Merezhkovsky, Dmitri Sergeyevich

Merezhkovsky, Dmitri Sergeyevich (dəmē`trē syĭrgā`yəvĭch mârĭshkôf`skē), 1865–1941, Russian critic and novelist. His principal critical study is Tolstoi as Man and Artist; with an Essay on Dostoievsky (1901–2, tr. 1902), in which he represented the authors as seers of, respectively, the flesh and the spirit. This type of antithetical thought is developed in his trilogy of historical novels entitled Christ and Antichrist, which concerns Julian the Apostate (1896, tr. 1899), Leonardo da Vinci (1902, tr. 1902), and Peter the Great (1905, tr. 1905). With his wife, Zinaida Gippius, he actively promoted the theories embodied in his novels through the Religious-Philosophic Society, which he founded in 1903. Merezhkovsky and Gippius were twice forced into exile—in 1905 temporarily, because of their support of the revolution, and after 1918 permanently, because they opposed the Bolsheviks. From his exile in Paris he attacked Bolshevism in The Kingdom of Antichrist (1922, tr. 1922) and other works.