Knowing Zinaida Hippius

It was distinguished chiefly by a rebellion against literalist realism, or "literally descriptive metrical composition, and influenced by the poetic theory of Edgar Allan Poe and the ancient doctrine of correspondences between the sensual and spiritual worlds" (Morner and Rausch 218). In Russia, the Symbolist movement appears also to invite been tinged with a strand of Romanticism.

Russian Symbolism, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, real a mythical plot expressing both the power of the exclusive unconscious(p) and forces operating at the level of the collective unconscious that shape national history. Russian Symbolism's view of history frequently tended towards the eschatological: national or social redemption is possible, plainly depends for its realization on an unavoidable outburst of violent instincts and cosmic bloodletting. Such outbursts reveal a repetitive vitality patent in the course of national history (Bar-Yosef 151-2).

Along the same(p) lines, Kelly notes that the Russian Symbolist movement "that dominated Russian poetry between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 was predominantly Slavophile and apocalyptic in tone" (Kelly 45).

Hippius's 1901 poem "The Seamstress" is consistent with a line of thought that seeks correspondence between physical and spiritual realms but that also reaches toward spirited Romanticist images, as for example when the daydreaming drudge dissociates from the boredom of piecework on fabric doubtless intended for a book lady: "All things flow into each other. /

The more general relevance of Symbolist aestheticism to the flavor and work of Hippius is that there seems a consensus in current lit that she and Merezhkovsky more or less functioned as facilitators of what amounted to a Petersburg literary-mystical-religious salon; as Pachmuss points out (722, correcting Hellman on a point of information), they "initiated the Religious-Philosophical Meetings in St. Petersburg, 29 November 1901 to 5 April 1903." References to the life and work of the couple passim the current literature suggest that they were considered princes among literary equals in Petersburg.

On the other hand, Vernadsky points out that the symbolist movement in Russia had some(prenominal) overlapping, diverging, and converging strands of thought. One view, which Vernadsky identifies with Constantine Balmont (d. 1942) and Valerius Briusov (d. 1924) was that the whole world comprises symbols and is meant to be elicited 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 hour generation, possibly because of its focus on the concrete, was given the name Acmeist (Kelly 48).

scarcely each has a mark of its own; / I ensure on objects, and wonder / What may lie hidden beyond" (Gippius 167). What is "beyond" is fundamentally ambiguous, although the element of religious meditation seems unsaid: Does the poet mean beyond the walls of the sewing room or beyond the limits of life itself, circumscribed in the case of the seamstress by the piecework but also circumscribed for the whole of humanity by the limitations of mortality.

Vernadsky's one-volume popular history of Russia was current as of the late sixties; its failure to mention Hippius or Merezhkovsky as poet-mystics either in Petersburg or in Paris seems consistent with
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