| Russian symbolism Dmitry Merezhkovsky |
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Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky - August 14, 1865, St Petersburg-December 9, 1941, Paris - was one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism. His wife Zinaida Gippius, a poet like him, ran a fashionable salon in St. Petersburg. Both he and his wife were freemasons. He was the sixth son of a Privy Councillor who had access to the Tsarist court. From 1884 until 1889 he studied History and Philology at the University of St. Petersburg, becoming fluent in several languages. His PhD was on Montaigne. In 1888 he met his wife, Zinaida Gippius, in Borjomi in the Caucausus. They married the following January and settled in St. Petersburg. He and his wife supported themselves modestly through their writing, and their salon would later become a centre of the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Merezhkovsky is credited with first articulating the basic tenets of Russian Symbolism with his essay On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). After 1900 he and Zinaida, along with Dmitry Filosofov and Vasily Rozanov, were promoting a new religious consciousness through the group Bogoiskateli, or God-seekers. This group of "spiritual Christians" regularly met with representatives of the Othodox Church until 1903 when these encounters were banned by the notorious Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church . In 1901 they founded The Religious-Philosophical Society which published Novyi put ("New Path") as its mouth piece. They lost a large portion of the readership following Pobedonostsev's ban. In 1904, publication of Novyi put was interrupted, as they departed on a trip across Russia, extending beyond the Volga river and meeting representatives of various mystical sects, with many of whom Merezhkovsky kept in touch. |