In his article “Izobretenie kontseptsii ‘Moskva – Tretii Rim’” (Ab Imperio 2/2000 [9/2000]), Marshall Poe argues that the Third Rome has affected Russian history only “as an anachronistic artifact that reinforced a pre-existing modern belief that Russians are imbued with some kind of messianic impulse.” Poe writes further that the Third Rome concept took on such relevance for members of the Russian intelligentsia in the period following the 1905 revolution; an example cited is Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii (1865-1941), who discussed the concept of a Russian Third Rome in a 1907 article. While Merezhkovskii used the term in his article, by 1907 Merezhkovskii had ostensibly rejected the feasibility of a Russian Third Rome. However, this rejection came as a new and final step in a series of evolving opinions, at times positive, about the Third Rome doctrine and its potential relevance to contemporary Russia. In addition, even as Merezhkovskii disclaimed his earlier allegiance to the Third Rome idea, he maintained his faith in Russia as a nation privy to visions of a coming universal, religious kingdom of the spirit – one he characterized, in terms evocative of the Third Rome, as a “Third Testament.”
This article aims to follow Merezhkovskii’s evolving vision of Russia as a potential Third Rome, or universal theocratic empire, focusing on his primary platform for pursuing this idea: the trilogy Khristos i Antikhrist (Christ and Antichrist: Smert’ bogov: Iulian otstupnik [The Death of the Gods: Julian the Apostate, 1895]; Voskresshie bogi: Leonardo da Vinchi [The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci, 1900]; Antikhrist: Petr i Aleksei [The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis, 1904]). Setting his first novel in the Eastern Roman Empire and his third in Petrine Russia, Merezhkovskii took the basic dichotomy that Rome represented for him – the East-West split – and strove through his writing to inspire Russia to fulfill its potential to become what he saw as a truly unifying “Third Rome,” combining Western secular imperialism and Eastern religiosity in a transcendent mix. In Merezhkovskii’s texts, the Third Rome became a powerful mythmaking tool for an influential Symbolist writer attempting to shape a new agenda for Russia. The novels were extremely popular – the literary critic D.S. Mirsky would later assert that Merezhkovskii’s Julian the Apostate “had probably interested more Russian readers in antiquity than any other single book ever did”^[1] – and Merezhkovskii’s impassioned musings on a theocratic-imperial mission for Russia inspired a series of similarly-inclined texts from his contemporaries. An examination of Merezhkovskii’s ideas of the Third Rome as expressed in his trilogy, then, provides a window into a dominant topos of Russian national identity among Russia’s writers of the Silver Age.
Merezhkovskii entered Russia’s literary arena decisively with his 1893 collection of articles “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury” (On the Reasons for the Decline and on New Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Poetry), often seen as the first Russian Symbolist literary manifesto. Based on a series of lectures Merezhkovskii had delivered a year earlier, the essays called for a new content for Russian literature, too long concerned, in Merezhkovskii’s opinion, with civic issues at the expense of the spiritual. Merezhkovskii was disheartened by the gap that remained between the narod and the Westernized intelligentsia after two decades of ineffectual Russian Populism and, further, by the repression following the assassination of Alexander II. He was also fearful of a new world of industrialization, urbanism, and Marxist materialism, which, he felt, dehumanized the individual and negated the religious values that Russians nonetheless craved. Voicing this concern in the essays, he wrote, “Never before have people so felt in their hearts the necessity of believing and understood with their minds the impossibility of believing.”^[2]
Merezhkovskii’s prescription for Russia’s ills consisted of a Russian Christianity mediated by the “pagan” joy, beauty, and power that Merezhkovskii, following Friedrich Nietzsche, associated with both Hellenic Greece and pre-Christian Rome.^[3] Merezhkovskii conceptualized these two elements – the Christian and the pagan – geographically. Russia, the East, was the home of Christian piety. The West, on the other hand, was the seat of the will to power, an empire of this world that valued the free, “pagan” pursuit of physical beauty and self-fulfillment. In the ancient world the boundaries had been less clear: Christianity had emerged in the East but had encompassed within itself the beauty and freedom Merezhkovskii now associated with the West. All too soon, however, Christians had rejected these life-affirming, pagan values, and the result had been what Merezhkovskii termed “Historic Christianity,” unremittingly pious and self-effacing and devoid of life and beauty; Merezhkovskii associated Historic Christianity with the doctrines of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church.^[4] According to Merezhkovskii, the pagan West and the pious East needed each other. Because Russia had received Christianity from the Greek Orthodox Church, Merezhkovskii concluded that Russian Christianity had an unfulfilled connection through its Greek roots to a Dionysian appreciation of joy and beauty. If Russian Orthodox Christians could rediscover this connection, Russia would be intrinsically well equipped to bridge the gap currently existing between Eastern spirituality and Western pagan imperialism in a union that would lead and inspire the rest of the world.
