Merezhkovsky’s Neo-Christianity of the Third Testament: From Symbolist Historiosophy to Radical Politics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

First of all, the article lacks a strong thesis that contributes to the scholarship on Merezhkovsky.  Rather than adding something new, it summarizes Merehkovsky's ideas, which have been adequately summarized in the existing literature (e.g., Matich).  The suggested thesis that Merezhkovsky's religious ideas are related to his radical views, both left and right, seemed to me to be the most original idea, but it is not well supported in the article.  When I accepted the article, I noted that I am not an expert on Merezhkovsky's theological views, but nonetheless I did not learn anything new about them from the article.  If you are going for a general overview of Merezhkovsky's ideas for a general audience, you have all the information for that, but a strong thesis is needed to contribute to the existing secondary literature.

Secondly, the entire article must be rewritten.  It is obviously translated from Russian, at least influenced by Russian syntax. The article needs to be better organized, and the syntax needs to be greatly simplified.  

Author Response

The article places Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Chiliastic concept of Three Testaments into a unified structure. The author analyzes the writer’s integral system of Christological, anthropological, and historiosophic idiomyths and meta-symbols. He studies the religious, philosophical and aesthetic genesis of the semantic transformation of traditional theological constructions and the doctrinal compilation of Russian fin de siècle culture dominant elements. It is shown how religious Modernist myth-making alters political reality in Merezhkovsky's mind and draws him towards radical ideologies of the extreme left and right.

Reviewer 2 Report

Italics should be used only to mark either book titles or words in foreign languages different than English, but not to highlight normal words

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The article places Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Chiliastic concept of Three Testaments into a unified structure. The author analyzes the writer’s integral system of Christological, anthropological, and historiosophic idiomyths and meta-symbols. He studies the religious, philosophical and aesthetic genesis of the semantic transformation of traditional theological constructions and the doctrinal compilation of Russian fin de siècle culture dominant elements. It is shown how religious Modernist myth-making alters political reality in Merezhkovsky's mind and draws him towards radical ideologies of the extreme left and right.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf