Konstantin Leontiev 1831 – 1891
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev was a Russian philosopher of culture, novelist, and former diplomat in the Ottoman Empire and one of the most uncompromising conservative voices of late imperial Russia. His Byzantinism and Slavdom and The East, Russia, and Slavdom defended the Byzantine Orthodox cultural inheritance of Russia against the modern liberal egalitarianism he saw as a flattening force in human life. He took Orthodox monastic vows shortly before his death and is honored as a major influence on twentieth-century Russian religious philosophy from Solovyov and Berdyaev to the present.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Russian
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Continental, Christian
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Konstantin Leontiev:
“Diversity of complexity is life; uniformity of simplification is death.”
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Attributed to Konstantin Leontiev:
“Modern liberalism flattens what culture has long made fruitful.”
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Attributed to Konstantin Leontiev:
“Russia must remain Byzantine if she is to remain Russia.”
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Attributed to Konstantin Leontiev:
“Suffering is the matrix in which great cultures are formed.”
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Attributed to Konstantin Leontiev:
“Beauty is no luxury; it is the form in which life resists decay.”