The article is devoted to the study of the "Onegin tradition" in the artistic work of A.V. Nikitenko (1804-1877), a professor of St. Petersburg University, a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, a historian of Russian literature, a literary critic and censor. In the centre of the research attention is Nikitenko's unfinished novel known under the common name "Leon", three small excerpts from which were printed in the first third of the 19th century in such popular Russian publications as the almanac "Field 47 Flowers" (1828), the almanac "Northern Flowers" (1831) and "Nevsky al-manac" (1832). The creative (albeit fragmentary) experience of the critic and censor in its semantic centre reveals a non-random connection with A.S. Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin. The published excerpts from "Leon" are compared with Pushkin's novel in verse, which makes it possible for the first time to reveal the specifics of the image of a reflective hero modelled by A.V. Nikitenko, who confronts the "disease of the century" (imitative and artificial romance) and tries to overcome it with the help of philosophy (it is natural that A.V. Nikitenko's work has the features of a philosophical novel). But at the same time A.V. Nikitenko uses almost the entire artistic text of Russian and foreign romanticism to create the image of Leon. The mechanisms of dialogue with this text are also the subject of consideration in the article. In addition, the thesis that Leon's image can be interpreted as a specific combination of the features of Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky is substantiated
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