Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev

Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev (25 January 1831 – 24 November 1891) was a conservative tsarist and imperial monarchist Russian philosopher. He advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East against what he believed to be the West's catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian, and revolutionary influences. He also advocated Russia's cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India, Tibet, and China. Leontiev was born and grew up on his father's estate in Kudinovo, Kaluga Governorate. After completing medical school in Moscow, Leontiev saw service as a doctor during the Crimean War. He later lived in various Ottoman towns as a Russian consular agent. In 1871, he was cured of cholera and dysentery and promised to take monastic vows. He moved to the Russian monastery on Mount Athos. In 1880, he moved to the censorship department in Moscow. Seven years later, he secretly took the tonsure at the Optina monastery. He died as a monk in the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra. Leontiev's most remarkable book is a volume of essays, "The East, Russia, and Slavdom" (1885–1886). He was ill at ease with the Western consumer society and the cult of material prosperity. Leontiev regarded traditional Russian Byzantinism as a blessing and a strong antidote against further liberalisation of the country's society. His aesthetic and political theories had similarities to those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. He proposed that all societies undergo a state of flowering and increasing complexity followed by one of "secondary simplification", decay, and ultimately, death. Leontiev felt that the West had reached the beginning of secondary simplification. In politics, Leontiev was a supporter of tsarist absolutism and the rule of the aristocratic gentry in Russia and vehemently criticized other Slavophiles who he believed had fallen to "utopianism" for supporting the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s. According to him, all great religions were ‘doctrines of pessimism sanctioning suffering, wrongs, and the injustices of life on earth.’ A pessimist, during the final years of his life Leontiev lost his faith in humanity’s ability to create a distinctive new cultural type. In his catastrophic predictions, he prophesied that in the 20th century, there would be a bloody revolution in Russia led by an "anti-Christ" that would be socialist and tyrannical in nature and whose rulers would wield even more power than their tsarist predecessors. He said, "Socialism is the feudalism of the future." He felt that only the harshest reaction could prevent that scenario.