Yan Staen’s Life according to Documents from Party, Academic and Family Archives

Abstract

The article describes the possibilities of a full-fledged reconstruction of the life path of Russian philosophers of the past on the material of the history of philosophy of the Soviet period. It is suggested, that a successful solution of such a problem is possible only by the constant integrated using of various archival and literary sources. Such sources include funds of academic archives, archives of educational institutions, party archives, archives of state of state security agencies. The role of family archives is emphasized, when working with which the analysis of surviving documents should be supplemented by a direct collecting of the memoirs of the descendants of philosophers. Literary sources include monographs, collections of articles, magazine and newspaper periodicals, reviews. These thoughts are illustrated by the example of the biography of the Soviet philosopher of the 1920s. Ya. E. Staen, a representative of the Deborin School. Published for the first time: autobiography of Ya. E. Staen from the case of the Commission of Party Control, speech by Ya. E. Staen at a discussion at the Institute of Scientific Philosophy, documents and photographs from the archive of Ya. E. Staen’s widow — Valeria Staen. Among these framily documents are evidence of Ya. E. Staen, written by his colleages (his former students) V. Ya. Kirpotin and G. M. Bespalov, Valeria Staen’s letter, addressed to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU P. N. Demichev with a demand to bring M. B. Mitin for plagiarism of Staen’s article “Philosophy” in Big Soviet Encyclopedia and memoires of Irene E. Myaskovskaya, great-granddaughter Valeria L. Staen. For the first time, unique photographs are published, depicting Ya. E. Staen. The documents were discovered in November — December 2021 in the cottage that firstly belonged to
Valeria Staen not far from Moscow, Memoirs by Irene E. Myaskovskaya were written during her cooperation with me in the memory of her beloved relatives.