Nikolay Lossky - Life

Life

Lossky was born in Krāslava, Latvia (then in the Russian Empire). His father, Onufry Lossky, was a Russian with Polish roots and an Orthodox Christian; his mother Adelajda Przylenicka was Polish and Roman Catholic. He was expelled from school for propagating atheism.

Lossky undertook post-graduate studies in Germany under Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt and G. E. Müller, receiving a Master's degree in 1903 and a Doctorate in 1907.

Returning to Russia, he became a lecturer and subsequently Assistant Professor of philosophy in St. Petersburg.

Lossky called for a Russian religious and spiritual reawakening while pointing out post-revolution excesses. At the same time, Lossky survived an elevator accident that nearly killed him, which caused him to turn back to the Russian Orthodox Church under the direction of Father Pavel Florensky. These criticisms and conversion cost Lossky his professorship of philosophy and led to his exile abroad, on the famed Philosophers' ship (in 1922) from the Soviet Union as a counter-revolutionary.

Lossky was invited to Prague by Tomáš Masaryk and became Professor at the Russian University of Prague at Bratislava, in Czechoslovakia. Being part of a group of ex-Marxists, including Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Peter Berngardovich Struve, Semen L. Frank. Lossky, though a Fabian socialist, contributed to the group's symposium named Vekhi or Signposts. He also helped the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin with his Social and Cultural Dynamics

In 1947 N.O. Lossky took a position teaching Christian theology at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox seminary in New York.

In 1961, after the death of his famous Christian theologian son Vladimir Lossky, N. O. Lossky went to France. The last four years of his life were spent in illness there.