The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, and: Saratovskii tekst, and: Paul Nicolay of Monrepos: A European with a Difference (review)

The discovery in Saratov of Semen Frank's diary for the first half of 1902 is a major event for scholars interested in the life and work of this Russian philosopher. Frank was dean of humanities at Saratov University during the Civil War, and he likely left the diary behind when moving to Moscow in 1921. The very survival of the manuscript is remarkable. ¹The text of the diary, along with a number of other unpublished items by Frank and his wife, Tat´iana, appears in Saratovskii tekst, a volume expertly compiled and annotated by A. A. Gaponenkov and E. P. Nikitina and published by Saratov University Press. ²The book adds to the growing body of writings by Frank that is in the public domain and reflects the increasing Russian interest in Frank. ³

Frank's 1902 diary is important because it provides a window onto a crucial moment in his life. Frank's phase as a Marxist, as both an activist and a thinker (one of the so-called "Legal Marxists"), was over. He had recently returned to Russia from Germany, where he had spent two years following his expulsion from Moscow University for his involvement in the university unrest of 1899. After completing his degree at Kazan University, he spent the winter of 1901–2 in Yalta, where most of the diary entries were written. At that time he chanced upon a copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which affected him profoundly, and had some kind of spiritual experience that, he later recalled, altered the direction of his life: "The foundation of my spiritual being was set in place or, rather, consciously revealed itself to me in the winter of 1901–2." ⁴It was a turning point, then, in his journey toward idealism, neo-Platonism, and Christianity.

The diary indicates that Frank was in a very unhappy state: he was burdened by loneliness and longed for a friend to whom he could unburden himself; he was troubled by an affair he was having with the wife of a close friend, Fania El´iashevich, that was to last up until his engagement to Tat´iana in 1907; and more generally, he felt that his life had no direction or meaning. In the first entry, on 31 December 1901, Frank observed that he had often lost courage and a sense of meaning in his life, and that unless he gathered all his strength he would perish. The diary was evidently his way of trying to get a grip on himself. Full of insecurity, he repeatedly turned to literary sources to try to make sense of his suffering; for example, the diary opens with a quotation from Pushkin's "Elegy" (1830) that includes the line, "I want to live in order to think and suffer" (31). Yet at the time it all seemed to no avail. In the last entry, written in Berdiansk on 23 June, Frank lamented that he felt no better than he did at the beginning of writing the diary, and indeed that he was worse off, since he was now nearer the grave (83). It was only later that Frank came to believe that an important change had taken place in his life at this time.

In view of the fact that a few years later Frank turned to metaphysics, and then to religion, as a way out of his difficulties, it is noteworthy that at this point he firmly rejected metaphysics. He suspected that the growing metaphysical interests of Petr Struve and Nikolai Berdiaev were not intellectually serious...