“Germany Has Already Become My Second Homeland for Me”: the Life and Creativity of S.L. Frank in Correspondence with F. Heiler et circum

Abstract

In the introductory article, based on correspondence between G. Bell, S.L. Frank, V.S. Frank, F. Heiler and the Austrian publishing house Anton Pustet we reconstruct some little-known aspects of the life and creativity of Semen Lyudvigovich Frank during his period of emigration. We clarify the circle of Frank’s friends and colleagues with whom he was close after he left Russia and went into exile. Thanks to the correspondence with the German historian and the phenomenologist of religion, Friedrich Heiler, we manage to describe in more detail the “ideological context” of the era of the dialogue of Russian and German thinkers. The presented correspondence contains a rich material on the ecumenical activity of S.L. Frank in 1930s of the last century, connected with the journal issued by F. Heiler “Eine heilige Kirche” (“The Holy Church”). Frank cooperated with Heiler’s journal not only as the author of a number of articles but also as a translator for German of S.N. Bulgakov’s texts (“Dogmat in the Eastern Orthodox Church”, 1935) and B. Sové (“The Sacrament of Confirmation in the Orthodox Church of the East”, 1936 and “Obituary on N.N. Glubokovsky”, 1937). A special attention is paid to the reconstruction of the history of German edition of the main work of S.L. Frank titled “The Unknowable”: the appearance of various versions of the German text (late 1935 and spring 1937) and a history of unsuccessful attempts of Frank and his friends and colleagues to publish this text in Swiss, Dutch, German and Austrian publishing houses in the 1930s.