I find Jonathan Rée’s LRB review (5 February 2026; archived) of two books on Alexandre Kojève interesting on a number of counts. For one thing, he had the unusual duality of being both a well-known philosopher (Hegelian variety) and an important figure in French governments (Rée’s piece begins “The obituary in Le Monde was unequivocal: the death of Alexandre Kojève on 4 June 1968 had deprived France of one of its greatest civil servants”). Of more Hattic relevance is his name; he was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov (in Moscow), but at some point (neither English nor French Wikipedia is clear about this) he adopted the snappier Gallicized version Kojève. Here is a piquant account of his adventures after leaving Russia:
After a hard journey, including a spell in a Polish prison, Kojève reached Berlin in July 1920 and a few months later came into possession of a large stash of diamonds, sent illicitly from Russia by his mother. He was just eighteen and found himself, as he recalled, ‘at the mercy of money and the pleasures of life’. His extravagances and indiscretions may have been extreme, but they did not stop him taking courses in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, and devouring, as he put it, ‘everything worth reading in philosophy’. He also registered at Heidelberg to pursue research on Vladimir Soloviev, whom he regarded as ‘the first Russian thinker to devise a universal philosophical system’. He commended Soloviev’s vision of an ‘end of history’ in which humanity would rally to the feminine figure of Sophia, or absolute wisdom, but criticised the irrational attachment to Christianity which, he said, prevented Soloviev from winning through to ‘a new stage in the evolution of thought’.
Kojève finished his dissertation in 1924 but didn’t stay in Heidelberg long enough to qualify for a degree. Berlin was far more exciting and before long he was involved with a glamorous Russian woman, Cécile Shoutak. She was already married, and her aggrieved husband persuaded his older brother, Aleksander Koyra, to remonstrate with Kojève. The scheme misfired, however: Koyra came away convinced that his sister-in-law was ‘absolutely right’ and that Kojève was ‘much, much better than my brother’. He then returned to his home in Paris and persuaded the scandalous couple to join him there in 1926. They married and lived in conspicuous luxury in the Latin Quarter, while Kojève took up an inquiry into determinism and modern physics. But the Crash of 1929 wiped out his investments, which put an end to his high living, his marriage and his work in natural science, though not to his friendship with Koyra.
Koyra was one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Russian diaspora. He had studied philosophy in Germany and France before joining the Foreign Legion, fighting on the Eastern Front and taking French citizenship under the name Alexandre Koyré. He completed a state doctorate in 1922, at the age of thirty, and was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he started trying to rehabilitate Hegel in France. The ‘traditional interpretation’, he said, was completely wrong: Hegel was not the ‘absurd dialectician and outrageous reactionary’ portrayed in patriotic French textbooks but a ‘singularly attractive’ thinker, more interested in ‘experience’ than ‘method’. Early in 1933, Koyré gave lectures on ‘Hegel in Jena’ in which he evoked ‘a human Hegel, vibrant and vulnerable’. He admitted that Hegel’s notion of an ‘end of history’ looked preposterous, even self-contradictory: how could abstract philosophical reasoning adjudicate on questions of historical fact and how could there be a ‘future’ in which there is ‘no longer any future’? But the difficulties disappear, according to Koyré, once you realise that Hegel was talking not about history as such, but about the way philosophy reflects on it. ‘Philosophy always arrives too late,’ as Hegel once put it. ‘When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a form of life has grown old,’ or in other words, the ‘owl of Minerva’ – symbol of philosophical insight – ‘takes flight only at dusk’. The notion of an end of history is therefore hypothetical rather than categorical: it means that philosophy will not be complete until history is finished, or conversely, that if philosophy is complete, then history must be over. Koyré seems to have thought that no one in their right mind could imagine that these conditions would ever be fulfilled; but he conceded rather sorrowfully that, in Jena in 1806, ‘Hegel himself may well have believed it.’
So there’s another odd onomastic change: why did Koyra (Койра) choose to become Koyré ([kwaʁe])? Is this what studying Hegel does to people? (Kojève’s innamorata Cécile Shoutak also has an odd name — Russian sources call her Цецилия Леонидовна Шутак, and what kind of Russian name is Цецилия?) Anyway, the whole review is worth reading if you care about this stuff, and I’ll quote another Hattic bit: Kojève “took some pride in having defied taboo by encouraging smoking and using colloquial French.”
