Zinaida Gippius — poet with roots in the Russian Empire
She was born at Belyov in Tula Governorate in November 1869, the eldest of four sisters, and was already a published poet when she met Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1888. They married the following year and moved to Saint Petersburg, where for the next three decades they were at the centre of literary life - their apartment the most consequential salon in the city, their acquaintance running to Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky and Blok.
Her own work has often been filed under her husband's. It should not be. She was a technical innovator who extended the range of Russian metre and rhyme in ways later Symbolists built on directly, and she frequently wrote her lyrics in the masculine first person, which unsettled readers then and still complicates her reception. Her subjects were faith, will and desire, handled with a hardness and precision quite unlike the mistiness of most Symbolist verse. She also wrote plays, novels, stories, memoirs and criticism, the last of it sharp enough to make lasting enemies.
The couple's politics moved twice. After the failed revolution of 1905 they turned against the tsarist government and spent several years abroad. They returned before the war, and regarded the October Revolution of 1917 as a catastrophe for Russian culture. Her Last Poems, published in 1918, and the diaries she kept through those years are among the more unsparing first-hand records of Petrograd in the period.
They got out in December 1919 by obtaining permission to travel toward the front, ostensibly to deliver lectures on Ancient Egypt to Red Army soldiers. They crossed into Poland with Dmitry Filosofov and her secretary Vladimir Zlobin.
In Warsaw they spent the better part of a year trying to organise opposition, placing their hopes in Pilsudski's campaign against Soviet Russia and bringing Boris Savinkov in to help. When Poland signed peace with Moscow the project collapsed. In October 1920 the Merezhkovskys left for Paris and stayed. Filosofov remained behind, which cost her not only her country but the third member of the intellectual partnership she had built her adult life around.
In Paris she wrote about the condition of the exiled Russian writer as a subject in itself, published her Petersburg diaries, and in 1927 founded the Green Lamp society, named for the circle Pushkin had belonged to a century earlier. Members were invited personally, meeting by meeting. Factional quarrels aside, it was the one place where Russian emigre writers and philosophers of every persuasion could reliably meet and argue.
Merezhkovsky died in occupied Paris in December 1941, after fifty-two years of marriage. She survived him by less than four years and died in Paris in September 1945.
"Left Petrograd December 1919 for Poland; Paris from October 1920"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tula
She and Merezhkovsky left Petrograd in December 1919 on a permit to lecture Red Army soldiers on Ancient Egypt, crossed into Poland, and settled in Paris in October 1920. In 1927 she founded the Green Lamp society, the principal meeting ground of the Russian emigration in France.
Born at Belyov in Tula Governorate in 1869. She married Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1889 and moved to Saint Petersburg, where their apartment became the most influential literary salon in the city.
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Tula. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The Revolution is not a sunrise. It is a conflagration."