Biography

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (1869−1945) was from a Russified German family; her father’s ancestors moved to Russia in the 19th century; mother is from Siberia. Due to the family's frequent moves (her father was a lawyer and held high positions), Z. Gippius did not receive a systematic education and attended educational institutions in fits and starts. Since childhood, I have been interested in “writing poetry and secret diaries.” In 1889, in Tiflis, she married D.S. Merezhkovsky, with whom she “lived for 52 years, without being separated for a single day.” Together with her husband, she moved to St. Petersburg that same year; here the Merezhkovsky couple made extensive literary acquaintances and soon took a prominent place in the artistic life of the capital.

Poems by Z. Gippius, published in the journal of “senior” symbolists “Northern Herald” - “Song” (“I need something that is not in the world ...”) and “Dedication” (with the lines: “I love myself like God” ) immediately became notorious. In 1904, “Collected Poems” was published. 1889−1893" and in 1910 - "Collected poems. Book 2. 1903−1909", united with the first book by the constancy of themes and images: the spiritual discord of a person, seeking a higher meaning in everything, a divine justification for a low earthly existence, but never finding sufficient reasons to reconcile and accept - neither the "heaviness of happiness" nor the renunciation of him.

In 1899-1901 Gippius worked closely with the magazine “World of Art”; in 1901-1904 she was one of the organizers and active participant in Religious and Philosophical meetings and the actual co-editor of the magazine “New Way”, where her smart and sharp critical articles were published under the pseudonym Anton Krainy, later becoming a leading critic of the magazine “Scales” (in 1908 selected articles published as a separate book - “Literary Diary”).

At the beginning of the century, the Merezhkovskys’ apartment became one of the centers cultural life Petersburg, where young poets underwent a difficult test through personal acquaintance with

"matress". Z. Gippius placed high, extreme demands on poetry for religious service to beauty and truth (“poems are prayers”). The collections of stories by Z. Gippius enjoyed much less success among readers and caused sharp attacks from critics.

The events of the Revolution of 1905−1907 became a turning point in the creative biography of Z. Gippius. If before this time socio-political issues were outside the sphere of interests of Z. Gippius, then after January 9, which, according to the writer, “turned her upside down”, current social issues, “civic motives” become dominant in her work, especially in prose. Z. Gippius and D. Merezhkovsky become irreconcilable opponents of the autocracy, fighters against the conservative state structure Russia (“Yes, autocracy is from the Antichrist,” writes Gippius at this time).

In February 1906 they left for Paris, where they spent more than two years. Here the Merezhkovsky spouses publish a collection of anti-monarchist articles on French, are getting closer to revolutionary circles, maintaining relations with B. Savinkov. Passion for politics did not cancel the mystical quest of Z. Gippius: the new slogan - “religious public” implied the unification of all the radical forces of the intelligentsia to solve the problem of renewing Russia.

Political preferences are reflected in the literary work of those years; the novels “The Devil's Doll” (1911) and “The Roman Tsarevich” (1912) are openly tendentious and “problematic.” The sharply changed life position of Z. Gippius manifested itself in an unusual way during the First World War, when she began to write “common” women’s letters stylized as popular prints to soldiers at the front, sometimes putting them in pouches, on behalf of three women (“pseudonyms” - first and last names three servants Z. Gippius). These poetic messages (“Fly, fly, gift,” “To the far side,” etc.), which were not of artistic value, had a great public resonance.

Z. Gippius accepted the October Revolution with hostility (collection “Last Poems. 1911−1918”, Pg., 1918) and at the beginning of 1920 she emigrated with her husband and settled in France. Two more of her poetry collections were published abroad: “Poems. Diary 1911−1921" (Berlin, 1922) and "Radiances" (Paris, 1939).

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was born on November 20, 1869 in the city of Belev, Tula region of the Russian Empire. Her paternal ancestors were German settlers, and her mother was Siberian.

Unfortunately, due to her father’s work and the associated moves, Zinaida was never able to receive a permanent education. However, from childhood she was distinguished by an enviable love of literature, writing poetry and secret diaries.

In 1881, her father dies of tuberculosis, and her mother decides to move the whole family to Borjomi. At the age of 18 she met D.S. Merezhkovsky and 2 years later in 1889 she married him. By the way, their marriage lasted, no less, 52 years. The Merezhkovskys immediately moved to St. Petersburg, where they soon took a prominent place in the cultural life of the capital.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Zinaida collaborated with the magazine “World of Art”, and a couple of years later she wrote her harsh critical articles under the pseudonym Anton Krainy. Revolution of 1905-1907 The Merezhkovskys do not accept it and act as obvious opponents. In February 1906 they had to go to Paris, where they spent the next two years of their life together. In France, they did not waste time, became close to revolutionary circles and published a collection of anti-monarchist articles in French.

They returned to their homeland only in 1908, but with the outbreak of the First World War they sharply spoke out against Russia’s participation in it. This is the only reason why Zinaida Gippius welcomes the revolution of 1917, hoping that it will put an end to the war. The Merezhkovskys establish close ties with the head of the Provisional Government, A.F. Kerensky, but quickly cease to trust him. In the early 20s, she and her husband had to leave the country and work abroad. Zinaida Nikolaevna passed away on September 9, 1945. She died far from her homeland, in Paris.

Today she would be called a gay icon. And she probably wouldn't mind. In the Silver Age they said about her: “The Decadent Madonna,” adding with irritation and admiration: “Devil!” A devilishly holy (or holy devilish) cocktail was boiling in Zinaida Gippius, thanks to which she also turned out to be a talented mystifier and director of fate.

Marriage of 52 years

- You're still sleeping? And my husband came. Get up! - Mom woke me up.
- Husband? What a surprise!
The marriage took place imperceptibly, as if casually. Nineteen-year-old Zinaida Gippius the next morning did not even remember that she got married. Wherein family union turned out to be super durable: for 52 years they were not separated for a single day.
My acquaintance with Merezhkovsky was short - several last days June, when Gippius arrived in Borjomi, and the first ten days of July. On the eleventh of July a change had already come in their relationship.
Dance evening, the hall is dark, stuffy, but the night is amazing, bright, cool, the trees in the park are silver from the moon. Zinaida and a graduate of the Faculty of Philology Dmitry Merezhkovsky walked further and further along the park alley from the sounds of music, passionately discussing the mournful poems of Merezhkovsky’s friend Nadson, a then popular poet, a young officer who died at more than twenty years old from tuberculosis. No matter what Dmitry spoke about, his opinions delighted the girl, and the imagery of his speeches captivated her. A serious young man with encyclopedic knowledge knew how to talk “interestingly about interesting things.”
Discussions about the high smoothly flowed into a conversation about how they would get married. Afterwards, remembering this evening more than once, especially during disagreements, of which there were many, Gippius asked herself whether it was out of coquetry that she did not object to him and did she really want to get married?
After all, she received marriage proposals more than once, and more than once she was in love. This happened for the first time at the age of 16. The hero of the unrest turned out to be a talented and handsome violinist, who actively showed interest in the young lady. True, at that time he did not yet know that he was mortally ill with tuberculosis, unlike Zina’s mother, who was against the development of any relationship and quickly took her daughter away from Tiflis.
In the summer in Borjomi, where the Gippius family was vacationing, young people went crazy about a tall, stately girl with golden hair and emerald eyes. Zinaida loved to dance, was interested in music, painting, and horse riding. And, of course, writing: she kept a diary and wrote poetry.
Subsequent loves caused despair in the well-read young lady. In her diary she wrote: “I’m in love with him, but I see that he’s a fool.”
Merezhkovsky was unlike anyone else. Returning from a walk that evening, Zinaida looked confused, and therefore stated bluntly: “Merezhkovsky proposed to me.”
- How, and him? – her Aunt Vera laughed, knowing how many suitors Zina had then.
– What did you answer him? - Mom asked.
- I? Nothing, and he didn’t even ask for an answer!
The next day - meeting with Merezhkovsky again and continuing the conversation as if nothing had happened. During the courtship, 23-year-old Merezhkovsky was infectiously cheerful with not evil, but more childish mockery. He talked about St. Petersburg and his travels, about his family, about how his father tested him for talent.
Dmitry Sergeevich was born into the family of an educated official, no stranger to literature. And in early years When Merezhkovsky began to write poetry, my father, a fundamental man, decided to check whether there was anything to bet on or whether it was just scribbling on paper. He went with young Dmitry to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Shortly before the writer's death. The apartment turned out to be littered with The Brothers Karamazov, pale Dostoevsky, having listened to the verses of the young rhyme-weaver, said: “Bad, no good. To write, you have to suffer. Suffer!"
“Well, Fyodor Mikhailovich,” said the father, “then it’s better not to write, as long as he doesn’t suffer. Why does he need this?
But Dmitry Sergeevich did not listen to either his father or Dostoevsky. In his life he had to write a lot and suffer.
Although he visited Gippius more than once, no official announcement about the future wedding was made. Zinaida and Dmitry considered all kinds of weddings and feasts too bourgeois, everything should be simpler without white dresses and veils.
The wedding was scheduled for January 8, 1889. It was a sunny and cold morning in Tiflis. Zinaida and her mother went to the St. Michael's Church, closest to the house, as if for a walk. The bride is wearing a dark steel-colored suit and the same small hat with a pink lining. Dear mother said excitedly: “You were born on the 8th, on the day of the Archangel Michael, with the first strike of the cathedral bell in St. Michael’s Cathedral. Now you’re going to get married on the 8th in the Church of the Archangel Michael.” The newlywed did not react to anything: she was either calm or stupefied. It seemed to her that what was happening was not too serious. The groom also looked casual: in a frock coat and the so-called “Nikolaev” overcoat with a cape and beaver collar. It was indecent to get married in an overcoat, so he took it off. The ceremony passed quickly: there were no singers, no people, and the solemn “let the wife fear her husband” quietly disappeared under the arches of the church.
Then the newlyweds went on foot to Gippius’s home. An ordinary breakfast awaited them there. True, either my mother or my aunt decided to celebrate the wedding, although not a grand one, and champagne appeared. It became more cheerful, only my mother was sad in anticipation of separation. Then the guests - the aunt and the groomsmen - went home, and the day passed quite normally. Zinaida and Dmitry continued reading yesterday's book, then had lunch. In the evening, her former French governess accidentally came in and almost fell out of her chair in surprise when her mother, pouring tea, casually remarked: “Zina got married today.”
Merezhkovsky went to his hotel quite early, and the newlywed went to bed and forgot that she was married. I forgot so much that the next morning I barely remembered when my mother shouted to her through the door: “My husband has come!”

