Fiction will never really be able to compete with the strange and fascinating figures of oddity and genius who populate history. Angelico Press, which specializes in “counter, original, spare, strange” writers, introduces us to Valentin Tomberg.
Tomberg was a pilgrim who made many stops on his journey. Born to a Protestant family in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1900, he started studying law at the University of St. Petersburg in 1917 but was forced to flee to Estonia because of the Russian Revolution. There his mother was killed by the Bolsheviks, but he stayed for nearly twenty years until moving to the Netherlands in 1938. The by-then-Eastern Orthodox but Rudolf Steiner-inspired Tomberg worked there until moving to Cologne in 1944 to study with the legal scholar Ernst von Hippel. There amid the ashes of Nazi Germany he wrote a doctoral thesis titled “The Degeneration and Regeneration of Jurisprudence” and also entered the Catholic Church. The polyglot scholar (he was fluent in six languages and read six others) kept writing and moving around. He lived in Germany and England, becoming a British citizen in 1952. He died in 1973 while vacationing on the island of Mallorca.
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