This book has changed several times during the twelve years it has been in the writing. It sprang originally from material gathered for a Ph.D thesis on the ‘Origins of Russian Symbolism with Special Reference to D. S. Merezhkovsky 1892–1985’, Cambridge, 1958. Most of my work since, however, has been devoted to twentieth-century Russian literature, and the need for a history of the Symbolist movement as a whole is apparent. This was my contract for Cambridge University Press. At the same time, work on the origins of the movement left me with an abiding interest in the thought, or perhaps I should say in the unanswered questions raised by the thought, of the fin de siècle. New publications from and about the period in Russia, especially the flood of new material about Andrei Bely and Pavel Florensky, have reanimated this interest and confirmed my conviction that the literary movement calling itself Russian Symbolism was not an imitation of the French, who first laid claim to the term and experimented with the techniques, but part of a wider European attempt to give expression to this thought, these questions. As Shestov says: ‘the most important and meaningful thoughts are born into the world naked, without verbal form: to find words for them is a special, very difficult task – an art in itself’.