“Antichrist. Peter and Alexey” is Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s philosophic-historical novel, the third in the trilogy “Christ and Antichrist.” In history, the embodiment of the struggle between two world principles (“Christ” and “the Antichrist”) became the era of Peter’s reforms in Russia. In the novel, several early threads of the trilogy converge: Aphrodite, shattered in “Leonardo da Vinci,” rises again through Praksiteles; Old Believer priests argue about the purity of faith, just as Christian monks invited by Julian had argued at the council. “When I began the trilogy ‘Christ and Antichrist,’ it seemed to me that there were two truths: Christianity—the truth about heaven, and paganism—the truth about earth, and in the future union of these two truths—the fullness of religious truth. But when I came to the end, I already knew that the union of Christ with the Antichrist is sacrilegious deception; I knew that both truths—about heaven and about earth—are already united in Christ Jesus… But now I also know that I had to go through this lie to the end in order to see the truth.” Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky