His mother Varvara Vasilyevna (née Tcherkasova) was a daughter of a senior Saint Petersburg security official, and was fond of arts and literature.

[1][2] 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.

The family set up home in Crimea, where he found work as a botanist looking at varieties of grape; he also created a substantial collection of diatoms from the Black Sea.

In 1902, he returned to Russia to become curator of zoology at Kazan University; he became a lecturer there in 1904, and started to develop his ideas on the symbiotic origins of complex cells.

[8] 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 pedophilic utopian beliefs (reflected in his 1903 book of stories, Earthly Paradise, or a Winter Night's Dream.

As an atheist, his dreamed-of utopia was to be scientifically based, involving the evolution of a perfect human race of pedophiles held aloft by the enslavement of Africans, Asians, and others.

[15] Mereschkowski's ideas are according to K. V. Kowallik "strikingly"[11] reflected in the modern symbiogenesis theory developed and popularised by Ivan Wallin[15] and Lynn Margulis, and now widely accepted.