The publication is the first book of the research novel “The Merezhkovsky Brothers”, dedicated to the eldest of the six brothers, Konstantin Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1855–1921). In the circles of historians of biology, he is well known as the founder of the heretical theory of symbiogenesis, the ideas of which were put forward by him in the 1900s and remained unclaimed for about sixty years, until at the end of the 1960s they were interpreted by a number of American and then Soviet biologists as the basis modern understanding of the evolution of the organic world and the construction of its system. However, the biography of K.S. Merezhkovsky remained unwritten, and information about him remained uncollected, since since 1914, a kind of “curse” had been hanging over Merezhkovsky: he was the most famous pedophile of his time, the hero of a noisy newspaper scandal of 1914, filled with shocking details, as a result of which he fled from Russia abroad in 1914, where he lived for seven years and ingeniously committed suicide in 1921.

“Renegadepenis of the Silver Age” - a comprehensive biography of the Russian a scientist and marginal philosopher, the “Russian Marquis de Sade,” who appears as an “absolutely negative person,” as a symbol of evil, as a person devoid of a single positive trait, as a real refutation of the aphorism about the incompatibility of “genius” and “villainy.” A pedophile who raped about thirty little girls (aged 3 years and older) and wrote about it in his secret diary; an informer who collaborated with the secret political police and for many years “snitched” on his colleagues at Kazan University, where he worked 1903–1914; a convinced anti-Semite who brought the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to Kazan, one of the active, albeit secret founders of the Union of the Russian People in Kazan... The biography of the main character of the book turns out to be the core on which numerous information is strung about the university life of Russia in the 1900s - 1910s years, and about the political struggle among professors, and about sexual scandals, crimes and customs of this period (in particular, for the first time, pedophilic discourse in Russian culture is analyzed in the greatest possible detail). Analysis of the brutal character and behavior of K.S. Merezhkovsky in the context of the poetics of everyday and aesthetic behavior of people of the decadent-symbolist circle shows that he can be considered the Main Symbolist.

The study is based on archival (more than 10 Russian and foreign archives were examined) and newspaper materials; all archival materials are published for the first time.

The publication also includes literary and philosophical works by K.S. Merezhkovsky, in which his utopian and pedophilic ideals were expressed, primarily the novel “Earthly Paradise” (1903) and the science fiction work “Universal Rhythm as the Basis of a New Concept of the Universe” (1920), which demonstrates that K.S. Merezhkovsky not only subtly understood, but also anticipated many scientific ideas of the 20th century.

All of Merezhkovsky’s works published in the book are provided with detailed comments.