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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
”... aber der Mensch ist ein wahrer Narziss:
er bespiegelt sich iiberall gern selbst; er
legt sich als Folie der ganzen Welt unter.“
GOETHE, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, IVKonstantin Leont'ev is not a well-known Russian writer. For some Russian and non-Russian readers Leont'ev is the most conservative and even reactionary of all Russian ideologists of the nineteenth century— the man who used to say: We have to freeze Russia in order to prevent any kind of progress which might endanger the very existence of the Russian monarchy.
Critics who know Leont'ev better will give a more appropriate characterization of him. They know that his approach to history is based on an aesthetic principle. His main reality is beauty, and nothing else. But what is beauty, and what is beautiful? According to Leont'ev's tastes and principles, the beautiful is life in an underdeveloped societv in a primary stage of civilization.
1 In chapter iii of Mill's essay On Liberty we find some bold metaphors which have a Leont'evian flavor: “If they [persons of genius] are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as ‘wild,’ ‘erratic,’ and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara river for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.” (On Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 80.) For K. Leont'ev clean, well-organized Holland was also the symbol of a dull mediocrity.
2 K. L.'s letter to V. Rozanov, August 13, 1891, 
June, 1903.
3 Rozanov's comments, ibid.;
(1911); notes and remarks on K. L. in Solitaria (1911), and in The Fallen Leaves, Vols. I-II (1913, 1915).
4
(Paris, 1926).
5 Naso, Ovidius, Metamorphoses, III, 341–510.Google Scholar
6 Martin-Chauffier, L., Chateaubriand [collection of essays] (Paris, 1949), p. 61.Google Scholar
7 Donnay, Maurice, Alfred de Musset (Paris, 1914), p. 78.Google Scholar
8
(9 vols.; Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1912), I, 229-30.
9 Ibid., I, 282, 414, 298.
10 Mirsky, D. S., A History of Russian Literature (New York, 1949), p. 327.Google Scholar
11
VIII, 285.
12 Ibid., VII, 425.
13 Ibid., III, 333.
14 Tiutschev in his poem “Kak okean…” used the image of pylaiushchaia bezdna (naming abyss).
15
pp. 267, 277, 271, 281, 259.
16 K. L.'s letters to A. Aleksandrov, February 5, 1888, 
Sergiev Posad. 1915, p. 36.