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St Francis of Assisi in D. Merezhkovsky’s work oeuvre and Russian ‘Frantsiskiana’ (Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Durylin) The reception of the image St Francis of Assisi in Merezhkovsky’s works (in the narrative poem St Francis of Assisi (A legend), 1891; in the treatise L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, 1901; and in the essay “Francis of Assisi”, 1938) is considered in the context of other interpretations of that image within Russian culture: prior to Merezhkovsky’s, as in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov and Alexei Tolstoy’s narrative poem John of Damascus, and subsequent to it, as in the religious and philosophical ‘Frantsiskiana’ of the Silver Age, which was actually influenced by Merezhkovsky. In his narrative poem about Francis, Merezhkovsky reiterated the Franciscan idea of Dostoevsky and Alexei Tolstoy (embodied, correspondingly, in the antagonisms between Father Zosima and the monk Ferapont, and between a singer named John and an anonymous “austere monk”): the idea of overcoming the medieval ascetic dualism. In a mode of intertextual reference(s), Merezhkovsky embedded these antagonisms in the images of his characters Francis and Sylvester, later explicitly correlating Francis and Zosima (in his L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). Basing on the Russian literary tradition (Dostoevsky, Aleksey Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin), Merezhkovsky inscribed St Francis in Russian culture. Merezhkovsky’s vision of St Francis was dialogised by Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Adrianov, Sergei Durylin, for them Francis became the emblematic figure of Christian humanism (witnessing for the humanity of Christ and for a Christian justification of nature and culture), the antithesis of Christian asceticism. Thus Merezhkovsky’s Francis of Assisi, impulsing Russian “Franciscanism” (Russian attraction towards the figure of St Francis) at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, became one of the paradigms of Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance in addressing key issues (the correlation of ‘Flesh’ and ‘Spirit’, ‘Church’ and ‘World’) and the basis of a new Christian art of the Orthodox Renaissance of the early 20th century (paintings by Mikhail Nesterov).