A different Russian with the same spelling, perhaps as a consequence of having ended up in a former French colony (oops, sorry, “League of Nations mandate”)? Although he was Кужеев not Коже́вников. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Koj%C3%A8ve
I am curious as to whether Cecile started life with a more Slavic name and if so what.
The points may or may not be substantively fair, but it turns out the late Roger Scruton expressed his negative views about Kojeve in rather striking words that I (de gustibus, of course) find amusing.
E.g.
“Kojéve influenced a whole generation of French post-war intellectuals with his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he injected into the bloated Hegelian* body some strong shots of Nietzsche and Heidegger, making the moribund organism writhe in interesting torment.”
or
“This man was, in my view, a dangerous psychopath, who brought with him from Russia the same kind of nihilistic fervour that had inspired the Bolsheviks, and who took an exhilarated joy in the thought that everything around him was doomed.”
*It may be relevant that while your more typical right-of-center Anglophone intelligentsy of Scruton’s generation thought Hegel a prototypical worthless foreigner who talked nothing but nonsense and bosh, Scruton himself thought that Hegel, rightly understood, was an important and valuable thinker. This probably gave him more animus toward “incorrect” (in his view) readings of Hegel than others would have.
I am curious as to whether Cecile started life with a more Slavic name and if so what.
You and me both.
Crash of 1929 wiped out his investments
Supposedly, most of which were in the company that makes La vache qui rit. It survived.
Not to knock the LRB as such, but if hat were less of an Anglophile he could have linked to the Cleveland Review of Books’ recent joint review of the same two new works on Kojeve: https://clereviewofbooks.com/isabel-jacobs-boris-groys-marco-filoni/
I’m not sure of the reviewer’s nexus with Cleveland – she is said to currently reside in Prague.
His extravagances and indiscretions may have been extreme, but they did not stop him taking courses in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese
Whoa! Classic false antithesis!
These are indeed extravagant languages all in their own ways. Indiscrete – I don’t know.
Alas, I don’t remember even knowing of the existence of the Cleveland Review of Books. Call me a coastal snob if you will.
why did Koyra (Койра) choose to become Koyré ([kwaʁe])?
Quare enim?
I have to say that all this biographical stuff makes me feel that Dostoevsky, contrary to the impression that we dull Brits may have of him, is basically a sort of kitchen-sink realist.
why did Koyra (Койра) choose to become Koyré ([kwaʁe])?
Rather, /koiʁe/? Some examples here and here.
That Wikipedia page for Vladimir Kojeve calls him a “major-general” with hyphen, which looks ill formed to me. When general in a title like that is a French-style postposed adjective, it can sometimes take a hyphen, as in “secretary-general” but not in “attorney general.” The military sense of general is from the longer “captain general” or “captain-general” (with both forms well attested* before the term fell out of use).** The next lower rank below general, “lieutenant general” never has a hyphen, because the name originates not with a meaning of “lieutenant with general authority,” but rather, “lieutenant to the [full] general.” A major general is not “a major*** of general authority”; it comes from sergeant-major-general, which does seem properly formed, since it denoted the most senior officer and a force or army with responsibility for things like training, drills, and discipline—so very much like a “sergeant-major of general authority.”
And now I’m just feeling confused.
* The hyphenated military ranks are all, so far as I know, also commonly written without the hyphens, unlike secretary-general (which certainly sometimes appears without the hyphen, but much less commonly).
** A common mistaken belief is that it is instead a shortening of “general officer.” Note that in English, at least, when this modifying sense of general appears before the name of the the position it modifies, it (almost?) never takes the hyphen: “general secretary,” “general manager,” “general counsel.”
*** The lower major rank comes from “captain-major,” indicating higher authority than a normal captain; sergeant-major is an analogous case. “Lieutenant” ranks are also, by default, taken to mean assistants to someone who can be (formally or informally) called a captain—and effectively taking over the captain’s position (“tenancy”) in lieu of him (or her, nowadays) when the permanent captain is unavailable. (Of course, lieutenancies can be other than for military positions, but the military has been the default meaning for quite some time.)
Re: what kind of Russian name is Цецилия?
