Dmitry Merezhkovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and never won it. He co-founded Russian Symbolism, helped invent the philosophical novel, and spent the final two decades of his life in exile, warning Europe about Bolshevism while almost nobody listened. When he died in Paris on the 9th of December 1941, only a handful of people attended his burial at the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. His reputation collapsed almost immediately, tainted by a radio speech that his own biographer believes was a Nazi propaganda fabrication.

  Who was this man that Anton Chekhov called a believer "of an apostolic kind," that Thomas Mann praised as a "genius critic second only to Nietzsche," and that Yevgeny Yevtushenko described as Russia's first universal dissident? How did a child who spent his summers in a palace-like dacha on the Yelagin Island in Saint Petersburg end up dying penniless in occupied Paris? And what does it mean that his most prophetic warnings, dismissed as political grotesque when he first wrote them, proved accurate within a decade?

• 2. A Saint Petersburg Childhood

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  The Merezhkovsky family kept a large estate in Crimea near the road leading to the Uchan-Su waterfall, and young Dmitry remembered it the rest of his life. "Fabulous Oreanda palace, now in ruins, will stay with me forever. White marble pylons against the blue sea... for me it's a timeless symbol of Ancient Greece," he wrote years later. His father Sergey Ivanovich, who had served in several Russian local governors' cabinets before rising to the rank of Privy Councillor at Emperor Alexander II's court, kept his household deliberately lean. He regarded luxury-seeking and reckless spending as the two deadliest sins, a disposition he called "moral prophylactics."

  Most of the emotional warmth in Dmitry's early years came from elsewhere. An old German housekeeper named Amalia Khristianovna told the children Russian fairytales and Biblical stories; it was her accounts of saints' lives that ignited Dmitry's religious feelings in his early teens. His mother Varvara Vasilyevna, a woman biographer Yuri Zobnin described as possessing "rare beauty and angelic nature," became what Dmitry later called the guiding light of his rather lonely childhood. He would later say there were only three people in his entire lifetime with whom he had any real affinity, and she was the first.

  In 1876 Dmitry joined an elite grammar school he later described in one word: "murderous." He remembered only one teacher as a decent person. The boy was already writing poetry by thirteen, working in the vein of Pushkin's "Bakhchisarai Fountain" by his own account, and his fascination with Moliere ran deep enough that he formed a Moliere Circle at the Gymnasium. The group had no political agenda, but the secret police summoned each of its members one by one to the Third Department's headquarters by the Politzeisky Bridge. It is believed that only his father's connections prevented Dmitry from being expelled.

• 3. First Encounters, First Words

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  In July 1879, in Alupka, Crimea, Sergey Ivanovich introduced his teenage son to Princess Yekaterina Vorontzova, once Pushkin's sweetheart. She read the boy's verses and, according to a biographer, "spotted in them a must-have poetic quality: the metaphysical sensitivity of a young soul," and encouraged him to continue. The same year the Saint Petersburg magazine Zhivopisnoe obozrenie published two of Dmitry's poems, "Little Cloud" and "The Autumn Melody," his debut in print.

  A very different reception came from Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Nervous to the point of stuttering as he began reciting his work, the teenager watched the famous novelist listen impatiently, then deliver a verdict: "Poor, very poor. To write well, one has to suffer. Suffer!" His father, appalled, shot back: "Oh no, I'd rather he won't - either suffer, or write well!" Merezhkovsky left Dostoyevsky's house deeply frustrated. He would spend much of the next six decades grappling with what Dostoyevsky's writing meant.

  In autumn 1882 Merezhkovsky attended one of Semyon Nadson's first public readings and wrote the poet a letter that same night. Nadson became his closest friend outside of his mother. When Nadson died in 1887 and Varvara Vasilyevna followed two years later, Merezhkovsky submerged into a depression he described as losing everything he had ever had in the world. From those years came the poem "Sakya Muni," which entered popular recital compilations and made the author almost famous. By 1896, the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary was rating him as a well-known poet, and major Russian composers including Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky had set dozens of his poems to music.

• 4. Marriage and Manifesto

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  In Borjomi, in early 1888, while touring southern Russia, Merezhkovsky met nineteen-year-old poet Zinaida Gippius. On the 18th of January 1889, the two married in Tiflis, forming what has been called arguably the most prolific and influential couple in the history of Russian literature. They moved into a Saint Petersburg house that was his mother's wedding present.

