Konstantin Leontiev

Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891) was a conservative Russian thinker who backed tsarist monarchy and closer cultural ties between Russia and the East. He is best known for opposing what he saw as the corrosive effects of Western egalitarianism, utilitarianism and revolutionary politics. Although he belonged in part to the Slavophile current, he departed from it on key points, which makes him a distinctive figure of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life.

He was born on 13 January 1831 (Julian calendar) on his father's estate at Kudinovo, in Kaluga Governorate. He studied medicine in Moscow, partly to please his mother, and served as a doctor during the Crimean War, but he found the work with corpses so distasteful that he gave up medicine. He then spent roughly eight years as a diplomat for the Russian Empire in various towns of the Ottoman world, and wrote fiction on oriental themes in his spare time. In 1880 he moved to Moscow to work in the censorship department, where he published admired analyses of Tolstoy's novels.

Around 1871 his life took a religious turn, and he spent time at the Russian monastery on Mount Athos. Later in life he took monastic vows, and he died in November 1891 at the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius in Sergiev Posad.

His most notable work is a collection of essays, The East, Russia, and Slavdom, published in 1885-1886. In it he treated traditional Russian Byzantinism as a bulwark against the liberalisation of society. Leontiev argued that civilizations pass through a flowering, a phase of growing complexity, a 'secondary simplification' and eventual decay, and he believed the West had already entered that final stage. In politics he supported tsarist absolutism and the rule of the landed gentry, and he criticised Slavophiles who backed the emancipation of the serfs. In his last years he grew pessimistic about creating a new cultural type and predicted a bloody, tyrannical socialist revolution in Russia. His ideas have often been compared with those of Nietzsche and Spengler, though his legacy remains debated.