kind'.}} In the words of a modern biographer, "he will find his place in history alongside Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Henry Miller, those classics who only through being condemned and ostracized by the many could be approached and appreciated by the few." "I was disliked and scolded in Russia, loved and praised abroad, but misunderstood, both here and there," Merezhkovsky wrote in a letter to Nikolai Berdyaev. Merezhkovsky has been given credit for his exceptional erudition, the scientific approach to writing, literary gift and stylistic originality. Seen in retrospect as the first ever (and, arguably, the only one) Russian "cabinet writer of a European type," Merezhkovsky was, according to Berdyayev, "one of the best-educated people in Saint Petersburg of the first quarter of the 20th century." Korney Chukovsky, pondering on the dire state of the early 20th century Russia's cultural elite, admitted that "the most cultured of them all" was this "mysterious, unfathomable, almost mythical creature, Merezhkovsky". Anton Chekov insisted that the Russian Academy of Sciences should appoint Merezhkovsky its honorary academic, in as early as 1902. Merezhkovsky was the first in Russia to formulate the basic principles of Symbolism and Modernism, as opposed to 'decadence', a tag he was battling with. Never aspiring to a leading role in the movement, he soon became, according to I. Koretskaya, "a kind of handy encyclopedia for the ideology of Symbolism," which others "could borrow aesthetic, socio-historical and even moral ideas from." Having added a new ("thought-driven") dimension to the genre of historical novel and turning it into a modern art form, Merezhkovsky influenced Andrey Bely and Aleksey Remizov, as well as Valery Bryusov, Aleksey N. Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mark Aldanov. It was Merezhkovsky who introduced such concepts as a "modernist novel" and a "symbolic historical novel" to the conservative Russian literature scene of the late 1890s. Merezhkovsky was praised as an engaging essayist and "a master of quote-juggling." Some critics loathed the repetitiveness in Merezhkovsky's prose, others admired his (in a broad sense) musical manner of employing certain ideas almost as symphonic themes, which was new at the time. No less influential, even if so much more controversial, were Merezhkovsky's philosophical, religious and political ideas. Alongside the obvious list of contemporary followers (Bely, Blok, etc.; almost all of them later became detractors) deeply interested in his theories were political figures (Fondaminsky, Kerensky, Savinkov), psychologists (Freud), philosophers (Berdyaev, Rickert, Stepun), lawyers