Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev

born September 10, 1893 

When I was a student in the late seventies, I was utterly captivated by the books of Alexei Losev, and I was certainly not alone. They were not easy reading, in fact you had to labor over every page. But just about everyone in my student world felt they had to try to get to the bottom of his Classical Mythology or Classical Philosophy of History. 

How far readers managed to get through these books varied, and  Losev – the man and his works – were seen as a kind of high ideal, a level of spirituality that it was not easy to measure up to, but that raised the bar and influenced the direction your reading and thought would take. Losev also published the multivolume History of Classical Aesthetics, and, after lengthy struggle, a brief biography of Vladimir Solovyov. There were also early works by Losev that came out in the late 1920s, the very names of which sounded like mystical incantations: Music as a Subject of Logic, The Philosophy of Name, The Dialectics of Number in Plotinus, Essays on Classical Symbolism and Mythology…