Semantic Sfumato: Transformation of an Ancient Source in “Julian the Apostateˮ by D. S. Merezhkovsky

Abstract

In despite of the prevailing conclusions, Dmitry Merezhkovsky as a novelist works quite scrupulously with historical sources. However, he subjects them to a significant semantic transformation. In this sense, the case with the novel “The Death of the Gods. Julian the Apostate&8j1; (1895) is especially representative. Here the material of the main source, “Roman History&8j1; (Res gestae) by Ammianus Marcellinus, is systematically fictionalized according to the laws of Modernist mythopoetics. Merezhkovsky can reduce a hero of the Latin work to one symbolic peculiar feature, or, on the contrary, decompose a character’s trait sparingly indicated by Ammianus into a complex series of figurative-motif derivatives. The author, mastering the registers of Modernist writing, resorts to the semantic transformation of the ancient source according to the type of “sfumato” technique by Leonardo da Vinci. As a result of the narrative correction of the quotation layer, the protagonist of the Symbolist novel appears not as a Stoic hero, the bearer of the Roman ethos, but as a passively aesthetic “martyr of the new religious consciousness” à la fin de siècle.