Bi or homo?

In 1889, after the wedding, she and her husband moved to St. Petersburg, where Zinaida began active literary activity.
With her golden-red mane of hair, enveloping her fragile figure to her toes, Gippius put men into a daze. Knowing this, she hid such luxury in her “casette.” “Communication with her was like hay catching fire in a drought,” recalled the then popular writer Andrei Bely. “...Beautiful? Oh, undoubtedly,” Gippius wrote about literary critic Sergei Makovsky.
And she knew that she was very beautiful. And she knew how to please men. Outwardly, she was the embodiment of weakness, tenderness, and femininity. A pretty girl, naive and flirtatious in her youth. With her husband, while waiting for guests, she lay down on the carpet in the living room and got carried away playing the fool or appeared to everyone with a duck doll in her arms. The duck, according to her plan, symbolized the separation of spouses who considered sexual intercourse vulgar.
So was there real love in Zinaida’s life with ardent confessions, vows and tears, and not a “comedy” that she often played out? Perhaps the answer to this question is her stormy romance in the early 1890s with two people at once - the symbolist poet Nikolai Minsky and the playwright and prose writer Fyodor Chervinsky, a university acquaintance of Merezhkovsky? Minsky loved her passionately, and Gippius, in her words, was in love “with herself through him.”
In 1894, Zinaida Nikolaevna began a romantic relationship with Akim Flexer, a famous critic and ideologist of the Northern Messenger magazine. It was he who first published Gippius’s poems, which no publication wanted to take. Long cooperation gradually grew into friendship, then into passion.
“And I can’t live without you... We gave too much to each other. And I ask God as a mercy, that He teach my heart not to love!”
“...God, how I would like everyone to love you!.. I mixed my soul with yours, and praise and blasphemy of you affect me as if addressed to myself. I didn't notice how everything had changed. Now I want everyone to recognize a significant person who loves me..."
“...I want to connect the ends of life, make a full circle, I want love not as it happens, but... as it should be and which one is worthy of you and me. This is not pleasure, not happiness - this is a lot of work, not everyone is capable of it. But you are capable - and it’s a sin, and it would be a shame to turn such a gift from God into something fun and unnecessary...”
To understand love in all its manifestations, you need to search, fall in love and make many people fall in love with you. different people, Gippius believed. Her sensuality was not satisfied. Conversations in the hospitable house of the Merezhkovskys with a tall, slender hostess with emerald eyes, a cascade of hair, quick movements, small steps turning into a sliding run, dragged on all night.
Zinaida was interested not only in men, but also in women. There were rumors about her that she was bisexual (loves both men and women) or even a lesbian (loves members of the same sex). In the late 1890s, Gippius was in a close relationship with the English Baroness Elisabeth von Overbeck. As a composer, she collaborated with Merezhkovsky - she wrote music for the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles translated by him, which were staged at the Alexandrinsky Theater. Gippius dedicated several poems to the Baroness.
Today your name I'll hide
And I won’t say it out loud to others.
But you will hear that I am with you,
Again you - alone - I live.
In the humid sky the star is huge,
Its edges tremble - flowing.
And I look into the night, and my heart remembers,
That this night is yours, yours!
Let me see my dear eyes again,
Look into their depth - and breadth - and blue.
Earthly heart on the great night
In his melancholy - oh, don’t leave!
And more and more greedily, more and more steadily
It calls - one - you.
Take my heart in your palms,
Warm - comfort - comfort, loving...
“Oh, if I could completely lose this possibility of voluptuous dirt, which, I know, lurks in me, which I don’t even understand, because even with voluptuousness, with all sensuality, I don’t want a certain shape love,” Gippius exclaimed theatrically.
For a decade and a half before the 1905 revolution, Zinaida appears as a promoter of sexual emancipation, proudly bearing the “cross of sensuality.”
In one of the stories “You are You,” Gippius depicted an unexpected meeting of her hero with a seemingly random girl. In her he recognizes the friend who was sent to him from above. In a restaurant in Nice, where he is sitting at dinner, a group of masked mummers suddenly appears, among whom Martynov finds his chosen one: “I looked at the thin slender hands, at the eyes sparkling from pink velvet. They looked at me too, those eyes. But then she slowly raised her mask... As soon as it happened, I understood why I couldn’t tear myself away from her: because I was in love, yes, in love, precisely in love, precisely with her, and with no one else. It was she who was the secret joy that I was waiting for all the time. It seemed to me that I had already seen her face somewhere: I must have dreamed about it.” And she answers him: “I’ve known you for a long time, I’ve loved you for a long time.” The meeting ordained from above took place. Recognition has occurred.
Like an immature teenager, Gippius tried to combine the two aspects of love, but any attempt to dwell on the purity and innocence of this feeling ran into its sinfulness. She was carried away more than once in search of “fire and purity.”
One of the unsuccessful experiments to gain “the flesh and beauty of the world” was the young professor of the Theological Academy Anton Kartashev. Smart, strange, talkative.
A thought flashed through Gippius: this eccentric, as if thirsty for culture, is a virgin! He preserved the old sacred thing and did not throw it out into the street. Kartashev's virginity was supposed, according to Gippius, to reconcile her quest for love. And her theory was practically confirmed: Gippius kissed Kartashev, who asked to pray for him. This request proved the purity of his love. But the happiness did not last long. Soon Gippius experienced bitter disappointment: the purity of Kartashev’s love (in 1917 he would become the Minister of Religions of the Provisional Government) gave way to passion. Saying goodbye on the dark threshold of her apartment, he no longer asked to pray, but began to kiss her greedily. The next experiment was unsuccessful.
Her search for love on the outside does not mean that she did not love her husband. The relationship with Dmitry Merezhkovsky was platonic, imbued with metaphysics. Both said more than once that their meeting was mystical in nature and was predestined from above. The unbreakable alliance between Gippius and Merezhkovsky was not broken by any of her hobbies. Maybe because, while quickly gaining power over those in love with her, she could never fully surrender to love?
Merezhkovsky became her companion, friend, and ally for the rest of her life, just as she was for him. “I love D.S. “You know better than anyone how—I couldn’t live without him for two days, I need him like air.”
Most of those around them were perplexed: how could this small man, fragile, shorter than his wife, greatly advanced - he did not give the impression of a powerful creator or thinker, keep such an extravagant lady next to him? These actors, writers, poets did not know what hurricanes were raging in his soul. He wrote a lot about love, but outwardly he gave the impression of an impassive person.
Gippius, who did not feel the emotional side of the relationship, loved Love in general. In her diary, she reasons: “Why do I always go to Love? I don't know; Maybe this is all because none of them really loved me? Dmitry Sergeevich’s love is also not like that, not “my” love. Lord, how I love some kind of Love.”
Zinaida considered Merezhkovsky unequal to herself: he is highly spiritual, while she is physical and sensual. How to get rid of the “voluptuous dirt” in physical love? Why do people pay so much attention to the body?
But Gippius was also a philosopher. A philosopher is characterized by an outside view: not only to love, but also to reflect on what this feeling is. The theme of love is the main one in Gippius’s diaries from 1893 to 1904. And what else can a young woman write about? Of course, there is also the usual coquetry in them. But many of the arguments completely contradict the idea of ​​what should be in the diary of a beautiful lady surrounded by admirers. Gippius writes a lot about “unconventional” love. She believes that human nature is bisexual. Masculine and feminine principles are not divided according to gender. That is, in one there is more masculine, in the other – feminine, so intuitively everyone feels something close to themselves in the other, although, perhaps, to a different degree. The personality, when viewed in this way, appears androgynous. Moreover, the writer most often depicts male types in a simplified manner, while female ones, on the contrary, depicts them subtly and with love. He sympathizes with his heroines in a feminine way, whether we are talking about a revolutionary populist in “The Roman Tsarevich” or an actress with a broken fate in “The Winners”, about a restless orphan from an “orphanage” in “A Simple Life”, or about a young Japanese woman, yielding to the love advances of her Russian adoptive father in “Japanese.”
At the same time, in real life Zinaida Nikolaevna acted as if she despised women's mental and moral qualities. She provoked the women she knew to envy, hostility, and gossip - and succeeded in this. Her ironic assessments, painful for the impressionable creative people, her famous golden lorgnette, which she pointed at her interlocutor, as if taking aim, they could not forgive her many years later, even after her death.
- Evening of poets? Just ladies? No, excuse me, I was once invited to such an evening in St. Petersburg, Marietta Shaginyan, it seems. By phone. I answered her: “Sorry, I don’t unite based on gender.”
She recognizes her acting in the famous “snake” motifs:
...She is rough, she is prickly,
She's cold, she's a snake.
I was wounded by a disgustingly burning
Her cranked scales.
(...) And this one is dead, and this one is black,
And this terrible one is my soul!
This image was skillfully constructed and introduced into the consciousness of his contemporaries. Gippius carefully thought through her social and literary behavior, which boiled down to changing different roles.

Hermaphrodite?