The Third Rome provided an ideal metaphorical vehicle for Merezhkovskii to promote this idea. As Poe discusses, the Third Rome doctrine comprised both secular and religious elements, which were given varying weight by successive generations of interpreters. It also possessed geographical connotations: Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii have argued that as early as Russia’s medieval period, Rome and Constantinople took on specific and opposing attributes in the symbolic systems created by Russian leaders and their subjects. The “first Rome” came to represent secular, imperial power, while the “second Rome” functioned as a symbol of religious piety.^[5] This distinction begged the question of unifying the two capitals’ missions in order to create a new Rome, one that combined both the secular and the religious, a theocratic kingdom of this world. Russian modernist writers read Filofei’s famous doctrine as an expression of this goal.
Merezhkovskii’s first novel, Julian the Apostate, set out the geographic terms he would use throughout his “Roman” trilogy and paved the way for the recognition in his second novel, Leonardo da Vinci, of Russia as a Third Rome, or religious empire. Julian the Apostate is a retelling of the life of the Roman Emperor Julian, who ruled from 361-363 CE. The brevity of Julian’s reign belies his significance as an object of fascination in subsequent centuries, particularly the nineteenth (Henrik Ibsen’s treatment of Julian is one of the better known precursors to Merezhkovskii’s own).^[6] Julian ruled the Roman Empire shortly after Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor, had established Constantinople as the new capital of the Roman Empire, replacing Rome itself, and had granted religious tolerance to Christians. During his short tenure on the throne, the pagan Julian attempted and failed to return to a vanished past by rejecting Christianity in favor of the Olympian gods. A noted soldier, Julian eventually died on a Persian battlefield in a vain effort to replicate the military conquests of Alexander the Great and enlarge his empire.^[7] In Merezhkovskii’s telling, Julian is a tortured combination of Western pagan and Eastern mystic, a Roman emperor born in Constantinople and unable despite his love of power to reject the self-sacrificing Christ he professes to abhor. With the advent of Christianity, Merezhkovskii suggested, a return to paganism was impossible: Julian condemns the Christians but outlaws gladiators and urges pagan temples to provide “Christian” charity. Julian dies with his internal contradictions unresolved, thereby leaving future generations and nations the task of moving beyond Rome or Constantinople to achieve a synthesis of both.
While in this novel pagan and Christian traits can be found in either half of the empire – Merezhkovskii is careful to show that the pagan gods, while on their way out, are not yet thoroughly vanquished, living on in popular memory – East and West are nonetheless distinct in their associations and relative positions of strength in the novel. Julian’s cousin Emperor Constantius, who has come to the throne by assassinating the rest of Julian’s family, summons Julian to the West to defend the frontier of the Empire from the Germanic tribes threatening it. Julian, heretofore a spindly, philosophizing student, now turns into implacable warrior, capable of subduing rebelling tribes against the odds and earning his troops’ adulation and expanding the empire in the process. Thus in the West Julian claims his power, craftily “permitting” his soldiers to proclaim him Emperor and in so doing hastening his cousin’s death (brought on by the shock of loss of power).^[8] And while his final, Persian campaign is initially successful, it is in the East that Julian the warrior will fail, occasioning a shameful peace for Rome following a philosophical leave-taking by an Emperor now subdued.
Indeed, during Julian’s deathbed scene, one modeled on the description of this event by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Merezhkovskii’s Julian admits that despite his best efforts, he has loved Christ all along. Ascribing to Julian the well-known phrase “Thou hast conquered, Galilean,” Merezhkovskii underlines the idea that by the time of Julian’s reign, Rome had been vanquished, despite its remaining traces, by Constantinople.^[9] While other characters in the novel visit Rome, Julian the Emperor does not, and Constantius’ Western imperial headquarters are in Milan, closer to the besieging hordes threatening the empire. Pagan, imperial Rome figures in the novel as a symbol of past glory, lauded by a group of Julian’s best – and oldest – soldiers as they enter a difficult battle and then proceed to win it “for Rome.”^[10] One character mourns the “rotting corpse of Greece and Rome” that the Christians have condemned (109). The figure of Juventinus, the last son of an ancient Roman family who denies his heritage and his mother’s wishes to become a Christian, is representative of the death of the old, proud Roman Empire, and of the power of the new faith of Christianity.^[11] The City of God has displaced the Roman imperial City of Man, and no union of the two appears likely.