  Three years later, in October 1892, Merezhkovsky delivered a lecture titled "The Causes of the Decline of the Contemporary Russian Literature and the New Trends in it." He argued that the three "streaks of Modern art" - Mystic essence, Symbolic language, and Impressionism - could be traced back to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, making Russian Modernism a continuation of the classical tradition rather than a break from it. Paired with his second poetry volume, Symbols, published the same year, the lecture became Russian Symbolism's early manifesto. The general reaction was largely hostile. Liberals condemned his ideas as "new obscurantism"; literary salon regulars treated them with scorn.

  Only the staff of the magazine Severny Vestnik gave "The Causes" an unanimous welcome and took him back in. His critical essays from this period - biographical studies of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Maykov, Korolenko, Pliny, and Calderon - scandalized the literary establishment. Compiled later into a volume called The Eternal Companions, they were eventually pronounced modern classics, their author praised as "the subtlest and the deepest" of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian literary critics by the historian Arkady Dolinin. By the early 1910s the volume had become an official honorary gift for excelling grammar-school graduates.

• 5. Trilogies and Turbulence

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  The Death of the Gods, published in Severny Vestnik in 1895, opened the Christ and Antichrist trilogy and is regarded in retrospect as the first Russian Symbolist novel. Valery Bryusov called it "a novel made for eternity." The book's publication was entangled in a private drama Merezhkovsky was entirely unaware of: Gippius had conducted a secret love affair with Akim Volynsky, one of the magazine's chiefs, and it was this relationship that had secured the novel's placement there. When Volynsky's jealousy eventually drove them apart, he retaliated by expelling Merezhkovsky from Severny Vestnik, working to shut the door on him at major literary journals, and publishing under his own name a monograph on Leonardo da Vinci that Merezhkovsky had written and compiled. The plagiarism scandal lasted nearly two years.

  The second novel of the trilogy, Resurrection of Gods: Leonardo da Vinci, remained unpublished for almost three years before appearing in Autumn 1900 in Mir Bozhy. The third, Peter and Alexis, came out in 1904 with Peter the Great cast as "an embodied Antichrist," an idea Merezhkovsky shared with the Russian raskolniki. By this point Julian the Apostate had undergone ten editions in France in four years. When The Daily Telegraph described Merezhkovsky as "an heir to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky's legacy," Russian critics denounced the praise so unanimously that the author was compelled to publicly deny having any pretensions of the kind.

  A second trilogy, The Kingdom of the Beast, marked a different phase entirely. The first part, a historical drama about Tsar Pavel the First, was confiscated and banned by Russian authorities. Cast in the humanist tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature rather than in the Symbolist vein of his earlier work, the trilogy was later seen as representing the peak of Merezhkovsky's literary career. Its second and third parts, the Decembrists novels Alexander the First and December 14, came out in 1913 and 1918 respectively.

• 6. Prophecy and Exile

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  After Bloody Sunday on the 9th of January 1905, Merezhkovsky's politics shifted sharply. The defeat of the Imperial Russian Navy by the Imperial Japanese Navy helped him see, as he put it, "the anti-Christian nature of the Russian monarchy." He wrote pro-revolutionary verse, organized protest gatherings, and described the 1905 Revolution as a prelude to the religious upheaval he believed himself destined to prophesy. In a 1905 book he described "the three faces of Ham'stvo" - the past (the Russian Orthodox Church's hypocrisy), the present (state bureaucracy and monarchy), and the future (a "boorish upstart rising from society's bottom"). Several years on, the book was regarded as prophetic by many.

  In spring 1906 Merezhkovsky went into European exile with Dmitry Filosofov to promote what they called "the new religious consciousness." In France he wrote that political revolution would bring nothing but tyranny unless preceded by a "revolution of the human spirit." This too was dismissed as grotesque. Within a decade it read as grim reality to those paying attention.

