Georgii Vasil'evich Florovskii was a Russian clergyman, theologian, patrologist, and historian of culture. A descendant of several generations of Orthodox priests, Florovskii graduated from the Department of History and Philology of Novorossiyskii University in Odessa (1916), and taught in Odessa until January 1920, when he emigrated to Sofia, Bulgaria. There he became a member of a group of five Russian émigrés who, in 1920 and 1921, founded the so-called Eurasianism. The Eurasian doctrine was first presented in the collective work "Exodus to the East," for which Florovskii wrote three articles.

"Exodus to the East" presented what was essentially a cultural morphology of Oswald Spengler's type (i.e., the botanized view of history as a process of development and interaction of ethnic and cultural organisms) and a geopolitical theory stating that, because Europe had exhausted its spiritual energies, Russia should break with...