Many contemporaries considered her a hermaphrodite. “In my thoughts, my desires, in my spirit, I am more a man, in my body, I am more a woman. But they are so merged that I don’t know anything,” she wrote about herself. Throughout her life, Gippius, with her characteristic asceticism, tried to renounce femininity as an unnecessary weakness. Nature really endowed her with an analytical, masculine mindset. According to contemporaries, Gippius amazed with her piercingly sharp conclusions, consciousness and even the cult of her exclusivity. By the way, most often she wrote poetry on behalf of a man, and signed her articles with numerous pseudonyms, usually male (the most famous is Anton Krainy). With pleasure, Zinaida Nikolaevna shocked the audience by appearing dressed extremely extravagantly as a man. She was not afraid of men's outfits - jackets, bows, page boys, which at that time was unheard of insolence.
In a camisole and trousers, reclining on a chair, her long crossed legs are stretched diagonally across the canvas, making the whole figure seem more elongated, she is depicted in the famous portrait of Lev Bakst. On her pale face, bordered by a white frill, under narrow, sharply defined eyebrows, there are slightly mocking and contemptuous eyes, thin lips, which she always painted brightly. She wanted to amaze, attract, enchant, conquer. (“I love myself as I love God,” she wrote in an early poem “Dedication”).
By the way, in those days, at the end of the 19th century, such heavy makeup was not accepted. And Zinaida blushed and whitened thickly, openly, as actresses do for the stage. This gave her face the appearance of a mask, emphasizing a certain artificiality.
She was often photographed with a cigarette in her hands. She smoked a lot and willingly. Thereby constantly declaring the bisexuality of Love. At the same time, she remarked quite femininely about her deeply religious sisters - Anna, Tatyana and Natalya: “... very beautiful, but of an ascetic type. Not a single one thought about marriage.”
There was a lot of strange talk about the Merezhkovsky couple. Vladimir Solovyov expressed the opinion of most of his contemporaries about Gippius as follows:
I am a young satire
I am a demon.
I live entirely for fun
Teles.
I'm melting hooves under my skirt
And the tail...
Someone will look at them angrily
- Scoundrel!
In the night under Maundy Thursday 1901 Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Filosofov and she, in improvised “priestly” robes, shared bread and wine with each other at the “Last Supper,” which marked the founding of the “Church of the Three,” which seemed to them the beginning of a new universal unity, new era divine revelation to the world.
And I'm so kind
If I fall in love, I'll suck it in.
I'm like a gentle cobra,
Caressing, I will wrap myself.
The tragedy of same-sex love clearly emerges in the relationship between Gippius and Filosofov, who was a homosexual. This can be seen from his letter to her: “...With a terrible aspiration towards you with all my spirit, with all my being, a kind of hatred for your flesh grew in me, rooted in something physiological...”. Gippius called Filosofov Dima, and he called her Merezhkovskaya. Nevertheless, this man remained significant in her life. After decades, she dedicated one of her last poems to him:
Once upon a time, she loved me
His Psyche, his Love.
But he did not know what the Spirit told
He is not flesh and blood about this.
He considered Psyche to be his deception,
Its truth is only flesh and blood.
I followed them, not her,
Hoping to find Love with them.
But he lost his Psyche,
And what happened will not happen again.
Psyche left, and with her
I lost his love.
But this did not stop the three of them from living together: the Merezhkovskys and the literary critic Philosophers. In the famous house of Muruzi, on the corner of Liteiny and Panteleimonovskaya, a special ritual of such existence has developed. Along with the “marriage” of the Merezhkovskys and Filosofov, another “triple union” also took shape there. His “spouses” were Zinaida Nikolaevna’s two younger sisters – Tatyana and Natalya and Kartashev.
The enthusiastic Merezhkovsky believed that these new family formations would represent the embryo of a “triple structure of the world,” the so-called Kingdom of the Third Testament, which should replace Christianity. At the everyday level, they hoped to create a kind of community, an intellectual mini-commune, which would combine the intimate connection of its members and the closeness of their worldviews.
The formation of the triad, or, as it was called, the “holy trinity,” was a challenge to society. The three of them living together looked downright shocking. Then they were joined by their secretary Zlobin, who lived with them for about thirty years, writing a wonderful book about Gippius, “Heavy Soul,” as well as wonderful poems in memory of Merezhkovsky and Gippius.
In general in Russia Silver Age homosexuality was at the level of an ideological trend. At the beginning of the 20th century, same-sex love was considered fashionable among the artistic elite. Their contemporary, St. Petersburg artist Alexander Benois was surprised: “I was especially amazed that those of my friends who belonged to supporters of “same-sex love” now did not hide it at all and even talked about it with a touch of some kind of propaganda...”

Is the glass half empty or full?

Until his old age, Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky used to say, not without pleasure, that he, “thanks to God, did not kill anyone or give birth to anyone.” Vyach. Ivanov, with his characteristic paradox, stated that Gippius, even in marriage, “is actually a girl, because she could never give herself to a man, no matter how much she loved him. (...) And this is drama for her, for she is a tender and passionate woman. Mother by vocation."
It is characteristic that Gippius, who accepted her husband’s attitude from the first day, never discussed this side of their life together.
The unusual nature of the marriage is emphasized by the fact that it united people not just different, but opposite in character. Despite the fact that Zinaida Nikolaevna constantly wore the psychological mask of a mannered, fractured, “aesthetic” society lady, the owner of popular salons (in her old age, she jokingly called herself “the grandmother of Russian decadence”), there was a lot of earthly, carnal things in her. It was the maternal grief of the Merezhkovskys’ young maid, Pasha, that prompted twenty-year-old Zinaida to write her first story - “ Simple life" And twenty years later, the description of a young mother over the grave of her first-born son will end her novel about revolutionaries with a piercing note.
“ - What is this... Ilyushechka... Curly. The shards are now... Where to now?
And the watchman keeps tugging at my sleeve.
- Let's go, honey, let's go... Christ is with him. Let's go, have some tea and remember. Let's go quickly.
The blue round bowl above them, above the bright cemetery, above the gray log church - the blue bowl is so clean, so affectionate. The promise of spring is so true.
...Next to the fresh, damp hump there are other humps, large and small, crowded together; there is yellow dead grass on them, and in places between them the snow turns white. And something else is whitening in the middle of the dark lumps of earth.
- What is this, aunty? - says Mashka, looking closer. - Like bones...
“These are little shards, my dear, little shards... Also, apparently, there was a baby... We have a lot of these...”
The grief of mothers becomes one of the main themes for Gippius during the First World War. Her maternal nature finds not only tragic expression. Before the revolution, her play “The Green Ring”, which was born from live communication with St. Petersburg high school students, was a great success. In 1914-1916, every Sunday a circle of teenagers (up to forty people at a time) gathered at Zinaida’s place. “I love the smart and real and indifferently forget the unnecessary,” she said on this occasion.
The list of young writers who came out through her apartment includes many bright and famous names.
“As a friend, as a comrade, as a partner in joy and sorrow, Zinaida Nikolaevna was unique. Her thoughtfulness extended to the condition of your shoes, to the defects of your linen... Living concrete details in the life of her neighbor always occupied her... - recalled literary and theater critic Akim Volynsky. “Of all the women I have met in my life, the most extraordinary was Zinaida Gippius.”
She wanted to appear to be something she really wasn't. Alone with her interlocutor, face to face, she became a person open to everything, essentially unsure of anything and with some kind of unquenchable thirst, with an infallible ear for everything.
Zinaida was descended from German nobles on her father’s side, but they had already lived in Russia for three hundred years; on her mother’s side, she was the granddaughter of Vasily Stepanov, the chief of police of Yekaterinburg. She was born in 1869 in the town of Belov, Tula province, where her father came after graduating from the Faculty of Law at Moscow University. They constantly moved from place to place, following their father's career changes. The girl was unable to complete her studies at the Fischer Gymnasium in Moscow, the reason was sudden onset of tuberculosis, and her parents took her to Crimea and then to Tiflis. Due to lung disease, Gippius did not receive a systematic education. She lived with her mother in Yalta and the Caucasus.
She said: “You don’t know Russia as well as I do,” “I know what it smells like in third grade...”.

And the Motherland was gone

Gippius called the October Revolution the power of darkness, the kingdom of the devil. “Executed Moscow submitted to the Bolsheviks. Capitals are taken by enemy - and barbarian - troops. There is nowhere to run. There is no homeland." Hatred of the revolution forced Zinaida to break with Blok, Bryusov, and Andrei Bely.
The Merezhkovskys, unlike most domestic cultural figures, reacted negatively to Russia’s entry into the First World War. In this she closely agrees with her sworn literary and ideological enemy, Vladimir Mayakovsky. From the second half of 1917 until the end of 1919, the Merezhkovskys lived in Petrograd, in the center of the developing events. Gippius's diaries, day after day, reflect the tragic picture of what was happening: “dog meat” is sold on the market by speculators under the counter. Costs 50 rubles per pound. A dead mouse costs two rubles, etc.
The Merezhkovskys hoped to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, but after the defeat of General Yudenich near Petrograd they decided to flee to Europe. “...How would you know that there is no hope...” she will write.
Together with their closest friend Filosofov and secretary V.A. Zlobin, the Merezhkovskys left Petrograd supposedly to give lectures in the Red Army units of Gomel. In February 1920 they moved to Warsaw. There they developed vigorous activity, organized a newspaper, and made plans to liberate Russia from the Bolsheviks. It took two years to understand the futility of the plan. In 1922, the Merezhkovskys settled in Paris. Filosofov, who lived with them for about 15 years, remained in Warsaw until the end of his life.
Since 1925, the Parisian apartment of Gippius has become one of the most attractive places in Russian cultural life. Literary Sundays resumed there, and since 1927, regular literary, religious and philosophical meetings “The Green Lamp” began. There they restored acquaintance with K. Balmont, I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, N. Berdyaev, Vyacheslav Ivanov. At the very first meeting, she made an indelible impression on Bunin: “Amazingly thin, an angel in a snow-white robe and with golden flowing hair, along whose bare arms something like either sleeves or wings fell to the floor.”
Despite the fact that in emigration they could not afford to live in grand style, as in St. Petersburg, buying perfume and gloves was always in the first place. In Paris, she could no longer be called a trendsetter. But she did not lose interest in beautiful, extravagant clothes. Even at 50, she was bold in her choice of dresses: she really loved transparent ones. She shocked the audience by appearing either in white from head to toe, or in black. Her last were the old diplomat Loris-Melikov and the poet Mamchenko.
She is faithful to her manner of speaking out contrary to generally accepted opinions, defeating the enemy with evil remarks, and showing concern for human destinies. Until recently, Gippius supported charity evenings, for example, in order to help financially Balmont, whose mother was seriously ill. Gippius' older sister, Anna, is also actively involved in the life of the Russian Orthodox community in Paris. Son cousin Zinaida Nikolaevna, priest Dimitry Klepinin, together with his mother Maria (Skobtsova), saved dozens of Jewish families from death during the German occupation. For this, in February 1944, he suffered martyrdom in a concentration camp.
In general, the 40s were bitter not only in world history, but also in the fate of Zinaida Nikolaevna. In 1940, she lost Filosofov, and on December 9, 1941, in German-occupied France, her husband. Dmitry Merezhkovsky lived to be 76 years old.
She took his death very hard. She even tried to commit suicide. “I’m dead, all that’s left to die is my body,” Gippius repeated. The history of literature, perhaps, does not know a second similar case when two people were so much one. They both admitted that they did not know where his thoughts began and where hers ended. Merezhkovsky left 24 volumes of his works. Love? Creative union? Spiritual community? In the book “Dmitry Merezhkovsky” she wrote: “The connection of our lives.”
The debate still rages: who was in charge in this pair? Outwardly, they were strikingly incompatible with each other. He is short, with a narrow sunken chest, in an antediluvian frock coat. Black, deep-set eyes burned with an alarming fire, a half-gray, freely growing beard and a slight squeal when irritated. He behaved with an undeniable sense of superiority and sprinkled quotes from the Bible and from pagan philosophers. And next to him is a seductive, elegant person with an expressive appearance.
Zinaida Nikolaevna was the soul of the union. It was she who suggested many ideas to her husband, and he developed them and made them public.
She also had a clear, thoughtful structure of the family and home. Merezhkovsky always worked in the morning, walked, then worked again. She said that what was surprising in his character was the complete absence of laziness. He didn't even understand what it was. She herself valued time no less.
Left alone, Gippius wrote the book “Dmitry Merezhkovsky,” which was not easy for her. It took away from her right hand. Last entry in the diary: “How wise and just God is.”
Her very last friend was a cat. She always sat on Zinaida Nikolaevna's lap. She got used to it and, dying, no longer opening her eyes, kept looking for her with her hands.
On the evening of September 1, 1945, Father Vasily Zenkovsky administered communion to Gippius. She understood little, but she swallowed the communion.
On September 9, Zinaida Nikolaevna was sitting in bed, it was difficult for her to breathe. Suddenly a light flashed in her unseeing eyes. She looked, as in years past, with endless tenderness and gratitude in her eyes. Two tears flowed down my cheeks. On the threshold of old age, the poetess admitted:
...I only regret one thing: the games...
Even wisdom cannot replace it.
The game is the most mysterious of all
And more selfless in the world.
She is always for nothing
How children laugh at nothing...
With her outrageousness and inventing sensations, she ensured that she is still talked about as a secret. She understood perfectly well that all the rumors, sometimes of the most scandalous nature, would continue after her death. Even the official ban of Soviet censorship on the study of Gippius’s creative heritage until the early 90s, it seems, also took place thanks to her plan.

