Konstantin N. Leontiev and Lev N. Tolstoy: A “Failed Creative Dialogue”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Konstantin N. Leontiev’s critique of the religious preaching of Lev N. Tolstoy. We analyze the philosopher’s main articles devoted to the great writer, noting that, despite Leontiev’s admiration for Tolstoy as the author of brilliant novels, he emphasized that Tolstoy had a much greater gift for writing than for personal religiosity. Tolstoy could not perceive Christianity at a deeper level, limiting himself to a superficial view. We show that Leontiev believed Tolstoy’s ideas fully corresponded to the “Zeitgeist,” in which the philosopher had seen the first signs of cultural decay and destruction. Leontiev considered a universal, reductionist confusion to be the cause of the beginning of the end and the destruction of the world, and he thought that the ultimate fruits of humanism—democracy and universal equality—bring with them a destructive, ruinously anti-Christian force.