(The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci ( Resurrected Gods. Leon...)
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci ( Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci, in literal translation) is the second novel by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, first published in 1900 by Mir Bozhy magazine, then released as a separate edition 1901. The novel constitutes the second part of the Christ and Antichrist trilogy (1895-1907), started by the writer's debut novel The Death of the Gods. The novel starts with the merchant Buonarcozzi digging out the statue of Venus, with Leonardo invited as an expert. This echoes the final scene of The Death of the Gods with Arsinoya's prophecy about "future brothers" who will dig out the precious bones of Hellas, and start worshipping them again. The adventures of the great artist and thinker of the Renaissance are set against the background of conflicts and tragedies, all going to show the new epoch's re-emerging humanism, harking back to the spirit of Antiquity and contrasting the monastic horrors of the Middle Ages.
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ...important order, perhaps', but only indistinct sounds came from bis lips, like a weak, unbroken mewing. No one could understand what he wished, and the sick man turned his eyes beseechingly on all in turn. The eunuchs, courtiers, generals and slaves crowded round the dying man, wishing to serve him for the last time, but not knowing how. At times anger flashed into his intelligent, steady eyes: then the mewing seemed angry. Finally Eusebius guessed, and brought him his writing tablet. Joy shone in the emperor's face; he seized the bronze stylus firmly, but awkwardly in his left hand, like a little child. After long efforts he succeeded in making certain scribbles on the soft surface of the yellow wax. The courtiers with difficulty read the word: "Baptise." He bent a beseeching glance on Eusebius. All were astonished that they had not understood sooner. The emperor wished to be christened before his death, as, following the example of his father, Constantine, he had put off the great mystery to the last moment, believing that it would miraculously cleanse his soul from all sin, and "wash it whiter than snow." They ran to bring a bishop. It turned out that there was no bishop in Mopsycrene. They sent for the Aryan presbyter of the poor city basilica. He was a very shy, insignificant person, with a birdlike face, a sharp red nose, like a beak, and a goat's beard, with provincial manners. When they came for him, Father Nymphidianus was beginning his tenth cup of cheap red wine, and seemed over merry. They could not explain to him at all what the matter was; he grew angry, thinking that they were laughing at him. But when they convinced him that he was to baptize the emperor, he almost lost his reason. The presbyter entered...
Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoyevsky
(IN the case of both Tolstoi and Dostoievski, but especial...)
IN the case of both Tolstoi and Dostoievski, but especially in the case of Tolstoi, their works are so bound up with their lives, with the personality of each author, that we cannot speak of the one without the other. Before studying them as artists, thinkers, or preachers, we must know what manner of men they are. In Russian society, and to some extent among critics, the opinion has taken root that about 1878, and in the early years of the next decade, there took place in Tolstoi a deep-seated moral and religious change; a change which radically transformed not only the whole of his own life, but also his intellectual and literary activity, and as it were snapped his existence into halves. In the first period, people say, he was only a great writer, perhaps too a great man, but at any rate a man of this world with human and Russian passions, grievances, doubts, and foibles; in the second he shook off all the trammels of historical life and culture. Some say that he is a Christian champion, others an atheist, others still that he is a fanatic, a fourth party that he is a sage who has attained the highest moral illumination.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(The novel tells the story of Roman Emperor Julian who dur...)
The novel tells the story of Roman Emperor Julian who during his reign (331363) was trying to restore the cult of Olympian gods in Rome, resisting the upcoming Christianity. Christianity "in its highest manifestations is presented in the novel as a cult of absolute virtue unattainable on Earth which is in denial of all things Earthly," according to scholar Z.G.Mints. Ascetic to the point of being inhuman, early Christians reject the reality as such. As the mother of a Christian youth Juventine curses "those servants of the Crucified" who "tear children off their mothers," hate the life itself and destroy "things that are great and saintly," the elder Didim replies: a worthy follower of Christ is to learn to "hate their mother and father, wife, children, brothers and sisters, and their very own life too." The author (who sees Christ as "life's sworn enemy") sympathizes with his doomed hero. The advent of Christianity in the novel is presented as "the victory for evil and blind mob," who treat "Julian as not just an Apostate, but Antichrist," according to modern critic and biographer Oleg Mikhaylov. Biographers saw Julian's spiritual quest as something parallel to the ideas Merezhkovsky started to develop in the 1880s1890s. The Emperor in the novel, acknowledging the "beautiful loftiness of Christian sermon," refuses to accept it, seeing it as a denial of the human sensuality and humanity as such. One of the novel's main ideas is that man's suffering stems from the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. The author conceded later that his initial philosophical approach was too straightforward and explained the way it changed: As I was embarking upon the trilogy Christ and Antichrist, it seemed to me that there were two truths: Christianity, the truth about Heaven, and Paganism, the truth about Earth. I considered the merging of the two as a way of attaining the higher religious truth. As I was finishing it, I knew already that the union of Christ and Antichrist was blasphemous lie. I understood that both truths, those of heaven and Earth, have been already united in Jesus Christ. But now I am also sure that I had to walk this misguiding path to its very end to finally see the truth.
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida Gippius – was twice forced into political exile.
Background
Dmitry Merezhkovsky was born in St. Petersburg on August 2, 1865, into the family of a minor court official. Even before graduating from the university there, he began (1883) publishing in liberal magazines poems in the prevailing style and civic spirit of Semyon Y. Nadson.
