Muravyov, Valerian Nikolaevich (philosopher)

Born in the family of the Moscow prosecutor, N.V. Muravyov . He graduated from the Alexander Lyceum , with a gold medal in 1905. He attended a course at École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. In 1907 he entered the diplomatic service. He worked in diplomatic missions of the Russian Empire in Western Europe. Acted as Secretary of the 2nd Hague Peace Conference . Later he worked in the central apparatus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during the First World War he held the position of vice director of the diplomatic office at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander .

After the February Revolution, he continued to work in state institutions, becoming the head of the political cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. After the October Revolution, he collaborated with the counter-revolutionary movement. In February 1920, he was arrested, in August sentenced by the Supreme Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to the death penalty, replaced by imprisonment, but was soon amnestied.

On the recommendation of L. D. Trotsky, he was hired by the diplomatic department of the RSFSR; for a short time he was in charge of the division of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs . I was forced to go to work in the concession department of the Main Forestry Committee, worked as a scientific consultant to the Central Forestry Administration, and a librarian of the Supreme Economic Council . Since 1924 he worked at the Central Institute of Labor as a scientific secretary; in 1929, during the next "purge" he was forced to leave him, he worked as a janitor.

On October 26, 1929 he was arrested and on November 10 of the same year sentenced by the Special Conference for anti-Soviet agitation to imprisonment in a forced labor camp for a term of three years.

The exact date and place of death is unknown: it is believed that he died a few months after the verdict of typhus, and this happened in 1930 in Narym ^[3] , according to other sources Muravyov died in 1932 ^{[1] [2]} .

V.N. Muravyov began to appear in print from the beginning of the 1910s. He published the pamphlet The Fourth Duma and Our Great Power Future (1910), was published in the journal Russian Thought, and in other print publications. After the February Revolution, he was actively involved in public debate on political issues and was regularly published in the weekly Russian Freedom, published by P. B. Struve . The articles are based on the traditions of Slavophilism and Christian socialism. In 1918 he took part in the famous collection "From the Depths" .

In the 1920s, he was actively working on an original philosophical concept, preparing for publication a large philosophical work entitled Sophia and Kitovras. It is written at the intersection of the genres of Platonic dialogue, the “philosophical novel” , journalism and a scientific treatise. The figurative series of the work refers both to the mythological aesthetics of ancient Russian apocryphal prose, and to the everyday realities of Soviet Russia. The text bears traces of numerous alterations and copyright editions. There is an author's translation of part of the text into English.

Both Sofia and Kitovras, as well as a number of unfinished works of fiction and numerous philosophical sketches, remained unpublished during the author's lifetime. As part of his work at the Central Institute of Labor, Muravyov prepares a number of works on the theory and organization of labor, and publishes at his own expense the pamphlet The Time Acquisition (1924), which became the author's only major lifetime publication.

In the early 1920s, V. N. Muravyov participated in the “ Myaslavl circle”, which included A. F. Losev , D. F. Egorov , P. S. Popov , P. A. Florensky and others. V.N. Muravyov took part in the work of the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture. In the 1920s, he was familiar with the philosophers-followers of N.F. Fedorov : with A.K. Gorsky and N.A. Setnitsky. The creativity of V. N. Muravyov lies in the mainstream of Russian religious philosophy and Russian cosmism . Developing the ideas of the teachings of Nikolai Fedorov , Muravyov created his own evolutionary concept of time ^[3]

After a long break, the first publication of V. N. Muravyov was the reprint of his brochure, “Mastering the Time,” undertaken by M. Hagemeister in 1983 in Germany. After 1992, several small works of the philosopher, previously published in the press, were published. In 1998, under the editorship of G.P. Aksyonov, a collection of selected works by V.N. Muravyov was published. In 2011, the publishing house of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences published the first publication in Russia of most of the archival heritage of V. N. Muravyov. Compilation, preparation of the text for printing and authorship of comments on the text belongs to A. G. Gacheva.

• short biography
• "Ants" - article in the New Philosophical Encyclopedia