page_title: Dmitry Merezhkovsky
section_title: 1895–1903
hierarchical_section_title: Dmitry Merezhkovsky / Biography / 1895–1903
caption_attribution_description: Zinaida Gippius and Akim Volynsky (Flexer)
context_page_description: 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. During his second exile he continued publishing successful novels and gained recognition as a critic of the Soviet Union. Known both as a self-styled religious prophet with his own slant on apocalyptic Christianity, and as the author of philosophical historical novels which combined fervent idealism with literary innovation, Merezhkovsky was nine times a nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature, which he came closest to winning in 1933.
context_section_description: The Death of the Gods which came out in 1895 (Severny Vestnik, Nos.1–6) opened the Christ & Antichrist trilogy and in retrospect is regarded as the first Russian symbolist novel. Sceptics prevailed (most of them denouncing the author's alleged Nietzscheanity), but the allies were ecstatic. "A novel made for eternity," Bryusov marveled. Five years later Julian the Apostate was published in France, translated by Zinaida Vasilyeva.
  Merezhkovsky's relationship with Severny Vestnik, though, again started to deteriorate, the reason  being Akim Volynsky's jealousy. In 1896 all three of them (husband still unaware of what was going on behind his back) made a trip to Europe to visit Leonardo da Vinci's places. Several ugly rows with Volynsky finally prompted Gippius to send her scandalous-minded lover home. Volynsky reacted by expelling his ex-lover's husband from Severny Vestnik (some sources say it was the Merezhkovskys who withdraw their cooperation with the "Severny Vestnik" a year before the magazine shut down in 1898, along with Minsky and Sologub), made sure the major literary journals would shut the door on him and published (in 1900) under his own name a monograph Leonardo da Vinci, written and compiled by his adversary.
  The scandal concerning plagiarism lasted for almost two years. Feeling sick and ignored, Merezhkovsky in 1897 was seriously considering leaving his country for good, being kept at home only by the lack of money. For almost three years the second novel, Resurrection of Gods. Leonardo da Vinci (The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci – in English and French) remained unpublished. It finally appeared in Autumn 1900 in Mir Bozhy under the title "The Renaissance". In retrospect these two 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."
  By the time of his second novel's release Merezhkovsky was in a different cultural camp – that of Dyagilev and his close friends – Alexandre Benois, Leon Bakst, Nikolay Minsky and Valentin Serov. Their own brand new Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) magazine, with Dmitry Filosofov as a literary editor, accepted Merezhkovsky wholeheartedly. It was here that his most famous essay, L. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky  was published in 1900–1901, coinciding with the escalation of Tolstoy's conflict with the Russian Orthodox church. Tolstoy invited the couple to his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1904 and, to both parties' delight, the visit proved to be friendly. Behind the facade, there was little love lost between them; the old man confessed in his diary that, he just couldn't "force himself to love those two," and Merezhkovsky's critique of what he saw as "Tolstoy's nihilism" continued.
caption: Gippius and Volynsky, 1890s
exif: {}