Transcriber's Note: All obvious errors have been corrected. Archaic and alternate spellings have been retained. By DMITRI MÉREJKOWSKI =THE DEATH OF THE GODS.= Authorized English Version by HERBERT TRENCH. 12^o =THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI: THE FORERUNNER.= (The Resurrection of the Gods.) Authorized English Version from the Russian. 12^o. With 8 Illustrations ----Artist's Edition, with 64 illustrations. 2 vols., 8^o =PETER AND ALEXIS.= Authorized English Version from the Russian. 12^o =G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS= =New York= =London= +Christ and Antichrist+ The Death of the Gods By Dmitri Mérejkowski Translated by Herbert Trench Sometime Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford _Authorised English Version_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press Copyright 1901 by G. P. Putnam's Sons Made in the United States of America The Knickerbocker Press, New York MÉREJKOWSKI Dmitri Mérejkowski is perhaps the most interesting and powerful of the younger Russian novelists, the only writer that promises to carry on the work of Tolstoi, Turgeniev, and Dostoievski. His books, which are already numerous, are animated by a single master-idea, the Pagano-Christian dualism of our human nature. What specially interests him in the vast spectacle of human affairs is the everlasting contest between the idea of a God-Man and the idea of a Man-God; that is to say, between the conception of a God incarnate for awhile (as in Christ) and the conception of Man as himself God--gradually evolving higher types of splendid and ruling character which draw after them the generations. The novelist's own doctrine seems to be that both the Pagan and the Christian elements in our nature, although distinct elements, are equally legitimate and sacred. His teaching is that the soul and the senses have an equal right to be respected; that hedonism and altruism are equals, and that the really full man, the perfect man, is he who can ally in harmonious equilibrium the cult of Dionysus and the cult of Christ. Mérejkowski conceives that European civilisation has been born of the tremendous conflict between these two main ideas. And he has embodied this conflict in a trilogy of novels,--three great historical romances. The first is entitled _The Death of the Gods_, and deals with the extraordinary career of the Roman Emperor. Julian the Apostate, who in the fourth century A.D. sought to revive the worship of the Olympians after Christianity had been adopted by Constantine the Great as the official religion of the Roman Empire.