D.S. Merezhkovsky and the "Conservative Revolution" in Germany

The article considers an important aspect of Russian-German cultural relations - the participation of the outstanding Russian writer-symbolist Dmitriy Merezhkovsky in the activities of the renowned Munich publishing house Piper in the first third of the 20th century: first, as one of the editors of the Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky in Germany (1906-1919); secondly, as the author of original works: novels, collections of articles and essays (1907-1938). Interest in the works of Merezhkovsky in Germany arose in the wake of Dostoevsky's enthusiasm, after the publication of the German translation of the critical-biographical study L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1903). The mastermind of the German Complete Works of Dostoevsky Arthur Moeller van den Bruck wrote his conceptual prefaces to the volumes of the publication under the direct influence of the ideas of the talented interpreter of the great Russian writer, though differed with him in a number of judgments. Only four introductory articles in four volumes belong to Merezhkovsky. In fact, he can claim co-authorship with Moeller in the development of the German myth of the "Russian soul" and the "Conservative Revolution", the outlines of which appeared in the prefaces of both critics to the Piper edition of Dostoevsky. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the intercultural translation of the concept "earth", key for the Russian mentality. Its ambiguous and multidimensional semantics in the works of Dostoevsky was interpreted in two ways by the Russian religious-philosophical thought: on the one hand, in the sophiological key (Vladimir Solovyov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sergey Bulgakov etc.), on the other hand, in the dichotomous one, tottering on the contrary vision of Dmitriy Merezhkovsky. Unlike adherents of sophiology who considered "fallen" empirical earth only as a temporarily distorted modus of its original sophistic perfection, Merezhkovsky had an ambiguous attitude to earth: negative - as a pagan element, hostile to true culture and therefore to be destroyed in the cleansing fire of the apocalyptic "religious revolution"; positive - as to the chiliastic "camp of God's people" (Rev. 20: 9), as to the modification of the "Holy flesh" in the expected synthesis of paganism and Christianity of the coming Third Testament - the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit. The presence of Merezhkovsky in the German cultural environment of the first two decades of the 20th century was noticeable; and such figures of the "Conservative Revolution" of the late 1910s-1920s as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler and Thomas Mann embraced Dostoevsky and his myth of the "earth", which is particularly strongly associated with the Lame (Demons) and Alyosha Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov), through the prism of Merezhkovsky's opinions rather than through the integral sophiological interpretation of the followers of Vladimir Solovyov. The concept of the Russian thinker about the earth not only entered their mythology of the Third Reich, but also became the tool of struggle against mass society - the "upcoming" and then the "triumphant" "rudeness", in Merezhkovsky's words.

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