Semën Liudvigovich Frank, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was trained in law at Moscow University (1894–1898) and in economies and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Munich (1899–1902). As a student in Moscow he was a member of a Marxist group headed by P. B. Struve; his first published work was a critique of Karl Marx's theory of value (1900). Between 1902 and 1905 (during which years he moved back and forth between Moscow and Germany) he was a principal contributor to Struve's journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), published in Stuttgart.

Frank joined a number of other young ex-Marxist intellectuals—among them Struve, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Sergei Bulgakov—in publishing three important symposium volumes: Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism; Moscow, 1903); Vekhi (Signposts; Moscow, 1909); and Iz glubiny (De profundis; Moscow, 1918). This last work was printed but because of Soviet censorship was...