Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii Sergeevich

Born Aug. 2(14), 1866, in St. Petersburg; died Dec. 9, 1941, in Paris. Rus-sian writer. Son of a court official.

Merezhkovskii graduated from the division of history and literature of the University of St. Petersburg, and his first collection of poetry, Poems, 1883-1887, appeared in 1888. His On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1893), hailing symbolism and the “mystical content”of art in opposition to the realistic literature and civic poetry of the 1880’s, became one of the first manifestos of the Russian decadent school.

Merezhkovskii’s best-known work is the historical trilogy Christ and Antichrist (parts 1-3, 1895-1905), in which the unifying theme is the mystical idea of an eternal struggle between Christianity and paganism. Rigid categorization and metaphysics detract from the trilogy’s artistic merit. The Russian Revolution is portrayed as “the boor that cometh.”His antirealistic teachings of “the new religious consciousness,”which he propagated through the Religious-Philosophical Society and in the journal Novyi put’ (The New Way, 1903-04), were sharply criticized by G. V. Plekhanov in “So-called Religious Searchings in Russia: The Gospel According to Decadence” (1909). As a critic, Merezhkovskii interpreted literature from a religious and idealistic standpoint, for example, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (vols. 1-2, 1901-02) and Gogol and the Devil (1906). He disparaged the works of M. Gorky.

Hostile to the October Revolution of 1917, Merezhkovskii emigrated in 1920. He wrote novels, religious-philosophical essays, poems, and anti-Soviet articles. During World War II, while living in France, he collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces.