In his most important phenomenological work, Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and sense, 1914), Gustav Shpet took up Edmund Husserl's idea of pure phenomenology and developed it in the direction of a "phenomenology of hermeneutical reason." In this theoretical framework he formulated, between 1914 and 1918, hermeneutic and semiotic problems, which in the 1920s he elaborated more specifically within the fields of philosophy of language and theory of art. In doing so, he was combining Husserl's conceptions with ideas from other philosophical movements, particularly Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics and Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language.

Shpet's reception and transformation of phenomenology must be seen in the context of Russian intellectual and cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Platonic "Moscow Metaphysical School" (which included Vladimir Solov'ëv and Sergei Trubetskoi) provided the intellectual atmosphere in which Shpet's turn to Husserl's phenomonology took...