Disenchanted Wanderer - The Apocalyptic Vision Of Konstantin Leontiev

 Epilogue 

 “Storms. The forest is crashing down. Our beloved motherland has fallen. Weeping, weeping and sighs. Everything that Leontiev foresaw has come to pass. Come to pass more horribly than he prophesied. Russia is a toothless hag. Oh, how frightful you are, witch, harridan with tangled hair. And then the furies of retribution, of execution. A Cassandra, Leontiev, Cassandra wandering through Troy and prophesying, and like her, no-one listened to him.”1

 The writer and philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote these words on 4 November 1918 (new style), three months before his death from hunger and neglect at the age of sixty-three. His friend and mentor Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev had died of pneumonia twenty-seven years earlier on 12 November 1891 at the age of sixty. Both men died at the Holy Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius in Sergiev Posad outside Moscow and are buried side by side in the nearby Chernigovsky-Gethsemane Hermitage. 

 Without directly mentioning her, by the time of his death Leontiev had come to be convinced that he was destined to play the role of a Cassandra.2 Until the outbreak of the First World War his memory endured, for good or ill, in the minds of those who had known the man himself and his writings. His devoted niece Marya Vladimirovna and his “disciples,” chief among them Anatoly Aleksandrov, Iosif Fudelʹ and Ivan Kristi, did what they could to preserve the memory of the man and his ideas, and were instrumental in putting together the first edition of his collected works, published in nine volumes in 1912–13 by V. M. Sablin.3

 For much of the century that followed Leontiev, the “lonely dreamer” as Fudelʹ described him, was a largely forgotten figure in Russian letters.4 This is not altogether surprising. A bare quarter of a century after his death came the Revolution, the cataclysm of whose advent he had so often warned in vain, after which he came to be regarded, insofar as he was regarded at all, as something in the nature of an antediluvian curiosity. And Leontiev had no defense against this relegation to the status of a nonperson; he left behind no enduring masterpiece of fiction which might have guaranteed him an afterlife despite official disapproval, no Dead Souls, no Anna Karenina, and no Brothers Karamazov. He had held no prominent position in Russian academic or political life, he founded no school of philosophy or social science, and he exerted a direct influence on only two followers who were to leave their own marks on Russian letters. One was Rozanov. The other was the repentant revolutionary Lev Tikhomirov (1852–1923), a one-time leading member of the “People’s Will” group that had assassinated Alexander II in 1881. 

 Leontiev’s relationship with Rozanov was not an easy one and is full of enigmas. They differed widely on social and religious questions, Rozanov’s Christ of the meek and oppressed clashing head-on with Leontiev’s God the aesthete and hierarch. And at times a certain impatience with Leontiev’s paradoxical thought processes is detectable in Rozanov’s writing. At one point he describes him as a “black hole for ideas, there’s no way in to him and no way out.”5 And elsewhere: “His thoughts? They cross each other out. His whole opera omnia is a series of works each struck through with a blue pencil. They make splendid reading. But there’s nothing there to ponder about. There’s no guidance in them, no wisdom.”6 Yet less than six months before his death, when the two men had been corresponding for only three months, Leontiev was moved to exclaim: “At last, after waiting almost twenty years, I’ve found someone who understands my work in just the way I wanted it to be understood.”7

 Despite occasional outbursts of frustration, Rozanov in his turn fully realized the debt he owed to the man who was in many ways his mentor and at the end of his life requested that he be buried near him. In his memoir Opavshie listʹia (Fallen Leaves) Rozanov provides a generous eulogy: “What was Leontiev then? Not a difficult question. He was an unusually fine Russian man with a pure and candid soul, one whose tongue never knew duplicity. And in this respect he was almost unicum in the sufficiently false, artificial, and dishonest world of Russian letters. In his person the good Russian God gave good Russian literature a good writer.”8 For Rozanov, “the whole man was there in his words, like Adam without clothes.”9 In years to come, he predicted, academic researchers would scour Leontiev’s papers to elucidate his thoughts, and “everything would be done for his posterity, just as nothing was done for him alive.”10

Disenchanted Wanderer 

The Apocalyptic  Vision Of Konstantin Leontiev 

GLENN CRONIN