Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dmitry Merezhkovsky was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Professor Sigurd Agrell of Lund University nominated him annually from 1930 until Agrell's own death in 1937, making eight of those nominations. Merezhkovsky came closest to winning in 1933, the year the prize went to Ivan Bunin instead.
Merezhkovsky's wife was the poet Zinaida Gippius. They met in Borjomi in early 1888 and married on the 18th of January 1889, in Tiflis. The couple has been described as arguably the most prolific and influential partnership in the history of Russian literature; Gippius consistently generated foundational ideas that Merezhkovsky developed and formalized.
The Christ and Antichrist trilogy consists of three historical novels: The Death of the Gods (1895), set around the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate; Resurrection of Gods: Leonardo da Vinci (published in 1900); and Peter and Alexis (1904), which portrayed Peter the Great as "an embodied Antichrist." The first novel is regarded in retrospect as the first Russian Symbolist novel.
Merezhkovsky fled Russia because he viewed the October Revolution of 1917 as a catastrophe and feared for his safety after the Bolsheviks dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly in January 1918. He and Zinaida Gippius left Petrograd on the 14th of December 1919, using a travel permit issued by Anatoly Lunacharsky. After stops in Minsk, Vilno, and Warsaw, they settled in Paris, where they remained until their deaths.
Merezhkovsky's Third Testament theory held that human religious history unfolds in three stages: the First Testament of the Divine Father (Law), the Second of the Divine Son (Grace), and a coming Third of the Holy Ghost (Liberation). He adapted the original concept from Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century theologist, and developed it with Zinaida Gippius into the foundation of the early twentieth-century Russian New Religious Consciousness movement.
His biographer Yuri Zobnin disputes that Merezhkovsky ever delivered the speech. Zobnin argues the printed text was most likely a montage fabricated by Nazi propagandists from an unpublished 1939 essay, and notes that the couple were in Biarritz at the time the broadcast supposedly occurred, making a trip to Paris implausible. A documented speech from his 75th-birthday celebration in August 1940 attacked both Bolsheviks and German fascists and alarmed Russian guests while German listeners applauded without understanding.