Does anyone know much about him and whether his works are fine to read?
I found this article in which one of his works discusses philia and how there are some subversive people who use his work to justify homosexuality. What I found interesting was that he seems to have been included with the New Martrys as he was among those "purged" by order of Stalin. But I found this in which they claim ROCOR denies its the same person:
After the communists closed the Moscow Theological Academy, Florensky spent most of the 1920s and early 1930s working for the State Electrification Commission. During these dismal times, he continued both his theological research and scientific investigations and publications. Florensky had powerful protectors in the Soviet establishment, initially Leon Trotsky, impressed with Florensky’s abilities. Florensky made no attempts to conceal his faith or his priesthood; he worked and gave scientific papers in his cassock, much to the dismay of hard-line communists. He was arrested a first time in 1928, but quickly released, thanks to the intervention of Ekaterina Peshkova, wife of writer Maxim Gorky.
But as the Stalinist assault on religion persisted, even Florensky’s protectors could no longer shelter him. Refusing offers to go into exile, he was arrested in February 1933 and sent to Siberia, where he conducted research on permafrost, and then to the White Sea island of Solovki, whose famous monastery was converted to a gulag especially for political and religious figures. Even there he continued his research, developing a procedure for producing iodine and agar from seaweed. But he was a victim of the great purge of 1937, when Stalin ordered the “liquidation” of tens of thousands of “enemies of the people.” Florensky was sentenced to death by an NKVD commission and executed by firing squad on December 8, 1937....
Certainly, Florensky’s theology has had its share of critics since the publication of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth over a century ago. Critics focus mainly on his sophiology—the complex doctrine of Divine Wisdom—and the absence of a robust Christology in the work. But even his strongest critics do not call into question his treatment of divine and human love. In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia canonized all Christian victims of communism, implicitly including Florensky. ROCOR subsequently denied that the name i. Pavel Fl. appearing on the frame of the glorification icon of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia was that of the great theologian, leaving his canonization in some doubt. Fr. Pavel Florensky would be the greatest victim of a campaign to drag him into the same-sex love battleground. Florensky, “perhaps the most remarkable person devoured by the gulag” in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was a great Christian martyr, a brilliant and bold witness to divine Truth and divine philia-Love.
