Today, like every day, is a good time for a narrative of decline. For that reason, Glenn Cronin's discussion of Konstantin Leontiev makes a welcome contribution. Its value does not lie in relating a particular compelling or insightful account of the world. Leontiev's narratives, however, offer an opportunity to consider a range of idiosyncratic anxieties about the future and how they project forward out of their time and into our own; they perhaps give us some indication of what fears might have power over us in the future.
The book is an odd sort of intellectual biography, carried out mostly through a comprehensive examination of Leontiev's works and correspondence. One oddity is the extent to which he is the sole source for his life. Documented events had little bearing on him, and his substantial interactions with others typically ended with him annoying and alienating them. So his life is a curiously monological one. Another oddity is that it did not seem to matter much what kind of work he was writing. Stories are “used to get across his ideas” (48) and their characters are “thinly disguised” (62) proxies of himself; if a story has two protagonists, this evidences a “divided self” (29). The theoretical writing and criticism are almost memoirs in disguise, and the correspondence can be dreamlike in its disconnection from its own time. Words are ultimately about ideas, and ideas are intra-psychic conflicts translated, awkwardly, into another idiom.
Some features of Leontiev's life are unsurprising. He had chronic health problems and financial difficulties, and a strained relationship with his mother, who owned a small, unprofitable estate. He studied medicine, enlisted in the army, worked as a family physician, abandoned medicine to pursue a literary career, joined the Russian Foreign Service when his literary career failed, started a literary career again, failed again, joined the Moscow Censorship Committee, and died in 1891. He managed to make enemies of possible and actual sources of support: Ivan Turgenev (14), Nikolai Strakhov (79), and Ivan Aksakov (124), among others. But the major event of his life is the “spiritual crisis of 1871” (135). Fearing death from cholera, Leontiev vowed that he would repent his whole past life, if only his sickness were relieved. It was, and he did. He burned manuscripts and devoted himself to “inner rebirth” (75) and a “violent conversion to personal orthodoxy” (75).
The ideas, then, fall naturally into a “before” and an “after.” Before the crisis, the center was an “aesthetic morality” (20) and an “aesthetic worldview” (53). According to the former, beauty is more important than, and provides the motivational basis for ethics. In an aesthetic worldview, everything is judged on aesthetic grounds: politics, evil, society, religion. Leontiev hoped for a “synthesis” (55) whereby beauty and morality could be reconciled with cultural flourishing through adherence to “the Byzantine legacy” (8). But he found this possibility affectively unsatisfying; and indeed, understanding Orthodoxy in terms of its contribution to aesthetic pleasure is not a sustainable way of thinking about it.
After the crisis there were a mixture of ideas: “a severe and uncompromising version of Orthodox Christianity” (55), autocracy and the “restratification of society” (94), an organicist theory of the state, a pan-Slavic nationalism based on a “central unifying idea” (85) rather than race, and acquiring Czargrad and Kiev as the religious and political centers of an expanded state. What underlies all these ideas is not any refined philosophical commitments. Although Cronin mentions Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, Leontiev was “not concerned with maintaining internal consistency in his arguments” (99) and was “at best an indifferent scholar” (89). The organizing themes of these ideas, rather, were that secular accomplishment is impossible, evil is ineradicable, only an anti-modern culture could temporarily stave off collapse, faith is rooted in “dread” (137) and “submission” (140), and the total rejection of worldly value is the only path to salvation.
The defining feature of his late thought, then, was the development of the narrative of decline into the apocalyptic vision of its culmination, while still maintaining an otherworldly hope. There are, it seems, points of view from which even an apocalyptic vision is grounds for optimism, or at least an “optimistic pessimism” (145). One could embrace the vision for the spectacle of watching the world burn, or from anticipation of others getting burned, or out of hope for what comes afterward. Reading Cronin's fine discussion, I am not sure Leontiev ever quite settled on what he was waiting for.
