Leont'ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich (1831–1891)

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LEONT'EV, KONSTANTIN NIKOLAEVICH
(1831–1891)

Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev was a Russian writer, philosopher, critic, and publicist. Like almost all important nineteenth-century Russian authors, Leont'ev came from a family of landowners. He was trained in medicine at the University of Moscow and served for three years as an army doctor in the Crimean war. After the war he took the post of family doctor on a country estate in the province of Nizhnii-Novgorod, married, and published his first novel, Podlipki (1861). In 1863 he entered the Russian diplomatic service and worked for eight years as a consular official on the island of Crete and the Balkans. After a cure from dysentery, he underwent a spiritual crisis and spent a year (1871–1872) in a Greek monastery on Mount Athos. Soon after he left the consular service, and he returned to Russia where he worked as a journalist in various cities and a censor of literature in Moscow. In 1887 he decided to renounce the secular world, was officially divorced from his wife, and retired to the Optyna Pustyn' cloister in the province of Tula. Shortly before his death he took monastic vows and died a monk in the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery near Moscow.

Although Leont'ev can be considered one of the brilliant representatives of nineteenth-century Russian culture, on a par with Alexander Herzen, his work is not very well known. His novels and stories have hardly been translated and his philosophical and political views only scantily studied. The main reason for this seems to be his odd, maverick-like personality, which expressed itself in views so paradoxical and extreme that it is almost impossible to weld them together and to integrate them with the main ideas of his age.

Leont'ev was torn between an amoral aestheticism and the intense desire for saving his soul by the ascetic renunciation of the world. The protagonist of almost all his novels (among which, apart from Podlipki, V svoem kraiu [In my own land, 1864], and Egipetskii golub' [The Egyptian dove, 1881–1882]) is a narcissistic superhero (more or less identical with Leont'ev himself) who takes delight in all things beautiful and considers it his duty to lead a poetic life. "Ethics does not coincide with aesthetics: otherwise it is impossible to approve the beauty of Alcibiades, of a diamond, of a tiger." Which is better: "the bloody and spiritually exuberant age of the Renaissance, or contemporary Denmark, Holland, Switzerland—humble, prosperous, moderate?" (Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, p. 282; 414). However, the hero is dissatisfied with his actual self as he realizes his own limitations and the vanity of his sensuous experience and of the world he has enjoyed so much.

It is this latter attitude that made Leont'ev severely criticize contemporary writers such as Fëdor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov'ëv. In the essay "Nashi novye khristiane: F. M. Dostoevskii i graf Lev Tolstoi " ("Our new Christians: F. M. Dostoevsky and Count Lev Tolstoy, 1882) he ridiculed the rose-colored Christianity of these authors. By promising paradise on earth (just like the utopian socialists), Leont'ev stated, they introduced heretical, humanistic elements into their religious views, making God a diluted God of love instead of a God of fear. However, in another essay he made a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy's novels, in particular praising War and Peace.

Leont'ev is best known for his aesthetic approach to history and his uncompromising criticism of his own age, which according to him, was dominated by equality and its unavoidable counterpart mediocrity. Just as such thinkers as de Maistre, Comte Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill, Leont'ev rejected the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, which had led to democracies in which there was no place for great men and intense, creative contradictions. In his collection of essays Vostok, Rossiia i slavianstvo (The East, Russia, and Slavdom, 1885–1886), which included his main work "Vizantizm i slavianstvo " (Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1875) he developed a biological theory of the evolution of history. Each historical cycle comprises three periods: a period of childhood, or primitive simplicity ; a second period of adulthood, characterized by differentiation and flourishing complexity ; and a final period of old age, which through decline and disintegration leads to a secondary simplicity.

According to Leont'ev Europe was already in its third phase, the first being the period of the barbarian invasions, the second the High Middle Ages. As clear signs of the contemporary decay, he considered the disappearance of class distinctions and the dominance of bourgeois culture, the culture of the average man. Since the time of Peter the Great (1672–1725), this European leveling interfusion had infected Russia. Russia's salvation, he maintains, lies in reversing this process, which can only be done by defending its prime institutions, autocracy and orthodoxy, and promoting a situation in which "despotism, danger, strong passions, prejudices, superstitions, fanaticism …, in a word everything to which the nineteenth century is opposed" (Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. VIII, p. 98) could flourish. More extreme and reactionary than the older Slavophiles such as Aleksei Khomiakov and the brothers Ivan and Petr Kireevskii, Leont'ev had no scruples about supporting strict censorship and political repression in order to reverse the pernicious process of democratization. However, he with great insight foretold the excrescences of the "fixed equality" of communism, which "through a series of combinations with other principles must gradually lead, on the one hand, to a decreased mobility of capital and property, and, on the other, to a new juridical inequality, to new privileges, to restrictions on individual freedom, and to compulsory corporate groups, clearly defined by laws—probably even to new forms of personal slavery or serfdom." (Edie, Scanlan, Zeldin 1965, p. 278).

Leont'ev is often called the Russian Nietzsche. With his pessimistic view on the development of European culture and society, he can be seen as a forerunner of Oswald Spengler. In Russia interest in his work has grown considerably since the 1990s. Biographical data, his complete works, and criticism about him (in Russian) can be found on the web at http://knleontiev.narod.ru.