Pavel Florensky - by Avril Pyman (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose great genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union.

Book Synopsis

This is a biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. Today Pavel Florensky is often referred to as the Russian da Vinci.

Review Quotes

"Avril Pyman is the best, perhaps the only, qualified person in the world to deal with Florensky's heritage, for she has studied the period and the background for some fifty years and her sympathy and enthusiasm are matched by her scholarly objectivity. ... [She] is to be congratulated on a long-awaited monument to her hero." - Donald Rayfield, Literary Review

"Avril Pyman's book is highly recommended for anyone interested in Florensky. While the biography itself is relatively short (less than two hundred pages), it is supplemented by a significant timeline based upon his life, and a glossary of names which will help the average reader unfamiliar with the Silver Age of Russian thought. It is not, as Pyman points out, a comprehensive biography - much of the material which would be needed for that is still being released, but it does provide a needful introduction to a man who could just as well have had the greatest mind in the twentieth century. It shows the complexities of his life, and shows that he was a man, with his own foibles, and they too must be understood in order to understand his writings as a whole. 4/5 stars." Vox Nova, Catholic Perspectives on Culture, Society, and Politics

"Beautifully written and well researched, [Pyman's] study examines Florensky's remarkable life as scientist and priest, mathematician and mystic, Renaissance man and Russian patriot. [...] Pyman provides a fresh perspective on the Silver Age in her probing exploration of the dialogue between traditional ecclesiastical culture and the spiritually adventurous intelligentsia; this is one of the major contributions of this book. [...] Pyman's skill in life writing is manifest not only in her careful blending of events and ideas, but also in her poetic turns of phrase and occasionally nostalgic tone (appropriate to her subject matter). She successfully eschews hagiography (for which many readers will be grateful) and instead crafts a living portrait out of the many strengths and weaknessess of one of the complex minds of his time, a mind that was idiosyncratic, humble, proud, stubborn, enigmatic, vulnerable, unconventional, endlessly curious, tenacious, and soaring--all at the same time. [...] It brings the extraordinary life of Russia's last Renaissance man to the attention of the wider readership it deserves." -- The Russian Review (April 2011, Vol. 70, No. 2)

"Excelling in her task, Avril Pyman has authored the first true biography of the priest Pavel Florenskii...Pyman has been most judicious in her recourse to primary sources and has truly culled important facets from the vast Florenskiana that is at hand as well as from the personal reminiscences of those closely associated with him...Pyman's biography is especially praiseworthy." -Slavic Review

"Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) was an outstanding figure of Russia's Silver Age and religious-philosophical renaissance. Avril Pyman's study, the first full-length intellectual biography of him in English, is a rich guide to his life and thought. She refers to him as Russia's 'da Vinci' to capture the extraordinary range of his intellectual interests, which spanned philosophy, theology, mathematics, physics and other sciences, electrical engineering, aesthetics and art history, philosophy of language, and literature. She masterfully shows how Florensky combined these various areas into an 'integral worldview, ' a quest characteristic of the best minds of the Silver Age. [...] Pyman seeks to write biography, not hagiography. She succeeds admirably." - Slavonic and East European Journal, 55.3 (Fall 2011).

"Pavel Florensky is one of the most extraordinary intellectuals ever to emerge in the Russian speaking world (and the competition is formidable), yet outside Russia he is almost completely unknown beyond a small community of Slavists and theologians. Avril Pyman's fine biography-the first of Florensky in English-must surely redress the situation. It is possible, and greatly to be desired, that its publication will become the defining moment when the study of Florensky breaks out of Russian studies into all the disciplines in which he himself worked at the highest level: aesthetics, art history, geology, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics and theology. [...] Avril Pyman reconstructs Florensky's last years beautifully, largely from his careful, loving letters to his family." -- The Times Literary Supplement

Avril Pyman has written a fine "creative path" account of P. A. Florenski.. She sympathetically conveys the emotional content of her protagonist's life story.

"Avril Pyman brings to the biography of Pavel Florensky the experience of a lifetime's research on Russian culture of the early twentieth century. No one could be better equipped to write this first biography in English of a man whom the epithet 'polymath' fits like no other. Mathematician, philosopher, linguist, applied physicist, inventor - and, above all, priest - Florensky could, in another place and time, have achieved an unparalleled reputation in a multitude of areas. In the event, his life ended, in the fateful year of 1937, after four years of exile and imprisonment, with a bullet in the back of his head. His writings on mathematics, philosophy and theology, although never completed in the way they were planned, confirm the immense originality of his thought. They are described in this book in a way that makes them accessible to readers without specialist knowledge. What emerges as the guiding thread of the whole is the depiction of a uniquely integrated personality, foreseeing and withstanding one crisis after another, and living out to the utmost degree the religious faith at which he arrived in his twenties through study and reflection, and which provided thenceforth the underpinning of his entire life. Avril Pyman's book brings to the attention of English-language readers for the first time a neglected cultural figure of immense importance. The book is the culminating achievement of a distinguished scholar."-- John Elsworth, Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester, UK, President of the International Council for Central and East European Studies, ICCEES and Chair of the Editorial Board of Slavonica.

"In this wonderful biography, Avril Pyman brings to life the tragic genius of Pavel Florensky: theologian, philosopher, mathematician, art critic. With a profound knowledge of his cultural and religious world, Pyman enables us to hear the authentic voice of the martyred priest who is now gaining an audience in Orthodoxy and beyond."-- Andrew Louth, Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, UK
Slavonica

"This is a thoroughly researched and very readable book that includes evocative photographs, a very useful chronology, a helpful glossary of names and extensive notes... The book should be of special interest for those engaged in both theology and science. In the first instance, it is a great source of inspiration of a life well lived." -- ESSSAT

About the Author

Avril Pyman is Reader Emerita in Russian Literature at the University of Durham, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is an expert in Russian literature of the 'Silver Age' and has published a major biography of Aleksandr Blok (OUP, 2 volumes, 1979-80) and A History of Russian Symbolism (CUP, 1994), as well as many translations from Russian. Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne and a Research Fellow at Columbia University's Russian Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Belknap Press, 2006), Russia and the Russians: A History (Belknap Press, 2001), Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (Belknap Press, 1997), and The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Belknap Press, 1992).