MEREZHKOVSKII, DMITRII (1865–1941), chief proselytizer of the religious renaissance in Russia in the early twentieth century. Scion of an eminent Saint Petersburg aristocratic family, Merezhkovskii was educated at the Third Classical Gymnasium and at the Historical-Philological Faculty of the University of Saint Petersburg (1884–1888). Interested in metaphysical and existential issues, he dissented from the positivism and materialism of his contemporaries and searched, all his life, for a new and all-encompassing higher ideal.

In the 1890s, he championed mystical idealism as the bridge between the atheistic intelligentsia and the believing peasantry, campaigned against mandatory social didacticism in literature, introduced Russians to French symbolism and the philosophy of Nietzsche, and reintroduced them to classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Versatile and erudite, he expressed his ideas in poetry, literary criticism, essays, novels, and plays. Major works of this period are Symbols (1892), a book of poems; "On the Causes of the Decline...