Comprehension of Christianity in D.S. Merezhkovsky’s Emigrant Work (On the Example of the Novel Luther ): Tradition and Its Overcoming

Merezhkovsky’s Christ-centered philosophy lies at the heart of his emigrant work. Christ in his understanding is the greatest Person in history who united the divine and human natures, the pinnacle of the writer’s philosophical conception, the beginning of all his cultural and philosophical constructions. The comparative analysis of fragments of the novel The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky and the novel-biography Luther by D.S. Merezhkovsky allows us to draw conclusions about Merezhkovsky’s inheritance of Dostoevsky’s ideas in comprehending historical Christianity, attitude to the Catholic Church, understanding of the philosophical category of freedom, issues of social structure of society, the danger of creating a totalitarian atheistic state. Answering the questions: What is the Church? What is Christ? What is Personality? Merezhkovsky follows the path of overcoming the traditional novel form, anticipating the “death” of the novel of the twentieth century. Merezhkovsky needs the image of Luther to realize his own ideas about the approach of the kingdom of God in the Third Covenant of the Spirit-Mother and the creation of an ecumenical Church, the understanding of the Person of Christ. But approaching the genre of philosophical essay in describing the spiritual portrait of Luther, the writer remains within the framework of artistic comprehension of reality, creates an artistic image using poetic figures of language, resorting to extended comparisons and metaphors, appealing to associative thinking. Creating an artistic image of Luther the Reformer, Merezhkovsky uses real biographical facts of his life, pursuing the goal not just to recreate the spiritual image of a significant historical figure, but seeks to substantiate his supra-worldly and extra-historical significance, relying on the artistic fabric of the narrative. Merezhkovsky’s novel is far from the traditional form of biographical and historical novels. It is a genre of novelized biography, “the only Merezhkovsky of his kind”, as his contemporaries said of him.