The starting point of the article is V. Ivanov’s epistolary statement and an expression included in it: “me, semper idem” as important for reflections on the question of “person and time.” Ivanov’s expression, considered within its context, was analysed taking into account other texts by the same poet (the poem Fio, ergo non sum, as well as others from the Prozrachnost’ cycle, author’s commentaries etc.), and S. Frank’s philosophical reflection and his idea of a person as a unity which encompasses continuing in time (“vremiaoblemlushcheje jedinstvo licznosti”). In analogous interpretation (lecture analogique) of both expressions included in the title of the article, two Paul Ricoeur’s conceptual categories were used: the idem identity and the ipse identity, as well as the thinker’s notion of their dialectic relationship. Referring to the European model of thinking about time (St. Augustine), taking into account its presence in Frank and Nikolai Berdyaev, author of the article considers two types of conceptualisations of the category of becoming, in its relation to the category of Being and the problem of transcending time in the reflections of the above- mentioned thinkers and in V. Ivanov’s poetry. Therefore, the article discusses situations in which a human as a person transcends the order of “horizontal” time, and in their existential experience enters the vertical dimension of Eternity (“moment-Eternity”). In relation to that, what turned out to be useful was another notional analogy: the concept of the “poetic moment” and “metaphysical moment” in Gaston Bachelard.

The article deals with two issues: (1) the research method of father Georges Florovsky used in his study entitled The Ways of Russian Theology (1937), which is regarded a classic in its genre, and (2) the practice of scientific research conducted with the use of this method. The article is supplemented with Florovsky’s opinions, expressed in letters to his brother Anton, a professor at the Charles University in Prague, concerning the scientific achievements of the authors and scholars whom he met with or whom he came to work with after his departure to the USA (1948). The content of this correspondence has remained hitherto unpublished.