Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (DSM) was born in the family of a court official in St. Petersburg, Russia. From 1884 to 1889 he studied history and philology at St. Petersburg University. His PhD pertained on Montaigne. DSM met his future wife Zinaïda Nikolaevna Gippius (1869-1945) in May 1888 during a stay in Caucasus in Borhoni/Borzhom. They married in January 1889, as he was 23 and she was 19. The couple settled in St. Petersburg, where they held a salon welcoming artists and intellectuals.

In 1891, DSM was on travel to Vienna and Venice.

Regarding DSM's revenue source, it seems that he got support from his parents, in the early years, especially when he had to undertake journeys for medical reasons for his wife. For the rest, DSM mostly made a living as a thinker, i.e. from the fees he earned from writing. He contributed articles for litterature and art magazines. He published his poems and novels in magazines. And he published books, which would bring interesting royalties: DSM was a well-known writer very early on. When publishing in Russian, DSM would earn his full fees. For translations, he would receive royalties only occasionally. Because Russia lacked a corresponding international convention, foreign publishers were free to remunerate their translations from Russian authors.

These considerations hold as well for the periods when DSM lived abroad, in France or elsewhere. DSM would live through publishing articles and books. However, as Zinaida complained in her letters, they could not always live the great life. Their reserves sometimes ran thin. Anyway, in the decades following his marriage, DSM is found animating a salon in St. Petersburg, launching a religious society, writing books. Thus, the young couple could live the upper class life in St. Petersburg just from writing, if not without difficulty.

The Merezhkovskys had no children. The reason for this is not known. Their stormy marriage became openly a triangle relation from 1901 onwards with Dimitri Vladimirovich Filosofov (1872-1940) who lived with them at their home. Dimitri Filosofov and Vladimir Zlobin (1894-1967) were their longtime secretaries, editors and writers.

The two authors that DSM most admired were Dostoievsky and Soloviev. He met both of them.

In the 1890s, DSM popularized French symbolism in Russia. He wrote his first novels and poetry ("Symbols" poems) in 1892. He published On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1893, translated the same year).

In his essay about the "decline" and "new trends" of Russian litterature, Merezhkovsky advocated that the naturalist tradition brought to a climax by Tolstoy and Dostoievski was now decaying, to be replaced by the religious/mystic trend (i.e. DSM's own preferred orientation). Further on, he argued that Russian naturalist authors had anyway never been that much naturalist, that at a deeper level they had been mystic.

With this essay, DSM is credited to having started the Russian symbolism and the Russian Silver Age.

Symbolism was a reaction to naturalism and realism. It was a cry for spirituality against the overflow of materialistic thought. Russian symbolic painting, for example, favored mysterious figures whose poses suggested some kind of otherworldly concerns. They often conveyed a kind of elegiac melancholy. Symbolists advocated a spiritual vision of the world. They waged war on the general "utilitarian and positivist world view, which included neither art nor philosophy" and which had to be replaced by a new quest for eternal values. The first Russian symbolists meant that a synthesis between a corrupt, material world and eternal values was not possible. They also rejected the belief that art should serve social progress. Rather, they posited the artist as a free godlike figure whose life and work could point the way to an elevated, spiritual, existence. They saw the artist as a mediating force between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. DSM represented the writers (like himself...) as seers of the two different worlds, the flesh and the spirit. This type of thought is developed in Christ and Antichrist.

The Merezhkovskys held a salon in St. Petersburg which became a meeting point of the turn-of-the-century capital city's seething intellectual scene. DSM and his wife were prominent figures of the Russian Silver Age. Zinaida Gippius herself was a prolific poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and critic. Gippius wrote many critical essays on literature, religion, and political issues. They were published in leading Moscow and Petersburg literary journals and newspapers under various pseudonyms including Anton Krajny and Roman Arensky.

