Dmitri Merezhkovsky

Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was a leading figure of the Russian Symbolist movement and a co-founder of Russian religious-philosophical thought. His best-known work is the trilogy Christ and Antichrist, whose second volume — a richly imagined life of Leonardo — was translated into English as The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci and became a European bestseller. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature repeatedly, and it is his fictional Leonardo, not the historical one, who speaks the famous vegetarian prophecy.