Christians before Christianity: Dmitri Merezhkovsky's Tragedies

• In Event: In Dialogue with the Antique: Russian Reception of Classical Literature

Abstract

This paper investigates in Merezhkovsky’s translations of Greek tragedy: his desire to merge ancient pagan religion with Christianity and create a religious and aesthetic metaphysics drawing upon both. In addition, I plan to compare his translations of Sophocles to those of the classical philologist Tadeusz Zielinski, whose translations I predict to be more accurate on the level of words but to be less evocative of the mystical doom and gloom of Sophocles than Merezhkovsky’s.

Author

• Olivia Kennison, Brown U