Aleksei Losev

Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev (; 22 September 1893 – 24 May 1988) was a Soviet and Russian philosopher, philologist and culturologist, one of the most prominent figures in Russian philosophical and religious thought of the 20th century.

Early life Losev was born in Novocherkassk, the administrative center of the Don Host Oblast, the far western Russian territory held by the Don Cossacks on the banks of the Don River. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Aleksei Polyakov; a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. Losev's paternal great-grandfather was also named Aleksei, and was awarded for heroism during the Napoleonic Wars, while fighting in a Cossack Brigade. Losev's father was Fyodor Petrovich Losev, a violinist and conductor by avocation and a teacher of mathematics and physics by trade. Attracted to a bohemian lifestyle, Losev's father left the family in the hands of his wife, Natalya Alekseyevna Loseva (née Polyakova), who raised Losev as an only child at her father's house. When Russia erupted in the 1917 February and October Revolutions, Losev kept a low profile, spending all of his time writing and studying. In 1919, typhus killed his mother. The same year, Losev's paper "Russian Philosophy" was published in a German-language volume composed of various articles about Russian cultural development. Losev was unaware of this publication until 1983. It was finally published in the Russian language after Losev's death. The series was to conclude with a ninth volume but The Dialectics of Myth caused a great deal of controversy, and Losev never finished the final monograph.

Despite this, it was Gorky's first wife who obtained Losev's release from the Gulag. Yekaterina Peshkova, formerly an activist with the Political Red Cross and, in the 1930s, the chair of the follow-on group Assistance to Political Prisoners, worked to free Losev, finally succeeding in late 1932 in overturning his conviction. Soon afterward, Losev was arrested because of his book The Dialectics of Myth. When he returned home in 1933, he wrote a novel using Yudina as the model: Woman as Thinker, or The Woman Thinker. The flawed heroine Losev created, Maria Valentinovna Radina, was a woman musician who spouted high-minded philosophy but slipped to lower standards in her personal life. The novel has been criticized as an outlet for Losev's difficult relationship with Yudina, and as a poor example of his capabilities as a writer. Yudina disliked the character of Maria which she recognized as herself, and in early 1934 she broke with Losev, never to see him again.

Losev also entered into the controversy raging within Eastern Orthodoxy over the nature of the Name of God, siding with and clearly articulating the Imiaslavie position which was at odds with the official stance taken by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Works 1916 – "Eros in Plato" (Эрос у Платона) 1916 – "On the Musical Perception of Love and Nature" 1916 – "Two Perceptions of the World" 1919 – "Russian Philosophy" 1927 – The Ancient Cosmos and Contemporary Science (Античный космос и современная наука.) 1927 – The Philosophy of Name, regarding the ideas of Onomatodoxy 1927 – The Dialectics of the Artistic Form (Диалектика художественной формы.) 1927 – Music as a Subject of Logic 1928 – The Dialectics of Number in Plotinus, a translation and commentary about Plotinus' treatise On Numbers 1928 – Criticism of Platonism by Aristotle, a translation and commentary about Aristotle's Metaphysics 1929 – Essays on Classical Symbolism and Mythology 1930 – The Dialectics of Myth (translated by Vladimir Marchenkov). New York: Routledge, 2003. 1934 – Woman as Thinker, or The Woman Thinker, a novel inspired by pianist Maria Yudina 1937 – translation of Latin works by Nicholas of Cusa 1975 – translation of works by Sextus Empiricus, first written in 1937 but published in 1975 1978 – Aesthetics of the Renaissance (Эстетика Возрождения.) 1982 – Sign, Symbol, Myth (Знак, символ, миф.) 1983 – Vladimir Solovyov (Владимир Соловьев.) 1963–1988 – The History of Classical Aesthetics (История античной эстетики, 8 volumes.) 1990 – "Scriabin's Worldview", essay about pianist/composer Alexander Scriabin, written in 1919–21, first published in 1990. 1994 – "Twelve Theses on Antique Culture", a public lecture Losev delivered to the Scientific Committee of Culture of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Science. First published in 1994 in Russian. Translated to English by Oleg Kreymer and Kate Wilkinson and published in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 2003, vol. 11, no. 1. Electronically available books by Losev (in Russian)