About the book: year / The book by D. S. Merezhkovsky "On the causes of decline and new trends in modern Russian literature" proclaimed a revival “artistic idealism” in art, which replaced “dead positivism”. Merezhkovsky calls “the three main elements of new art” “mystical content”, “symbols” and “expansion of artistic impressionability” and through this prism examines the work of Turgenev, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Koltsov, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Garshin and Korolenko. The book was received as the first manifesto of a new artistic movement, it caused a large number of reviews, mostly negative. Only a critic of Moskovskie Vedomosti called the author of the book “seeing the light” for his departure from the revolutionary traditions of the 60s and 70s and for turning to the “infinite and immortal».