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The Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Semyon Ludvigovich Frank, also known as S.L. Frank and Semen Frank, Семён Людвигович Франк, was born on Jan. 28, 1877 (Gregorian calendar), in Moscow, and died on Dec. 19, 1950, in London. More than any other Russian philosopher of the so-called Silver Age who survived in exile, his life illustrated the effect of state terror in the 20th century. The Russian emigre scholar Vasily Vasilevich Zenkovsky in his standard ''A History of Russian Philosophy'' called Frank the greatest of Russian philosophers, while American translator-scholar Boris Jakim more recently called Frank's book ''The Unknowable'' (also translated “The Unfathomable”) the greatest work of Russian philosophy. Yet he is perhaps one of the least known of the Silver Age Russian philosophers today. Raised in a Jewish family with active interest in Jewish religious intellectual tradition, then a Marxist revolutionary, Frank married an Orthodox Christian in 1908 and converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1912. His politics evolved from revolutionary to liberal before 1917, and then to what he indicated was a creative conservatism, which a biographer termed liberal conservatism. His philosophical outlook has been described as articulating a metaphysical libertarianism, but more centrally as expressing anti-utopianist Christian realism and Christian existentialism. Singled out by Lenin for exile in 1922 on the "ships of philosophers", Frank fled Communism and ended up with his family first in Berlin and then near the outbreak of World War II in France. Because of his Jewish ethnic background he was in danger from Nazi Anti-Semitism, and after interviews with the Gestapo, went into hiding in southern France towards the end of World War II as his family was temporarily separated, an experience he described as similar to being "hunted like an animal."He and his wife Tatyana Sergeevna Bartseva (1886-1984), whose union in marriage he came to cherish as a concrete expression of the mystery of Christian love, had four children: Victor (1909-?), Alexei (1910-1969), Natalia (1912-1999), and Vasiliy (1920-1996).
In terms of theodicy, Frank in his works ''The Fall of the Idols'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' shows keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life amid the unleashing of great evil, which he identifies with demonic idolatry, in its objectifying of self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as inconsequential in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of both 20th-century refugee life. He criticized the Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of the disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies and a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, while upholding Orthodox Trinitarian teaching as distinct from Catholic theology. Frank disagreed with Berdyaev's brief post-World War II reconciliation with the Soviet state as naive, seeing the Soviet system as totalitarian evil, although he had earlier in exile defended the post-Tikhonite Moscow Patriarchate's situation under the Soviets. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of a potential Christian universalism, highly praised the writings of the ancient Sufi Muslim mystical writer Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press and the World Council of Churches as sources of refugee aid, he was not active in organized ecumenism, and resisted American Protestant influence on the YMCA Russian youth movement among emigres.
All his works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship. This is perhaps related in part to Frank's lack of firm academic and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad (such as contemporaries like Fr. Georges Florovsky), where he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants; his precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopher who was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution; and because the nature of his work did not encourage the controversial celebrity of some other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev. These factors and Frank's more introverted family-centered life limited his social networks in exile. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translations of some of Frank's books, Philip Boobbyer's biography, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995) is a valuable source in English on Frank's life and work, as is a [[short helpful essay in English on Frank's mature social philosophy|https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/08/s-l-franks-imaginative-conservatism.html]] by Dylan James Pahman.
