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Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. V. Brusoff, a poet, is the editor. Balmont and Sologub write for its pages, as do Rosanow and Merejkowski. In 1898 there was a review started called Mir Iskousstva. Its director was Serge Diaghilev, and it endured until 1904. Sologub is one of the most promising poets. Block, Remisov, Ivanov are also poets of much ability.
Tolstoy reaches, after many hundred pages of his essay, the astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy as man and artist.
This other author, in whom I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who is, if I mistake not, young and with his career still before him.
And he had the courage of his chimera. Tolstoy feared art as being too artificial, and, as Merejkowski shows: "From the dread mask of Caliban peeps out the familiar and by no means awe-inspiring physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat squire, the gentleman Positivist of the sixties."
The son of a court official, Merejkowski was born in 1866, and began to write verses at the age of fifteen, his first volume of poems appearing in 1888.
Turgenieff understood Tolstoy; so did Dostoïevsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri Merejkowski. Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more pathetic because written on the eve of his death. Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well; that is not to be thought of.
Merejkowski, in his historical novel, Peter and Alexis, gives a more detailed account of the sexual ceremonies of this sect. See also Heard's description, Russian Church, p. 258. Russian Church and Russian Dissent, p. 262.
This happy state I conceived would continue; but fortune soon began to show another aspect, and a fresh series of miseries and difficulties followed her altered looks troubles which it would be too cruel a task for me to have to recount. The Death of the Gods Among Russian writers whose works have achieved European reputation, prominence must be given to Dmitri Merejkowski.
Merejkowski has said without fear of contradiction that Dostoïevsky is like the great dramatists of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, accumulation, increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action." His books are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes.
Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three there is a touch of the sublime naïveté of childhood's outpourings. I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century.
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