They weren’t Orthodox ethnic Russians. The Koyra family was Roman Catholic from Grodno. Shutak seems to be a Western Ukrainian name geography-wise, I haven’t checked if they were Roman Catholic too. Definitely a proper context for the feminine name Cecile, regardless.
I am pleased to learn from wiktionary that цецилия with no capital letter is, in Bulgarian at least, a kind of amphibian (the sort that’s a “caecilian” in English). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%86%D0%B5%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%8F
Rather, /koiʁe/? Some examples here and here.
Ah, I just copied Wikipedia — I don’t know why I trusted them. Someone more daring than I might try correcting it.
Re: what kind of Russian name is Цецилия?
Thanks very much; that all makes sense.
JWB –
all I know of Hegel (almost) was acquired from Popper, and I’ve never felt the need to go further.
Schopenhauer on Hegel:
Searching Schopenhauer’s Gesammelte Werke for mentions of Hegel is great fun.
@Brett: The Russian wiki article about Vladimir K. calls him a генерал-майор (transliterates as general-major*). Perhaps whoever did the English article was suffering from an ESLish lack of insight into how hyphenation conventions differ.** Separately, that Russian rank is reportedly equivalent to AmEng “brigadier general” rather than AmEng “major general.”
*or mayor or maior etc.
**Although if wikipedia is to be trusted the title is hyphenated “major-general” in the armies of e.g. Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, so you can’t necessarily work these things out from first principles. For the first two that parallels hyphenation in the French and Gaelic versions of the title, but that wouldn’t account for NZ.
ETA: see also the hyphen in at least wikipedia’s account of the junta that briefly controlled England-and-Wales late in the Interregnum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_Major-Generals
So… Koÿré then?
(I used to walk past the bus to L’Haÿ-les-Roses every day.)
Not that it’s going to matter, but isn’t Greek Catholic more likely? Or were they Polish?
(The name looks Finnish if anything, but there the meaning seems unlikely…)
The Schachtelsatz of Doom.
I see that and raise you some German: Oberleutnant “senior lieutenant”, literally “higher l.”; Oberstleutnant, literally “highest l.”, but really “lieutenant colonel”.
Back in the relevant time period, Grodno was approximately half-Jewish but the gentile population was overwhelmingly Polish and thus “Latin” for religious purposes rather than either Orthodox or “Greek Catholic.” Things are different now, after the Jews were massacred and the Poles substantially-but-not-entirely pushed further west. Although it’s not clear to me that Cecile (as opposed to her first husband) was from Grodno? Here’s a Bolshevik Цецилия born in 1873 near Smolensk, although she was Ashkenazic, so … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Bobrovskaya
@David Marjanović: The lack of parallelism between Oberleutnant and Oberstleutnant is certainly odd as well. The source of the latter is the German practice of using Oberst for the colonel rank, which is itself peculiar, since colonel is not the highest rank.
A further note on Grodno/Hrodna historical demographics. By the later 19th century the official “Greek Catholic” population of the city was zero, because it was in one of the regions where the Czars had forcibly suppressed the Greek Catholic Church following the Partitions of Poland. While the official theory was that the erstwhile Greek Catholics were all simply returning to the true Orthodox faith that their ancestors had been wrongly detached from by wicked heterodox secular rulers, in practice some subset of the former Greek Catholics eventually became western/Latin Catholics, since that was an option the Czars had not suppressed, as doing so would obviously provoke too much negative reaction from their Polish & Lithuanian subjects.* One suspects that the folks who had availed themselves of that option may have sometimes/often been classified in late Czarist census records as Poles even if their actual ethnic ancestry had been more East-Slavic.
*Who were indeed being subjected to various heavy-handed sorts of coercive Russification, yet someone in the Czarist regime still had a sense of what would be going too far from a cost-benefit perspective.
I’m very much enjoying this sidebar on Grodno/Hrodna historical demographics!
@hat, we aim to please…
Separately, the first paragraph of the block quote in the OP mentions Kojeve’s interest in V.S. Soloviev, who is of interest not only for the various strikingly original thoughts in his writings but because he’s an excellent example of the vagaries of transliteration-from-Cyrillic. Wikipedia has him as Solovyov, and you can also find Solovyev, Solovyof (early 20th century), Solovieff (ditto) and no doubt other variant romanizations Out There.
