Georgy Ivanov on the “Vial of Poison” by Konstantin Leontiev

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of G. Ivanov’s judgments about K. Leontiev. The sharpness of Ivanov’s statements is explained by the similarity of Leontiev’s views with the ideology of a new generation of emigrants, including members of the fairly mass party of “mladorosses” (young Russians). From the point of view of Ivanov, Leontiev’s political convictions in many ways contain a danger for the formation of the worldview of contemporaries. Leontiev’s idea that liberal-egalitarian progress would lead to the collapse of the Empire was combined with his belief in the possibility of protective socialism in Russia and a socialist monarch, blessed by the Church. The “mladorosses” were social monarchists who believed that with the older generation of Bolsheviks leaving the political arena, Bolshevism would come to an end; they saw the Soviets without the Bolsheviks as a promising form of self-government. In the political activization of the younger generation of emigrants, their way of thinking, Ivanov was not satisfied with the opposition to the ideals of the old emigration. He considered the ideas of the “new Russian people” contradictory and illusory, and expressed his beliefs in a number of articles. The deceptive hope of emigrants for the Soviets without the Bolsheviks is the motif of the famous poem “The way is Free under Thermopylae...” Ivanov created a complex, contradictory portrait of Leontiev; he is partly close to the opinion of N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov, V. Rozanov in his assessments of Leontiev’s human qualities and judgments.