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.
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. "
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.
Throughout his lifetime Dmitry Merezhkovsky polarized opinion in his native Russia, bringing upon himself both praise and scorn, occasionally from the same quarters. Merezhkovsky was the first in Russia to formulate the basic principles of Symbolism and Modernism, as opposed to 'decadence', a tag he was battling with.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
