 The style was largely inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article "The Ancient Debate" (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book "On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature" (1892).Both writers promoted extreme individualism and the act of creation.Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on "god-men", among whom he counted Christ, Joan of Arc, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and (later) Hitler.