“Peter and Alexey” [1905] is devoted to the era of Peter the Great, to the tragic contradiction between the old and the new, the European and the Old Russian foundations.
This work is the third part of the trilogy “Christ and Antichrist,” the largest composition by Merezhkovsky, which brought him pan-European fame. In the trilogy, using the example of three historical epochs separated by time, Merezhkovsky depicts the eternal struggle between Christ and Antichrist, the battle of good with evil—whose intensity, in his view, is heightened at the culminating moments of history.