And yet in this first novel there is hope, albeit unrealized, for a future synthetic kingdom. The novel’s final scene features Julian’s friend the sculptor Arsinoe, who has come to understand the links between paganism and early Christianity; her pagan acquaintance Anatolius; and Ammianus. Following Julian’s death, the three have gone to Italy, where in mutual acceptance they hear the mingled notes of a boy’s reed pipe song to the god Pan and the hymns of Christian monks. Ammianus points to the writings of Clement of Alexandria, who had believed that Plato, emblematic of Hellenism, or paganism, was a forerunner of Christ.
The idea of a forerunner is brought out more explicitly in the second novel of the trilogy, The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci. When he set out to write this fictionalized biography of the Renaissance artist who lived from 1452 to 1519, Merezhkovskii was disappointed to find that Leonardo had been the lone figure of his era capable of exemplifying Merezhkovskii’s synthetic vision. Leonardo’s acceptance of both faith and the will to power is emblematized simultaneously by his painting of the Last Supper, with its sensitive rendering of Christ, and his Colossus, a sculpture dedicated to Francesco Sforza, throne-seizing Duke of Milan; Leonardo insists that the one helps him better understand the other.^[12] While Leonardo is unable to communicate this synthetic vision to his contemporaries, his art speaks for him to a visiting Russian icon-painter named Evtikhii Paiseevich Gagara. Evtikhii absorbs Leonardo’s pagan-Christian synthesis and, linking the prescient Leonardo to John the Baptist, foretells a time when Russia the Third Rome, celebrating the unifying message embodied in Leonardo, will spread that message through a newly unified world.
Julian, with his charitable impulses and conflicted religiosity, was never able to achieve the superman status he sought; his empire building was thwarted by his irrepressible Christian impulses and mysticism. In this second, Western-based novel, however, Renaissance Italy is dominated by pure paganism, a love of power centered exclusively on this world. The Nietzschean supermen of this novel range from the aptly named Cesare Borgia, lauded in Machiavelli’s Prince as a potential unifier of Italy, to Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI, a lascivious hypocrite and murderer who as head of the Church focuses his energy on political machinations and dreams of incest with his daughter Lucrezia. The pagan Roman empire is back in full force, brought out most strongly in a scene in which the Pope honors his son as one who could head a united Italy. The theme of the festivities is “The Triumph of Julius Caesar,” and the ensuing procession has been arranged according to ancient Roman books and monuments: the laurel-strewn, power-hungry Cesare is surrounded in a chariot by soldiers whose outfits recall the uniforms of ancient Roman legionnaires. To Leonardo’s conflicted apprentice Giovanni Beltraffio, visiting Rome with Leonardo, the scene he is witnessing can mean only one thing: the Beast of the Apocalypse, or the Mangod, has arrived in Rome.
Having installed themselves in the Papacy, the pagan Borgias are able in their strength to dominate even the admonitory cries of the “Historic” Christian Savonarola, one-time mentor to the confused Giovanni and inspiration for the bonfire of the vanities that claims the work of Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo himself. Of course neither the Borgias’ power-mongering nor Savonarola’s “historic” preaching can suffice on its own in Merezhkovskii’s schema, and Merezhkovskii soon presents a potential moderating synthesizer of the two excesses in the person of Evtikhii, the Russian icon painter. Evtikhii travels to Europe as part of a group that includes the historical figure Dmitrii Gerasimov, who is said to have composed the “Tale of the White Cowl.”^[13] The tale describes the progression of power and sanctity, embodied in a white cowl, from Constantine the Great and Byzantium to Russia. In the tale, Constantine is said to approve Russia's future identity as the Third Rome. By bringing Gerasimov into his text, Merezhkovskii thus established a connection between his first and second novels: Constantine, who inaugurated the events of the first novel, now sanctions what Evtikhii will realize by the end of the second novel: the intended unity of Christ, the Godman, and Antichrist, the Mangod, representative respectively of East and West, in a Russian theocracy.