"The soul is religious by origin, the feeling of loneliness in the world is unbearable if there is no God", Zinaida Gippius wrote. Religion connected with any kind of church, including the Orthodox Church, didn't suit her, nor her husband. She was searching her own way to God like her favorite writer Fiodor Dostoevsky. This is how arouse the idea of "new" Christianity, "new" church, where a person and God exist as an equal. Sometimes, they expressed their neochristianity in their words and their deeds sometimes in a shocking way. For example, their "Triple Alliance" with Dimitri Filosofov, publicist and critic who played an important role in the artistic union "World of Art". He lived at the Merezhkovskys' home for several years. This alliance or family showed absolutely new spiritual unity... But the society viewed it as insolence, as the continuation of Zinaida's shocking poetry: "I can't obey God if I love God... We are not slaves but we are God's children, and the children are free like Him."

In the 1900s, the huge Russian empire was swiflty industrializing with borrowed foreign money, without any modernization of his social structure. No relief was brought to the untold misery of his peasant population. Either landless under the mercy of landowners, or independent but squeezed by outsized taxes destined to provide for repayments of Russian borrowings (large landowners did not pay taxes). A huge proletarian underclass living in nondescript conditions was building up in cities and industry centers. A fantastic population growth supplied imperial army soldiers, factory workers, Siberian colonizers and too low pay levels on the countryside. The empire was constantly shaken with political trouble. Strikes, demonstrations, clashes with the police occured in a number of cities. Left-wing radicals resumed political terrorism. The rigid authoritarian structures of the autocracy seemed unable to respond, or even to grasp what was going on. Even Tolstoy was excommunicated in 1901 from the Orthodox Church.

After 1900, DSM actively propagated a "new religious consciousness". He animated a group of "spiritual Christians" called the God-seekers (bogoiskateli), or the decadents. This group included his wife Zinaida Gippius, Dimitri Filosofov, Vasilij Rozanov, V. Ternavcev and others. From November 1901 onwards Merezhkovsky led discussions between "spiritual Christians" and "official Christians" (i.e. representatives of the Orthodox Church). These regular meetings were known as the St. Petersburg religious assemblies. They lasted from 1901 to 1903. In April 1903, these religious-philosophical assemblies were prohibited by the Church (by Pobedonoscev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, the Russian Ministry of Orthodox Church).

In 1901, DSM and his wife founded the Religious-Philosophic Society and started the society's journal, "Novy Put" ("The New Path"). Novy Put reflected their metaphysical ideas. It lost many readers and faced financial problems after the hostile move by the Church in April 1903. DSM began to look around for new contributors in particular, he approached the "new idealists". In 1904, publication of "Novy Put" was interrupted.

DSM an his wife travelled deep into Russia beyond the Volga river, to visit Russian mystics in secluded monasteries. They met with representatives of diverse mystical sects. Merezhkovsky maintained a correspondence with some of these Russian Gnostics. Gippius penned a story describing, with a great deal of inside knowledge, the secret rites of the Gnostic Khlysty community.

Between 1896 and 1905, DSM published a trilogy of historical novels entitled Christ and Antichrist, which became European best-sellers. It was composed of Julian the Apostate (1896, translated 1899), Leonardo da Vinci (1902, translated 1902), and Peter and Alexis (1905, translated 1905). With this trilogy Merezhkovsky revived the historical novel in Russia. Its three parts, set in widely separated epochs and geographical areas, reveal historical erudition and serve as vehicles for the author's historical and theological ideas.

On the burning political issues of contemporary Russia, the God-seekers did not have any clear answer or stance. Their mysticism was a romantic one, and they showed little potential for raising political questions and providing political solutions. Dimitri Merezhkovski quietly supported the Russian monarchy, which he saw as a divine institution. As a consequence, he weathered severe criticism from progressive writers. He was for example sharply mocked in an article printed in "Osvobozhdenie" in 1902, an underground newspaper published abroad, in reference to his comparing the Russian autocracy to a "mystical order" in his book on Dostoevski: "It would be convenient to ask the author: well, and the police department, the regulations on intensified control, the Moskovskie vedomosti, the Grazhdanin, Cossack whips and gallows and other attributes of protection, are they also objects of "mystical order"? Do they also contain the "unutterable secret of God"? We would like to say to gentlemen like Merezhkovskij: mysticism obliges. If the idea of monarchy is a mystical one and you are not promoting it in vain, not as a ringing phrase, but with fear and respect, then this conviction obliges you to fight with fury against the Russian police-order (....) You say that autocracy is a religious idea, but the defence of this idea is a matter for God, and not for the Police-department".

