Semyon Frank

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 29th of September 1922, some 160 prominent Russian intellectuals and their families boarded a ship at Petrograd. Among them was the philosopher Semyon Frank. The Soviet authorities called it an expulsion, and they made the passengers pay their own fares. None could come back without official permission. The ship reached Stettin on the 2nd of October, and later generations would call it the philosophers' ship. Frank was a man who had begun as a young socialist and ended as a Christian metaphysician. How did a Moscow boy raised in a Jewish household arrive on that deck? What did he believe about freedom, knowledge and the nature of reality? And what became of him once a second regime in Europe also turned against him?

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• 2. A Moscow Childhood

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  Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank was born in Moscow on the 28th of January 1877, into a Jewish family. His father was a doctor who died while the boy was still young. His maternal grandfather, M. Rossiansky, an Orthodox Jew, took over the boy's upbringing. He taught his grandson Hebrew and took him to the synagogue. A stepfather, the populist V.I. Zak, pulled him in another direction. Through Zak, Frank met the works of N.K. Mikhailovsky and other revolutionary writers. At secondary school he turned to Marxism. In 1894 he enrolled in law at Moscow University, yet he spent more time preaching socialism to workers than studying. By 1896 he found Marxist economic theory unsatisfactory, although he stayed a socialist. A revolutionary pamphlet in 1899 got him expelled from Moscow. He finished his studies of philosophy and political economy in Berlin instead. There, in 1900, he published his Critique of Marx's theory of value in Russian. He returned to Russia in 1901 and took his bachelor's degree at the University of Kazan. From then on, philosophy was his main preoccupation.

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• 3. Against Materialism

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  In 1901 the writer Peter Berngardovich Struve sent Frank an invitation. He wanted a contribution to a collection titled The Problem of Idealism, which appeared in 1902. The book attacked both materialism and positivism, the two creeds that had once attracted Frank himself. For the next five years he moved between Moscow and Germany. He wrote and translated philosophical works and helped Struve with his projects. Between 1902 and 1905 he wrote for Struve's journal Osvobozhdenie, which means Liberation. It was printed in Stuttgart until 1904 and then in Paris. In 1906 Frank settled in St Petersburg and sent philosophical essays to Struve's other periodical, Russkaya Mysl. Two years later he joined the symposium Vekhi, which means signposts. The source calls it influential, and it placed him among the leading thinkers of his generation.

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• 4. Faith and Family

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  In 1908, Frank married Tatyana Sergeevna Bartseva, who was born in 1886 and lived until 1984. They had four children. Alexei was born in 1910 and died in 1969. Natalia lived from 1912 to 1999, and Vasiliy from 1920 to 1996. A fourth child was named Victor. In 1912 Frank converted to Orthodox Christianity and began lecturing in philosophy at St Petersburg University. He never described the step as a break with his childhood. In his own words, he wrote: "I consider my Christianity as the completion of my Old Testament upbringing, as an organic evolution based on the religious foundations which I accepted in my childhood". Those foundations dated back to his grandfather Rossiansky and the synagogue. This faith would shape every book that followed.

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• 5. Books and Chairs

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  The year 1913 found Frank in Germany, where he stayed until 1914. There he wrote Der Gegenstand des Wissens, which means The Object of Knowledge. The work earned him a master's degree in 1916. Dusha Cheloveka, or Man's Soul, followed in 1917. That summer, the new University of Saratov appointed him dean of its arts faculty. In 1921 he took the chair of philosophy at Moscow University. Another philosopher was already there: Nikolai Berdyaev, who directed the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture. Frank joined him. Their partnership in Moscow lasted barely a year, because the ship at Petrograd was already being prepared.

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• 6. Free Will and Becoming

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  Frank built his philosophy on a theory of knowledge rooted in the nature of being. He held that knowledge is intuitive when taken as a whole, yet also logically abstract. In his view, logic covers only one part of being. He also taught that existence is both being and becoming. As becoming, a thing carries dynamic potential, and so its future stays open. Reality, for Frank, is at once rational and irrational. That means it joins necessity with freedom. From this unity he drew his central position, which was a defense of free will. The label for the view is metaphysical libertarianism. He would test the idea against European politics in the 1930s.

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• 7. Exile and Persecution

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  After the ship, Frank lived in Berlin and spent the rest of his life supported by the World Council of Churches. His friend Ludwig Binswanger, described in the source as one of the most famous psychiatrists in the world, also helped him. From the 1930s, work with ecumenical journals and organizations grew steadily more important to him. In December 1931 he was elected head of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin. Barely over a year later, on the 7th of April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service came into force. It demanded an Aryan certificate from every employee in the public sector, education included. Frank's Jewish ancestry made him unemployable in Germany. Ivan Ilyin took his place for a couple of months, and then Adolf Ehrt succeeded Ilyin. In January 1936 Frank stopped collaborating with the Kantian Society. In 1937 he fled the Nazi persecution for Paris. Throughout these years he kept publishing. He wrote books and articles in Russian, articles in German and French, and one in Dutch, De Russische Wereldbeschouwing, in 1932. Willem Adolph Visser 't Hooft judged him a great authority on religion and metaphysics.

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• 8. Hiding and Britain

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  Frank and his wife survived World War II by hiding near Grenoble. A scholarship from the World Council of Churches supported them, and it came about thanks to the intercession of J.R.R. Tolkien. Their four children escaped to Britain. In the early years of the war Frank wrote God With Us. It was the first of his works to be translated into English and appeared in 1946. In 1945 he and his wife moved to Britain themselves. He died in London on the 10th of December 1950. The couple are buried together in Hendon Cemetery in London, far from the Moscow where his life began.

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