Education
In 1876 Dmitry Merezhkovsky joined an elite grammar school, the St. Petersburg Third Classic Gymnasium. Years spent there he described later by one word, "murderous", remembering just one teacher as a decent person – "Kessler the Latinist; well-meaning he surely never was, but at least had a kindly look. "
Career
The appearance of Merezhkovsky's first book, Poems, in 1888, the year after Nadson's death, suggested that he was Nadson's successor, but in 1892 he published another book of verse provocatively entitled Symbols and in 1893 a small critical book, On the Reasons for the Decline of and on New Currents in Contemporary Russian Literature. Rejecting sociological criticism and socially oriented verse, these two books affirmed a new quasi-religious philosophy and a fresh literary manner. With his young wife, the temperamental red-haired poetess Zinaida Hippius, he served on the board of the magazine Northern Messenger, the first herald of the new movement.
Merezhkovsky's first popular presentation of his antithetical religious views was the trilogy Christ and Anti-Christ, of which volume 1, The Death of the Gods: Julian the Apostate, appeared in 1896, followed by The Resurrection of the Gods: Leonardo da Vinci in 1901 and Anti-Christ: Peter and Alexis in 1905. The books' persuasive power came from Merezhkovsky's success in catching currents then around him: strong contrasts between social life and spiritual values, fresh interest in the drama of pagan ancient Athens, and identification with general western European culture. His translations of Daphnis and Chloe and works of Pliny, Marcus Aurelius, Miguel de Cervantes, Gustave Flaubert, and Henrik lbsen, among others, were valued contributions to Russian literary sophistication.
Merezhkovsky's application of his critical principles to Russian literature in his Christ and Anti-Christ in Russian Literature: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (1901-1903) imaginatively, if tendentiously, analyzed West versus East, flesh versus spirit, in the Russian literary tradition. Even recently, outside of the Soviet Union, critics who reject both the utilitarian attitude of the naturalist school and the structural subtleties of the formalist school have repeated Merezhkovsky's method of explaining a writer's work through biography, metaphor, and religious values.
Merezhkovsky and his wife collaborated with D. V. Filosofov, with whom, in 1903, they founded the magazine New Way (it was they who first published Aleksandr Blok) and the Religious-Philosophical Society, devoted to discussing issues of Slavophilism and Orthodoxy. Merezhkovsky's 1907 book, Le tsar et la révolution, written and published in Paris, well exemplifies the broadly cultural but conservative views of himself and his followers.
In 1906 Merezhkovsky wrote The Coming Ham, an attack on all forms of collectivism ("Ham, " which refers to the biblical figure, is also the Russian word for "boor"), although he was "mystically" a supporter of the 1905 revolution. The failure of constitutional reform in the autumn of 1905 drove him to Paris, where he lived from 1906 to 1912 and wrote a number of works, including plays such as Paul I (1908). Returning to Russia, he and his wife, like most intellectuals of the time, opposed events leading up to World War I and Russian involvement in it. In 1917 he bitterly opposed the Soviets and with his wife and two friends crossed into Poland in late 1919 and encouraged intervention to overthrow the new Soviet government (as he later hoped the Germans would in 1939-1941). In 1920 he settled in Paris. There he wrote violent diatribes against the Soviets (The Reign of Anti-Christ, 1926) as well as many novels and essays on Classical and Christian topics but centered on the one, mystical theme of the "Unknown Jesus. " He died in Paris on December 9, 1941.
Man's evolutional progress towards the Third Testament Kingdom Come won't be without some revolutionary upheavals, according to Merezhkovsky, will be strewn with "catastrophes", most of them dealing with the "revolution of Spirit. " The consequence of such revolution would bring about gradual change in the nature of religion itself, the latter taking under its spacious wing not only man's sensual liberation but also the latter's "freedom of rebellion. " "We are human only as long as we're rebels, " Merezhkovsky insisted, expressing what some saw as a proto-existentialist idea.
One result of the "revolution of Spirit" should be the severing of ties between state and religion, according to Merezhkovsky. "The Church – not the old, but the new, eternal, universal one – is as opposite to the idea of the state as an absolute truth is opposing an absolute lie, " he declared in an open letter to Berdyaev.
B. Rozental, analyzing Merezhkovsky's political and religious philosophy, thus summed up the writer's position: "The Law amounts to violence. .. The difference between legitimate power that holds violence 'in reserve' and violence itself is but a matter of degree: sinful are both. Autocracy and murder are nothing more than the two extreme forms of exhibiting [criminal] power. "nInterpreting the Biblical version of the human history as a sequence of revolutionary events, Merezhkovsky saw religion and revolution as inseparable. It is just that for a social revolution to succeed, spiritual revolution should always come one step ahead of it. In Russia the lack of the latter brought about the former's fiasco, with Antichrist taking hold of things, he argued.
In the 1920s Merezhkovsky lost interest in the religious anarchism doctrine. In his later years he became close to ecumenical ideals, prophesying the Kingdom Come as a synthesis of "Peter, Paul and John's principles", that is, bringing Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions together.
Politics
Although never a nationalist, Merezhkovsky was a Russo-centric author and thinker, cherishing the idea of his country's unique and in many ways decisive place in the world culture in history. Never tiring of reiterating the "Russian plight is the problem of the world, not Russia" postulate, he was ever on the look-out for some 'strong leader' who would be able to organize and successfully see through the anti-Communist crusade. For a while Merezhkovsky thought he's found his hero in Benito Mussolini who, having sponsored his book on Dante, had several lengthy talks with the Russian writer on politics, literature and art. Impressed, Merezhkovsky started to see his new friend as an incarnation of Dante, almost.
Views
Merezhkovsky's first adopted philosophical trend was the then popular positivism. Soon, disillusioned in this idea, although never rejecting it wholly, Merezhkovsky turned to religion.
Connections
In Borjomi Merezhkovsky met 19-year-old poet Zinaida Gippius. The two fell in love and on January 18, 1889, married in Tiflis, making arguably the most prolific and influential couple in the history of Russian literature.