KIREEVSKII, IVAN (1806–1856), was a Russian publicist and Slavophile. In his early years Kireevskii's literary criticism gained him the patronage of Vasilii Zhukovskii (1783–1852) and the approval of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). He founded and was briefly the editor of a promising journal, Evropeets, closed by the authorities in 1832. This event drove Kireevskii into semiretirement, from which he was to emerge only occasionally and with reluctance. Only in the last decade of his life was he to find a cause that helped to justify his withdrawal from society: collaboration with the monastic elders of the hermitage at Optino. This in its turn provided him with a theological diagnosis for what in 1853 he called "the disorder of my inner forces."

In his early years Kireevskii was a proponent of Westernization. But by the late 1830s he insisted on the role of Russia as a lodestar for a western Europe in decline...