlovna - to Moscow: Plyushchikha, corner of Dolgoy lane and Novokonyushenny, 12, apt. 7). But each letter was addressed to several addressees at once - the letters were arranged on a sheet of paper in stripes and upon receipt could be cut into pieces. By the period of the Solovetsky exile, Fr. Pavel developed a system for numbering letters - each “general” letter had a single number and date. This was necessary for orientation in the circumstances of the camp mail - letters could disappear or be delayed. At the request of Fr. Pavel's response letters were also clearly numbered by family members. Since in this edition parts of the letters are divided into sections, the date of writing the letter is given in italics in the subheadings, and the place where it was written is also indicated. Notes on letters are given in the text, after each letter. The notes also include fragments of letters from Roman Nikolaevich Litvinov, a fellow prisoner of Fr. Pavel on Solovki, his wife Varvara Sergeevna, many of which are published for the first time. These letters complement the picture of camp life and algae production, which Florensky and Litvinov developed on Solovki. In preparing the book, letters from another prisoner P.A. were also used. Florensky Nikolai Yakovlevich Bryantsev. The text of the letters is published in their full edition in the 4th volume of “Works in 4 volumes”. M., 1998; “Testament”, as well as fragments of memories of Fr. Pavel Florensky, included in the notes, is based on the book: Priest Pavel Florensky. To my children. Memories of past days. Genealogical research. From Solovetsky letters. Will. M, 1992. In references to the book in the notes, its title is given in abbreviation: “To my children,” indicating the page. From these same books came the reference information collected by A.S. Trubachev (now abbot Andronik). When compiling notes, the book by V.I. was also used. Onoprienko “Florenskie” (M., 2000). For the convenience of readers, information about the addressees of the letters - family members - was not included in the notes, but is given at the end of the book, before the name index. You might be interested in: