April 7, 1872
В Petersburg was born Dmitry Filosofov — publicist, critic, and public figure. One of the founders of the "World of Art" association.
Woe to the country where terror can still be justified.
His father was an assistant to the Minister of War, later the Chief Military Prosecutor and a member of the State Council. His mother was a writer and feminist from a family Diaghilevs, one of the founders of higher educational institutions for women.
He graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. He completed an internship at Heidelberg University. Upon his return, he served as a lawyer for the State Council and the Imperial Public Library.
He combined service with journalism and public activities.
While still a student, I met artists. Alexander Benois и Konstantin Somov, and his family's ancestral estate in Pskov The province was a cultural center and meeting place for the intelligentsia. It was there in 1898 that the artists' association "World of Art" was conceived (with the support of patrons Princess Maria Tenisheva и Savva Mamontov). 26-year-old Dmitry Filosofov became the editor of the magazine of the same name. The idea belonged to his cousin and peer, a future entrepreneur. To Sergei Diaghilev.
Russian decadence was born in our village of Bogdanovskoye, because the main leaders were my son Dmitry and my nephew Sergei Diaghilev. The “World of Art” was conceived here.
(from the memoirs of his mother, Anna Filosofova)
In 1905, after participating in rallies against the shooting of a workers' demonstration, he resigned from the library "due to domestic circumstances." Along with the poetess Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky Went to Paris lived with them in a “triple marriage” (he had been in a romantic relationship with his cousin Diaghilev for the previous 15 years).
In France, he worked part-time at newspapers. Together with Gippius and Merezhkovsky, he published the collection "The Tsar and the Revolution."
He returned to Russia in 1908 and collaborated with newspapers and magazines.
The individual has become a static entity. Cholera, suicides, murders, and executions have ceased to be real, taking the form of statistical tables that we indifferently glance at. Fate has placed too much on a generation that has consciously endured the external and internal devastation of recent years. Perhaps this generation will never recover. Even if it recovers, it will still remain crippled, its soul crushed.
He was close to Cadet circles. He welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and advocated democratic reforms. Together with Gippius and Merezhkovsky, he held religious and philosophical meetings in St. Petersburg. He was the chairman of the Religious and Philosophical Society.
If storms and disasters have not yet extinguished the unquenchable lamp, then the Russian land is still alive, and the time will come when the Russian people will take up their bed and go
He met the October Revolution with hostility. He returned to work at the Public Library, became an activist in the Political Red Cross, and helped those arrested for dissent.
A government machine gun started firing on the roof of our building. The street emptied. Then an armed crowd arrived. Some of it climbed up the stairs. There were soldiers in the courtyard too. The crackle of gunfire was constant.
In 1919, along with Gippius and Merezhkovsky, he left Petrograd (ostensibly to lecture to Red Army units) and left Russia. He lived in Poland and fought against the Bolsheviks in the USSR. He was an activist in the Russian Political Committee and the People's Union for the Defense of the Homeland and Freedom. He edited the newspapers Svoboda, Molva, and Mech. He was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Literary Commonwealth.
The main danger is the Bolsheviks, and not just because their foul spirit is spreading throughout Europe. The Bolsheviks' presence in Moscow also accustomed anti-Bolsheviks to their methods. War and communism destroyed long-standing humanitarian skills for several generations.
In his later years, he was deeply affected by the betrayal of a like-minded person. Boris Savinkov, whose right-hand man he was in exile, he returned to the USSR and later committed suicide.
He retired from literary and public life. He died in 1940, at 68, in German-occupied Poland.
