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The article demonstrates how Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his novel The Fourteenth of The article demonstrates how Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his novel The Fourteenth of December written in the midst of the revolutionary crisis in Russia and based on the history of the Decembrists revolt, attempts to give a historiosophical understanding of the October Revolution. The article also reconstructs Merezhkovsky’s revolutionary mythoideology developed in 1905–1917 and analyzes modification it underwent after October 1917. According to Merezhkovsky, not only was the Decembrists revolt in 1825 the first attempt of political revolution in Russia but it also defined the dual nature of Russian revolutionism as such. His own post-revolutionary experience enabled Merezhkovsky to make the following revisions in his idea of revolution. The people had become the “Beast” in 1917 instead of the Tsar. Bolshevism proved to be the “autocracy in reverse.” While in February there was still a glimpse of hope that revolutionary forces would unite, the October Revolution split this unity in question into “revolutionary democracy” (a new autocratic union of the people and the Bolsheviks) and “revolutionary aristocracy” (intelligentsia as a bearer of the ideals of freedom and Christian values). The traditional unity of the people and the “land” no longer existed: the people had betrayed their homeland, mother-land, Russia. Yet Merezhkovsky believed that Russia would not perish since it is larger than the people; it is also the land. The essay specificaly focuses on the way the author dis-identifies the notions of “the people” and “the land” in the wake of current political cataclysms.

Absstract added for FEB 2