Poems by Zinaida Gippius

Gippius was descended from German aristocracy, Russified centuries before her birth. She wrote poetry from the time she was seven and soon thereafter started writing stories. Her work was first published in 1888. For some critical literary essays a little later, she used the pseudonym Anton Krainy.

Gippius married Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1889 and established a fashionable literary salon, which became popular with celebrities and favored by the Symbolists. Together with her husband she condemned the October Revolution and furiously assailed Aleksandr Blok for his poem “The Twelve”, the profound significance of which she seemed not to understand. In 1919 she and her husband emigrated to Paris, where they tried to create a semblance of the St. Petersburg salon. In her lifetime her poetry was last published in the Soviet Union in a 1925 anthology.

Gippius’s lyric emerged in the Symbolist milieu and remained deeply religious and philosophical in theme, expressing an effort to comprehend both the surrounding cultural world and the spiritual reality of love and death. Her prose writings on public affairs have given us valuable, intimate portraits of Valery Bryusov, Blok, Vasili Rozanov, and other luminaries of the Silver Age.

When Gippius and Merezhkovsky were published again in the Soviet magazine Ogonyok in the latter decades of the century, the publication was attacked and the two writers accused of being “reactionaries”. But such political views should not hinder our examination of literature and history.