| Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev modified scientific methods from Carl Gustav Carus and Matthias Schleiden, under the influence of Slavophile controversies over historical scholarship (Timofei Granovskii, Boris Chicherin, and Iurii Samarin), in order to explore readers' responses to literary fiction. Leont'ev's sources derived aesthetic concepts from Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Alexander Humboldt, and Kant's third critique. The pseudo-science of physiognomy, developed by followers of Johann Christian Lavater and Franz-Josef Gall, helped Leont'ev become the first Russian critic, as D. S. Mirsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Viktor Shklovskii recognized in the early 20th century, to discuss how readers transform devices, discrete arrangements of verbal material, into abstract ideas, employing habits elaborated within specific reading communities. Leont'ev defended aesthetic writing against attempts by Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov to subordinate it to epistemological and moral ends. He also rejected the notion of a "pure art" favored by critics like Aleksandr Druzhinin and Pavel Annenkov. According to Leont'ev, authors follow conscious plans under the influence of unconscious processes associated with personal memory and collective sensibilities. A work's significance, therefore, cannot be expressed in paraphrases or articulable concepts. Further, the process of reading produces an aesthetic object, never exhaustively accounted for by a critical tradition, that is neither identical with nor separable from the work's material text. Leont'ev reads works by Ivan Turgenev and Marko Vovchok (Mariia Markovich) to show that significant patterns form in fiction around human standpoints (characters, narrating voices, implied readers). He criticizes writers associated with the Natural School (Dmitrii Grigorovich, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin), whose methods derived from Nikolai Gogol's fiction and Vissarion Belinskii's criticism, and "expose" literature (Nikolai Uspenskii, Nikolai Pomialovskii) for utilizing "blatant" devices and "specific signs" that encourage readers to make premature categorizing judgments and to read reductively. He suggests that a realism that confronts readers with diverse, perplexing responses to the world (with examples from Fedor Dostoevskii, Ivan Goncharov, Lev Tolstoy, and Alexei Pisemskii) could ethically renew Russian society by teaching readers to value heterogeneous local sensibilities more than homogenizing utilitarian projects. Leont'ev claimed affinity with the critics Apollon Grigor'ev and Nikolai Strakhov, influenced Vasilii Rozanov, and anticipated Mikhail Bakhtin's early writings. |