  The October Revolution of 1917 Merezhkovsky called the Coming of Ham he had written about years before. He and Gippius used their remaining influence to secure the release of arrested Provisional-government ministers. On the 14th of December 1919, the couple left Petrograd along with Filosofov and Gippius' secretary Zlobin, having obtained from Anatoly Lunacharsky a signed permission "to leave Petrograd for the purpose of reading some lectures on Ancient Egypt to Red Army fighters." From Minsk and Vilno they traveled to Warsaw, where Merezhkovsky called Bolshevism a "global threat, not just local Russian disease" and described its dictatorship as belonging to Lenin and Trotsky alone. They reached Paris, which would be their home for the rest of their lives.

• 7. Paris, the Nobel, and a Contested Speech

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  In Paris Merezhkovsky founded the Religious Union, later renamed the Union of the Unpacified, and contributed to the newspapers of Pavel Milyukov and Pyotr Struve. His single reliable ally in the anti-Soviet campaign was Ivan Bunin; the two men shared little personal affinity but maintained a firm alliance. In winter 1925 Merezhkovsky and Gippius formed a small literary and philosophy circle that was formally launched two years later as the Green Lamp group. With its own magazine, Novy Korabl, the group attracted much of the Russian intellectual elite in exile and remained an important cultural center for the next ten years.

  From 1930 onward, Sigurd Agrell, professor of Slavic languages at Lund University, nominated Merezhkovsky for the Nobel Prize each year, but always alongside Bunin. In November 1932, Gippius wrote in a letter to Vera Bunina that Merezhkovsky had no chance of winning "because of his anti-Communist stance." Merezhkovsky apparently suggested the two rivals make a pact to split the prize money if either won. Bunin took what seemed to be a joke at face value and refused outright. He won in 1933. Agrell kept nominating Merezhkovsky until Agrell's own death in 1937, eight nominations in total.

  The most damaging episode of Merezhkovsky's final years was a speech broadcast on German radio in June 1941, in which a voice calling for an anti-Bolshevik crusade compared Hitler to Joan of Arc. Biographer Yuri Zobnin disputes that Merezhkovsky ever delivered it. The couple were in Biarritz at the time, and for an elderly man to slip away and reach Paris was, Zobnin argues, hardly probable. The document published in 1944 by Parizhsky Vestnik was, in Zobnin's assessment, most likely a montage fabricated by Nazi propagandists from an unpublished 1939 essay on Dostoyevsky's Demons. The actual birthday speech Merezhkovsky gave at his 75th-anniversary celebration in Biarritz in August 1940, the one with documented witnesses, targeted both Bolsheviks and German fascists, spoke of both Antichrists perishing, and caused such alarm among the Russian guests that they whispered they would surely all be thrown out of the hotel. The Germans in the audience applauded and seemed not to understand a word.

• 8. Legacy of a Dissident Mind

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  Merezhkovsky died on the 9th of December 1941, in the Paris flat where he had been working continuously on an unfinished novella called Little Theresa. The evening before, he and Gippius had argued, as usual, about the Russia versus freedom dilemma. He skipped supper, skipped his habitual cigarette, and went to bed early. The next morning the maid found him unconscious beside a cold fireplace. A doctor arrived within fifteen minutes and diagnosed brain hemorrhage. Merezhkovsky was pronounced dead half an hour later. On a piece of paper on the table were his last written words, a paraphrase of Psalm 21: a worm wrapping itself into a chrysalis "only to break out as a shiny white, sunlight-like, resurrected butterfly."

  Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko later named Merezhkovsky Russia's first universal dissident, the man who managed to upset "just about everybody who thought themselves responsible for guarding morality and order" - Tsarist authorities, Orthodox patriarchs, literary academics, Futurists, and Trotsky all included. Nikolai Berdyaev called him one of the best-educated people in Saint Petersburg in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Korney Chukovsky, reflecting on the cultural elite of early twentieth-century Russia, concluded that "the most cultured of them all" was this "mysterious, unfathomable, almost mythical creature, Merezhkovsky."

  His direct literary influence reached Andrey Bely, Aleksey Remizov, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Mark Aldanov. He is credited with introducing the concepts of the modernist novel and the symbolic historical novel to Russian literature. Sigmund Freud, Nikolai Berdyaev, and the philosopher Rickert engaged seriously with his ideas. Thomas Mann called him a "genius critic and specialist in world psychology, second only to Nietzsche." And yet Merezhkovsky himself wrote in a letter to Berdyaev: "I was disliked and scolded in Russia, loved and praised abroad, but misunderstood, both here and there." That summary has not been improved upon since.