Death of the gods. Julian the Apostate

D. S. Merezhkovsky began work on the novel "Julian the Apostate" in the summer of 1890 . The most important importance for the successful completion of this painstaking, initially, mainly “office” labor was the (undertaken with hard-to-raise funds) Merezhkovskys' trip to Europe in 1892, with the return to Russia by sea - through Greece ( Athens ) and Turkey ( Constantinople ) - to Odessa . At first, the “ancient land of Hellas” disappointed the writer, who later described “the rather nasty faces of the natives, dust, stench” and heat, - Asia, but not “... real wild Asia, but ... semi-cultural, that is, the most uninteresting”. Everything changed when he saw the sacred hill of the Acropolis.

I looked, I saw everything at once and immediately understood - the rocks of the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and I felt something I would not forget until my death. The joy of that great liberation from life, which beauty gives, poured into the soul. Ridiculous care about money, unbearable heat, fatigue from traveling, modern, trite skepticism - all this is gone. And - confused, half-mad - I repeated: “Lord, what is it” ^[5] .

The writer described a state close to deja vu : “... And it’s strange: as in all the very important, single circumstances of life, it seemed to me that I had already seen and experienced all this somewhere, very long time ago, but not in books . I watched and recalled. Everything was familiar and familiar. ” Describing the Parthenon , Merezhkovsky contrasts it with the Colosseum:

Blue sky, blue sea and white marble, and the sun, and the scream of birds of prey at half-day height, and the rustling of dry, prickly blackthorn. And something stern and sternly divine is in desolation, but nothing sad, not a trace of that despondency, the feeling of death that seizes in the brick caves of the Palatine palace of Nero, in the ruins of the Colosseum. There is the dead greatness of the overthrown power. Here is the living, eternal beauty. Only here, for the first time in my life, I realized what beauty is. I didn’t think about anything, didn’t want anything, I didn’t cry, I wasn’t happy - I was calm ^[5] .

At the end of the trip, the couple plunged into the world of the half-nischensky life, which was almost already familiar to them. “Now we are in a terrible, all-time position. We have literally half-starved for several days and laid wedding rings, ”Gippius reported in one of the letters of 1894 (noting that one doctor cannot use the kefir prescribed by doctors, there is no money) ^[5] .

Publish

The work (according to the biography of D. M. Magomedova) was the first in a series of constantly “rejected, oppressed by censorship or the works of Merezhkovsky confiscated by the police” ^[6] . According to the memoirs of Z.N. Gippius , “when“ Julian the Apostate ”was finished, he did not find a shelter in any Russian magazine.

In 1895, the novel (as it was thought, “out of grace”) printed The Northern Herald, but here it was also dismissed. According to the memoirs, Gippius, a critic of A. L. Volynsky, "... came to Merezhkovsky with a manuscript that he took to read, and almost rudely (maybe he just couldn’t keep himself?) Pointed to the marked pieces:“ This is - out! This is also won! “What he motivated with his“ won ”is - I don’t remember at all” ^[6] . As a result, the novel "Julian the Apostate", the first in the trilogy, appeared in The Northern Herald in a shortened and sometimes distorted form.

Merezhkovsky, to whom fashionable then “decadent” and “upadnik” labels firmly adhered, was able to bring his work to the general reader, mainly due to the support of the Chairman of the Literary Fund, one of the most influential writers' organizations of the time, P. I. Weinberg , who I began to invite the Merezhkovskys to my “evenings”. “We need to know the atmosphere of that time, the then public, the“ old ”youth, in order to understand that it was really audacity on the part of Weinberg. Mixing in with the older young people, Weinberg taught the public little by little to them, ”wrote Z. Gippius . Weinberg was one of the few “old school” writers who evaluated Merezhkovsky’s first novel. In his apartment, he gave chapters from Julian, and this played a significant role in the fate of the novel ^[5] .

