D. S. Merezhkovsky’s book “Eternal Companions” is a series of essays, literary portraits of writers from different eras and countries. The author defined his main task in the preface: “First of all, I would like ... to show the living soul of the writer behind the book - a unique, unique, never repeated form of existence ...” and therefore in Merezhkovsky’s book there are no biographies, but there is everything that he himself believed an indispensable condition for the existence of genuine literature: “mystical content”, “symbols”, “artistic impressionability” and poetry.