K. N. LEONTIEV: DOCTOR, WRITER, PATIENT

Abstract

The article outlines the legacy of K. N. Leontiev, a well-known writer and philosopher, who served as a military doctor during the Crimean War and worked as a private practitioner for five years after. It deals with the plethora of «medical» themes in his fi ction and his memoir-autobiographical prose, as well as with the use of the relevant imagery in his historiosophic writings. A number of previously unknown facts of the writer’s biography are introduced to the academic community for the fi rst time, e. g. the permission to practice medicine he received in 1876 from the Meshchovskaya County Medical Board, his unsuccessful attempt to take the position of a zemstvo doctor in the same county in 1877, at a time when the author of «Byzantium and Slavyanism» seemed to have long abandoned his «professional path».