The novel "Death of the Gods. Julian the Apostate introduces the reader into the world of the tense struggle of Christianity and paganism - in the era of the Roman emperor Julian II the Apostate (331-363), who tried to restore the cult of the Olympian gods during his reign (361-363). The emperor Julian’s attempt to restore the Eastern empire to Hellenic paganism , pressed (after Milan’s edict of 313) by Christianity, brought him the nickname “Apostas” (or “Apostat”: apostate). Julian's dying words: “You won, Galilean!” Became a historical aphorism.

As Z. G. Mintz notes, Christianity "in its highest manifestations is revealed in the novel as a religion of absolute Good, on earth not attainable from the earthly repudiate," personified by the "immaculate charm" of the dying girl Myrrh ^[7] . But Christians reject the real world: they are ascetic and "alien to all human." In response to the passionate blasphemous curses of the mother of the young Christian Christian Juventin: "Be damned, taking the children away from the mother ... the servants of the Crucified, life-hating, the destroyers of everything that is sacred and great in the world!" - the words of the aged Didim sound: the disciple of Christ can only become He who hated "his father and mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and his very life." Christ and life, according to Merezhkovsky, irreconcilable ^[7]

Merezhkovsky (according to O. Mikhailov) sympathizes with his hero; Christianity appears in the novel not assertion of the highest principles of spirituality, but "... the victory of the evil will of the blind and dark in its intoxication with the permissiveness of the crowd." Belief in the Savior is a religion of the lower classes, a religion of the poor, and in popular perception Julian appears not only the Apostate, but the Antichrist ^[4] .

Subsequently, it was noted that the spiritual quest of Julian was largely consonant with the ideas that Merezhkovsky was interested in at the turn of the 1880-1890s. The emperor (in any case, in the novel), recognizing the “high spiritual beauty of Christian preaching”, cannot accept it, since the practical implementation of the commandments seems to him a denial of sensuality and, in general, the idea of ​​humanity, which was formed in Hellenic culture.

The tragedy of his position is that any of the possible choices between the "spirituality" of Christianity and the "carnal" harmony of paganism, according to conscience, cannot bring him full satisfaction. His ideal is a synthesis of spirit and flesh, such a state of being in which the carnal life would be spiritualized so that spiritual ideals could easily be embodied in everyday life ^[5] .

Among the main ideas of the novel, researchers noted the following: the content of human life in history - the suffering resulting from the conflict of two principles: "spiritual" and "carnal." They give rise to two systems of values: everything that the "spirit" loves affects the "flesh" negatively, and everything "carnal" terrifies the "spiritual." Attempts by man to create “heaven on earth” are in vain: without the help of the Creator, man can truly “do nothing” ^[5] . The solution of the dilemma that Julian unsuccessfully tried to put into practice (through the ideal of Christian-pagan synthesis), in a sense, tells him Arsinoe's girlfriend ("... What is your enemy to Him? When your mouth curses the Crucified, your heart longs for Him. When you fight against His name, you are closer to His spirit than those who repeat with dead lips: Lord, Lord, these are your enemies, not He ”) ^[5] .

The author of the novel acknowledged that initially he was too straightforward in developing the basic ideas, and that his views on them in the process of working on the trilogy changed:

When I started the trilogy "Christ and the Antichrist", it seemed to me that there are two truths: Christianity is the truth about heaven, and paganism is the truth about the earth, and in the future combination of these two truths - the fullness of religious truth. But, finishing, I already knew that the union of Christ with the Antichrist is a blasphemous lie; I knew that both the truths about heaven and earth were already united in Christ Jesus ... But now I also know that I had to go through this lie to the end in order to see the truth ^[5] .

Later, as the researchers noted, “spiritual twins” of Julian in search of harmony of “spirit” and “flesh” “on earth as in heaven” became all, without exception, historical characters of Merezhkovsky: Leonardo , Peter I , Alexander I , Ryleev , Pestel , Napoleon , Francis of Assisi , Joan of Arc , Augustine , Paul , Pharaoh Akhenaten and others ^[5] .

