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There is a great deal of fine drawn reasoning in all of this, some very original ideas, but a great many paradoxes. Even the very personality of Tolstoy, the analysis of which occupies a large part of the book, is belittled in the hands of Merezhkovsky. Instead of a noble character, one sees a very vain person, preoccupied only with himself.
In his novel, "The Death of the Gods," Merezhkovsky has painted the first of these epochs, the different phases of which revolve about the principal hero, the emperor Julian the Apostate. In "The Resurrection of the Gods" he develops, in sumptuous frescoes, the age of the Renaissance, personified by Leonardo da Vinci, who best typifies the character and tendencies of that time.
Without being a great scholar, it is easy to perceive that our contemporary Russian authors are legitimate sons of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and grandsons of Gogol, who himself is closely related to Pushkin. A democratic and humanitarian realism widely separated from the Nietzscheism of Merezhkovsky strongly characterizes the Russian lineage.
In the refusal of Tolstoy to "bow to the great authorities of the literary world, such as Æschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare," a refusal which is only the logical consequence of his ideas on the principle and purpose of art, Merezhkovsky can only see a lack of general culture.
Such a renewal of Christianity demands an energetic struggle, self-forgetfulness, and martyrs. But where is one to find the necessary forces? Merezhkovsky does not see them in the States of western Europe, because the "intellectuals" there are antichristians and are congealed in their bourgeois positivism.
Besides his novels Merezhkovsky has published several essays, on Pushkin, Maykov, Korolenko, Calderon, the French neo-romanticists, Ibsen and others.... The most important of all are: "The Causes of the Decadence of Modern Russian Literature" and "Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky."
Besides, when I have money it may be from lack of habit, I don't know I become extremely careless and idle; the sea seems only knee-deep to me then.... I need time and solitude. November, 1888. In the November number of the Syeverny Vyestnik there is an article by the poet Merezhkovsky about your humble servant. It is a long article. I commend to your attention the end of it; it is characteristic.
The poetry that followed was clearly Epicurean and in complete contradiction to the altruistic tendencies of the neo-Christian period, which found an arch enemy in Nietzsche, whose philosophy evidently influenced Merezhkovsky.
As is evident, these three works of Merezhkovsky belong to the "genre" of the historical and philosophical novel which demands, besides the power to call up past ages, a careful education and the gift of clear-sightedness. And the novelist completely fulfills these requirements.
Merezhkovsky affirms that the Chinese and the Japanese, being the most complete and the most persevering representatives of this "terrestrial" religion, will without fail conquer Europe, where positivism still bears some traces of Christian romanticism.
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