Through the first scene of the book devoted to Russia, however, Merezhkovskii made it clear that this process would not occur easily. For Russia, grown increasingly “Historic” in its Christianity, had strayed from its Hellenic spiritual roots. The scene describes a banquet given by Leonardo’s patron Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and attended among others by Danilo Mamyrov, the envoy of Moscow’s Grand Prince. Surrounded by representations of the Greek gods, Mamyrov dismisses them as “abominations of the Antichrist”^[14] and muses on his own nation’s unique destiny:

The Grand Muscovite Prince had already been declared sole heir of the two-headed eagle of Byzantium, having united under the protection of its wings East and West, as the Lord All-powerful, as it was told in the tale, having cast down for heresies both Romes, the old and the new, had raised up a third secret city, in order to pour out onto it all His glory, strength and favor – a third, northern Rome – Orthodox Moscow – and there would never be a fourth Rome. (I, 508)

Mamyrov’s “Historically” Christian, closed-minded premise undermines his assertion of the doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome, as does the mistaken idea that East and West are already united in Russia. At the same time, the assembled European guests refer mockingly to the Russians:

Unpleasantness with the Muscovites again? A wild people!...It is impossible to invite them anywhere. Barbarians! And that language – do you hear it? – it’s completely Turkish. A brutal tribe! (I, 507)

Settling down to a dinner of “a naked Andromeda, made out of tender breasts of capon, chained to a rock made out of cottage cheese, and her liberator, the winged Perseus, made out of veal” (I, 509), the Europeans refer to Russia as an “unfortunate land, cursed by God” (I, 509).
It is left to Evtikhii, who arrives in Europe two decades later, to join with Leonardo to put forth a more attractive vision of Russia’s potential than the closed-minded Mamyrov or his scornfully worldly dinner companions can imagine. Evtikhii’s transformation from meek monk to all-accepting unifier begins when he pages through his Psalter, written in Uglich in 1485, and is shocked to recognize among the familiar illustrations of his book the figures of Western pagan antiquity he has seen in Italian museums and palaces. Evtikhii proceeds to incorporate pagan figures into one of his own icons, thereby suggesting a Russian Orthodoxy that recognizes its Greek roots. Leonardo, meanwhile, comes into contact with Evtikhii’s “Ikonopisnyi podlinnik,” a book which contains prototypes of Eastern Orthodox icons. Leonardo is especially struck by a rendering of John the Baptist as a man with wings, a representation of the Baptist, which originated in Byzantium. For Leonardo has spent much of his life working on a flying machine: it is this machine that has crippled one of Leonardo’s disciples and has convinced his often hypocritical contemporaries that he is the Antichrist, a Mangod going against God's laws. When Leonardo sees the winged John the Baptist, therefore, he is struck by the similarities between this “barbaric” art (II, 291) and his own endeavors: like Leonardo himself, the Greek artist apparently believed that one could strive to fly and still be holy. Sensing the power of the Eastern icons even as he finds them alien, Leonardo attributes to them the quality of “a secret twilight, in which the last ray of Hellenic charm has merged with the first ray of a still unknown dawn” (II, 291).
Leonardo’s faith in the East appears to be justified at the end of the novel, when Evtikhii comes into contact with Leonardo’s Dionysian John the Baptist, a painting that has bewildered all the Westerners in the novel who have seen it. The painting portrays the Baptist as a beautiful and rather androgynous youth, whose cross looks very much like a Dionysian thyrsus. After seeing the painting, Evtikhii turns to two of his favorite tales, the “Tale of the White Cowl” and “About the Babylonian Kingdom”; the latter story features three men who bring the crown of Nebuchadnezzar back to the patriarch of Constantinople, who passes it on to the Russian prince. Both tales, of course, are related to the idea of Moscow the Third Rome. The religious artifact literally moves from the Second Rome to the land of the Third; the imperial Babylonian regalia passes from Nebuchadnezzar to Constantinople and then Russia. Evtikhii initially wonders why the crown of the pagan despot Nebuchadnezzar is assigned such a high status in the second tale, but then realizes that in Russia, the Third Rome, the crown of the Antichrist, the prince of this world, is united with that of Christ: Russia’s mission lies in the unification of Christianity with the worldly empire. Leonardo and Evtikhii have understood each other's creations: East, with its Russian spirituality and faith in the Godman, and West, home of the European love of beauty, antiquity, and human potential, have united, if only in these two men, and a shining future is prophesied for Russia.