The 1905 Revolution

Whatever the people's misery and suffering, the tsarist regime retained some prestige through steadily expanding the Russian empire. The Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East provinces had been swallowed in the course of the XIXth century. At the turn of the XXth century, that situation abruptly changed. In the Far East, the imperialisms of Russia and newly modernized Japan came to clash. A war burst out over influence zones in Korea and Manchuria. The Japanese attacked the Russian fleet of Port-Arthur in February 1904. They laid siege to the city and inflicted severe defeats to the Russian army in gigantic and merciless ground battles involving up to 500,000 soldiers and announcing the trench fights of the First World War. Port-Arthur fell to the Japanese in January 1905.

The news of the fall of Port-Arthur sent shock waves throughout Russia. Military success had been the last justification of the tsar's autocracy. In January 1905, a crowd of 200,000 persons approached the palace in St. Petersburg to bring a petition to the tsar. It was pitilessly shot at by the guards, leaving hundreds of deads on the ground. A wave of strikes and protests burst out. Then, in the Far East war, the rescue Russian fleet having sailed around half of the globe from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan for a counter-offensive was sunk by the Japanese navy in May 1905, near the island of Tsushima. This worsened the popular uprising. In August 1905, the tsar under pressure from the street conceded a parliamentary assembly (douma) to the populace. (He would, however, slowly scuttle this assembly in the two following years).

Dimitri Merezhkovski, who had been rather supportive of the Russian monarchy, switched mind during the 1905 revolution, which he openly supported. His wife and him became zealous revolutionaries, and wrote much political verse. With the failure of the revolution, the couple emigrated to Paris. They lived two years there (1906-1907), then returned. DSM saw the uprising of 1905 as a religious event, announcing a religious revolution of which he tried to become the prophet.

In 1907, Dmitri Merezhkovski and Zinaida Gippius, with the help of a circle of friends (Ern, Pavel Florenskii, Sergei Bulgakov Brikhnichev and others) founded in Moscow a journal called Zhivaia zhizn.

Merezhkovsky and Gippius divided the history of humanity and its future in three phases. The realm of God the Father, i.e. the realm of the Old Testament; the realm of Jesus Christ, i.e. the realm of the New Testament, the present phase which was now closing, and the realm of the Holy Spirit, i.e. the era of the Third Testament, which was now dawning, gradually disclosing its message to humanity. In this revealing, the 1905 events were a mailstone of the transformation. The kingdom of the Old Testament had divine authority as supreme; the kingdom of the New Testament had love as supreme; and the kingdom of the Third Testament would reveal inner freedom as supreme... One could argue that this blissful worldview mirrored Merezhkovsky's happiness in life: he was a handsome young man, author of bestsellers, famous all over Europe, and wealthy enough to freely dispose of his life. Just as the previous kingdoms symbolised a change in human consciousness, so the final Kingdom of the Third Testament was to usher in a new religious consciousness, the genesis of a New Humanity. The Third Testament would resolve all present antitheses – sex and asceticism, individualism and society, slavery and freedom, atheism and religiosity, hatred and love. The enigma of Earth and Heaven, the flesh and the spirit, would be solved in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit would redeem the world, giving humanity a new life in peace, harmony, and love. The Three in One would be realised, and Spiritual Christianity – long ago driven underground – would be brought into the open. In propagating their 'Cause of the Three in One' Gippius and Merezhkovsky hoped for a religious revolution, a spiritual metamorphosis of man to prepare him for the Third Kingdom. According to Gippius the aim of all universal-historical development is the end of humanity and the world in their present forms through the Apocalypse. Only the coming of Christ would unite humanity in brotherly love and harmony as one living family. At this point in the spiritual evolution of mankind the apocalyptical Church would be established, not as a temple, but as a new experience of God in human consciousness and in the human soul.

