Merezhkovsky was born into the family of a minor Imperial Court official of the Ukrainian gentry and studied history in St. Petersburg and Moscow universities. His poetry, first published in 1881, displays his unique religious-mystical views. While his first verse was influenced by Nadson, the popular poet of the 1880s, Merezhkovsky became one of the pioneers of Russian Symbolist poetics. In 1889 he married the poet Zinaida Gippius. Until the Revolution he often traveled to Greece and translated Greek tragedies.
By 1914 he had published a twenty-four-volume collection of his works, which included a religious-philosophical novel trilogy, Christ and Antichrist (1901—1905); a celebrated book of essays, Vechnye sputniki (Eternal Companions) (1896); and a well-known literary study, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (1901). In 1918 he wrote a novel of the 1825 Decembrist Revolt, The Fourteenth of December, composed in the light of what he perceived as the horrors of the October (1917) Revolution.
Merezhkovsky was a fierce enemy of the October Revolution and emigrated to Paris in 1919. He strongly believed that his emigration had a historical mission: to struggle against communism by any means necessary, which led him to place his hopes in Hitler’s war against Russia. Hence he was not published in the USSR from 1925 to 1985.
