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Transcriber's Note:

All obvious errors have been corrected.
Archaic and alternate spellings have been retained.




By DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI


    =THE DEATH OF THE GODS.= Authorized English Version by HERBERT
    TRENCH. 12^o

    =THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI: THE FORERUNNER.= (The
    Resurrection of the Gods.) Authorized English Version from the
    Russian. 12^o. With 8 Illustrations

    ----Artist's Edition, with 64 illustrations. 2 vols., 8^o

    =PETER AND ALEXIS.= Authorized English Version from the Russian.
    12^o


    =G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS=
    =New York=      =London=





    +Christ and Antichrist+




    The Death of the
    Gods


    By

    Dmitri Merejkowski


    Translated by

    Herbert Trench

    Sometime Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford


    _Authorised English Version_

    G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
    NEW YORK AND LONDON
    The Knickerbocker Press





    Copyright 1901
    by
    G. P. Putnam's Sons


    Made in the United States of America


    The Knickerbocker Press, New York






MEREJKOWSKI


Dmitri Merejkowski is perhaps the most interesting and powerful of the
younger Russian novelists, the only writer that promises to carry on
the work of Tolstoi, Turgeniev, and Dostoievski. His books, which are
already numerous, are animated by a single master-idea, the
Pagano-Christian dualism of our human nature. What specially interests
him in the vast spectacle of human affairs is the everlasting contest
between the idea of a God-Man and the idea of a Man-God; that is to
say, between the conception of a God incarnate for awhile (as in
Christ) and the conception of Man as himself God--gradually evolving
higher types of splendid and ruling character which draw after them
the generations.

The novelist's own doctrine seems to be that both the Pagan and the
Christian elements in our nature, although distinct elements, are
equally legitimate and sacred. His teaching is that the soul and the
senses have an equal right to be respected; that hedonism and altruism
are equals, and that the really full man, the perfect man, is he who
can ally in harmonious equilibrium the cult of Dionysus and the cult
of Christ.

Merejkowski conceives that European civilisation has been born of the
tremendous conflict between these two main ideas. And he has embodied
this conflict in a trilogy of novels,--three great historical
romances. The first is entitled _The Death of the Gods_, and deals
with the extraordinary career of the Roman Emperor. Julian the
Apostate, who in the fourth century A.D. sought to revive the worship
of the Olympians after Christianity had been adopted by Constantine
the Great as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The historical novel, pure and simple, exists no longer. Writers of
genius who seem to write historical novels in reality are only
transferring to the stage of the world a drama which is being played
in their own souls. They transfer thither that drama in order to show
that the struggle which is now going on in us is eternal. Merejkowski
sees the question, which is of supreme interest to us, being asked by
the great spirits of a wealthy and imperial civilisation closely
resembling our own, in the fourth century. And, what is of more
interest still, he not only sees the momentous problem and places it
before us with remarkable lucidity, but he also seems, in his own
fashion, to arrive at a solution. Moreover, this novelist, this
psychologist, is also an artist and a poet, possessed by what he
somewhere calls the "Nostalgia of the Distant." With an ardour as of
Flaubert in _Salammbo_, and with perhaps more skill than Sienkiewicz
in _Quo Vadis_, the author of _The Death of the Gods_ has succeeded in
re-creating the wonderful rich scenes and characters of that remote
epoch. We see the racing stables of the Hippodrome of Constantinople,
battles with wild German warriors round Strasburg, the interior of the
baths at Antioch, dinners of epicures and men of letters at Athens,
pictures of a Roman Emperor at his toilet-table, or of a lovelorn
child in the Temple of Aphrodite. Before writing this first of his
great romances Merejkowski himself travelled through Asia Minor and
Greece, visited Constantinople and Syria, and gathered everywhere
living impressions to serve his art and his thought. He was besides
admirably prepared to handle a subject which had attracted him from
youth. A delicate Hellenist, his first appearance in literary life was
as a harmonious translator of AEschylus and Sophocles. Later, the
Gnostics, the Fathers of the Eastern Church, the Greek Sophists (who
represented the last throes of expiring Paganism and already dreamed
of reviving it), were the young poet's objects of study. Thus was born
the romance of _The Death of the Gods_, which he has continued later
in _The Resurrection of the Gods_ (of which Leonardo da Vinci is the
hero), and completed by _The Anti-Christ_, portraying the savage