Russia awaiting the Apocalypse. Notes on the edge of the abyss

“All of us, Russians, love to wander around the edges and abysses” - this is the statement of Yuri Krizhanich, the first Slavophile, loved to cite Dmitry Merezhkovsky - a Russian writer, historian, philosopher and public figure, a bright representative of the Silver Age in his works. The expectation of an Apocalypse is characteristic of Russia, he claimed. Some associated the offensive of the Russian Apocalypse with the intelligentsia, which, quoted Merezhkovsky, “hates Russia, thinks to destroy it, and if it achieves its goals, Russia will break up into many parts, and our Western enemies will rush, like kite, into a decaying. The corpse of Russia will condemn it to the position of Western European colonies. " Others associated the beginning of the Apocalypse with revolutionaries, who, according to Dostoevsky, “want to fill the world with blood”, others, like Herzen, saw the coming fall in the triumph of a crowd of united mediocrity, in the constant flickering of life, and the exclusion of universal interests from it. Merezhkovsky had his own point of view on the "Russian Apocalypse" and outlined his opinion in bright and deep articles that are given in this book