Larisa Sinenko

Gippius Zinaida Nikolaevna
Born: November 8 (20), 1869.
Died: September 9, 1945.

Biography

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (after her husband Merezhkovskaya; November 8, 1869, Belyov, Russian empire- September 9, 1945, Paris, France) - Russian poetess and writer, playwright and literary critic, one of the prominent representatives of the “Silver Age” of Russian culture. Gippius, who formed one of the most original and creatively productive marital unions in the history of literature with D. S. Merezhkovsky, is considered the ideologist of Russian symbolism.

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was born on November 8 (20), 1869 in the city of Belev (now Tula region) into a Russified German noble family. Father, Nikolai Romanovich Gippius, a famous lawyer, served for some time as chief prosecutor in the Senate; mother, Anastasia Vasilievna, nee Stepanova, was the daughter of the Yekaterinburg chief of police. Due to the necessity associated with her father’s work, the family often moved from place to place, which is why the daughter did not receive a full education; She visited various educational institutions in fits and starts, preparing for exams with governesses.

The future poetess began writing poetry at the age of seven. In 1902, in a letter to Valery Bryusov, she noted: “In 1880, that is, when I was 11 years old, I was already writing poetry (and I really believed in inspiration and tried to write immediately, without lifting the pen from the paper). My poems seemed to everyone to be depraved, but I did not hide them. I must make a reservation that I was not at all spoiled and very religious despite all this ... ": 71. [~ 1] At the same time, the girl read voraciously, kept extensive diaries, and willingly corresponded with her father's acquaintances and friends. One of them, General N. S. Drashusov, was the first to pay attention to the young talent and advised her to take literature seriously.

Already the girl’s first poetic exercises were characterized by the darkest moods. “I have been wounded by death and love since childhood,” Gippius later admitted. As one of the poetess’s biographers noted, “... the time in which she was born and raised - the seventies and eighties - did not leave any imprint on her. From the beginning of her days, she lives as if outside of time and space, busy almost from the cradle with solving eternal questions.” Subsequently, in a humorous poetic autobiography, Gippius admitted: “I decided - the question is huge - / I followed a logical path, / I decided: numen and phenomenon / In what ratio?”:70. Vladimir Zlobin (the secretary who spent most of his life next to the poetess) subsequently noted:

Everything that she knows and feels at seventy, she already knew and felt at seven, without being able to express it. “All love is conquered, swallowed up by death,” she wrote at the age of 53... And if, as a four-year-old child, she cries so bitterly over her first love failure, it is because she felt with the utmost acuteness that there would be no love, as she felt after the death of her father that will die.

V. A. Zlobin. Heavy soul. 1970.:71 N. R. Gippius was sick with tuberculosis; As soon as he received the post of chief prosecutor, he felt a sharp deterioration and was forced to urgently leave with his family to Nizhyn, in the Chernigov province, to a new place of service, the chairman of the local court. Zinaida was sent to the Kiev Women's Institute, but some time later they were forced to take her back: the girl was so homesick that she spent almost the entire six months in the institute's infirmary. Since there was no girls’ gymnasium in Nizhyn, she studied at home, with teachers from the local Gogol Lyceum.

Nikolai Gippius died suddenly in Nizhyn in 1881; the widow stayed with big family- four daughters (Zinaida, Anna, Natalya and Tatyana), grandmother and unmarried sister - practically without a livelihood. In 1882, Anastasia Vasilievna and her daughters moved to Moscow. Zinaida entered the Fischer gymnasium, where she began to study at first willingly and with interest. Soon, however, doctors discovered tuberculosis in her, which is why she had to leave the educational institution. " Small man With great grief“- these were the words they remembered here for a girl who constantly wore the stamp of sadness on her face.

Fearing that all the children who had inherited a tendency towards consumption from their father might follow his path, and especially worried about her eldest daughter, Anastasia Gippius left with the children for Yalta. The trip to Crimea not only satisfied the love of travel that had developed in the girl since childhood, but also provided her with new opportunities to do two of her favorite things: horse riding and literature. From here, in 1885, the mother took her daughters to Tiflis, to her brother Alexander. He had sufficient funds to rent a dacha for his niece in Borjomi, where she settled with a friend. Only here, after a boring Crimean treatment, in a whirlwind of “fun, dancing, poetic competitions, horse racing,” was Zinaida able to recover from the severe shock associated with the loss of her father. A year later, two large families went to Manglis, and here A.V. Stepanov died suddenly of brain inflammation. The Gippiuses were forced to stay in Tiflis.

In 1888, Zinaida Gippius and her mother again went to their dacha in Borjomi. Here she met D.S. Merezhkovsky, who had recently published his first book of poetry and was traveling around the Caucasus in those days. Feeling an instant spiritual and intellectual closeness with her new acquaintance, who was sharply different from her environment, eighteen-year-old Gippius without hesitation agreed to his marriage proposal. On January 8, 1889, a modest wedding ceremony took place in Tiflis, followed by a short honeymoon. The union with Merezhkovsky, as noted later, “gave meaning and a powerful stimulus to all her gradually occurring internal activities, soon allowing the young beauty to break out into vast intellectual spaces,” and in a broader sense, played a crucial role in the development and formation of the literature of the “Silver Age” .

Beginning of literary activity

At first, Gippius and Merezhkovsky entered into an unspoken agreement: she would write exclusively prose, and he would write poetry. For some time, the wife, at the request of her husband, translated (in the Crimea) Byron’s “Manfred”; the attempt was unsuccessful. Finally, Merezhkovsky announced that he himself was going to break the agreement: he had the idea of ​​a novel about Julian the Apostate. From that time on, they wrote both poetry and prose, depending on their mood.

In St. Petersburg, Merezhkovsky introduced Gippius with famous writers: the first of them, A. N. Pleshcheev, “charmed” a twenty-year-old girl by bringing some poems from the editor’s portfolio of Severny Vestnik (where he was in charge of the poetry department) during one of his return visits for her “trial” strict": 100. Among Gippius’ new acquaintances were Ya. P. Polonsky, A. N. Maikov, D. V. Grigorovich, P. I. Weinberg; she became close to the young poet N. M. Minsky and the editors of Severny Vestnik, one of the central figures in which was the critic A. L. Volynsky. The first literary experiments were associated with this magazine, which was oriented toward a new direction “from positivism to idealism.” writers. During these days, she was actively in contact with the editors of many metropolitan magazines, attended public lectures and literary evenings, met the Davydov family, who played important role in the literary life of the capital (A. A. Davydova published the magazine “The World of God”), attended the Shakespeare circle of V. D. Spasovich, whose participants were famous lawyers (in particular, Prince A. I. Urusov), became a member-employee of the Russian Literary society.

In 1888, two “semi-childish” poems, as she recalled, were published in Severny Vestnik (signed “Z.G.”). These and some subsequent poems by the aspiring poetess reflected “ general situation pessimism and melancholy of the 1880s” and were in many ways consonant with the works of the then popular Semyon Nadson.

At the beginning of 1890, Gippius, impressed by the little love drama that played out before her eyes, the main characters of which were the Merezhkovskys’ maid, Pasha and “family friend” Nikolai Minsky, wrote the story “A Simple Life.” Unexpectedly (because this magazine did not favor Merezhkovsky at that time), the story was accepted by Vestnik Evropy, publishing it under the title “The Ill-Fated”: this is how Gippius made her debut in prose.

