Abstract

Since perestroika, popular interest in the ideas of Pavel Florenskii has declined, but scholarly interest in them has increased steadily. In Russia an authoritative four-volume collection of his works came out in 1994-99 and a fifteen-volume collection has been planned. His largest and most important work, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth [Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny] was reprinted in Moscow in 1990 and was translated into English in 1997. An Italian translation has been available since 1974 and a French one since 1975. A German translation is under way. The first three volumes of a ten-volume German collection of his works have come out. There is a dearth of English translations and studies of Florenskii's work. The only book-length study is R. Slesinski's Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. The most solid and extensive research on Florenskii is done in Germany and it is fully covered by M. Hagemeister's bibliographies, which appear among the papers of two international conferences on Florenskii. The papers of the first conference, which took place in 1988 in Bergamo, were published as PA. Florenskij i kul'tura ego vremeni / P.A. Florenskij e la cultura della sua epoca in 1995 and those of the second conference, which took place in Potsdam in 2000, as Pavel Florenskij—Tradition und Moderne in 2001. Our journal has published a translation of Florenskii's "Avtoreferat " and two articles on him— one on his relation to contemporary Orthodox theology and one on his importance to the future Russian culture.