Letters from S.I. Hessen to N.A. Hans in 1926–1930. Hessen, Sergei I., Letters to N.A. Hans (1926–1930), ed. by Kir­zhaeva, Vera P.

The legacy of the Russian philosopher and educator S. Hessen has been of active interest to historians of philosophy, education and culture in Russia and abroad for the last decades. One of the urgent tasks of modern Hessen studies should be considered the creation of a full-scale the thinker’s scientific biography on the basis of newly discovered archival materials, unknown and hard-to-access sources, memoirs of contemporaries, official documents of numerous émigré or­ganizations. A special role of epistolary is evident in these circumstances. S. Hessen’s letters preserved in various archives are an important source that makes it possible to reconstruct the details of the scholar’s biography and everyday life, to feel the atmosphere that surrounded him, to reveal the contexts and subtexts of his works. For the Prague period, such a source are the letters to N. Hans, a renown English expert in comparative education and a life-long friend of Hessen. Due to the fact Hessen’s archive was burnt down in 1944 during the Warsaw up­rising, the letters to Hans are of particular value. The correspondence began in 1923 after they met in Prague. The letters from 1926 to 1930 show the pecu­liarities of Hessen’s work as the editor of “Russian School Abroad” journal, his co-operation with European philosophical and pedagogical editions, his partici­pation in international scientific forums, his co-authorship of the English version of the book on the Soviet educational policy, and reveal the circumstances of his life in Prague, his family and financial problems, and etc.