New publications followed, in particular, the stories “In Moscow” and “Two Hearts” (1892), as well as novels (“Without a Talisman”, “Winners”, “Small Waves”), both in the Northern Messenger and in “Bulletin of Europe”, “Russian Thought” and other well-known publications. “I don’t remember these novels, not even the titles, except one called Shallow Waves. What kind of waves these were - I have no idea and am not responsible for them. But we both rejoiced at the necessary replenishment of our budget, and the freedom necessary for Dmitry Sergeevich for Julian was achieved by this”:93, Gippius later wrote. Many critics, however, took this period of the writer’s work more seriously than she herself, noting “the duality of man and being itself, the angelic and demonic principles, the view of life as a reflection of the unattainable spirit” as the main themes, as well as the influence of F. M. Dostoevsky. Gippius's early prose works were met with hostility by liberal and populist critics, who were disgusted, first of all, by the “unnaturalness, unprecedentedness, and pretentiousness of the heroes.” Later "New encyclopedic Dictionary“Noted that Gippius’s first works were “written under the obvious influence of the ideas of Ruskin, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and other thought leaders of that time.” Gippius's early prose was collected in two books: “New People” (St. Petersburg, 1896) and “Mirrors” (St. Petersburg, 1898).

All this time, Gippius was plagued by health problems: she suffered from relapsing fever and a series of “endless sore throats and laryngitis.” Partly to improve their health and prevent a tuberculosis relapse, but also for reasons related to creative aspirations, the Merezhkovskys made two memorable trips to southern Europe in 1891-1892. During the first of them, they communicated with A.P. Chekhov and A.S. Suvorin, who became their companions for some time, and visited Pleshcheev in Paris. During the second trip, stopping in Nice, the couple met Dmitry Filosofov, who several years later became their constant companion and closest like-minded person: 400. Subsequently, Italian impressions occupied important place in Gippius’s memoirs, superimposed on the bright and sublime moods of her “happiest, youngest years.” Meanwhile, the financial situation of the couple, who lived almost exclusively on royalties, remained difficult during these years. “Now we are in a terrible, unprecedented situation. We have been literally living from hand to mouth for several days now and have pawned our wedding rings,” she reported in one of her letters in 1894 (in another, complaining that she could not drink the kefir prescribed by doctors due to lack of money):115.

Poetry Gippius

Much more striking and controversial than prose was Gippius’s poetic debut: poems published in Severny Vestnik - “Song” (“I need something that is not in the world...”) and “Dedication” (with the lines: “I love I consider myself as God") immediately became notorious. “Her poems are the embodiment of the soul of modern man, split, often powerlessly reflective, but always rushing, always anxious, not putting up with anything and not settling for anything,” one of the critics later noted. Some time later, Gippius, in her words, “renounced decadence” and fully accepted Merezhkovsky’s ideas, primarily artistic, becoming one of the central figures of the emerging Russian symbolism, however, the established stereotypes (“decadent Madonna”, “Sataness”, “white devil” etc.) haunted her for many years.

If in prose she consciously focused “on the general aesthetic taste,” then Gippius perceived poetry as something extremely intimate, created “for herself” and created them, in her own words, “like a prayer.” “The natural and most necessary need of the human soul is always prayer. God created us with this need. Every person, whether he realizes it or not, strives for prayer. Poetry in general, versification in particular, verbal music is only one of the forms that prayer takes in our Soul. Poetry, as Baratynsky defined it, “is a complete feeling of a given moment,” the poetess wrote in her essay “The Necessary of Poems.”

In many ways, it was “prayerfulness” that gave critics a reason to attack: it was argued, in particular, that by turning to the Almighty (under the names He, the Invisible, the Third), Gippius established with him “her own, direct and equal, blasphemous relations,” postulating “not only love for God, but also for oneself.” For the wider literary community, the name Gippius became a symbol of decadence - especially after the publication of “Dedication” (1895), a poem that contained the defiant line: “I love myself like God.” It was noted that Gippius, largely provoking the public herself, carefully thought through her social and literary behavior, which amounted to changing several roles, and skillfully introduced an artificially formed image into public consciousness. For a decade and a half before the 1905 revolution, she appeared before the public - first as a propagandist of sexual liberation, proudly bearing the “cross of sensuality” (as her 1893 diary put it); then - an opponent of the “teaching Church”, who argued that “there is only one sin - self-abasement” (diary 1901), a champion of the revolution of the spirit, carried out in defiance of the “herd society”. “Criminality” and “forbiddenness” in the work and image (according to the popular cliche) of the “decadent Madonna” were especially vividly discussed by contemporaries: it was believed that Gippius coexisted “a demonic, explosive principle, a craving for blasphemy, a challenge to the peace of an established way of life, spiritual obedience and humility “, and the poetess, “flirtying with her demonism” and feeling herself the center of symbolist life, both him and life itself “perceived as an extraordinary experiment in the transformation of reality.”

"Collected poems. 1889-1903,” published in 1904, became a major event in the life of Russian poetry. Responding to the book, I. Annensky wrote that Gippius’s work concentrated “the entire fifteen-year history of lyrical modernism,” noting as the main theme of her poems “the painful swing of the pendulum in the heart.” V. Ya. Bryusov, another ardent admirer of Gippius’s poetic work, especially noted the “invincible truthfulness” with which the poetess recorded various emotional states and the life of his “captive soul.” However, Gippius herself was more than critical of the role of her poetry in shaping public taste and influencing the worldview of her contemporaries. A few years later, in the preface to the reissue of the first collection, she wrote:

“I’m sorry to create something useless and no one needs now. Collection, book of poems in given time- the most useless useless thing... I don’t want to say by this that poetry is not needed. On the contrary, I maintain that poetry is necessary, even necessary, natural and eternal. There was a time when everyone seemed to need entire books of poetry, when they were read in bulk, understood and accepted by everyone. This time is the past, not ours. The modern reader does not need a collection of poems! » Muruzi House

The Merezhkovskys' apartment in the Muruzi house became an important center of religious, philosophical and social life in St. Petersburg, a visit to which was considered almost obligatory for young thinkers and writers who gravitated towards symbolism. All visitors to the salon recognized the authority of Gippius and for the most part believed that it was she who played the main role in the endeavors of the community that had developed around Merezhkovsky. At the same time, the regulars also felt hostility towards the owner of the salon, suspecting her of arrogance, intolerance and a tendency to experiment with the participation of visitors. The young poets, who underwent the difficult test of personal acquaintance with the “matress,” indeed experienced serious psychological difficulties: Gippius made high, extreme demands on poetry for religious service to beauty and truth (“poems are prayers”) and was extremely frank and harsh in her assessments . At the same time, many noted that the Merezhkovsky house in St. Petersburg was “a real oasis of Russian spiritual life at the beginning of the 20th century.” A. Bely said that it “truly created culture. Everyone studied here at some point.” According to G.V. Adamovich, Gippius was “an inspirer, instigator, adviser, corrector, collaborator of other people’s writings, the center of refraction and crossing of dissimilar rays.”

The image of the salon owner “amazed, attracted, repelled and again attracted” like-minded people: A. Blok (with whom Gippius had a particularly complex, changing relationship), A. Bely, V.V. Rozanov, V. Bryusov. “A tall, slender blonde with long golden hair and emerald mermaid eyes, in a blue dress that suited her very well, she was striking with her appearance. A few years later I would call this appearance Botticelli-esque. ...All of St. Petersburg knew her, thanks to this appearance and thanks to her frequent appearances at literary evenings, where she read her very criminal poems with obvious bravado,” one of the first symbolist publishers, P. P. Pertsov, wrote about Z. Gippius.

Social activity

In 1899-1901, Gippius became close to S.P. Diaghilev’s circle, grouped around the magazine “World of Art,” where she began to publish her first literary critical articles. In them, signed with male pseudonyms (Anton Krainy, Lev Pushchin, Comrade German, Roman Arensky, Anton Kirsha, Nikita Vecher, V. Vitovt), Gippius remained a consistent preacher of the aesthetic program of symbolism and the philosophical ideas embedded in its foundation. After leaving the “World of Art”, Zinaida Nikolaevna acted as a critic in the magazines “New Path” (actual co-editor), “Scales”, “Education”, “New Word”, “New Life”, “Peaks”, “Russian Thought” , 1910-1914, (as a prose writer she had been published in a magazine before), as well as in a number of newspapers: “Rech”, “Slovo”, “Morning of Russia”, etc. The best critical articles were subsequently selected by her for the book "Literary Diary", (1908). Gippius generally assessed the state of Russian artistic culture negatively, linking it with the crisis of the religious foundations of life and the collapse of the social ideals of the previous century. Gippius saw the vocation of an artist in “an active and direct influence on life”, which should have been “Christianized”. The critic found her literary and spiritual ideal in that literature and art that developed “before prayer, before the concept of God.”:163 It was believed that these concepts were largely directed against writers close to the Znanie publishing house headed by M. Gorky, and in general “against literature oriented towards the traditions of classical realism.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, Gippius and Merezhkovsky had developed their own, original ideas about freedom, the metaphysics of love, as well as unusual non-religious views, associated primarily with the so-called “Third Testament”. The spiritual and religious maximalism of the Merezhkovskys, expressed in the awareness of their “providential role not only in the fate of Russia, but also in the fate of humanity,” reached its apogee in the early 1900s. In her article “The Bread of Life” (1901), Gippius wrote: “Let us have a sense of duty towards the flesh, towards life, and a premonition of freedom – towards the spirit, towards religion. When life and religion really come together, they become one and the same - our sense of duty will inevitably touch religion, merging with the premonition of Freedom; (...) which the Son of Man promised us: “I have come to make you free.”

The idea of ​​renewing Christianity, which had largely exhausted itself (as it seemed to them), arose among the Merezhkovskys in the fall of 1899. To implement the plan, it was decided to create a “new church”, where a “new religious consciousness” would be born. The embodiment of this idea was the organization of Religious and Philosophical Meetings (1901-1903), the purpose of which was declared to be the creation of a public platform for “free discussion of issues of church and culture... neo-Christianity, social order and the improvement of human nature.” The organizers of the Meetings interpreted the opposition between spirit and flesh as follows: “The Spirit is the Church, the flesh is society; spirit is culture, flesh is people; spirit is religion, flesh is earthly life...”

Essays

Poetry

"Collected Poems". Book one. 1889-1903. Book publishing house "Scorpio", M., 1904.
"Collected Poems". Book two. 1903-1909. Book publishing house "Musaget", M., 1910.
“Last Poems” (1914-1918), publication “Science and School”, St. Petersburg, 66 pp., 1918.
"Poetry. Diary 1911-1921". Berlin. 1922.
“Radiants”, series “Russian poets”, second issue, 200 copies. Paris, 1938.

