Background

Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius was born on November 20, 1869, in Belyov, Russia. She was the daughter of Nikolai Romanovich Gippius, a famous lawyer and Procurator of the Russian Senate and Anastasia Vasilevna, the daughter of Ekaterinburg Chief of Police. Zinaida was the eldest of four daughters.

After her father's death in 1881, Gippius's mother moved the family to Moscow and then eventually to Tiflis (Tbilisi).

Education

Young Zinaida was educated at home with an emphasis on literature, history, arts, and music. She began writing poetry at the age of seven. While living with relatives in the south of Russia, she wrote comic verses about friends and family members, which she frequently read aloud, as well as more serious poetry, which she reportedly hid or destroyed. She studied at Kyiv Institute for Women and the Moscow Fischer Gymnasium.

Career

After her first publications in St. Petersburg, which appeared in the avant-garde journal, The Northern Herald, in 1888, under the signature Z.G, Zinaida Gippius emerged as a poet, novelist, and a reputable literary critic. Her writings got attention from such critics as Ivan Bunin and Yakov Polonsky among others. In 1891, Gippius and Merezhkovsky made a trip across Europe on the Orient Express train. Their journey included ascension of Mont Blanc, there Gippius and Merezhkovsky demonstrated their persistence, determination, and courage while climbing together. One of the highlights of their journey was their visit to the birthplace of Leonardo Da Vinci. At that time they worked together on a book titled 'Leonardo.' Gippius made handwritten copies of hundreds of pages from libraries in Florence and Rome while working on their book about Leonardo. Through their mutual research and studies in Rome, Florence, and Paris, and later in Russia, Gippius and Merezhkovsky formed a group of writers, historians, and clerics for interdisciplinary studies in pursuit of better inter-religious communication. Their idea of starting a United Church was supported by many intellectuals. They got permission from the Russian Orthodox Sinode and founded a study group focused on the history of religions and religious influence on world cultures. At that time Gippius and Merezhkovsky were contacted by the Vatican and by some Catholic leaders in France, but they remained focused on their independent studies and lectures. Soon their lectures and social gatherings came under ostracism from the Russian Orthodox Church, which was followed by social pressures, manifested as a sharp and biased critique of both Gippius and Merezhkovsky, and made-up rumors about the private life of the couple. However, in 1900, such intellectuals as Nikolai Minsky, Vasili Rozanov, and others joined Gippius and Merezhkovsky and formed the St. Petersburg Society of Religions and Philosophy. Their studies embraced traditional religions as well as theosophy, mysticism, and metaphysics. That collaboration ended a few years later in a bitter dispute about their differences in interpretation of various religions and philosophies.

In 1914 Gippius joined the Red Cross in her effort to help the veterans of the First World War. She kept a detailed record of events that led to the Russian Revolution and the following Civil War. Gippius and Merezhkovsky remained in St. Petersburg, regardless of the danger to their life after the murder of Tsar Nicholas II by the Communists. Gippius recorded many facts of the massacre of innocent people in St. Petersburg (then renamed Petrograd) by the Bolsheviks who established Communist rule. They emigrated after their last hope, admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was killed by the Communists in Siberia. In 1920 Gippius and Merezhkovsky fled to Poland, then settled in Paris. There they formed one of the important centers of anti-communist resistance among Russian émigrés. In 1941, Gippius and Merezhkovsky made a political mistake with their public support of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, their last hope was that the Communists will be destroyed and they could return to their home. Merezhkovsky wrote that both Stalin and Hitler were evils, that the Nazis and the Russian Communists should destroy each other, and for that goal, Hitler must take Moscow. So, they lost many friends. Gippius assisted her ailing husband until his death on December 9, 1941, in Paris. She died in Paris on September 9, 1945, and was laid to rest with her husband in Cimetière Russe de Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, a Russian cemetery in Paris, France.

Gippius and Merezhkovsky were banned from publications in Soviet Russia. Gippius's sisters, Natalia and Tatiana, were arrested and exiled in Gulag camps in Siberia under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. The most valuable private library of Merezhkovsky and Gippius was partially stolen, and partially confiscated by the Communist revolutionaries, some books are now in storage at the St. Petersburg public library.

Achievements

• Zinaida Gippius was an eminent and significant Russian poet, prose writer, and critic. Her poetic and cultural influence went hand in hand with her refusal to conform to prescribed notions of femininity. Besides distinguishing herself as a major figure in the Russian Symbolist movement, Gippius, together with her husband, played a leading role in the Russian religious renaissance at the turn of the century.
  
  Admired by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Gippius was a central figure in the established cultural elite of her day, despite being highly subversive.

