critics its playwright remained a "controversial author". "All in all, Russian literature is as hostile to me as it has always been. I could as well be celebrating the 25th anniversary of this hostility", the author wrote in his short autobiography for Semyon Vengerov's biographical dictionary. 1917: February and October 1917 for the Merezhkovskys started with a bout of political activity: the couple's flat on Sergiyevskaya Street looked like a secret branch of Russian Duma (that was when the seeds of a rumour concerning the couple's alleged membership in the Russian freemason community were sown). Merezhkovsky greeted the February anti-monarchy revolution and described the Kerensky-led Provisional government as "quite friendly". By the end of the spring he had become disillusioned with the government and its ineffective leader; in summer he began to speak of the government's inevitable fall and of a coming Bolshevik tyranny. Late October saw Merezhkovsky's worst expectations coming to life. Merezhkovsky viewed the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 as a catastrophe. He saw it as the Coming of Ham he wrote about a decade later, the tragic victory for, as he choose to put it, Narod-Zver (The Beast-nation), the political and social incarnation of universal Evil, putting the whole of human civilization in danger. Merezhkovsky and Gippius tried to use whatever influence they retained upon the Bolshevist cultural leaders to ensure the release of their friends, the arrested Provisional-government ministers. Ironically, one of the first things the Soviet government did was lift the ban from Merezhkovsky's anti-monarchist Pavel Pervy play, and it was staged in several of Red Russia's theaters. 1918 - 1919 For a while the Merezhkovskys' flat served as an Eser headquarters, but this came to an end in January 1918 when Vladimir Lenin dissolved the so-called Uchredilovka - the Russian Constituent Assembly. In his 1918 diary Merezhkovsky wrote: In 1919, having sold everything including dishes and extra clothes, the Merezhkovskys started collaborating with Maxim Gorky's new , receiving a salary and food rations. "Russian Communists are not all of them villains. There are well-meaning, honest, crystal clear people among them. Saints, almost. These are the most horrible ones. These saints stink of the 'Chinese meat' most", Merezhkovsky wrote in his diary. After news started to filter through of the defeats suffered by the White forces of Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin in the course of the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, the Merezhkovskys saw their