Vasily Sesemann: the other and time

ENIn some respects, Vasily Sesemann is a uniquely contemporary figure. His biography, his work, and his historical fate all exhibit an unbreakable connection of the global and the local; they merge a universality of horizons with a particularity of trajectories. His identity as a person and as a thinker crystallized in several markedly distinct cultural and linguistic contexts without completely fitting into any one of them. Sesemann was both at home in, and alien to, a number of cultural traditions to which, at one or another period of his life, he was intimately related. He wrote philosophical works in Russian, German, and Lithuanian; and he wrote personal letters in these languages and Swedish, too. His Russian texts, however, were published mainly in the émigré press, which was unavailable and forbidden in Soviet Russia; his German texts appeared mostly in scholarly journals; and his Lithuanian writings became part of a small literary heritage largely unknown to the rest of the world. In this way Sesemann was and remained a marginal polymorph, so to speak. Those wishing to discern all sides of him need to follow him through terrains that changed in more ways than merely language. Nevertheless, his philosophical output accorded well with the basic dynamism of the philosophical thought of his times; it interacted with some of the most important philosophical currents and constituted an individual variety thereof (p. 15).