Ivan M. Kontsevich passed away on this day in 1965. We just celebrated St. John of Shanghai. He became a person we venerate not on his own, but through the Church of Christ, the Russian Church Abroad. Russian Church Abroad generously offered its authentic tradition of Russian spiritual life, piety, and asceticism to all who would want to partake in it. Ivan Mikhailovich Kontsevich is an important link in this live bond between Orthodox Russia and the Russian Church Abroad. Like St. John he was born in Poltava in 1893 (St. John was born there in 1896). The future St. John graduated from Military Cadet Corps in Poltava and Ivan from Emperor Alexander I Gymnasium there. When Ivan studied at the Mathematical Department of Khrar’kov University he became an acolyte of the Holy Confessor Nicholas Zagorovskii. The death of Ivan’s brother Vladimir at the frontlines of World War One forced Ivan to seek spiritual comfort. In 1916, he went to Optina Hermitage and became linked with this place forever. Through Ivan his family also became connected with Optina. His brother Oleg became a bishop of the Russian Church Abroad with the name Nektarii, after the heavenly protector of the St. Nektarii Schema-Priestmonk of Optina Hermitage (d. 1928). In 1920, Ivan went on the road of exile with the White Army from Crimea to Gallipoli and then to Paris. St. Serge Theological Institute (Sergievo podvor’e “a metochion of Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra,” which was closed by the Bolsheivks in 1919) was founded there in 1925 with the active support of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitskii). With the blessing of St. Nektarii, Ivan enrolled in the institute. In 1948 he defended his master’s in theology thesis The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit in Ancient Russia. In 1989, this work was published in English by St. Herman of Alaska Monastery. While in France, as many other Russian refugees, Kontsevich had to support himself working physically. In 1930, he graduated from the Mathematical Department of the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, Ivan married Elena Iur’evna Kartseva, a niece of the spiritual writer Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus (1862-1929). Similarly to Konstevich, his bride also at some point in her life wanted to be a monastic. Elena grew up in her uncle’s family, which, like Kontsevich, was connected with Optina. They were married in Algeria by a clergyman of Metropolitan Evlogy, Fr. Basil Shustin, also a spiritual child of the Optina Elders. There also was the darker side of spirituality “exported” from pre-revolutionary Russia, that is, the one that focused on the conspirology leading to the end of the world. The same person can be right in one sense but err in another, as it is clear in Sergei Nllus’s case. The same man who published Conversation of Nicholas A. Motovilov with St. Seraphim of Sarov, which became a standard writing on Orthodox spiritual life, also published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No wonder that his niece Elena during the Berne trial of 1934 regarding the authenticity of this forgery, provided the court with “authentic” Nilus papers, allegedly confirming a Jewish plot to dominate the world. After World War Two the Kontsevitchs moved to the US. (Oleg escaped from the USSR during World War Two and in 1949 arrived in the US.) For two years, from 1952-1954, Ivan and Elena tried to live near “American Optina.” Ivan taught Patrology at the seminary in Jordanville, but something did not work, and in 1954 they moved to San Francisco. The Russian Church Abroad there was rich in a striking palette of human experience. It is enough to mention that Fr. Michael Polsky, the author of the ground-breaking collection of the New Martyrs of Russia, was a protopresbyter at the cathedral. This milieu bore direct impact on the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina. Ivan Kontsevich’s magnum opus Optina Hermitage and Its Time was published in Jordanville, in Russian, and posthumously, in 1970, by Elena Kontsevich and Gleb Podmoshensky, the future Abbot Herman and a founder of Platina Hermitage, together with Eugene Rose.
Source:
Olga Rozhneva, “Khranimyi molitvami optinskikh startsev” [The One Who Was Preserved through the Prayers of Optina Elders], pravoslavie.ru. |