Works

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• book

  • Between Paris and St. Petersburg: Selected Diaries of Zinaida Hippius 1975
  • The Green Ring: A Play in Four Acts 1916

Religion

After 1900 Zinaida and Merezhkovsky, along with Dmitry Filosofov (a notable critic) and Vasily Rozanov (was one of the most controversial Russian writers and philosophers), promoted a new religious consciousness through the group "God-seekers." This group of "spiritual Christians" regularly met with representatives of the Orthodox Church until 1903, when these encounters were banned by the notorious Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1901 they founded "The Religious-Philosophical Society" which published "New Path" as its mouthpiece. It printed the works of Symbolist writers and published the reports of the Religious-Philosophical Meetings. However, they lost a large portion of their readership following Pobedonostsev's ban.

The "philosophy" of Zinaida Gippius, was a highly cerebral religious scheme, based on a faith in the mystical significance of numbers, especially of the holy number three, which was an attribute of the world and humanity as well as of the godhead. History was divided into three periods, the Old Testament and the New in the past, and the Third Testament of the future. Ethics were threefold: personal, sexual, and social, and the sexual act could be represented by an isosceles triangle, of which the horizontal line stood for the "earthly" union of man in the left corner, and woman in the right, while "an invisible vertical line" that ascended "from the middle of the base" to the apex symbolized their "spiritual journey" to Christ. (Without this imaginary line to Christ, the apex, men, and women would be no more than beasts.) She needed a particular way of narration to present interesting details from Russia's daily life at the time. She was also trying to notice the process of the philosophical needs of people involved in the religious Renaissance in Russia at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These people were also seriously touched by such unexpected events as revolutions, civil war, and the inevitability of emigration. Moreover, they had to change their former way of reasoning and were forced to adapt to unknown political, economical and cultural realities far away from their country of origin.

Deeply religious, Gippius's revolution was to incorporate spiritual, as well as social and political, transformation. Central to this spiritual transformation was her concept of holy erotic love, whereby all erotic love, homosexual, heterosexual or other, was to be sanctified and thus permissible in the future utopian society. Her experiments with gender indeterminism have been the focus of increased academic attention in recent years, particularly by literary scholars such as Olga Matich and Jenifer Presto.

Views

Gippius identified with androgyny, which she expressed by wearing masculine and feminine clothing in turn. Even her poetry, which was written under her own name, was often written with a male voice. She was criticized for using the masculine endings of verbs and personal pronouns. In response, she asserted that she wanted to "write poetry not just as a woman but as a human being."

She also believed that bisexuality was the natural state of people, and wrote that "it is equally good and natural for any person to love any other person." Her views on sexuality, politics, and religion were closely entwined, and she believed that sexual and gender liberation were religious and revolutionary pursuits.

Personality

Gippius treated her life as art and used it as another medium through which to explore her creative philosophy. She had a reputation outside of her circle for being a "decadent Madonna" and was likened to the devil. She did nothing to contradict these labels, associating herself with the gothic figure of the spider and using decadent motifs and imagery throughout her poetry.

Physical Characteristics: Andrei Bely, one of the most important Russian symbolists described her as "a human-sized wasp," going on to say that "a lump of distended red hair... concealed a small, crooked face... the charm of her bony, hipless skeleton recalled a communicant deftly captivating Satan."

Interests

• Politicians

  Artemy Volynsky

• Writers

  Semion Nadson, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy

• Artists

  Leonardo Da Vinci

Connections

Zinaida met the aspiring writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky at the age of 19. They married on January 9, 1889, in Borjomi. Gippius' marriage to Merezhkovskii was hardly "typical" in the traditional sense. Although the couple lived together for 52 years, never parting for so much as a day, they never had any children and purportedly never engaged in conjugal relations. In her memoirs, Gippius recalls that after the marriage ceremony which occurred "by itself," as if in some kind of a dream, they each retired to their separate quarters.

Whether or not this was the case, Gippius actively fostered the myth that their marriage remained chaste. As her contemporary Sergei Makovskii recalls in On the Parnassus of the "Silver Age," Gippius would appear in society with "her thick, gently wavy, bronzish-red hair in a long braid as a sign of her virginity (in spite of her ten-year marriage)."

While the Merezhkovskiis' marriage may not have been productive in the traditional, reproductive sense, it was very productive in the intellectual sense. The couple collaborated on numerous projects and developed a creative relationship that seemed to replace the need for a procreative one.

Father:

Nikolai Romanovich Gippius

Mother:

Anastasia Vasilevna Gippius

husband:

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Sister:

Natalia Nikolaevna Gippius

Sister:

Tatiana Nikolaevna Gippius

Acquaintance:

Maxim Gorky

Acquaintance:

Anton Chekhov

Acquaintance:

Leo Tolstoy

Friend:

Dmitry Filosofov

References

• A Difficult Soul: Zinaida Gippius
  1980
• Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex
  2008