First World War and Bolchevik Coup

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Russian troops entered Germany. DSM saw the First World War as a battle "for culture", that is, for Russia, against German militarism. After initial victories, however, the Russian offensive turned sour for St. Petersburg. Russian troops lost all the German ground they had gained, then Poland, then Lituania. In 1916, the badly-commanded Army was steadily loosing ground, entirely demoralized. The population was sizzling against the German-born empress and against her favourite healer Grigori Rasputin. St. Petersburg was crumbling under the weight of the war refugees, under the misery of the huge lower class. Society was slowly disintegrating. In the upper class, men were attracted by younger impoverished girls and the divorce rate skyrocketed. At the beginning of the war, the capital city had been renamed to non-Germanic sounding Petrograd. Zinaida Gippius dubbed it "Chertograd", "Devil-town", because the mood in the city was so frightening.

Following the catastrophic military defeats, and the ensuing final loss of prestige of the tsars, and the disintegration of the state, a revolution toppled the tsar, in March 1917. A democratic regime was set up. DSM was a strong supporter of the fledgling Russian democracy.

The new Russia went on fighting Germany. To bring St. Petersburg to its knees, Berlin played a wild card. It flooded a small agressive subversive group, the Bolcheviks, with funds with the mission to take power, surrender, and give up huge territories to the German empire. (This highly dangerous German game backfired horrendously in 44-45). The Bolcheviks' leader, Lenin, was sent to Russia in a German military train. The Communists fulfilled their mission. They staged a coup and took power in November 1917 (the "October Revolution") and entered an armistice with Germany in December 1917. They signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany in March 1918, whereby they renounced Ukraine, White Russia, Baltic provinces, Poland and Finland, which entered the German influence zone. In the wake, however, the Bolcheviks erected a monstrous totalitarian regime, reigning with terror, executing thousands of people in its first months of existence. They quickly established their grip on the industry by nationalizing the (mainly foreign-held) factories and denouncing all foreign debt. They secured control of the army by assigning a communist "warden" to each officer. When the German empire fell, in November 1918, vanquished by the United States, the bolchevik regime was able to survive in Russia on its own.

DSM rejected the new communist dictatorship as a devilish caricature of God's regime he had called for. He entered active opposition. Meanwhile, the Western democratic powers (France and England) supported troops opposing the Bolcheviks with the aim to recoup their assets – debts and facilities – and to restore the democratically-elected government. During the year 1919, the pro-democracy "white armies" pushed deeper and deeper into Russia. However, the "red armies" victoriously counter-attacked in October 1919 and secured control, in particular, of Petrograd. In December 1919, DSM fled with his wife to neighbouring Poland. In April 1920, the bolchevik troops attacked Polish armies (which had ventured as far as the Dniepr). They reached the Vistula and came close to conquer Warsaw in August 1920. Thanks to Western intervention, the Russian armies were defeated and the Polish state survived. In October 1920, the Merezhkovskys migrated further to France.


Exile in France

From his exile in Paris, DSM lambasted Bolshevism in The Kingdom of Antichrist (1922, translated 1922) and other works. He published two more historical novels under the general title Rozhdenie bogov (1924-25; Birth of the Gods) the first Tuthankamon in Crete and the second The Messiah. The novels centered around Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton, the founder of one of the first known, and short-lived, monotheistic religion. They depicted Akhenaton as a messiah, in the Christian sense, that is, as an ancient manifestation of the Christ. Both novels share the central idea of continuity and integrity of pre-Christian and Christian world.

The turning point of 1919-20 proved critical for DSM and his wife, since their exile out of Russia turned out to be definitive this time. From then on, Gippius produced very bitter, angry works against the Bolsheviks. Her later works were so subjective and capricious that they were noted more for their form than for their content. Similarly, DSM became very pessimistic. Exit the happy coming of a Third Age of freedom and Holy Spirit of his dandy life in St. Petersburg. Instead he became a prophet of doom, foreseeing the imminent end of the world in Atlantis-Europe, The Secret Of The West (1930, translated 1931).

Still DSM and his wife succeeded in animating a Russian literary salon at their home in their Parisian exile. In August 1927, they founded a literary circle called "The Green Lamp" out of the gatherings of old and young Russian writers, with a respectable number of members.

DSM wrote biographical studies of Napoleon, Jesus Christ, St. Augustine, St. Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Dante, and many others; most of these have been translated into English.

