Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii (1865-1941) was a seminal thinker. In the 1890s, he popularized Nietzsche's thought and reawakened Russians' interest in antiquity and in the classics of world literature, and his lecture "O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh v sovremennoi russkoi literature" ("On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Russian Literature, " 1892, published 1893) became the manifesto of Russian symbolism. 1 In the early twentieth century, he pioneered the study

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... f Fedor Dostoevskii, Nikolai Gogol' , and Lev Tolstoi as religious writers and cofounded the Religious-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg (1901-03, 1906-17), which helped inspire a religious revival. The members were called "God-seekers" even though most of them were already believers, because they were seeking a new interpretation of Christianity. During and after the revolution of 1905, he advocated a religious revolution. Throughout, he opposed materialism, rationalism, utilitarianism, and positivism. He promoted his ideas in articles, book-length essays, and historical novels, and at meetings of the Religious-Philosophical Society. Newspapers reported on Merezhkovskii's attack on Vekhi and on his polemics with Petr Struve, a prominent Constitutional Democrat and a contributor to Vekhi. 2 Merezhkovskii's attack on Vekhi was part of a larger polemic with Struve and certain other Vekhi authors on such issues as the state, economic development, and rule by law. A radical by temperament and by conviction, Merezhkovskii perpetuated the anarchistic, utopian strain of Russian cultural history, without the atheism. His apocalypticism mingled with other apocalyptic scenarios circulating in Russia since 1900.