To the history of the text of D. Merezhkovsky's article “Revolution and religion”

The article analyzes the textual history of D. Merezhkovsky’s article “Revolution and Religion”. It could remain purely a problem of textual criticism, of interest only to a small group of experts dealing with preparing texts for publication, if not for the conclusions that can be drawn from studying it. The history of the article’s text indicates the development of D. Merezhkovsky’s ideas and clarifies the perception of how his views evolved. In his work on the article - its first journal version (1907), the second version, included in the collection “Not peace, but a sword. Towards a future criticism of Christianity” (1908) and reproduced without changes in both editions of the writer’s complete works, and finally the “French” version published in the collection “Le Tzar et la Révolution” (1907) - the writer evidently strives to introduce several principal additions into the text. The analysis establishes the sequence of the article’s versions and comprehends the nature of reworking its text. Having started from the popularization of the legend of Prester John and the idea of a fruitful unity between Orthodoxy and autocracy in his book “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”, D. Merezhkovsky proceeded to reject the positive connotation of autocracy. Subjects raised in his studies of the early 1900s converge to the article “Revolution and Religion”, which develops the problems found in the works written between the two Russian revolutions. The concept of a religious upheaval, outlined in the article “Revolution and Religion” and shaped through the documents of Decembrism, was fully developed in the writer’s works of the 1910s.