Konstantin Leontiev's aestheticism as an antipode of the egalitarian progress and mass culture

The author gives the interpretation of Konstantin leontiev’s ideas about egalitarian progress from the point of aesthetic criterion. it is shown that a rapid growth of interest in leontiev’s works in the 1990s was not accidental. The article also outlines the historical significance of the work “The average european as an ideal and instrument of universal destruction”, which outstripped the warnings of Western philosophers and sociologists for decades.