Early life Konstantin was born in
Saint Petersburg, one of six sons and three daughters in the Mereschkowski family. His father, Sergey Ivanovich, served as a senior official in several Russian local governors' cabinets (including that of I.D. Talyzin in
Orenburg) before entering
Alexander II's court office as a
privy councillor. His mother, Varvara Vasilyevna (née Tcherkasova), was a daughter of a senior Saint Petersburg security official, and was fond of arts and literature. The writer
Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866–1941) was one of his younger brothers. From 1875 to 1880 he worked for his degree at the
University of Saint Petersburg, travelling north to the
White Sea to examine
marine invertebrates and discovering a genus of
Hydrozoa. On graduating he travelled to France and Germany, meeting famous scientists; he published on
anthropology and
animal pigments while in Paris. In 1914 he was prosecuted for
raping more than two dozen girls. He had earlier escaped Saint Petersburg in 1886 and the Crimea in 1898 for fear of being prosecuted for similar crimes. He was dismissed from Kazan University, and escaped to France. In 1918 he moved to the
Conservatoire Botanique in Geneva, where he worked on
Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert's
lichen collection and distributed the
exsiccata Lichenes Ticinenses exsiccati, rariores vel novi, pro parte ex aliis pagis provenientes, editi a Prof. Dre. C. Mereschkovsky.
Death In Geneva, he became
seriously depressed, ran out of money, and on 9 January 1921 he was found dead in his hotel room, having tied himself up in his bed with a mask which was supplied with an asphyxiating gas from a metal container. It appears that his suicide was directly connected to his paedophilic
utopian beliefs (reflected in his 1903 book of stories, ''Earthly Paradise, or a Winter Night's Dream. Tales from the 27th century
) as well as his view that he was becoming too old and frail to continue his history of child abuse. As an atheist, his dreamed-of utopia was to be scientifically based, involving the evolution of a perfect human race of paedophiles held aloft by the enslavement of Africans, Asians, and others. The Earthly Paradise'' describes specially-bred castes of human including one of
neotenised, sexualizing children prolonged into adult age - still displaying child-like features and behaviour - who were put to death at the age of 35, as they could not be happy in old age. Further, he held extreme ideological beliefs on
eugenics and
antisemitism. He actively assisted the far-right
Black Hundredist organisation the Kazan Department of the
Union of Russian People, and provided secret assistance to the
Ministry of Internal Affairs in hunting down Jews and supposed traitors. == Symbiogenesis ==