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Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev
(January 25, 1831 - November 24, 1891) Russia

Konstantin Leontiev

Critic, diplomat, doctor, philosopher and man of letters

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Leontiev was an ultraconservative political philosopher, a literary critic, and novelist, who spent much of his life in consular service in the countries of the Near East. Bisexuality was a theme he often treated in his fiction.

Konstantin LeontievIn his early novel A Husband's Confession (1867), the husband loves his young wife, but he also falls in love with a mustachioed Turk taken captive during the Crimean War. To give expression to this second love, he encourages his wife to become the Turk's mistress and to run away with him to Turkey.

Such simultaneous infatuation of a man with a well-bred but drab female and with a robust and colorful male is also the situation in Leontiev's best-known novel, The Egyptian Dove (1881). His story Hamid and Manoli, published in 1869, is an account of a love affair between two men, a Turk and a Cretan, which ends in a bloody tragedy because of the prejudices of the Cretan's Christian family. It is the only piece of Russian literature of the nineteenth century that denounces the ugliness of homophobia.

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