In the third novel of the trilogy, The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis, Merezhkovskii turned at last to his own country, to the crucially important reign of the Westernizing emperor Peter the Great, who ruled from 1694 to 1725, and his relationship with his son Alexis, a pious Russian Orthodox Christian. A reader of his preceding novel might have expected that this work would portray the Third Rome that had been prophesied: Peter had opened Russia to Western influences and through victorious battles had made holy Russia an empire. With the clash between his two main characters, however, a clash that ended in Peter’s murder of Alexis, Merezhkovskii demonstrated instead Russia’s unsuitability within a historical framework for becoming a Third Rome. Merezhkovskii condemned the Mangod Peter, whose imperialism had entered Russia not to supplement Christianity but to supplant it. He also found wanting nearly all the Christians in the novel, portraying them either as Peter’s stool pigeons or as unremittingly “Historic” and opposed therefore to any sort of rapprochement with the West. Through his unflattering portrayals of Peter and the Christians, Merezhkovskii renounced both the will to power that had previously played a role in his historiosophical schema and his hope in a newly paganized Russian Orthodoxy. At the end of the novel, the dying Tsarevich Alexis and a Russian wanderer named Tikhon Zapolskii are vouchsafed otherworldly visions of an impending, post-apocalyptic Kingdom of the Spirit. Merezhkovskii had abandoned his earlier dream of a Third Rome consisting of Christ and Antichrist, substituting for it an ahistorical realm based on faith alone.^[15]
The rupture in Merezhkovskii’s Third Rome narrative came in part as the result of a series of disappointments related to the Religious-Philosophical Society he had started in 1901 with his wife and colleague Zinaida Hippius and their companion Dmitrii Filosofov.^[16] The goal of the society was to bring together members of the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian Orthodox clergy for open discussion of such issues as Merezhkovskii’s view of “true” Christianity’s appreciation of the beauty and potential of human beings and of human sexuality. Merezhkovskii had hoped that the Westernized intelligentsia would recognize the importance of Russian Orthodoxy as a result of the meetings, and that the “Historic” Russian Orthodox clergy would admit the validity of Merezhkovskii’s broader vision of their faith. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the meetings did not achieve the effect Merezhkovskii had envisaged.^[17] The clergy looked with suspicion upon the fin-de-siècle aesthetes, while the latter appeared unmoved by the clergy’s views. Merezhkovskii was deeply disillusioned by the failure of the meetings to bring about an acceptance in the Church hierarchy of what he saw as the Church’s pagan roots. Meanwhile, his faith in autocracy was shaken when in 1903 the Synod, which was sanctioned by the tsarist government, shut down the Society. In 1904 Merezhkovskii renounced his former allegiance to the autocracy; the same year, Peter and Alexis appeared.
In an essay on Pushkin written in 1896, Merezhkovskii had praised Peter, along with Pushkin, as one of the great synthesizers of Russian culture. Peter had opened Russia to the West: his actions should be applauded, for they acquainted Russians with the necessary Western paganism and in so doing made possible a future Russian-European union. Eight years later, however, in Peter and Alexis, Merezhkovskii presented Peter differently. Recognizing the validity of Peter’s Westernizing goals, Merezhkovskii nonetheless took Peter to task for his methods and emphases, linking Peter to the pagan Caesars and Borgias who did not recognize Christ. Like Augustus Caesar, Merezhkovskii’s Peter revels in the titles “Father of the Fatherland” and “Imperator” bestowed upon him by the Roman-style Senate he has created.^[18] Like Julian in his warlike persona, Peter dreams throughout the novel of replicating the conquering feats of Alexander the Great. Most dangerously, like the Borgias, Peter subordinates the Church to the state and proclaims that he is “both together – the patriarch and the tsar!”^[19] (453) In his diary, Peter’s son Alexis questions his father’s actions: “Jesus Christ struck and destroyed the Roman Empire and broke its clay feet into dust. But again we create and build what God destroyed. Is this not fighting with God?” (455)
An example of the state's desecration of Russia's religious life comes near the end of the novel, when Alexis confesses to his priest about a plot against his father. Breaking the seal of confession as Petrine law dictates, the priest repeats Alexis’ seditious words to Peter, who looks upon them as decisive evidence against his son. It is only after Alexis’ vision of John of the Apocalypse, who has come to Alexis’ jail cell to administer communion to him, that Peter and Alexis, representative respectively of imperialism and Christianity, are briefly reconciled. This union occurs however as Alexis lies dying, killed by his father’s own furious blows in the “interrogation” chamber.^[20]
