Peter and Alexis

Peter and Alexis is th third and final part of the Christ and Antichrist trilogy. All three novels had considerable success in Western Europe but were received coolly in Russia where the majority of the critics considered the trilogy tendentious and scholastic. Merezhkovsky saw Russia as an ‘heir’ to the fundamental Christ-Antichrist conflict and focuses here on Peter the Great as the embodiment of Antichrist (an idea he shared with Russian Old Believers) as opposed to the ‘purely Christian’ figure of Tsarevich Alexei.