The Gathering Storm

This chapter describes the time when Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev became a serving diplomat attached to the Russian Embassy to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. This life was hugely more to his liking than his time in Petersburg. The sights and sounds of this new world stimulated Leontiev's aesthetic sensibilities to an extraordinary degree. In addition, the chapter shows how the repeated clashes between Leontiev's “extensive” personality and the restraints of his environment in Russia reinforced a deep cleavage in his psyche with which he had difficulty coping. His life in the East thus offered the opportunity of resolving these conflicts, at least to some extent. These inner conflicts also found literary expression in the cycle of short stories Leontiev wrote building on his experiences of life in the Ottoman lands, a series of well-observed psychological sketches which appeared under the collective title Scenes from the Life of Christians in Turkey.