Alexis’ revelation is shared by one other character in the novel, Tikhon, the last offspring of a nobleman whom Peter had brutally executed. Tikhon resembles previous “seekers” in Merezhkovskii’s trilogy, such as Arsinoe, Giovanni, and Evtikhii. Torn between the Western education Peter imposes on him and the anguished pronouncements of his Old Believer acquaintances, Tikhon eventually comes to a startling conclusion: the choice between East and West is irrelevant, as both paths in their disunity will end in apocalypse. Fittingly, Tikhon’s journeys culminate in a meeting with John of the Apocalypse, who has earlier administered Communion to the dying Alexis. John proclaims a new Church, a third testament that succeeds both Old Testament and New. The trilogy ends with Merezhkovskii’s joyful paean to this long-awaited unification: “Hosanna! Christ shall defeat the Antichrist!” (759)
Peter and Alexis represents an abandonment of the unifying vision for Russia that Merezhkovskii had originally set out to promote in his trilogy. Instead of a progression from a first novel in Rome to a third novel in Russia, or the Third Rome, Merezhkovskii presented the reader with a portrayal of the roots of the hopeless division he saw in his own spiritually confused, divided, and overly materialistic contemporary society. Peter, Merezhkovskii suggested, had had an opportunity to lead Russia to the splendid destiny outlined in Leonardo, but his subordination of the Church to the state had simply replicated the critical mistake of the West. As Merezhkovskii wrote in his 1907 article “Revoliutsiia i religiia” (Revolution and Religion), “The head of the state became the head of the church, the Caesar of undoubtedly pagan first Rome became the archpriest of the doubtfully Christian Third Rome.”^[21] Russia lost its uniqueness, as in both West and East “there occurred the identical abolition of the Church, the kingdom of love and freedom, the kingdom of God, by the state, the kingdom of enmity and violence, the kingdom of godlessness.”^[22]
Merezhkovskii claimed in the same article that the “Russian decadents are the first Europeans [in Russia – JK], people of world culture, who, having reached its upper limits from which the unknown vistas of the future are revealed, are the first to emerge from the blind alley formed by two blank walls – Westernism, the slavish submission to Europe, and Slavophilism, a slavish revolt against Europe; they are the first to acquire freedom in relation to Europe.”^[23] This statement implies more faith in Russia’s intelligentsia and future than the end of Peter and Alexis appears to offer. It is worth noting, therefore, that in this last and least hopeful novel, John of the Apocalypse chooses to make his pronouncement of a future kingdom in Russia and to Russians – his “Third Testament” thus has aspects in common with the Third Rome idea Merezhkovskii supposedly had renounced, though without the imperial element. And Merezhkovskii appears to have cast himself in the mold of his various seekers; unlike Tikhon, however, who is struck dumb by the revelation he has received, Merezhkovskii propagated his apocalyptic vision in repeated texts for the remainder of his life, both in Russia and in exile in France after the Bolshevik revolution.
It was Christ and Antichrist, though, that had the largest impact, both within Russia among Merezhkovskii’s contemporaries and in Europe; in fact, Merezhkovskii was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the trilogy in 1933, though the award went to Ivan Bunin. Evaluating Merezhkovskii’s significance for his generation, Nikolai Berdiaev would later write, “It cannot be denied that in one respect at least Merezhkovsky’s work was of great importance: he introduced, and was himself expressive of, a whole unknown or forgotten world of cultural values, of Greek and Roman antiquity, of the Italian Renaissance, of French literature, of Nietzsche and Ibsen...”^[24] Valerii Briusov would note Merezhkovskii’s ability through his writing to capture and preserve the mood of his generation.^[25] Certainly Merezhkovskii’s contemporaries were quick to seize upon the set of terms found in the trilogy as they, too, sought to construct their own visions of Russia’s national identity and goal. Building upon Merezhkovskii’s concept of the Third Rome, with its imperial and religious elements marked in geographic terms, writers ranging from Briusov in his two Rome-based novels to Mikhail Bulgakov in his Master and Margarita would construct their own Russian Romes. Interpreting the ancient world in an effort to comprehend contemporary Russia and chart its course, they created new Russian empires of words and dreams.