Prose

"New people". The first book of stories. St. Petersburg, 1st edition 1896; second edition 1907.
"Mirrors". Second book of stories. St. Petersburg, 1898.
“The Third Book of Stories”, St. Petersburg, 1901.
"The Scarlet Sword." The fourth book of stories. St. Petersburg, 1907.
"Black and white." Fifth book of stories. St. Petersburg, 1908.
« Moon ants" The sixth book of stories. Publishing house "Alcyone". M., 1912.
"Damn doll." Novel. Ed. "Moscow book publishing house". M. 1911.
"Roman Tsarevich" Novel. Ed. "Moscow book publishing house". M. 1913. - 280 p.

Dramaturgy

"Green Ring". Play. Ed. “Lights”, Petrograd, 1916.
Criticism and journalism|
"Literary Diary". Critical articles. St. Petersburg, 1908.
"The Kingdom of the Antichrist." Merezhkovsky D. The diaries of Z. Gippius (1919-1920) were published. 1921.
"Blue Book. Petersburg diaries 1914-1938". Belgrade, 1929.
"Zinaida Gippius. Petersburg diaries 1914-1919". New York - Moscow, 1990.
Zinaida Gippius. Diaries
Modern editions (1990 -)|
Plays. L., 1990
Living faces, vol. 1-2. Tbilisi, 1991
Essays. Leningradskoe department Artist lit. 1991
Poems. St. Petersburg, 1999

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the entire color of the Russian intelligentsia gathered in a huge house on the corner of Liteyny and Panteleimonovskaya. At meetings of the religious and philosophical society they argued, shouted, read poems and plays, and expressed their ideas about the reorganization of the world. The center of attention was always the hostess: tall, thin, golden-haired, with a tiara on her white forehead, invariably dressed in a page's costume, allowing her to admire her beautiful long legs. Zinaida arrogantly and unceremoniously “lorneted” the writers and poets who came to the house, said witty barbs and mercilessly made fun of everything that seemed sacred. In her presence everything faded and faded; it was as if she was deliberately putting herself on display, trying to touch the most sensitive strings in people’s souls. Her literary feuilletons, signed by the male pseudonym “Anton Krainy,” aroused either indignation or admiration for the sharpness of her gaze and the ruthlessness of her mind. She deliberately provoked conflicts and sought to create awkward situations; She received the young poet Seryozha Yesenin coldly and arrogantly. She brought her to two men and introduced them as two of her own - at the same time! - husbands. The singer of the village cunningly, like a peasant, remained silent and did not show that he was embarrassed: he guessed in his gut that behind the pose and unceremoniousness was hiding an unhappy and suffering woman, smart, subtle and terribly lonely. Andrei Bely also guessed about Zinaida’s vulnerable soul, having previously described the scoundrel in the most repulsive colors. And then, then he dedicated the warmest pages of his memories to her. But there were few of those who understood, she skillfully wore a mask Snow Queen. And much later, “witty” remarks will be heard at her coffin, that we should check whether this devil is really dead, poke the corpse with a stick - what if the snake comes to life?
Arrogance and the eternal lorgnette that irritated everyone so much; in fact, severe myopia, from which Zinaida Gippius’s eyes will become completely slanted in old age. A proud carriage of the head, a sharp laugh, merciless remarks - behind them is vulnerability, desire and readiness to help, contempt for conventions, loyalty. Loyalty - but they talked so much about her novels, hobbies, lovers. And two husbands at the same time! In fact, everything was very difficult and painful. Zinaida was born in the town of Belev, then her family moved to Ukraine, then ended up in St. Petersburg, where she entered the gymnasium. A brilliant mind and excellent abilities did not bring happiness to the girl; Doctors were alarmed to discover that she had rapidly progressing tuberculosis. It was decided to go south to improve Zina’s health. At nineteen years old, she met Dmitry Merezhkovsky, an educated and intelligent young writer, at the Borzhom resort. It would seem that exactly what happened romantic meeting, which young girls dream of at all times; they were madly drawn to each other. “Both suddenly began to talk as if everything had already been decided, that we were getting married, and that it would be good,” she wrote in her diary on July 22, 1888. Six months later the wedding took place, after which she was not separated from her husband for a single day. They lived side by side for 52 years! And over these years, empires collapsed, kings died, the fires of revolution and war engulfed half the globe. They walked together, and it was her merit.
Representatives of bohemia and the intelligentsia who came to their salon saw Merezhkovsky: “short in stature, with a narrow sunken chest, in an antediluvian frock coat.” His black eyes sparkled biblical prophet , his freely growing beard stood on end. He kept talking and talking, squealing with excitement. And next to her constant lorgnette stood the “mysteriously beautiful” Zinaida, a “gentle snake,” as she called herself in one of her poems. In the painting by the artist Bakst, a young, slightly broken woman with lush golden hair exudes mystery, looking somewhere into the distance with half-closed eyes. Mystery hid the tragedy; It was not for nothing that an offensive epigram, composed by someone to offend Merezhkovsky, circulated around St. Petersburg: “Aphrodite punished you by sending a hermaphrodite wife.” Everything related to gender and sex did not exist for Zinaida. All her many novels ended with just kisses, which she considered the highest expression of passion; except these kisses - nothing. Her male costumes, pseudonyms and habits were an expression of the very real sexlessness to which she was doomed by the goddesses of fate - the harsh Moiras. All the love for her husband existed in her cold and sharp mind, in her tremulous and vulnerable heart, and nowhere else. But no one knew about this; Therefore, the St. Petersburg intellectual society was shocked when another family member appeared in the house of Gippius and Merezhkovsky - Dima, Dmitry Filosofov, known for his homosexual views. As Zinaida's second husband, Filosofov lived in a spacious apartment, causing gossip and rumors, direct indignation and anger. The “Triple Alliance” was based on spiritual love, implicated in philosophy and art, but in times of “decadence” and general flaunting of immorality it was perceived quite unambiguously: the debauchery of bohemia. The soft, weak-willed intellectual Philosophers was dear to the ardent supporter of same-sex love Diaghilev, who somehow simply stole his treasure, tore it out of the “triple alliance” and took it abroad. Gippius and Merezhkovsky went after him and kidnapped the weakly resisting Filosofov themselves, returning him to his family, so strange and unusual. Diaghilev tore and tore, showering the harpy and her husband with terrible curses and insults; Zinaida was cold, distant, she was indifferent to threats and attacks. She lived, as it were, outside society, outside its laws, interested only in the highest life of the spirit, which is art. Attracted by her beauty, fans joyfully anticipated a rapprochement and hoped for an affair with the mysterious and beautiful Zinaida; the more bitter was their disappointment when the affair took place - there were hot and romantic kisses, one, two. But only. Heated, lured, clouded and fooled, the failed lovers composed monstrous gossip about Gippius and spread disgusting rumors. She didn't seem to care.
The revolution broke out, everything was confused old Russia. Gippius hated the new government, the mob, which destroyed her world, ruined culture and art. She also hated Blok, who tried to explain to her what was happening, to reconcile her with the inevitable. She only hoped that victory would come, everything would return to normal, and again in her salon, in the soft light of the eternal green lamp, the piano would sound, poets and writers, philosophers and representatives of religion would start talking vyingly; she passionately protested loudly and in print against what happened with fatal inevitability. She endured hunger and cold, illness and hardship along with everyone else, waiting for change. But when she realized that there was nothing more to wait for, she decided to take the most dangerous step. In 1920, she and Merezhkovsky crossed the Polish border illegally and left Russia forever.
They ended up in Paris, where they settled down to the envy of the emigrants, who had lost absolutely everything in the bloody storm of the revolution. While others rented miserable attics and dreamed of becoming taxi drivers, forgetting about titles and past glory, the Gippius-Merezhkovsky couple simply opened the door of their Parisian apartment with a key and found everything in its place: dishes, linen, furniture... They entered a new life in the country almost painlessly , where they visited often and had many acquaintances. And almost immediately the “salons” resumed, where downtrodden and forgotten writers and poets came, whose names once thundered in Russia. Here they received the joy of communication, memories, the warmth of comfort, even if it was alien, the opportunity to talk, reason, dream - an unprecedented luxury in the life in which they found themselves. And the aged Zinaida, still arrogant and arrogant, witty and cold, and all bent like a tree root, small, like a gnome, Dmitry Merezhkovsky - all this was a fragment of that life, that world that once existed a long time ago. They were reviled, they made jokes behind their backs and threw mud at them, but they came to them for the last joy of the soul; The Green Lamp society of writers and philosophers illuminated the path for many, saved many from spiritual death and degradation in a foreign language country, far from their homeland.
Merezhkovsky lived in the past; he was still waiting for the appearance of a liberator, a hero, a titan who could change the world, return the past, restore justice. Carried away, passionate, crazy in his isolation from the real world, the husband began to glorify...Hitler, whom in a romantic delirium he mistook for a fairy-tale victorious hero. Hatred and contempt for the Merezhkovsky-Gippius couple became obvious; Everyone turned their backs on the writer-philosopher himself and refused to communicate with Zinaida. She perfectly understood her husband’s mistake, his delusion, she tried to convince Dmitry, but in vain - with wild stubbornness he expressed his point of view, raged both on the radio and in the newspapers. She could only silently wear her eternal mask of contempt for people and cold loneliness. She could not leave him under any circumstances. Only death could separate them.
On December 9, 1941, Dmitry Merezhkovsky died. He was completely disappointed in his idol, who turned out to be the most bloody and cruel monster. A war started by a villain raged; Russia resisted the enemy's invasion with all its might. In Paris, the aged Zinaida remained with the occupiers, becoming truly lonely. The death of her husband devastated her terribly; 52 years of marriage without a single day of separation have grown them together, like two trees clinging to each other. Scary, gray-haired, with slanting green eyes, she looked like a witch from an old fairy tale; all that remained of her former beauty were the memories of her dead friends. In recent years, Zinaida's last only friend remained next to her - a tattered, vicious cat, absolutely wild. That’s what her name was: “Koshshshka”, with three hissing letters. The cat lay on the thin senile lap of the mistress, immediately running away when strangers appeared. However, strangers appeared so rarely now...
Lonely, dying, Zinaida Gippius kept rummaging around the bed with her hands, kept searching with her last movements for her Koshshka, hoping to feel the warmth of her little body, as if it could warm and save the soul of the mistress. On September 9, 1945, Zinaida Gippius died; and few people regretted this loss. They remembered her angry feuilletons, sharp critical articles, harsh attacks and heckling; her arrogance, coldness, ruthlessness. Her death became a reason for jokes and witticisms, just as her misfortune and misfortune once became the reason for an epigram. She left just as proud, lonely and annoyingly independent, never taking off the mask that covered her unhappy and broken heart.