There’s also a currently-living Vladimir Соловьёв (but with a different patronymic), described by wikipedia as a “Russian TV presenter and propagandist,” who also experiences some variability in transliteration.
ETA: I should have specified that the philosopher is “Solovyov” in *English* wikipedia. He’s Soloviev in the French and Spanish editions of wikipedia, not to mention Solowjow in the German one and Solovjov in both Dutch and Esperanto.
i’m not sure at all whether this is a relevant data point, but the poet celia dropkin (who was from bobruisk / babruysk, near minsk) is properly ציליע | tsilye, and the two other variations on the name that show up in the Leksikon are both spelled with ציל־ (tsili adler, the actor, and a prose writer named tsile levonen).
Compare Tschebyscheff.
Not to mention Kzeremetz.
OK, I am totally embarrassed but I must admit that the Grodno connection was a false lead.
I spotted exactly one Koyra family in the classic Familysearch database and was satisfied with the result. But there was a catch. Their lists significantly underrepresent Jewish populations (which were tallied completely separately in census and vital records of the Russian Empire).
And there turns out to be a whole cluster of Jewish Koyra/Koyre families, originating in Upper Podolia and Kremenets areas of Ukraine and spreading from there to urban centers such as Odessa and Belaya Tserkov’ and beyond.
Alexandre Koyré has been born in Taganrog, and his parents’ family is documented there and in nearby Rostov. His father, Russified in Alexandre’s official patronymic as Vladimir, was Volf s/o Meyer, and his mother, Gitlya d/o David. His grandfather Meyer Koyre, son of Shaya, was a merchant in Odessa, and his uncle graduated from the university there, so it must have been a prominent and highly educated family. Alexandre’s wife was also of Odessa Jewish extraction.
The Russian spelling alternates between Koyra and Koyre in most of the families, and Alexandre must have been restoring his grandfather’s original surname spelling when he Hallicized it.
PS: most embarrassingly, one of the Podolian Koyra families lived in the same hamlet with the long name of Murovannye Kurilovtsy as my direct Gonikberg/Honigberg ancestors, back when the Jewish population there numbered mere dozens. I must have scrolled through their records so many times in the lists!
I expect that Dimitry P. just suffered an accidental typo (as happens to us all) in producing “Hallicized,” but I take it as a nod to the same orthographic variation as explains Grodno v. Hrodna or (in his post) Gonikberg v. Honigberg.
Eh, no, I just made a quick guess about a proper technical term for changing the spelling of a personal name to conform with French conventions. It crossed my mind that I could have invented a completely nonexistent word LOL, but I trusted the learned community of LH to understand what I meant.
What would be the right way to say it?
Edited: oh, drats! Only now I see it. Rolling on the floor…. Very RRRRussian indeed
at some point (neither English nor French Wikipedia is clear about this) he adopted the snappier Gallicized version Kojève— Google books says “Until 1936 Kojève’s texts appeared under the name of Koschewnikoff or Kojevnikoff” and “Only in January 1937 was he naturalized as Kojève”
“Kojève” is a particularly happy creation, I think. “Cojève” sounds like a perfectly good French word which is only missing by accident.
je cojève
nous cojevons
vous cojevez
The philosopher Solov??? seems to have been from an interesting family. One of his brothers (Vsevolod, a novelist) has a wiki article about him with the exemplary sentence “By 1886 he had abandoned his plans to promote Theosophy in Russia and denounced Blavatsky as a failed spy of the Okhrana.” And one of his sisters (Polyxena or perhaps Poliksena, primarily a poet and illustrator) was the first Russian translator of Alice in Wonderland, sub nom. Приключения Алисы в Стране чудес.
Perhaps a musical name? The Moscow Conservatory goes with Святая Цецилия, and Russian Wikipedia also uses that spelling for the patron saint of music, though they both promptly acknowledge it’s the same person known to the Russian Orthodox Church as Кикилия.
@gp
https://santacecilia.it/
Magari! The Easter concert looks fantastic.
BTW Alexandre Beider explained that Koyre is Ukrainian Yiddish way to pronounce קוֹרֵא (officially qore’ ), which is Hebrew for “reader” (and the surname meant “reader of the Torah scroll in the synagogue”). So in this sense, too, the change of the surname from Koyra appears to be restoring the right spelling.
Ah, that makes sense!