Person

Karsavin, Lev Platonovič

1882–1952

"In the summer of 1922 he was arrested and then expelled to Germany together with a large group of noncommunist public figures ... In exile, he lived in Berlin (1922–1926), then in Clamart, next to Paris (1926–1928), and finally settled in Lithuania, where he was invited to hold the chair of general history at Kaunas University. ... When in 1944 it was clear that the Soviet Union was about to recapture Lithuania, Karsavin refused to leave and move to the West. In 1946 he was dismissed from the university for his deliberately defiant attitude toward Soviet authorities. In 1949 he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Abez, near the polar circle. In the Gulag he wrote about ten texts of spiritual poetry and metaphysics and until his final days (he died there from tuberculosis) was a spiritual guide and teacher for his fellow prisoners."