Dmitry Merezhkovsky

 Waiting for permission to depart the city, he called on a friend who lived in an apartment on Sergievskaya Street. On the door of another apartment in the same building, he spotted the name Dmitry Merezhkovsky. One of Russia’s most prominent living writers, Merezhkovsky was the author of The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, an exploration of how Renaissance humanism had taken root and flowered in the soil of barbarism from the Middle Ages. Recognizing the name, Czapski impulsively rang the doorbell. A short man with light-colored eyes and a dark goatee and wearing a fur-trimmed velvet cape opened the door. Czapski would soon learn the cape belonged to Merezhkovsky’s wife but he wore it because the apartment was so cold. The young Polish soldier was invited to enter; Czapski would always derive great pleasure from the ease with which Russians welcome new acquaintances. Prompted by an appreciation of Merezhkovsky’s writings on the subject of faith, he blurted out that he was a disciple of Tolstoy and was against killing as a means of combating evil. His heart was numbed by what he had seen in the past few years in Russia; his innate pacifism was called into question by the brutality he had witnessed. How was it possible to maintain his beliefs when so many around him were being killed? How could the spirit of the Gospel be reconciled with the violence of war?

(...)

Merezhkovsky and his wife, the symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius, opened their home and hosted him for several days and nights. Czapski would later claim that they had effectively “cured” him of Christian extremism and freed him from a state of moral paralysis. Merezhkovsky “created his own world for himself, where much was lacking,” chronicler Nina Berberova wrote, “but the indispensable was always present.” Gippius, Merezhkovsky, and their intimate friend and fellow writer Dmitry Filosofov were a formidable presence in the world of Russian literature. The three had first bonded as anti-tsarists following the Revolution of 1905, then as anti-Bolsheviks after the October Revolution in 1917. Hoping to negotiate a reconciliation between Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, they believed in a “third Russia,” a democratic Russia, neither Bolshevik nor tsarist. Their dream—to bring the intelligentsia and the church together in a freely flowing union of intellect and faith—spoke directly to Czapski at a critical juncture in his young life. They armed the young man with an arsenal of reading material: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov topped the pile. Plunging into a period of intense study over the coming months, Czapski found his mind was unburdened, and a long-standing internal stalemate was resolved. The immersion in ethics and passionate thinking helped free him to become the man he wanted to be. The impulse to knock at a door bearing the name of an admired writer led to a rare advancement in the formation of his character and emboldened him to trust such unpremeditated gestures.

from Almost Nothing

The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski

by ERIC KARPELES