Anthony of Sourozh - Early Life

Early Life

Andrei Bloom was born on 19 June, 1914, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to Xenia and Boris Edvardovich Bloom. On his mother's side, he was the nephew of the composer Alexander Scriabin.

He spent his early childhood in Russia and Iran. During the Russian Revolution the family had to leave Iran, and by 1923 they were settled in Paris, where he was educated. He graduated in physics, chemistry and biology, and took his doctorate in medicine at the University of Paris.

By his own words, he met Christ, when he was a teenager:

"I met Christ as a Person at a moment when I needed him in order to live, and at a moment when I was not in search of him. I was found; I did not find him". "I was a teenager then. Life had been difficult in the early years and now it had of a sudden become easier. All the years when life had been hard I had found it natural, if not easy, to fight; but when life became easy and happy I was faced quite unexpectedly with a problem: I could not accept aimless happiness. Hardships and suffering had to be overcome, there was something beyond them. Happiness seemed to be stale if it had no further meaning". "As it often happens when you are young and when you act with passion, bent to possess either everything or nothing, I decided that I would give myself a year to see whether life had a meaning, and if I discovered it had none I would not live beyond the year..."--

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