Seven Days on the Roads of France: June 1940

  • Year 1998
  • Type Book
  • Genre spiritual memoir
  • Tradition Orthodox
  • Original language French

For For readers who want Lossky the man, and for anyone interested in France in 1940 seen by a Russian émigré Christian; not theology in the technical sense.

Should I read this?

For the general reader
3 of 5 worth your time
For the researcher
2 of 5 useful
Difficulty
2 of 5 moderate

A short diary of his flight across France in June 1940, and his reflections on France and its Christian past. The easiest and most personal thing he wrote.

How it proceeds
  • Philosophic 1 of 5
  • Scriptural 0 of 5
  • Experiential 4 of 5
  • Sociological 3 of 5
  • Historical 4 of 5

Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.

Lossky's account of his journey across France in June 1940, when the German army reached Paris. On 13 June he left the city to enlist in the French army, and seven days and some six hundred kilometres later he was reunited with his family in a small town in the south. He wrote the account a few days afterwards. It records the roads, the refugees and the people he met, and his reflections on France, its history and its Christian vocation, the country he had made his own after his exile from Russia in 1922 and whose citizen he had become in 1939. The diary remained unpublished in his lifetime and appeared from Éditions du Cerf in Paris in 1998, in a volume of 89 pages. An English translation by Michael Donley, edited by his son Nicholas Lossky, was published by St Vladimir's Seminary Press in 2012.

Catalog IDW.FRSMR2.1

Edition details and descriptions on this page were compiled with the aid of AI research tools. Readers are encouraged to verify specifics (publisher, translator, edition year) against the originating source before purchase or citation.