In later life, Merezhkovsky regarded Mussolini and Hitler as leaders capable of eradicating communism. D.S.M. was in 1933 on behalf for his Trilogy Christ and Antichrist (1901-1904) nominee for the Nobel Price for Literature.


APPEARANCE
Some photos of Dimitri Merezhkovsky.

                       

1888: Stikhotvorenija (1883-1887).

1892: Simvoly, Pesni i poemy ("Symbolism, Poems").

1893: O prichinakh upadka i o novykh tecenijakh sovremennoj russkoj literatury ("On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature", "Des causes de la décadence et des tendances nouvelles de la littérature russe contemporaine").

1896: Novyje stikhotvorenija (1891-1895)

1897: Vechnye sputniki. Portrety iz vsemirnoj literatury.

1901-1902: Tolstoj i Dostoevskij (1900?).
–English translation: Tolstoi as Man and Artist; with an Essay on Dostoievsky (1902).
–German translation: Tolstoi und Dostojewski als Menschen und Künstler – eine kritische Würdigung ihres Lebens und Schaffens, Leipzig 1903.

The trilogy Christ and Antichrist:
1893: Yulian Otstupnik
–English translation: Julian the Apostate, 1896.
–French translation: Julien l'Apostat, 1896. Reedition: La mort des dieux ou Julien l'Apostat, Editions de l'Agly, Perpignan, 1999? (280 pages).

1901: Leonardo da Vinchi
–English translation: Leonardo da Vinci (1902)
–German translation: Leonardo da Vinci (1903)

1905: Antikhrist: Pyotr i Aleksey ("The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis")
–English translation: Peter and Alexis (translated 1905)
–German translation: Peter der Große und sein Sohn Alexej. Berlin (1918-1920)

1904: Sobranie stikhov, 1883-1903, 1904 ("Poetic Collection, 1883-1903").
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij. 24 Bde, SPb 1911-1915.
Dafnis i Chloa. Povest'-Lotusa, SPb 1904.
Ljubov' sil'nee smerti. Ital'janskaja novella XV veka. SPb 19042
1906: Gogol i chort. Issledovanie. M 1906 ("Gogol and the Devil")
"Gogol" SPb 1909;
–German translation: Gogol. Sein Leben, sein Werk und seine Religion, München 1914.

Trilogy of fictional works relating to the Russian history: the play Pavel I (1908), the novel Aleksandr I (1911-12) and the novel 14 Dekabrya (1918) "December 14th".
Pavel I. Drama. SPb 1908.
Smert' Pavla I. P'esa. Berlin 1908.
Aleksandr Pervyj. 2 Bde. M 1913.
Perventsy svobody, Istorija vosstanija 14-go dekabrja 1825 g, Petrograd 1917.
14-oe dekabrja, Paris 1921.
Aleksandr I i dekabristy. Berlin 1925.

Grjadushij kham. Chekhov i Gorkij, SPb 1906.

Prorok russkoj revoljutsii. K jubileju Dostoevskogo, SPb 1906.
–French translation: Le Tsar et la Révolution, Société du Mercure de France, Paris 1907.
–German translation: Zar und Revolution, Munich, Leipzig 1908.

Ne mir, no mech, SPb 1908.
Bol'naja Rossija, SPb 1910 ("Sick Russia")

Lermontov poet sverkhchelovechestva: Gogol, tvorchestvo, hizo, religija, SPb 1911.
Bylo i budet. Dnevnik 1910-1914, Petrograd 1915.
Dve tajny russkoj poezii. Nekrasov i Tjutchev, Petrograd 1915.
Budet radost, P'esa, Petrograd 1916.
Nevoennyj dnevnik. 1914-1916, Petrograd 1917.
Romantiki. P'esa, Petrograd 1917.

1921: Tsarstvo antikhrista, Munich 1921.
–German translation: Das Reich des Antichrist. Rußland und der Bolschewismus, Munich 1921.