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (1869-1945) was from a Russified German family; her father’s ancestors moved to Russia in the 19th century; mother is from Siberia. Due to the family's frequent moves (her father was a lawyer and held high positions), Z. Gippius did not receive a systematic education and attended educational institutions in fits and starts. Since childhood, I have been interested in “writing poetry and secret diaries.” In 1889, in Tiflis, she married D.S. Merezhkovsky, with whom she “lived for 52 years, without being separated for a single day.” Together with her husband, she moved to St. Petersburg that same year; here the Merezhkovsky couple made extensive literary acquaintances and soon took a prominent place in the artistic life of the capital.

Poems by Z. Gippius, published in the journal of “senior” symbolists “Northern Herald” - “Song” (“I need something that is not in the world ...”) and “Dedication” (with the lines: “I love myself as God") immediately gained scandalous fame. In 1904, “Collected Poems” was published. 1889-1893" and in 1910 - "Collected poems. Book 2. 1903-1909”, united with the first book by the constancy of themes and images: the spiritual discord of a person, seeking a higher meaning in everything, a divine justification for a low earthly existence, but never finding sufficient reasons to reconcile and accept - neither the “heaviness of happiness”, nor the renunciation of him.

In 1899-1901 Gippius worked closely with the magazine “World of Art”; in 1901-1904 she was one of the organizers and active participant in Religious and Philosophical meetings and the actual co-editor of the magazine “New Way”, where her smart and sharp critical articles were published under the pseudonym Anton Krainy, later becoming a leading critic of the magazine “Scales” (in 1908 selected articles published as a separate book - “Literary Diary”).

At the beginning of the century, the Merezhkovskys’ apartment became one of the centers of cultural life in St. Petersburg, where young poets underwent a difficult test through personal acquaintance with

"matress". Z. Gippius placed high, extreme demands on poetry for religious service to beauty and truth (“poems are prayers”). The collections of stories by Z. Gippius enjoyed much less success among readers and caused sharp attacks from critics.

The events of the Revolution of 1905-1907 became a turning point in the creative biography of Z. Gippius. If before this time socio-political issues were outside the sphere of interests of Z. Gippius, then after January 9, which, according to the writer, “turned her upside down”, current social issues, “civic motives” become dominant in her work, especially in prose. Z. Gippius and D. Merezhkovsky become irreconcilable opponents of the autocracy, fighters against the conservative state structure of Russia (“Yes, autocracy is from the Antichrist,” writes Gippius at this time).

In February 1906 they left for Paris, where they spent more than two years. Here the Merezhkovsky spouses published a collection of anti-monarchist articles in French, became closer to revolutionary circles, and maintained relations with B. Savinkov. Passion for politics did not cancel the mystical quest of Z. Gippius: the new slogan - “religious public” implied the unification of all the radical forces of the intelligentsia to solve the problem of renewing Russia.

Political preferences are reflected in the literary work of those years; the novels “The Devil's Doll” (1911) and “The Roman Tsarevich” (1912) are openly tendentious and “problematic.” The sharply changed life position of Z. Gippius manifested itself in an unusual way during the First World War, when she began to write “common” women’s letters stylized as popular prints to soldiers at the front, sometimes putting them in pouches, on behalf of three women (“pseudonyms” - first and last names three servants Z. Gippius). These poetic messages (“Fly, fly, gift,” “To the far side,” etc.), which were not of artistic value, had a great public resonance.

Z. Gippius accepted the October Revolution with hostility (collection “Last Poems. 1911-1918”, Pg., 1918) and at the beginning of 1920 she emigrated with her husband and settled in France. Two more of her poetry collections were published abroad: “Poems. Diary 1911-1921" (Berlin, 1922) and "Radiants" (Paris, 1939).

Gippius Zinaida Nikolaevna (1869 – 1945)

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius - poet, prose writer, critic. In the 70s 19th century her father served as a companion to the chief prosecutor of the Senate, but soon moved with his family to Nezhin, where he received the position of chairman of the court. After his death, in 1881, the family moved to Moscow, and then to Yalta and Tiflis. There was no women's gymnasium in Nizhyn, and Gippius was taught the basics of science by home teachers. In the 80s, living in Yalta and Tiflis, Gippius became interested in Russian classics, especially F. M. Dostoevsky.

Having married D.S. Merezhkovsky, in the summer of 1889, Gippius and her husband moved to St. Petersburg, where he began literary activity in the Symbolist circle, which in the 90s. develops around the journal “Northern Herald” (D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, A. Volynsky, F. Sologub) and popularizes the ideas of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck. In line with the moods and themes characteristic of the work of the participants in this circle, and under the influence of new Western poetry, the poetic themes and style of Gippius’s poetry begin to be determined.

Gippius's poems first appeared in print in 1888 in Severny Vestnik, signed by Zinaida Gippius. Later she takes the pseudonym Anton Krainy.

The main motives of Gippius’s early poetry are the curse of boring reality and the glorification of the world of fantasy, the search for new, unearthly beauty (“I need something that is not in the world...”), a melancholy feeling of disconnection from people and at the same time, a thirst for loneliness. These poems reflected the main motives of early symbolic poetry, its ethical and aesthetic maximalism. True poetry, Gippius believed, comes down to only “the triple bottomlessness of the world,” three themes - “about man, love and death.” The poetess dreamed of reconciling love and eternity, but she saw the only way to this in death, which alone can save love from everything transitory. These reflections determined the “eternal themes” and determined the tone of many of Gippius’s poems.

In the first two books of stories by Gippius, the same sentiments prevailed. “New People” (1896) and “Mirrors” (1898). Their main idea is the affirmation of the truth of only the intuitive beginning of life, beauty “in all its manifestations” and contradictions and lies in the name of some high truth. In the stories of these books there is a clear influence of Dostoevsky's ideas, perceived in the spirit of a decadent worldview.

In the ideological and creative development of Gippius, the first Russian revolution played a major role, which turned her to public issues. They are now starting to take great place in her poems, stories, novels.

After the revolution, collections of stories “Black and White” (1908), “Moon Ants” (1912), novels “Devil’s Doll” (1911), “Roman Tsarevich” (1913) were published. But, speaking about revolution, creating images of revolutionaries, Gippius argues that a true revolution in Russia is possible only in connection with a religious revolution (more precisely, as a result of it). Outside of the “revolution in the spirit,” social transformation is a myth, a fiction, a game of the imagination that only neurasthenic individualists can play. Gippius convinced readers of this by depicting Russian post-revolutionary reality in “The Devil’s Doll.”

Having met the October Revolution with hostility, Gippius, together with Merezhkovsky, emigrated in 1920. Gippius's emigrant creativity consists of poems, memoirs, and journalistic writings. She made sharp attacks on Soviet Russia and prophesied its imminent fall.

Of the Emigrant publications, the most interesting are the book of poems “Shine” (Paris, 1939), two volumes of memoirs “Living Faces” (Prague, 1925), very subjective and very personal, reflecting her then social and political views, and an unfinished book of memoirs about Merezhkovsky (Gippius - Merezhkovskaya Z. Dmitry Merezhkovsky - Paris, 1951). Even the emigrant critic G. Struve said about this book that it requires great allowances “for the bias and even bitterness of the memoirist.”

Gippius Zinaida Nikolaevna (1865-1945)

“The Decadent Madonna”, poetess, prose writer, playwright, publicist and literary critic Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius was born on November 8 (20 NS) in the city of Belev, Chernigov province, in the family of a government official.

On her father's side she had German roots. My father’s ancestor, the German Adolfus von Gingst, changed his surname to “von Gippius” and already in the 16th century opened the first bookstore in the German settlement of Moscow. My father served in the judicial department, and often changed his place of service, lived with his family in various cities of Russia: St. Petersburg, Tula, Kharkov, etc. The mother was a Siberian, the daughter of the Yekaterinburg police chief Stepanov.

Father Z. Gippius died of tuberculosis when the girl was 12 years old and the mother and children (elder Zinaida and her three younger sisters) moved first to Moscow, and then, due to the illness of the children, to Yalta, and in 1885 to Tiflis (Tbilisi ) to my brother.

Z. Gippius, due to family circumstances, was unable to systematically study at the gymnasium; she was educated at home. Subsequently, she studied very briefly at the Kiev Women's Institute (1877-1878) and the Fischer Classical Gymnasium in Moscow (1882). She started writing poetry early, at the age of seven.

The first two poems of the young poetess were published in the St. Petersburg magazine "Severny Vestnik" in 1888 (N 12), where in different time G. Uspensky, N. K. Mikhailovsky, L. N. Tolstoy, M. Gorky and others collaborated. Since 1891, the magazine began to actively promote the work of the Symbolists (D. S. Merezhkovsky, K. D. Balmont, Z. Gippius herself and etc.).

She was very beautiful by nature: tall and flexible, thin as a youth, with large green eyes, golden braids around her small head, with a constant smile on her face, she had no shortage of admirers. They were drawn to her and, at the same time, were afraid of her sharp tongue, caustic phrases and bold jokes. “Sataness”, “real witch”, “decadent Madonna”, that’s what her contemporaries called her. In 1888, in Borjomi, she met the capital’s poet D. Merezhkovsky and after that began to believe that “all my high school students... had become completely stupid.” She married him on January 8, 1889 in Tiflis and then, without being separated “for a single day,” lived for 52 years.

In the same year, she and her husband moved to St. Petersburg. Meets Y. Polonsky and A. Maykov, D. Grigorovich and V. Rozanov, A. Blok, V. Bryusov, A. Bely, etc. Begins to work closely with the editors of the journal "Northern Herald", establishes business contacts with editors of other capital cities magazines ("Bulletin of Europe", "Russian Thought"). Z. Gippius attends literary evenings and salons, listens to various lectures. She begins to find her way in literature.

