(1831 - 1891), social philosopher, literary critic, and novelist.
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev occupied a unique place in the history of nineteenth-century Russian social thought. He was a nationalist and a reactionary whose position differed in significant respects from the thinking of both the Slavophiles and the Pan-Slavists. Some historians refer to Leontiev's social philosophy as Byzantinism.
Leontiev led a varied life, in which he was in turn a surgeon, a diplomat, an editor, a novelist, and a monk. He was raised on a small family estate in the province of Kaluga. After studying medicine at the University of Moscow, he served as a military surgeon during the Crimean War. Following his military service, he returned to Moscow to continue the practice of medicine and to write a series of novels that enjoyed little success. He married a young, illiterate Greek woman in 1861, but continued to engage in a series of love affairs. His wife gradually descended into madness.
In 1863 Leontiev entered the Russian diplomatic service, which led to his assignment to posts in the Balkans and Greece. While serving in that region, he developed an admiration for Byzantine Christianity, which was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking. He was irresistibly attracted to the Byzantine monasticism that he observed during a stay at Mount Athos in 1871 and 1872. Leontiev arrived at the conviction that aesthetic beauty, not happiness, was the supreme value in life. He rejected all humanitarianism and optimism; the notion of human kindness as the essence of Christianity's social teaching was utterly alien to him. His stance was anomalous in that he lacked strong personal religious faith, yet advocated strict adherence to Eastern Orthodox religion. He believed that the best of Russian culture was rooted in the Orthodox and autocratic heritage of Byzantium, and not the Slavic heritage that Russia shared with Eastern Europeans. He thought that the nations of the Balkans were determined to imitate the bourgeois West. He hoped that despotism and obscurantism could save Russia from the adoption of Western liberalism and constitutionalism, and could give Russia and the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans the opportunity to unite on the basis of their common traditions, drawn from the Byzantine legacy.
Leontiev accepted Nikolai Danilevsky's conception that each civilization develops like an organism, and argued that each civilization necessarily passes through three phases of development, from an initial phase of primary simplicity to a second phase, a golden era of growth and complexity, followed at last by "secondary simplification," with decay and disintegration. He despised the rationalism, democratization, and egalitarianism of the West of his day, which he saw as a civilization fully in the phase of decline, as evident in the domination of the bourgeoisie, whom he held in contempt for its crassness and mediocrity. He thought it desirable to delay the growth of similar tendencies in Russia, but he concluded, with regret, that Russia's final phase of dissolution was inevitable, and saw some signs that it had already begun.
Leontiev did not hesitate to endorse harshly repressive, authoritarian rule for Russia in order to stave off the influence of the West and slow the decline as long as possible. He saw Tsarist autocracy and Orthodoxy as the powerful forces protecting tradition in Russian society from the dangerous tendencies toward leveling and anarchy. He glorified extreme social inequality as characteristic of a civilization's phase of flourishing complexity. Un-like the Slavophiles, Leontiev had little admiration for the Russian peasants, who in his view inclined toward dishonesty, drunkenness, and cruelty, and he repudiated the heritage of the reforms adopted by Alexander II. Toward the end of his life, he became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of preserving autocracy and aristocracy in Russia.
After leaving the diplomatic service, Leontiev suffered from constant financial stringency, despite finding a position as an assistant editor of a provincial newspaper. His stories about life in Greece did not find a wide audience, although late in his life he did attract a small circle of devoted admirers. In 1891 he took monastic vows and assumed the name of Clement. He died in the Trinity Monastery near Moscow in the same year.
Leontiev was one of the most gifted literary critics of his time, though he was not widely appreciated as a novelist. In Against the Current: Selections from the Novels, Essays, Notes and Letters of Konstantin Leontiev (1969), George Ivask says that in Leontiev's long novels, "his narration is often capricious, elliptic, impressionistic, and full of lyrical digression depicting the vague moods of his superheroes, who express his own narcissistic ego." After Leontiev's death Vladimir Soloviev contributed to the recognition of Leontiev's erratic brilliance, stimulating a revival of interest in Leontiev in the early twentieth century.
Bibliography
Ivask, George, ed. (1969). Against the Current: Selections from the Novels, Essays, Notes and Letters of Konstantin Leontiev. New York: Weybright and Talley.
Roberts, Spencer, ed. and tr. (1968). Essays in Russian Literature: The Conservative View: Leontiev, Rozanov, Shestov. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Thaden, Edward C. (1964). Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
—ALFRED B. EVANS JR.
