Russian Poet Zinaida Hippius

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 cent

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oked as such. "The next generation of Russian poets," says Vernadsky, which was led by husband-and-wife poets Gumilev (d. 1921) and Akhmatova (d. 1966), "moved away from symbolism: 'We want to admire a rose because it is beautiful, not because it is a symbol of mystical purity'" (Vernadsky 267). This second generation, possibly because of its focus on the concrete, was given the name Acmeist (Kelly 48). Vernadsky's one-volume popular history of Russia was current as of the late 1960s; its failure to mention Hippius or Merezhkovsky as poet-mystics either in Petersburg or in Paris seems consistent with the fact that only in recent years has the literary importance of Hippius been more widely acknowledged (Brostrom). The situation with Hippius appears to be that her fairly extravagant, or at least unconventional, way of life in both Petersburg and Paris long overshadowed her poetry. As Brostrom explains: Although she and her husband, the writer and philosopher Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, developed a new, apocalyptic form of Christianity, she will be remembered for the artistry of her aphoristic, passionately abstract metaphysical verse. Here, deliberate paradoxes and contradictions are built upon a tension between the spiritual
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Approximate Word count = 1754
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)