The Future of the World by Konstanty Leontyev: An Ordinary European Man as an Ideal and a Device for the Worlwide Destruction

Abstract

The paper includes the analysis of some texts of the Russian conservative thinker, Konstanty Leontyev who was confronted with the apocalyptic moods of the Russian intelligentsia of the second half of the 19^th century. He made an effort to diagnose the “disease” and find a remedy. He was not single with his conviction that Russia would cease to exist as an independent culture unless stopped the influence of the Western ideas. Similar thoughts were expressed by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Konstanty Pobiedonoscew. In the article An European Man as an ideal and a device for the worldwide destruction Leontyev claimed that a representative of the Western civilization is indifferent to beauty, fascinated by technical progress, morally ambivalent and, at the same time, extremely expansive. The progress which is aimed at material prosperity and crude happiness Leontyev recognized as a threat for the State and Religion. Strong Tsar’s power, that he called a “despotism of form”, he regarded as remedy for the dangerous situation. He also glorified the state power as the person who perceived the meaning of life in searching and creating beauty, struggle with the real world. He contested the safe but boring and predictable world of egalitarianism.