Dmitry Merezhkovsky entered literature as a poet and translator, tried himself as a critic and playwright, his trilogy "Christ and the Antichrist", studies "Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky" and "Gogol and the Devil" (1906) gained great popularity. But all his life he was in search of the final form in which he could clothe his own philosophical ideas. Merezhkovsky was convinced that the Gospel had not been read correctly and Jesus was not understood, that beyond the Old and New Testaments mankind awaited the Third Testament, the Kingdom of the Spirit. He sought in world and Russian history, in the work of Russian writers, confirmation that this new Kingdom is coming, that the future gives its signs to the present about the future End and Transfiguration. And if you look at the creative path of the writer, you can see that he is all directed to the book "Jesus the Unknown", he had to end with it, to become the peak to which he went long and persistently.

1934 ru Chernov2 chernov@orel.ru FB Editor v2.0 14 December 2008 http://www.litres.ru Text provided by copyright holder. 15dfdf16-1775-102c-96f3-af3a14b75ca4 1.0

v 1.0 – creation of fb2 Chernov Sergey, December 2008

Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky

Jesus the Unknown

And the world did not recognize Him.

Και ό κύσμοζ αυτόν όυκ έγνω.

Io 1.10

Volume One

Part I. The Unknown Gospel

1. Was there a Christ?