This introductory chapter explores a major turning point in the life of Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev and briefly explains the significance of his works. It shows how a crisis during 1871 is usually regarded as the great watershed in Leontiev's life—the moment at which the pagan aesthete and anti-moralist of his youth and early manhood disappeared to be replaced by the gloomy pessimist and God-seeker of his maturity and premature old age. But as this chapter shows, Leontiev's conversion was by no means a clear-cut Damascene experience. On the contrary, Leontiev's entire life was spent in a continuous, and only partially successful, struggle to achieve a resolution of the competing impulses within his soul. This struggle repeatedly gave rise to conflicts of one kind or another, conflict within himself but equally conflict with his contemporaries.