Autobiographical motifs

Some researchers noted that in the novel “Julian the Apostate” many repressed experiences of D. Merezhkovsky’s childhood were embodied in a latent form. It is known that he, from an early age, had the ability to sincere religious exaltation, very early began to realize "the separation of personal religiosity and official churchhood." One of the most precious childhood memories of Merezhkovsky is “a dark corner with an image, with the quiet light of an icon lamp and the never-repeated happiness of children's prayer.” At the same time, as he himself recalled, he “went to church ... did not really like it: the priests in lush vestments seemed terrible to me” ^[6] .

It is these children's experiences, according to D. S. Magomedov, expressed themselves in the opposition of the “terrible” image of Christ to the Arian church and the Good Shepherd.

Suffice it to recall how the theme of fear is inflamed when describing a church service in which young Julian participates: scary images of martyrs and sinners on the walls of the temple, cripples, possessed and fools in the crowd of worshipers, the terrifying words of the Apocalypse and above all - the Arian image of Christ is formidable , dark, emaciated face in a golden radiance and tiara ". And only in one corner of the temple, “in the twilight, where only the lamp was warm,” is a marble bas-relief of the first times of Christianity and Christ is the Good Shepherd. And for this little image of other times for him was connected some distant, childish sleep, which he sometimes wanted to remember and could not <...> And Julian whispered a word he had heard from Mardonius: “Galilean!” ^[6] .

It was also noted that another bright children's memory of the writer was realized in the imagery of the novel. In an autobiographical note, Merezhkovsky recalled how impressed the palace was in Oreanda (“White marble columns on the blue sea are for me an eternal symbol of ancient Greece”). This motif, as D. Magomedov notes, “almost literally repeats the description of the temple of Aphrodite, which Julian admires in chapter IV of the novel” (“The white marble of Ionic columns, drenched in the sun, bathed in blizzard with bliss; and dark, warm azure rejoiced, embracing this marble, cold and white as snow ”) ^[6] .

The novel "Julian the Apostate" interested both the general public and literary criticism. The latter, having discerned in the young Nietzschean writer, nevertheless, recognized the merits of the first symbolist historical novel: brilliant knowledge of an era unknown, masterly proficiency in language. All this (as noted by the biographer Y. Zobnin ) favorably distinguished "Julian" "from the historical fiction of that time, leading its origin from the novels of Danilevsky."

Soon, foreign publishers became interested in the novel. Zinaida Vasilyeva, an ardent fan of Merezhkovsky, a Russian Parisian, translated the novel into French in 1899 and published it in the Journal de Debates in 1900. A few months later, he was released in Paris as a separate publication, marking the beginning of Merezhkovsky’s European glory.

Modern Merezhkovsky critics have found in the novel echoes of Nietzscheanism, manifested, in particular, in the reluctance to reckon with the commandments of traditional, Christian morality. Subsequently, this idea was developed by I. A. Il'in , who analyzed Merezhkovsky’s biased and very consistently:

False is true. And the true is false. Is it a dialectic? Perverted is normal. Normal perverted. Here is a sincere Christian believer - from Christian kindness, she is given to the departed departed. Here is a Christian deacon, a priest of the altar - he rubs his face like a public woman, and constantly has dirty-erotic adventures in a circus. Here is the crucifixion - the body of Christ, and the head of an ass. Here is the holy martyr - with a wild swearing, he spits in the eyes of his executioners. Here are Christians who only think about how they would carve out all pagans. Christ is identical with the pagan god Dionysus. You can only believe in what is not, but what will happen in the future. The criminal is portrayed as delightful ... That girl is invested in the wooden likeness of a cow and given to the bull in this form - this is a mystery in Crete, preceding the Last Supper of Christianity. The witchcraft is like a prayer; prayer - on the spell. Christ is Mithra. Evil is good. And all this is supreme gnosis. And the divine revelation is meant to give people doubt ... Is this art? But then this art, violating all the laws of art. Religion is it? No - it is rather unbelief and godlessness ^[4] .