Abstract
Nietzsche’s apotheosis of the aesthetic vision, glorification of creative activity, exaltation of individualism and hatred of the Philistines made his philosophy enormously appealing to Russian artists. The prophetic posture of Thus Spake Zarathustra, its aphorisms and epigrams, made the author appear a fellow poet and seeker. Nietzsche had foreseen the malaise which was gripping the European world; his entire philosophy was an attempt to overcome nihilism. Influential in France, in Russia his effect was even greater. The traditional Russian tendency to live by ideas made Nietzscheanism into a philosophic rationale for the symbolist attempt to find new truths through art.
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References
According to Hippius this is what brought them together. Merezhkovsky’s friend Minsky was also a Nietzschean of sorts; his most famous work In the Light of Conscience (1890) was a Nietzschean critique of morality.
Vechnye, XVII, 190-94 and passim.
Ibid., p. 14.
Merezhkovsky, “Panteon”, PSS XXIII, 159-60.
Merezhkovsky, Vechnye, XVII, 18.
Merezhkovsky, “Volny”, PSS XXIII, 157.
Merezhkovsky, “Rim”, Ibid., p. 159.
Merezhkovsky, “Budushchii Rim”, Ibid., p. 160.
Vechnye, XVIII, 71.
Merezhkovsky, Smerf bogov: Yulian Ostupnik, PSS I, 183-85. On p. 185, the hero admits, “I fear life”. Originally entitled “Outcaste”, (Otverzhennyi) it was serialized in Severnyi Vestnik 1895 I-VI (Jan.-June).
Merezhkovsky, “Deti nochi”, as quoted by Modest Gofman, Kniga russkikh poetakh posledniago desiatiletiia (Moscow, 1909), pp. 13-14. The lines “for the new beauty—we will break all lawsvtrespass all limits—” are omitted from the PSS version, see PSS XXII, 171. The PSS do not include all his poems, only those he considered significant. Thus he deleted or altered the poems written during his Nietzschean period because they clashed with his later religious views.
Vechnye, XVIII, 134.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., 131-38.
Smerf bogov, pp. 275-76.
Ibid.
“Otverzhennyi”, VI, 53. This is omitted from the PSS. By 1914 Merezhkovsky retracted his earlier views. In 1895, he thought that Christianity and Paganism were two halves of a greater whole. But by 1914 he considered his previous views “dangerous blasphemy”, for both are combined in the Person of Jesus Christ. PSS I, v. Thus he deleted the more shockingly blasphemous statements in Julian and downplayed the joyousness of paganism.
Ibid., p. 54. Also omitted from the PSS.
Smerf bogov, pp. 335-36. The last sentence is omitted from the PSS, however. Moreover, in the original version, the sun itself was almost a God. See p. 75 in “Otverzhennyi”, VI. For Nietzsche’s statement “learn to laugh”, see W. Kaufman, ed. Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 408.
“Dafnis”, p. 220.
Ibid., p. 219.
Breaking the old tablets of values is an allusion to Zarathustra, see pp. 135-36.
“Dafnis”, p. 206.
Merezhkovsky, “Mikel’Anzhelo”, PSS XXII, 141.
Merezhkovsky, “Pesnia Vakkhanok”, PSS XXII, 45-46.
“Smerf bogov”, pp. 240-41. The reader is reminded that Merezhkovsky’s mother had died only a few years earlier.
Merezhkovsky, “De Profundis”, PSS XXII, 176-77.
“Deti nochi”, Ibid., p. 171.
N. Minsky, Na obshchestvennyia temy (St. Petersburg, 1909), p. 206.
Vechnye, XVII, 190-94.
Ibid., pp. 190-91. See also p. 202.
Vechnye, XVII, 240-42.
Ibid., XVIII, 14.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., XVII, 168-69. See also p. 176, “each must love himself”. Note Merezh-kovsky’s apolitical orientation.
Merezhkovsky, “Pushkin”, Vechnye, XVIII, especially pp. 130-32, 136-37, 144, 154.
Ibid., pp. 111, 140. According to Merezhkovsky, Pushkin was more than a poet; he was a giant of world culture whose works could be placed alongside those of Goethe and Dante.
Ibid., pp. 122, 134. Note Merezhkovsky’s remarks on “democratic barbarism”, p. 93.
Ibid., pp. 97, 122-23.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., pp. 160-62, 167-68.
Ibid.
Merezhkovsky, Dve tainy russkoi poezii (Petrograd, 1915).
Merezhkovsky, V tikhom omute, PSS XVI, 54.
Dve tainy, p. 13. These were difficult years for Briusov also. See Rice, p. 62.
Ibid, pp. 81-94 passim.
Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., pp. 95-97.
Merezhkovsky, Ne mir no mech, PSS XIII, 82-84.
Ibid. As Merezhkovsky later used the terms, decadents are those who stress art and sensual experience for the pleasure involved whereas symbolists value art and sensuality as a means to spiritual truth. By this definition, both he and Hippius (often considered the quintessence of decadence) ceased to be decadents in 1899 when they turned to Christ.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 84. Ne mir no mech was first published in 1908. Upon reading this passage, Bely remarked, “that titmouse wants to set his own sea afire; he is a decadent himself!” Nachalo, p. 69. The Nietzsche statement is in W. Kaufman, ed., Zara-thustra, p. 284.
Merezhkovsky, Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevsky (PSS IX, X, XI, XII), XII, 272.
Nicholas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1963). For Kantian Marxism see George Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought, p. 91 and his “Theoretische Ethik im russischen Frühmarxismus”, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 9 (1963): 270-4. Ivanov’s “The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God” was serialized in Novyi Put’ in 1904. Father George Florovsky regards the ideological ferment of the fin de siecle as entirely religious. To him it can not at all be explained either psychologically or sociologically as the product of the disintegration of the bourgeois order. See his Puti russkago bogosloviia (Paris, 1937), pp. 455, 484.
Ne mir, p. 98. Reminiscent of Baudelaire’s views on the human seas of the city, both were reacting to the new urban society. But Baudelaire often posed as a dandy and thought of the crowd as his mirror; Merezhkovsky avoided the crowd altogether.
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© 1975 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Rosenthal, B.G. (1975). Nietzsche and Russian Symbolism. In: Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9036-7_4
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