Disenchanted Wanderer : : The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev / / Glenn Cronin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Cronin, Glenn,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (276 p.) :; 10 b&w halftones

Disenchanted Wanderer is the first comprehensive English language study in over half a century of the life and ideas of Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831–1891), one of the most important thinkers in nineteenth-century Russia on political, social, and religious matters. This work by Glenn Cronin gives the reader a broad overview of Leontiev's life and varied career as novelist, army doctor, diplomat, journalist, censor, and, late in life, ordained monk. Reviewing Leontiev's creative work and his writing on aesthetics and literary criticism—such figures as Belinsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy appear—Cronin goes on to examine Leontiev's socio-political writing and his theory of the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations, placing his thought in the context of his contemporaries and forbears including Hegel, Herzen and Nietzsche, as well as Danilevsky, Pobedonostsev and other major figures in Slavophile and Russian nationalist circles. Cronin also examines Leontiev's religious views, his ascetic brand of Orthodoxy informed by his experiences of the monastic communities of Mount Athos and OptinaPustyn, and his late attraction to Roman Catholicism under the influence of the theologian Vladimir Solovyev. Disenchanted Wanderer concludes with a review of Leontiev's prophetic vision for the twentieth century and his conviction that after a period of wars socialism would triumph under the banner of a new Constantine the Great. Cronin considers how far this vision foretold the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, an aspect of Leontiev's legacy which previously had not received the attention it merits. Elevating Leontiev to his proper place in the Russian literary pantheon, Cronin demonstrates that the man was not, as is often maintained, an amoralist and a political reactionary but rather a deeply moral thinker and a radical conservative.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- English Names of Newspapers and Journals -- Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates -- Introduction -- Part One: “Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty” -- 1. The Divided Self -- 2. The Best of All Possible Worlds -- 3. The Gathering Storm -- 4. Desperate Times -- Part Two: A Prophet in His Own Country -- 5. Russians, Greeks, and Slavs -- 6. The Social Organism -- 7. Blood Is Not Enough -- 8. The Tide of History -- Part Three: Toward the Abyss -- 9. The Beginning of Wisdom -- 10. The Grand Inquisitor -- 11. Reactionary or Revolutionary? -- 12. The Feudalism of the Future -- 13. The Red Czar -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index