Background
Losev, Aleksei Fedorovich was born on September 10, 1893 in Novocher- ^ssk.
classicist An* eC 'cal idealist: aesthetician
Losev, Aleksei Fedorovich was born on September 10, 1893 in Novocher- ^ssk.
Moscow mversity.
1919-1921, Nizhnii Novgorod ^mversity. 1921-1930, State Academy of Arts and ler>ces and Moscow Conservatory of Music:
1942 4. Moscow State University.
1944-1988, Moscow Pedagogical Institute.
Losev gained renown with a series of eight brilliant books in ancient philosophy, aesthetics, the philosophy of language/and mythology published between 1927 and 1930. In them he employed a version of Husserl's phenomenologi cal method to elaborate a dialectical metaphysics that owed more to Plato and Plotinus than to Hegel. The idealist cast of Losev’s dialectical outlook was displayed in 1930 when he wrote that 'a dialectical materialism is a crying absurdity’. That statement proved to be the last criticism of Marxist philosophy published in Stalin’s Russia, and for it Losev was deprived of freedom for three years and deprived of appropriate philosophical recognition for the reaminder of his long life. For 23 years he could not publish his writings. When he was able to resume publishing upon Stalin’s death in 1953, it was only on subjects more or less closely related to aesthetics and classical philology and only with the msot scrupulous attention to the shibboleths of Marxist orthodoxy. None the less, and despite his almost total blindness, Losev’s ensuing output was stunning in both quantity and quality, encompassing some 27 additional books and hundreds of articles, the philosophical content and implications of which frequently went well beyond their nominal subjects. His monumental eight-volume Istoriia antichnoi estetiki [A History of Ancient Aesthetics] (1963-1992) is a comprehensive study of Greek and Roman philosophy which established him as Russia’s leading authority on the subject. He also translated the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and others into Russian. Although Losev’s post-1953 works have inspired generations of Russian students and are valued for their original scholarship, their philosophical profile is clouded by the heavy demands of Soviet censorship. Losev himself claimed publicly to have become a convert to Marxist materialism after 1930; privately, he admitted to remaining a Russian Orthodox Christian. D. Skalon contends that philosophically Losev was throughout his life a Hegelian objective idealist. Takho-Godi affirms more plausibly that Losev sought to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism, in the spirit of Vladimir Solov’ev’s metaphysics of ‘totalunity’; this suggestion is consistent with the great esteem in whcih Losev held Solov’ev’s conception from his youth until the writing of his last book, a study of Solov’ev’s philosophy.