Vysheslavtsev, Boris Petrovich (1877–1954)

Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev, Russian idealist philosopher and religious thinker, was exiled from his homeland in 1922 because of his anti-Marxism (which he later elaborated in a full-fledged philosophical critique). In western Europe he became a leading figure in the Russian émigré philosophical community, lecturing and writing on questions of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology and social philosophy. Vysheslavtsev was particularly noted for his study (begun in an early work on the ethics of Fichte) of the irrational as the sphere of human contact with the Absolute. Subsequently he developed this theme through the application of concepts of depth psychology to ethics and to the interpretation of Christian doctrine.