The purpose of this research is to examine the life and work of the Russian poet Zinaida Hippius (also Gippius), who was born in Russia in 1869 and who died in Paris in 1945, having emigrated from the postrevolutionary USSR. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for consideration of Hippius as a poet relevant to the modern period and then to discuss the interpenetration of life, art, and social conditions, which appears to have affected the critical judgment of her literary reputation.
The very dates and bare geographical facts of Hippius's life seem an encoded narrative of certain choices faced by Russian artists of the period. From czarist Russia to the Bolshevik revolution to France between the wars and after the end of World War II, the line of Hippius's life seems sharply marked by defining moments, and perforce not necessarily simple or pleasant, especially when the content of that life is factored into the literary equation. Indeed, the facts of Hippius's life as Symbolist poet, dramatist, critic, and religious mystic very much seem to bear out such a judgment. Hippius's early literary career in Russia was centered in its intellectual, social, and political center: St. Petersburg, where she and her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky appear to have been at the center of what is commonly referred to as the Russian Symbolist movement. The Symbolist movement per se has been associated with literary currents in Europe, especially France, at the turn of the century. It was distinguished chiefly by a rebellion against literalist realism, or "literally descriptive poetry, and influenced by the poetic theory of Edgar Allan Poe and the ancient doctrine of correspondences between the physical and spiritual worlds" (Morner and Rausch 218). In Russia, the Symbolist movement appears also to have been tinged with a strand of Romanticism.
Russian Symbolism, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, developed a mythical plot expressing...