This study aims to examine Konstantin N. Leontiev’s (1831-1891) critique of Lev N. Tolstoy (1828-1910) through the lens of What Men Live By, one of Tolstoy’s late-period folk tales. Both Leontiev and Tolstoy, as contemporaries of the same century, spent their lives in pursuit of existential meaning. However, the divergent paths they followed in this quest ultimately set them in profound opposition to one another. Tolstoy, as explicitly articulated in the aforementioned story, locates the meaning of life in the identification of God with love. Leontiev, too, sought answers in God; yet, in contrast, he contended that God could not be approached without fear. According to Leontiev, Tolstoy’s conflation of God with love reflects a liberal humanist ideology of progress, a “virus” that originated in Western Europe and has since spread throughout humanity. In this sense, Tolstoy’s identity of love and God is a kind of “rosy Christian preaching.” Nonetheless, the present analysis reveals that while Leontyev accuses Tolstoy of preaching a reductive and one-dimensional gospel of love, he himself is equally guilty of promoting a one-sided Christian doctrine—this time grounded in fear. Ultimately, both thinkers arrive at a conception of religious meaning rooted in belief in God, albeit through starkly contrasting theological emphases. In What Men Live By, Tolstoy distills three fundamental divine revelations imparted to humankind: That love resides within man, That love is God, and whoever dwells in love dwells in God, That man does not know what he truly needs, for all that is good and necessary comes from God alone. For Leontyev, by contrast, God is above all to be feared, and love is but the fruit of such fear. Tolstoy’s doctrine of love, in Leontiev’s estimation, reflects a form of anthropolatry—the worship of man in place of God.
Keywords: Leontiev, Tolstoy, What Man Live By, Love, Fear