Aleksei Fëdorovich Losev was a Russian philosopher and classicist and the author of numerous works on ancient and early modern aesthetics, language, symbolism, myth, and music aesthetics. A native of Novocherkassk, he graduated from Moscow University in 1917 with degrees in philosophy and classical philology and later taught at the University of Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow Conservatory. Before they ceased to exist in 1922 he attended the meetings of the Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ëv (Solovyov) Religious-Philosophical Society and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev's Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, where he met the leading figures of the so-called religious-philosophical renaissance.

During the 1920s Losev forged his own version of Christian neoplatonism for which he drew on ancient Platonists, Greek church fathers, German idealism (especially Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), Russian religious-philosophical thought, and Edmund Husserl...