Merezhkovsky's Ideas
Merezhkovsky's first adopted philosophical trend was the then popular positivism, a trend Konstantin Merezhkovsky (a future well-known biologist), who had great influence on his younger brother, was following too. Soon, disillusioned in formal positivism but never rejecting it wholly, Merezhkovsky turned to religion. Seeds of this hybrid (European positivism grafted to what's been described as 'subjective idealism' of Russian Orthodoxy) sown on the field of literature study brought forth a brochure entitled "On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature". This manifesto gave a burgeoning movement both ideology and the name as such: Merezhkovsky was the first to speak of symbols and see them as definitive means of cognizance modern Art.
In the center of this new train of thought was the notion of "rejecting the rational in favour of the intuitive" by means of exploiting what the author termed as 'spirituality of a symbol', seeing the latter as a perfect means of describing Reality, otherwise unfathomable. Only a symbol, according to Merezhkovsky, could burrow circumvent through to reach an object's deeper meaning, whereas (quoting, as he did, Tyutchev) "thought, whilst being spoken, turns a lie":
In poetry the unspoken things, flickering through the beauty of symbol, affect us stronger than what's expressed by words. Symbolism endows both style and essence of poetry with spirituality; poetic word becomes clear and translucent as walls of alabaster amphora carrying flame… Longing for things that ahs never been experienced yet, looking for undertones yet unknown, searching out dark and unconscious things in our sensual world is the coming Ideal poetry's main characteristics. <…> The three principle elements of the new art are: the mystic essence, symbolism and the expansion of artist's impressiveness. – Dmitry Merezhkovsky.Interestingly (according to D. Churakov), Merezhkovsky — pronouncing 'death of metaphysics' and putting forward the idea that only language of symbols could be an adequate instrument for discovering the modern world's pattern of meanings, was unwillingly following O. Komte, the difference being that the latter was employing these ideas in scientific fields, while the former proposed to use them in literature and criticism.
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