Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev was a Russian writer, philosopher, critic, and publicist. Like almost all important nineteenth-century Russian authors, Leont'ev came from a family of landowners. He was trained in medicine at the University of Moscow and served for three years as an army doctor in the Crimean war. After the war he took the post of family doctor on a country estate in the province of Nizhnii-Novgorod, married, and published his first novel, Podlipki (1861). In 1863 he entered the Russian diplomatic service and worked for eight years as a consular official on the island of Crete and the Balkans. After a cure from dysentery, he underwent a spiritual crisis and spent a year (1871–1872) in a Greek monastery on Mount Athos. Soon after he left the consular service, and he returned to Russia where he worked as a journalist in...