From the Memoirs of A.P. Primakovsky about Pavel Florensky, Primakovsky, Aleksandr P., “Chapter from the Book: My Meetings (About Conversations and Meetings withP.A.F.)”, Publ. by Furtsev, Dmitrii O., Florensky, Ivan V.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the discovery of the most extensive (about 80 handwrit­ten pages) memoirs about Father Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky. The author of the memoirs is a student and follower of Father Pavel, Alexander Petrovich Primakovsky, an employee of the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, one of the first scientists who was seriously engaged in philosophi­cal bibliography, an expert on methods of working with the book. A.P. Pri­makovsky met Florensky in his youth and, realizing the full scale of his person­ality, began to keep a diary about his communication with the philosopher. The preamble to the article contains the history of the document’s discovery, brief information about its author, as well as general information about the publi­cation. The article contains the most informative fragments of memoirs describ­ing the personality, daily life, habits, daily routine and philosophical positions of Father Pavel Florensky. Father Pavel’s attitude towards other philosophers is particularly interesting: S.N. Bulgakov, A.F. Losev, V.P. Zubov, G.G. Shpet, A.N. Schmidt, etc. The circumstances of the two arrests of Father Pavel and
their perception by A.P. Primakovsky are given. The notes say a lot about
A.P. Primakovsky himself,  who was an extraordinary personality, a scientist who preserved valuable information for the history of Russian philosophy and deserves to be remembered. A commentary is given to the published text, which includes in­formation about Father Pavel’s family, friends and colleagues, his philosophical ideas, A.P. Primakovsky himself and his relatives, who also contacted Father Pavel.