Novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky was a complex and seminal figure of the Silver Age in Russian literature. As one of the founders of the Russian Symbolist movement in the 1890s and of the Religious-Philosophical Society in the early years of the twentieth century, Merezhkovsky combined the Western-leaning literary innovations and the Slavically focused, religious seeking characteristic of fin de siècle Russian modernism. As a self-styled religious prophet and author of religious texts that proclaimed his version of apocalyptic Christianity, he assigned himself the mantle of leading nineteenth-century literary and spiritual figures such as the novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. As a literary critic, particularly of the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he influenced a generation of writers, including Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok and Andrei Bely, who were generally acknowledged to have been more talented writers than he. As an historical novelist...