n Europe.

VII

DMITRY MEREZHKOVSKY

Unlike Gorky, Andreyev, and Tchekoff, Merezhkovsky was brought up in
the midst of comfort and elegance; he received a correct and careful
education; fate was solicitous for him, in that it allowed him to
develop that spirit of objective observation and calm meditation
which permits a man to look down on the spectacle of life, and
indulge in philosophical speculations very often divorced from
reality.

The son of an official of the imperial court, Merezhkovsky was born
in St. Petersburg in 1865. In this city he received his entire
education, and here he gained the degree of bachelor of letters in
1886.

He began his literary career with some poems which won for him a
certain renown. In 1888, he published his first collection, and then
a second in 1892, "The Symbols." At the same time, he published
several translations from Greek and Latin authors.

As he was a friend of the unfortunate Nadson, and a pupil of the
humanitarian Pleshcheyev, Merezhkovsky wrote at first under the
influence of the liberal ideas of his early masters. His verses,
always harmonious, and a little affected, soon belied this tendency
and very frankly revealed his preferences. In the first collection
of his poems, vibrant with generous ideas, he proclaimed that he
wanted, above all, "the joy of life," and that a poet should not
have any other cult than that of beauty.

The poem called "Vera" was his first real success. The extreme
simplicity of the plot--the unfortunate love of a young professor
and of a young weakly girl who dies of consumption in the very
flower of youth--and the very faithful reproduction of the
intellectual life of Russia in 1880, give to this work the
importance of a document in some ways almost historic.

This poem is like a last tribute paid by the author to the
humanitarian and realistic tendencies of Russian literature.
Afterward, yielding to the inclinations of his nature and his taste
for classical antiquity, Merezhkovsky insensibly changed. While
acquiring, both in prose and in verse, an incontestable mastery, he
could now look only for a cold and haughty beauty which was
sufficient unto itself. The beginning was hard, but then all came
easier. After critical articles on the trend of modern literature,
he published "The Reprobate," a bold dithyrambic on ancient Greek
philosophy. The poetry that followed was clearly Epicurean and in
complete contradiction to the alt