The Death of the Gods / (Christ and Antichrist, 1 of 3)

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

MÉREJKOWSKI

Dmitri Mérejkowski is perhaps the most interesting and powerful of the younger Russian novelists, the only writer that promises to carry on the work of Tolstoi, Turgeniev, and Dostoievski. His books, which are already numerous, are animated by a single master-idea, the Pagano-Christian dualism of our human nature. What specially interests him in the vast spectacle of human affairs is the everlasting contest between the idea of a God-Man and the idea of a Man-God; that is to say, between the conception of a God incarnate for awhile (as in Christ) and the conception of Man as himself God—gradually evolving higher types of splendid and ruling character which draw after them the generations.

The novelist's own doctrine seems to be that both the Pagan and the Christian elements in our nature, although distinct elements, are equally legitimate and sacred. His teaching is that the soul and the senses have an equal right to be respected; that hedonism and altruism are equals, and that the really full man, the perfect man, is he who can ally in harmonious equilibrium the cult of Dionysus and the cult of Christ.

Mérejkowski conceives that European civilisation has been born of the tremendous conflict between these two main ideas. And he has embodied this conflict in a trilogy of novels,—three great historical romances. The first is entitled The Death of the Gods, and deals with the extraordinary career of the Roman Emperor. Julian the Apostate, who in the fourth century A.D. sought to revive the worship of the Olympians after Christianity had been adopted by Constantine the Great as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The historical novel, pure and simple, exists no longer. Writers of genius who seem to write historical novels in reality are only transferring to the stage of the world a drama which is being played in their own souls. They transfer thither that drama in order to show that the struggle which is now going on in us is eternal. Mérejkowski sees the question, which is of supreme interest to us, being asked by the great spirits of a wealthy and imperial civilisation closely resembling our own, in the fourth century. And, what is of more interest still, he not only sees the momentous problem and places it before us with remarkable lucidity, but he also seems, in his own fashion, to arrive at a solution. Moreover, this novelist, this psychologist, is also an artist and a poet, possessed by what he somewhere calls the "Nostalgia of the Distant." With an ardour as of Flaubert in Salammbo, and with perhaps more skill than Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis, the author of The Death of the Gods has succeeded in re-creating the wonderful rich scenes and characters of that remote epoch. We see the racing stables of the Hippodrome of Constantinople, battles with wild German warriors round Strasburg, the interior of the baths at Antioch, dinners of epicures and men of letters at Athens, pictures of a Roman Emperor at his toilet-table, or of a lovelorn child in the Temple of Aphrodite. Before writing this first of his great romances Mérejkowski himself travelled through Asia Minor and Greece, visited Constantinople and Syria, and gathered everywhere living impressions to serve his art and his thought. He was besides admirably prepared to handle a subject which had attracted him from youth. A delicate Hellenist, his first appearance in literary life was as a harmonious translator of Æschylus and Sophocles. Later, the Gnostics, the Fathers of the Eastern Church, the Greek Sophists (who represented the last throes of expiring Paganism and already dreamed of reviving it), were the young poet's objects of study. Thus was born the romance of The Death of the Gods, which he has continued later in The Resurrection of the Gods (of which Leonardo da Vinci is the hero), and completed by The Anti-Christ, portraying the savage figure of Peter the Great, the creator (despite all natural obstacles) of St. Petersburg and of modern Russia.

In the first romance of the three the new Christian spirit is seen invading the soul of Julian himself, the last champion of expiring Paganism. It can even be seen in the little treatises, The Sun King and the Mother of the Gods, which Julian wrote in his feverish nights to defend his lost cause. Soon there remained to this singular man of all that first ardour but a feeling of impotent rage and unbridled pride—the Napoleonic lust of conquering the world. And so we see him in this book, in the midst of the mad expedition against Persia, where he was to meet his death, oversetting the altar of the gods who had betrayed him, and exclaiming: "The gods are no more; or rather, the gods do not yet exist. They are not. But they will be. We shall all be gods. We have but to dare!" A few days later he falls, vanquished by the Galilean, whose image haunts his deathbed. But at that last hour it is not the fierce God of the Arians (who educated Julian the Emperor) that he sees. He whom delirium calls up is Christus Pastophorus,—the Good Shepherd,—the Spirit of gentleness and love. It is that Spirit who has dethroned the Olympians.

But the gods do not perish utterly. Centuries pass, and from the bosom of the waters, like Aphrodite, from the bosom of the earth, like Cybele, they come forth again, serene and impassive. Popes, kings, great nobles, simple Florentine merchants welcome them, brought by galleys from the coasts of Hellas, or discovered by patient excavators of the antique soil. Their marble glory shines anew. The rays of Helios penetrate the soul of artists. The fires of Dionysus kindle the blood of the young men and the young women. It is the dawn of the Renaissance. Has then the God-Man conquered the Man-God? No; because, see, Savonarola is defying the gods of Olympus and the gods of the earth. The latter destroy him, but the Christ has reappeared, and the problem of the two forms of wisdom continues to be set in a form more august and more painful than ever before.

This is the subject of the Renaissance of the Gods, a romance of which the distinguished critic in the Revue des Deux Mondes, M. Theodore de Wyzewa, says that it "far surpasses the mass of the romances published in Russia during the last twenty-five years."

And since then, as before then, as at all times, at every fresh crisis, at every renewal of the creative process taking place within human consciousness, the two principles reappear. They struggle too in the soul of the strongest. Look at Peter the Great, whom old believers used to call "The Anti-Christ." He will be the hero of the third romance of the trilogy. We shall see therein the tragedy of the gentle Tsarevitch Alexis, servant of the Galilean and immolated victim of the new god; victim, that is, of human will incarnate in the genius of Peter, lifting itself above good and evil.

The above notes are largely taken, and partly translated, from an interesting paper on Mérejkowski by M. Prozor in the Mercure de France.