Aleksei Losev

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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.

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 neoplatonism, dialectics of Schelling and Hegel, and phenomenology of Husserl. In The Dialectics of Myth (1930) Losev called dialectical materialism “obvious nonsense”—the book became the last published in the USSR which openly rejected Marxism. 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.

After returning to Moscow, he was allowed to pursue his academic career and even to teach. Ancient philosophy, myth and aesthetics became his “inner exile”: under the guise of interpreting the thinkers of the past, he was able to express his own spiritualist beliefs while paying lip service to the official ideology in the introductions to his books. He published some 30 monographs between the 1950s and 1970s. With regards to Western philosophy of the time, Losev criticised severely the structuralist thinking.

The Soviets played double politics with him—heavily censoring and prohibiting his works on the one hand while praising him as one of the greatest philosophers of the time on the other. He was even awarded the USSR State Prize in 1986 for his 8-volume History of Classical Aesthetics, two years before his death.

[edit] Bibliography

Losev, A.F. The dialectics of myth (translated by Vladimir Marchenkov). N.Y.: 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).