Biography
Dmitry Merezhkovsky was born on August 2, 1865, in Saint Petersburg, the sixth son in his family.
His father, Sergey Ivanovich Merezhkovsky, served as a senior official in several Russian local governors' cabinets (including that of I. D. Talyzin in Orenburg) before entering Alexander II's court office as a Privy Councillor. His mother Varvara Vassilievna Merezhkovskaya (née Cherkasova) was a daughter of a senior St. Petersburg security official. Fond of arts and literature, she was what Dmitry Merezhkovsky later remembered as the guiding light of his rather lonely childhood (despite the continual presence of five brothers and three sisters). In fact, there were only three people Merezhkovsky had any affinity with in his whole lifetime, and his mother, a woman "of rare beauty and angelic nature" according to a biographer, was the first and the most important of them.
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