The Symbolist, Zinaida Gippius

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Zinaida Gippius’s death. A leading Russian Symbolist poet and polemical critic, she chronicled revolution and exile with an unsparing, self-interrogating voice; her diaries are among the sharpest first-person records of Petrograd in 1917-1918, when the Russian capital (renamed from St Petersburg during the war) was convulsed first by the overthrow of the tsar in February and then by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.

Gippius (also written as Hippius) was born in Belyov in 1869, the eldest of four sisters who only received a sporadic education as their father, a respected lawyer and a senior officer in the Russian Senate, moved residence often. She came of age in the Petersburg literary world of the 1890s. She married the writer-critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1889, and together they became central to the city’s Symbolist circles - embracing mysticism, aesthetic experimentation, and the idea of art as a path to spiritual renewal. They launched the Religious-Philosophical Meetings, which tried to bring the intelligentsia and the Church into dialogue. Her most important works (beyond the diaries - see below) include several volumes of poetry that placed her at the centre of Russian Symbolism, the short story collections New People and The Devil’s Doll, the novel The Roman-Tsarevich. 

Gippius also cultivated a deliberately androgynous, confrontational persona and, under the male pseudonym ‘Anton Krainy’, wrote some of the era’s most incisive criticism. The 1905 Revolution radicalised Gippius’s politics while deepening her spiritual preoccupations. She welcomed the February 1917 revolution which overthrew the tsar and installed the Provisional Government, but judged October a cultural catastrophe, a judgment that drove the couple into emigration in 1919 - first to Poland, then France and Italy - where she kept writing poetry, prose, memoir. She died in Paris on 9 September 1945, four years after Merezhkovsky. Further information is available from Wikipedia; Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Library of Congress. 

Gippius began making diary entries in the 1890s, though only fragments from those years remain. The first substantial run of entries dates from the early 1900s. From then on she maintained diaries more or less steadily, though they became especially intense and historically important during the Revolutionary years, 1917-1918, when she wrote almost daily in Petrograd. After emigrating in 1919 she continued the habit in exile, sometimes combining poems and diary notes in the same volumes.

Her first major diary publication was Stikhi: dnevnik 1911-1921 (Berlin, 1922), a hybrid volume pairing late poems with diary entries; her best-known diary book, Sinyaya kniga. Peterburgskiy dnevnik 1914-1918 (The Blue Book), appeared in Belgrade in 1929. An English selection, Between Paris and St Petersburg: Selected Diaries of Zinaida Hippius, edited and translated by Temira Pachmuss, was issued by University of Illinois Press in 1975. This can be freely borrowed online at Internet Archive.

‘Hippius’s diaries are works of art,’ Pachmuss says in her preface. ‘Her skill as an artist is inevitably reflected in her diaries, even though they were not written for subsequent publication. They reveal aspects of her personality which are not expressed in her poetry or published prose works. They further illuminate her views on literature, religion, politics, freedom, ethics, love, marriage, life, death, God, the Holy Trinity - in fact, the entire evolution of her Weltanschauung may be reconstructed from her diaries. In them she defined her attitude toward other people, her concept of creative work, her criteria for imaginative literary criticism, and above all, her credo as a poet. Hippius’s diaries, written in her minute and graceful script, are a valuable, highly artistic personal confession. Their intrinsic value is justification for their publication in English in the present volume.

Hippius’s diaries have great historical and literary significance not only because they describe the views and attitudes of the poetess herself, but also because they re-create the spiritual atmosphere of St. Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century - with its emotional maximalism, metaphysical disposition, and religious aspirations. They further reveal the nature of life in Poland after the October Revolution, and the activities of ‘Russian Paris’ in the third and fourth decades of this century.’

Here is a sample extract from an early diary quoted in Between Paris and St Petersburg.

13 March 1901

‘I would like to know what attracts me to this diary - now? There is no more contes d’amour, no special amorousness . . . About what, then, to write? Yet I want to write precisely here. This means that there is within me some form of amorousness, or something resembling it.

Something resembling… yes, but at the same time something completely different. It is good that it does resemble, and it is also good that it is something different.

In spite of this absolutely shameless, personal pain of the old and human aspect of my soul (I am saying it calmly), there is a great deal of serene strength in me, active strength, and there is a great deal of my good and old amorousness for ‘something different.’ I have much strength now, but I do not wish to conceal from myself that there is a certain danger for me. An almost inevitable danger.

From now on I am destined to pursue the path of ascetism, complete as a closed circle. I know with the combined insight of both my body and my soul that this path is the wrong one for me. A deep knowledge that you are pursuing the wrong path will - without fail, quietly, but certainly - deprive me of my strength. I won’t be able to reach the end of the path; I won’t pour forth the whole volume of my strength. Even now, when I think about the future, it depresses me. At the present time there is so much of this lively strength in me. I will engross myself in the spirit - without fail - and my spirit will evaporate like light vapor. Oh, I do not suffer because of myself! I am not sorry for myself! I am sorry for That to Which I will not serve to the best of my abilities.

I would have selected another path - there isn’t any other, however. It is not even worthwhile talking about - it is immediately obvious that there isn’t any other path.

Sometimes it seems to me that there must be people who resemble me, who are neither satisfied with the existing forms of passion nor with the forms of life; that is, there must be people who want to go forward, who desire God not only in those phenomena which already exist, but also in those which will take place. So I think. But then I laugh. All right, there are such people. So what? Will I feel better from this knowledge? For I definitely won’t meet such a person. But if I do meet him? Then probably it will just be in order ‘to bless him while I descend into my grave.’ For in a few years I will become an old woman (a weak old woman who will be embittered by her past). And I will know that I have not lived righteously. And even if I meet him now, at this moment, will I believe it? And if I do fall in love with him, I will preserve my silence till the very end anyhow - from fear that he is not the ‘right’ one. And he, if he resembles me, will also be silent. No, it won’t be that way. It, this miracle, can take place only in the Third Person, but what He will tell me - I don’t know. I have not heard His voice as yet. But why do I ponder it? Why am I apprehensive? Why do I complain? Everything will be as it should be. This is not my will. It is not my volition that there is such strange, such lively blood in me. For something, for Somebody this blood is necessary. So let Him do with it whatever He wants. And also with that strength of mine which He has granted to me. I will only be sincere. Asceticism [the next page is missing] is stronger than what they think about themselves. Their sin is only their self-belittlement. I see how some people, who are able to save not only themselves but other people as well, perish from this sin. And my white flowers wither, wither away . . .

How can I tell them? How can I help them? Indeed I am not so strong, so long as I am alone.’