After the appearance of Merezhkovsky’s programmatic work “On the Cause of Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature” (1892), the work of Z. Gippius acquired a clear “symbolic” character (the first collections of stories “New People” (1896; 1907), “Mirror” (1898 )). Later, in the book "Literary Diary" (1908), she substantiates and defends symbolism. Liberal criticism reacted sharply negatively to the uninhibited maximalism of the “new people.” The main theme of Gippius's works was the metaphysics of love, neo-Christianity, the fundamental philosophical foundations of existence and religion ("The Scarlet Sword", "Black on White", "Moon Ants", etc.).

In 1899-1901 Z. Gippius published his first literary critical articles in the magazine "World of Arts". As a rule, he signs them with pseudonyms: Anton Krainy, Roman Arensky, Nikita Vecher, etc. During the same period, D. and Z. Merezhkovsky had the idea of ​​​​renewing Christianity, creating a “new church.” They came up with the idea of ​​​​creating “Religious and Philosophical Assemblies”, the meaning of which was to unite the intelligentsia and representatives of the church for the purpose of “religious revival” of the country, as well as the magazine “New Way” - the printed organ of the Assemblies.

The influence of the ideas of D. Merezhkovsky on the work of Z. Gippius can be traced in such works as “The Lord the Father”, “To Christ”, etc. The most valuable part of her poetic heritage is contained in five collections of poetry: “Collected Poems 1889-1903” (1904) , "Collected poems. Book two. 1903-1909" (1910), "Last poems. 1914-1918" (1918), "Poems. Diary. 1911-1921" (Berlin, 1922), "Radiances" (Paris, 1938 ). An exquisite poetic vocabulary, a special broken rhythm, the predominance of favorite epithets and verbs, “... all the same matte-pearl, noble colors with which Gippius has long captivated us,” as V.A. wrote. Amphitheaters in 1922 are an integral part of her poetic heritage. The poetess devoted many poems to the theme of love. One of the earliest: “One Love” (1896) was translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gippius met the October Revolution of 1917 with extreme hostility. Already in October 1905, in a letter to Filosofov (written an hour before the Manifesto), she, reflecting on the fate of Russia after possible victory revolution, wrote: “...their whole path and this whole picture is so unacceptable, disgusting, disgusting, and terrible to me that to touch it... would be tantamount to my betrayal...”. After the arrival of the “kingdom of the Antichrist,” on December 24, 1919, Z. Gippius and D. Merezhkovsky left Russia forever, first to Poland and then to France.

In Paris, Gippius took an active part in the organization of the literary and philosophical society "Green Lamp" (1927-1939), which played a significant role in the intellectual life of the first wave of Russian emigration. He writes articles and, less often, poetry, in which he sharply criticizes the Soviet system. In 1925 he published two volumes of memoirs “Living Faces” (Prague), and in 1939 a book of poems “Radiants” was published in Paris.

Second World War Gippius brought not only poverty (their Paris apartment was described for non-payment), but also the loss of loved ones. At the end of 1941, her husband, D. Merezhkovsky, died, and her sister Anna died in 1942. In recent years, she has been working on the long poem “The Last Circle” (published in 1972), occasionally composing poetry, writing memoirs, and creating a truly literary monument to her husband. "Dmitry Merezhkovsky", a biography book full of rich factual material, was published after her death in 1951. Zinaida Gippius, the green-eyed and golden-haired “decadent Madonna” died on September 9, 1945 in Paris at the age of 76.

GIPPIUS, ZINAIDA NIKOLAEVNA (1869–1945), Russian poet, prose writer, literary critic. Since 1920 in exile. Born on November 8 (20), 1869 in Belev, Tula province. in the family of a lawyer, a Russified German. On her mother’s side, she is the granddaughter of the Yekaterinburg police chief. She did not receive a systematic education, although from her youth she was very well read. In 1889 she married D.S. Merezhkovsky and moved with him from Tiflis to St. Petersburg, where her poetic debut took place a year earlier. She lived with her husband, in her words, “52 years, without being separated... not for a single day.”

Having quickly overcome the influence of S.Ya. Nadson, noticeable in her early poems, Gippius, in the eyes of participants in the literary life of both capitals at the turn of the century, was the personification of decadence - the “decadent Madonna,” as she was called after the publication of the Dedication (1895), containing the defiant line: “ I love myself like God.” This image was skillfully constructed and introduced into the consciousness of contemporaries by Gippius herself, who carefully thought through her social and literary behavior, which amounted to changing several roles. For a decade and a half before the revolution of 1905, Gippius appears as a promoter of sexual emancipation, proudly bearing the “cross of sensuality,” as stated in her 1893 diary; then an opponent of the “teaching Church”, for “there is only one sin - self-abasement” (diary 1901); the initiator of the “Religious and Philosophical Meetings” (1901–1904), at which a program of “neo-Christianity” was developed, corresponding to the views of Merezhkovsky; a champion of the revolution of the spirit, carried out in defiance of the “herd society”.

The Muruzi House, occupied by the Merezhkovskys, became an important center of the religious, philosophical and social life of St. Petersburg, a visit to which was mandatory for young thinkers and writers who gravitated toward symbolism. Recognizing the authority of Gippius and the majority believing that it is she who plays the main role in all the endeavors of the community that has developed around Merezhkovsky, almost all of them, however, feel hostility towards the owner of this salon with her arrogance, intolerance and passion for experimenting on people. A special chapter in the history of Russian symbolism was the relationship between Gippius and A.A. Blok, the first publication of which took place with her assistance in the magazine “New Way”, which did not subsequently prevent sharp conflicts caused by the difference in their ideas about the essence artistic creativity and about the appointment of a poet.

Collection of poems. 1889–1903 (1904; in 1910 the second Collected Poems was published. Book 2. 1903–1909) became a major event in the life of Russian poetry. Responding to the book, I. Annensky wrote that in Gippius’s work there is “the entire fifteen-year history of our lyrical modernism,” noting as the main theme of her poems “the painful swing of the pendulum in the heart.” An admirer of this poetry, V.Ya. Bryusov, especially noted in it the “invincible truthfulness” with which Gippius records various emotional states and the life of his “captive soul.”

As a critic who wrote under the pseudonym Anton Krainy, Gippius of this time remains a consistent preacher of the aesthetic program of symbolism and the philosophical ideas that served as its foundation. Constantly publishing in the magazines “Scales” and “Russian Wealth” ( best articles were selected by her for the book Literary Diary, 1908), Gippius generally negatively assessed the state of Russian artistic culture, associated with the crisis of the religious foundations of life and the collapse of the social ideals that lived the 19th century. An artist's calling that she failed to realize modern literature, for Gippius, lies in an active and direct influence on life, which, according to the utopia taken on faith by Merezhkovsky, needs to be “Christianized,” because there is no other way out of the ideological and spiritual impasse.

These concepts are directed against writers close to the Znanie publishing house headed by M. Gorky and, in general, against literature oriented towards the traditions of classical realism. The same challenge to the range of ideas based on faith in liberalism and outdated interpretations of humanism is contained in the dramaturgy of Gippius (Green Ring, 1916), her stories, which formed five collections, and the novel The Devil's Doll (1911), which describes the bankruptcy of beliefs in progress and peaceful improvement of society.

TO October revolution 1917 Gippius reacted with irreconcilable hostility, the monument of which was the book Last Poems. 1914–1918 (1918) and St. Petersburg diaries, partially published in emigrant periodicals of the 1920s, then published in English in 1975 and in Russian in 1982 (most of them were discovered in the St. Petersburg Public Library in 1990). And in the poetry of Gippius of this time (the book Poems. Diary 1911–1921, 1922), and in her diary entries, and in literary critical articles on the pages of the newspaper “Common Cause,” the eschatological note prevails: Russia has perished irrevocably, the kingdom of the Antichrist is coming, brutality rages in the ruins of a collapsed culture. Diaries chronicle the physical and spiritual dying of the old world, which Gippius understood as a literary genre with a unique ability to capture “the very course of life,” recording “little things that have disappeared from memory,” from which descendants will form a relatively reliable picture of the tragic event.

Hatred of the revolution forced Gippius to break with those who accepted it - with Blok, Bryusov, A. Bely. The history of this gap and the reconstruction of the ideological collisions that led to the October catastrophe, which made confrontation between the former allies in literature inevitable, constitutes the main internal plot of Gippius’s memoir series Living Faces (1925). The revolution itself is described (contrary to Blok, who saw in it an explosion of the elements and a cleansing hurricane) as a “dragging suffocation” of monotonous days, as “amazing boredom,” although the enormity of these everyday life inspired one desire: “It would be nice to go blind and deaf.” At the root of everything that happens “is a Vast Madness.” It is all the more important, according to Gippius, to maintain a position of “sound mind and strong memory.”

During the years of emigration, Gippius’s artistic creativity begins to fade; she is increasingly imbued with the conviction that the poet is not able to work away from Russia: a “heavy cold” reigns in his soul, it is dead, like a “killed hawk.” This metaphor becomes key in the last collection of Gippius Radiance (1938), where motifs of loneliness predominate and everything is seen through the eyes of “one passing by” (the title of poems important for the later Gippius, published in 1924). Attempts at reconciliation with the world in the face of an imminent farewell to it are replaced by declarations of non-reconciliation with violence and evil. Bunin, implying Gippius’s style, which does not recognize open emotionality and is often built on the use of oxymorons, called her poetry “electric verse,” Khodasevich, reviewing Radiance, wrote about “a peculiar internal struggle of the poetic soul with the non-poetic mind.”

On the initiative of Gippius, the Green Lamp society was created (1925–1940), which was supposed to unite different literary circles of the emigration, if they accepted that view of the vocation of Russian culture outside Soviet Russia, which the inspirer of these Sunday meetings formulated at the very beginning of the circle’s activities: it is necessary to learn true freedom of opinion and speech, and this is impossible unless one abandons the “testaments” of the old liberal-humanistic tradition. The Green Lamp itself, however, suffered from ideological intolerance, which gave rise to numerous conflicts.

After Merezhkovsky's death in 1941, Gippius, ostracized because of her ambiguous position on fascism, devoted her last years to working on his biography, which remained unfinished (published in 1951).