Gustav Shpet

Shpet was born as the illegitimate son of an Austro-Hungarian officer and a mother of Polish-German descent of an aristocratic background.

Shpet enrolled in St. Vladimir University of Kiev in 1898, but was expelled for joining a Marxist circle.

[2] As a thinker, he was thoroughly grounded in Russian religious thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His philosophy combined Husserl's analysis of the structure of consciousness with Platonism of Orthodoxy, the doctrine of incarnation, and veneration of matter.

He was charged with anti-soviet activities, received a sentence of five years internal exile, and was sent to Tomsk, the first university city in Siberia.