Cronin , Glenn Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 772 depiction of place; and their work on poets and novelists (Grevs, for example, on Turgenev). In the final chapter the author returns to her over-arching question: whether we should be thinking of tsarist historiography not as art or science but, at the very least, as a literary-investigative hybrid. The book makes no attempt to embrace the work of all the historians at work in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russia. Indeed, Nethercott’s approach limits the number of historians on whom she can focus, for not all the historians at work in her period are grist to her mill. Different readers will have different views about who should have been included and who omitted. The present reviewer particularly welcomed the appearances in the book of Nikolai Kostomarov and did not regret the near-total absence of Nikolai Ustrialov and Sergei Solov´ev, but he was disappointed that Nikolai Polevoi did not attract much attention and that neither Ivan Beliaev nor Vasilii Semevskii rated a mention. But the book is not trying to supplant George Vernadsky’s Russian Historiography: A History (Belmont, MA, 1978), let alone the monstrous volumes of the collective Soviet Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (5 volumes + 2 volumes of bibliography, Moscow, 1955–85). Dr Nethercott is putting forward a thesis. At times, she protests too much, for the endnotes take up more than a quarter of her space and often continue discussions begun in the text. Nevertheless, the book achieves its purpose of suggesting an additional way of reading some of the famous Russian-language historians of the later tsarist period. Newcastle University David Saunders Cronin, Glenn. Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2021. xi + 261 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a flowering of scholarly interest in Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont´ev (1831–91), especially in Russia. Glenn Cronin has written the first English-language biography of Leont´ev since Stephen Lukashevich’s Konstantin Leontev, 1831–91: A Study in Russian ‘Heroic Vitalism’ (New York, 1967). Lukashevich adopted a narrow, psychological approach and failed to produce a convincing picture of his subject. By contrast, Cronin’s highly readable biography is rooted in deep knowledge of the intellectual and literary context of Leont´ev’s life. After studying medicine and serving as a military doctor in the Crimean War, Leont´ev sought to make his mark as a writer. He emerged as a defender REVIEWS 773 of art for art’s sake, as opposed to the view, predominant in Russian letters at the time, that the proper function of literature was to draw attention to social problems. Cronin surveys Leont´ev’s writings from this period of his life, finding early precursors of the emphasis on ‘unity in variety’ which would be the hallmark of his later thought (p. 18). Having failed to earn his living as an author, Leont´ev joined the diplomatic service, and between 1863 and 1871 he served in various Russian consulates in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout this period Leont´ev continued to write, and Cronin traces his intellectual development through his novels. However, Leont´ev’s official diplomatic activities receive only cursory treatment, despite the availability of his dispatches, which depict how the struggle between the great powers for influence over the Ottoman Empire unfolded between their representatives in remote postings. In July 1871, Leont´ev abandoned his post in Salonica in order to take up residence in the Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. His flight was prompted by a simultaneous illness and religious awakening, which, Cronin unconvincingly suggests, were the product of guilt about an illicit relationship with his niece Maria. Cronin’s treatment of Leont´ev’s time on Athos is oddly perfunctory, and relatively little effort is made to connect his experiences as a diplomat and a pilgrim with the developmentoftheviewsexpressedintheprofusionofexplicitlypoliticalworks, most notably Byzantinism and Slavdom (1875), which Leont´ev subsequently produced while residing in Constantinople. Cronin does...

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