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# On 3 June 1929 the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife Valentina were secretly tonsured as monastics by the Athonite elder Archimandrite David, taking the names Andronik and Athanasia
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/3-iiunia-1929-goda-filosof-aleksei-losev-i-ego-zhena-valentina-taino-priniali-monasheskii-postrig-ot-afonskogo-startsa-arkhimandrita-davida-s-imenami-andronik-i-afanasiia/
- Published: 2026-04-15T06:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:18.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Books, Mores, People

It was a monastic tonsure "in the world", that is, without withdrawal to a monastery. The person goes on living an ordinary life, but takes monastic vows.

For decades neither students nor colleagues, for the most part, suspected anything; the secret was confided only to a chosen few from the inner circle. Only in later years did Losev come to be spoken of more and more often as an Orthodox thinker and a monk.

Of the whole monastic habit Losev wore only a single item: a small black skufia. With Losev's aristocratic bearing, always in a suit and tie, the headgear looked suitable and natural, and was taken for the black academic cap so common in those years among elderly scholars. But it was in fact an unrecognised monastic skufia.

Losev's first wife, Valentina Mikhailovna, was an astronomer by profession; in 1930 she was arrested together with her husband in the case of the "monarchist organisation of churchmen". Losev was given 10 years, she 5\. In the 1920s it was Valentina Mikhailovna who saw to it that Losev's books made their way through the censorship. In 1933 the couple were released early thanks to a petition from Ekaterina Peshkova. For 32 years they lived in what Vyacheslav Ivanov called "unearthly love", as "two arms of a single cross".

Aza was a young postgraduate student who lived in their house. When illness struck Valentina Mikhailovna down, she said to Aza Takho-Godi: "I hand him over from hand to hand." And she asked her never to leave Alexei Fyodorovich. Thus the secret monk Losev acquired a second "wife", a sister 40 years his junior. Aza Alibekovna outlived her companion by 37 years and died in 2025 at the age of 102, guarding the Losev archive to her last day and answering the letters of researchers.

Aza Takho-Godi had an interesting story: the black cap with the letter "M" appears in Bulgakov's *The Master and Margarita*, and Bulgakov himself had a friend, Pavel Popov, a university comrade of Losev's. Popov, shuttling between the two friends, could have described Losev's fate and appearance to Bulgakov.