D.Merezhkovsky’s Religious Publicism

What is it about?

The article discusses the issue of how Dmitry Merezhkovsky thinks about Polish Republic new religious consciousness, appearances of anti-bolshevists. Researches are based on the analysis of publications in periodicals of Polish Republic. The main issue is religious messianism of Russian and Polish peoples.

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Why is it important?

In 1920, the Russian publicist, religious philosopher and interpreter Dmytry Merezhkovsky speaking with correspondent of Vilna (Vilnius) newspaper “Nasz kraj” Eugeniusz Świerczewski expressed prophetic symbolic maxim: “Russia is extremely feminine; however she has never had a husband. She was raped by Tatars, Tsars, and Bolshevists. The only possible husband Russia could be Poland – but Poland looks too weak nowadays”. The founder of the “new religious consciousness” did not say a word about Europe as a possible spouse or any Slavic country. However, a century afterwards his opinion could be interpreted only in context of european ambitions of Russia and Poland. The former one, as it is known, is still being raped by oligarchs headed by Putin, and the later one deliberately connected its own fate with the Old world. The forced seizure of Ukrainian Donbass and Crimea performed by the troops of the Russian Federation actually copies the aggression of Lenin’s RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) of the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish territories in the twenties of the twentieth century. Therefore historians and intellectuals with national persuasion are frankly sorry about the weak efficiency of D. Merezhkovsky’s publicist performances of the first period of emigration regarding the immediate offensive of Józef Piłsudski’s army on the bolshevists’ unstable positions, and concerning support of German and French armed formations for Polish army. Young II Rzeczpospolita (1919-1939), which although endeavored to recover in historical borders of I Rzeczpospolita, but there was the lack of human and military resources to “suppress the red devil in its own covert”, did not become the bridge between the civilized Europe and half-wild Russia. The bloody consequences of the Bolshevists expansion to the West in the twentieth century allowed thousands of Polish and Russian intellectuals to reconsider the radical position of D.Merezhkovsky, however even the USA did not dare to “suppress the devil” after the finishing the Second World War.

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