Zinaida Gippius

Leon Bakst Portrait of Gippius, 1906.

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, (Russian: Зинаи́да Никола́евна Ги́ппиус; 1869, Belyov - 1945) was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia". She was married to philosopher Dmitriy Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. Their union lasted 52 years and is described in Gippius' unfinished book Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Paris. 1951; Moscow., 1991).

Biography

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was born on November 20, 1869, in Belev, Tula, the oldest of four daughters. Her father, Nikolai Romanovich Gippius, a Geman-Russian (whose ancestors, von Hippius' came to Moscow in XVI century) was a renown lawyer and Procurator of the Russian Senate. Her mother, Anastasia Vasilevna (née Stepanova), was a daughter of Chief of Police in Ekaterinburg.

Emigration

Merezhkovsky and Gippius hoped for the demise of the bolshevik rule, but after they learned of Kolchak's defeat in Siberia and Denikin's defeat in the south of Russia, they decided to flee Petrograd. On 24 December 1919 together with their friend Dmitry Filosofov, and secretary V. Zlobin, they left the city as if going to present lectures to the Red Army regiments in Gomel, while in actuality, in January 1920 they defected to the territory occupied by Poland and settled for a while in Minsk. Here the Merezhkovskys lectured to the Russian immigrants and wrote political pamphlets in the Minsk Courier newspaper.

The tragedy of the life and work of a writer, destined to live outside of Russia is a constant topic in the later works of Gippius. In exile she remained faithful to the aesthetic and metaphysical mentality that she acquired in the pre-revolutionary years while involved in the Religion and Philosophy Assembly and Religion and Philosophy Society. She was preoccupied by mystical and covertly sexual themes. She was also an alert, if harsh literary critic and connoisseur of poetry, who became known for dismissing many of the Symbolist and Acmeist Russian writers. This made her unpopular with the younger generation in her time, but she is now recognized as one of Russia's most important women writers.

In exile Gippius republished several works which had previously been published in Russia. A collection of stories Nebesnye slova was published in Paris in 1921, a book of poems Stikhi: Dnevnik 1911-1912 was published in 1922 in Berlin, while in Munich a book by four authors (Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Filosofov, and Zlobin) Tsarstvo Antichrista (The Kingdom of the Antichrist) came out, where the first two parts of Peterburgskiye dnevniki (St. Petersburg Diaries) were published for the first time, and with an introductory article by Gippius "The Story of my Diary."

English Translations

• Apple Blossom, (Short Story), from Russian Short Stories, Senate, 1995.
• The Green Ring. (Play), C.W. Daniel LTD, London, 1920.

External links

• Collection of Poems by Zinaida Gippius (English Translations)
• English translations of 3 poems by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, 1921
• English translations of 4 miniatures from Last Poems, 1914-1918