The Meaning of Life

Eerdmans has just sent me a copy of their latest book in the "Russian front" (as their publisher calls it):

S.L. Frank, The Meaning of Life, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), xvi+138pp. 

Frank, who died in 1950, was an outstanding Russian philosopher and critic of Marxism and Soviet communism. As with many of the Slavophiles, his philosophy and theology often blended together.

This present book was originally written in Russian and published there in 1925. It reflects Frank's bitter experience during the 1917 Russian Revolution and its horrific, bloody aftermath. The Revolution unleashed such massive suffering that Frank was led to write this book to try to make some sense of the meaning and purpose, if any, of suffering.

Boris Jakim, the leading translator of Russian religious though today, calls this book "the closest thing we have in the twenty-first century to the book of Job."

The book will be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies by Robert Slesinski.