Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

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. 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-notable figures such as Belinsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy appear-Cronin goes on to examine Leontiev's sociopolitical writing and his theory of the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations, placing his thought in the context of his contemporaries and predecessors 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 r