The bilogy The Birth of the Gods
1924-25: Rozhdenie bogov. Tutankhamon na Krite, Prag. ("Birth of the Gods: Tutankhamun in Crete")
–English translation: The birth of the gods, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1926. Translated by Natalie A. Duddington.
–German translation: Tut-ench-Amon auf Kreta, 1924.
–French translation: La naissance des dieux: Toutankhamon en Crète, Editions de l'Agly, Perpignan, 2001. Translated by Lucile Négel (144 pages), isbn 2-913025-24-2.
–First Russian edition in Russia: at Ivan Limbakh, 2000 (392 pp), isbn 5-89059-023-5.

1925?: Messija. 2 Bde. Paris (The Messia)
–English translation: Akhnaton, King of Egypt, J.M. Dent (or E.P. Dutton), New York, 1927 (327pp).
–German translation: Der Messias, Leipzig, Zurich, 1927.
–First Russian edition in Russia by Ivan Limbakh, 2000.

Atlantis-Europe: The Secret Of The West 1925: Tajna Trekh. Egipet i Vavilon, Prag 1925. –German translation: Das Geheimnis des Ostens, Berlin 1924. –French translation: Les Mystères de l'Orient, Paris 1927. 1930: Tajna Zapada. Atlantida-Evropa, Belgrad 1930 (in Russian "The Mystery of the West: Atlantis-Europe") –German translation: Das Geheimnis des Westens – Atlantis-Europa, Betrachtungen über die letzten Dinge, Grethlein, Leipzig&Zürich 1930 (translated by Arthur Luther). –Portuguese translation: Atlântida-Europa: O Mistério do Ocidente. Belgrado, 1930. –English translation: The Secret of the West, Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1931 (translated by John Cournos). Republished 1971: Atlantis/Europe:The Secret of The West, Rudolph Steiner Publications 1971, 449 p. –Italian translation: Atlantida, Ulrico Hoepli, Milano, 1937. –Spanish translation: Atlantida-Europa, 1944 –French translation: Atlantide-Europe, le Mystère de l'Occident, L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1995 (translated by Constantin Andronikof). 1932-34: Iisus Neizvestnyj, Belgrad. –German translation: Jesus, der Unbekannte, Leipzig 1932. –French translation: Jésus inconnu, Rhône, Genève 1946, 364 p.. (Trad. du russe par Dumesnil de Gramont)

1934: Jesus, der Kommende, Frauenfeld 1934.
Calvin, Gallimard, Paris 1942 (Trad. du Russe par Constantin Andronikoff).
Napoleon. 2 Bde. Beograd 1929
Tsarevich Aleksej, (tragedy), Prag.
Tod und Auferstehung. Frauenfeld 1935
Pavel, Avgustin, Berlin 1936
Francisk Assizskij. Berlin 1938
Franz von Assisi. München 1938
Zanna d'Ark. Berlin 1938
Dante. Zürich 1939
Dante, Paris 1939


ORTHOGRAPH
D.S.M.' first and second names were rendered into a myriad of orthographs, several in each language, making internet searches about him difficult. I listed the following uses (as much for love of completeness as for beckoning to search engines!):

In English:		Merezhkovsky, Merezhkovski, Merezhkovskii, Merezhkovskij, Merejkowski.
In German:		Merezkovskij, Mereschkowskij, Mereshkovsky
In French:		Mérejkovsky, Mérejkovski, Merejkovsky, Merejkovski, Merejkowsky.

Dimitri, Dimitrii, Dimitrij, Dmitri, Dmitrii, Dmitriij, Dmitry


SOURCES
I found the information and pictures above on the following websites:

ww.bautz.de/bbkl/m/merezkovskij.shtml
A biography and list of books (in German)

ww.amherst.edu/~acrc/gip/gipdesc.html (Amherst Center for Russian Culture)
A short biography and a photo (in English).

ww.britannica.com/search?query=merezhkovsky (Encyclopedia Britannica)
A short biography and a photo.

ww.encyclopedia.com/articles/08348.html
Short biography

ww.bartleby.com/65/me/Merezhko.html (Columbia Encyclopedia)
A short biography

http://www.slider.com/enc/21000/Gippius_Zinaida_Nikolayevna.htm (Slider Encyclopedia)
A short biography of Zinaida Gippius

ww.geocities.com/countermedia/2.html
About the religious ideas and beliefs of DSM

ww.hf.uio.no/east/Medd/Medd69/Theocracy3.html
About DSM monarchism and critics