The Russian writer and literary critic Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1865-1941), a founder of the modernist movement in Russian literature, combined fervent idealism with literary innovation.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky was born in St. Petersburg on Aug. 2/14, 1865, into the family of a minor court official. Even before graduating from the university there, he began (1883) publishing in liberal magazines poems in the prevailing style and civic spirit of Semyon Y. Nadson. The appearance of Merezhkovsky's first book, Poems, in 1888, the year after Nadson's death, suggested that he was Nadson's successor, but in 1892 he published another book of verse provocatively entitled Symbols and in 1893 a small critical book, On the Reasons for the Decline of and on New Currents in Contemporary Russian Literature. Rejecting sociological criticism and socially oriented verse, these two books affirmed a new quasi-religious philosophy and a fresh literary manner. With his young wife, the temperamental red-haired poetess Zinaida Hippius...