Wave and Stone. About the Relationship between Akim Volynsky and Dmitry Merezhkovsky.

Abstract

The article treats the history of mutual influence and complex personal relationships between the literary critic A. L. Volynsky and the writer D. S. Merezhkovsky. Having known each other while studying at St. Petersburg University, they collaborated for ten years in the journal “Severny Vestnik,” which became an outpost of the struggle against ‘sociologism’ and positivism in the system of artistic thought. Both of them became forerunners of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost simultaneously they rediscovered Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky for the reading audience and, each in his own way, searched for ways to a new religiosity. The unstable alliance between the two writers collapses due to their disagreement over Nietzsche’s philosophy. Volynsky does not accept Nietzschean immoralism, extreme individualism and godlessness. Their interpretations of the Renaissance are also fundamentally different: while Merezhkovsky viewed it in the Nietzschean vein as a period of revival of the vivid light pagan force, struggling with the dusky Christianity, and longed for the coming of the Third Renaissance, Volynsky interprets the Renaissance as an anti-Christian, demonic movement, the restoration of dark pagan forces.