and anti-German. According to Teffi, one of the people present, — Irina Odoyevtseva independently corroborated this. "He was going on about the Atlantis and its demise. For those who understood Russian it was obvious that what he meant was Germany's defeat and Russia's imminent victory, but the Germans never understood this and applauded," she remembered. All this, according to Zobnin, makes the "infamous German radio speech" look very much like a Nazi propaganda myth, picked up first by Yuri Terapiano, then authenticated by numerous reiterations. Merezhkovsky's death For the last three months of his life Merezhkovsky was working continuously in the couple's Paris flat, trying to finish Little Theresa. On December 6 husband and wife returned from one of their regular walks and spent the evening, in Gippius' words, "arguing, as usual, about the Russia versus freedom dilemma." Skipping both supper and his habitual evening cigarette, Merezhkovsky went to his room early. Next morning the maid called Gippius to tell her the man was in some kind of trouble. Merezhkovsky was sitting unconscious next to a cold fireplace. The doctor arrived in 15 minutes' time and diagnosed brain hemorrhage. In half an hour Merezhkovsky was pronounced dead. "...Me, I'm a worm, not man, slandered by humans, despised by peoples (Ps. 21, 7). But wrap itself into a chrysalis a hapless worm does only to break out as a shiny white, sunlight-like, resurrected butterfly," these were his last written words found on a piece of paper on a table. The funeral service was held on December 10 in the Orthodox church of Saint Aleksandr Nevsky. Dmitry Merezhkovsky was buried at the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, with just several people attending the ceremony. Merezhkovsky's ideas Merezhkovsky's first adopted philosophical trend was the then popular positivism. Soon, disillusioned in this idea, although never rejecting it wholly, Merezhkovsky turned to religion. Seeds of this hybrid (European positivism grafted to what's been described as "the subjective idealism" of Russian Orthodoxy) sown on the field of literature study brought forth a brochure entitled "On the Causes of the Decline and the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature". This manifesto gave a burgeoning Russian Symbolist movement both ideology and the name as such: Merezhkovsky was the first in Russia to speak of symbols as definitive means of cognizance in modern Art. In the center of this new train of thought was the notion of "rejecting the rational in