Zinaïda Hippius Merejkovsky

Zinaïda Nicolaïevna Hippius forms with her husband Dimitri Merejkovsky an original and prolific literary couple who mark the Silver Age in the history of Russian literature. She is considered a theorist of Russian symbolism. Daughter of Nicolas Romanovitch Hippius, a senior Russian-German justice official, and Anastasie Vassilievna née Stepanoff, she received a live-in education with governesses, moving from one city to another according to her father's appointments. She wrote her first verses at the age of seven and began writing regularly from the age of eleven. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1881 and the family (his widow, Zinaïda and her three younger sisters Anne, Nathalie and Tatiana, as well as the deceased's mother and one of her unmarried sisters) moved to Moscow, where the little girl took classes. at Fischer Gymnasium. When she was diagnosed with the beginnings of tuberculosis, she left with her mother and sisters for Yalta. There she discovered a love of literature and horseback riding. In 1885, her mother sent her to Tiflis to stay with her brother Alexandre, who rented a villa in Borjomi for her niece where she spent pleasant stays indulging in poetry, dancing evenings, and the joy of living. Her uncle died two years later and the girl remained in the Caucasus with her mother. There in 1888 she met the writer Dimitri Merejkovsky who had just published his first book of poetry and whom she married a few months later on January 8, 1889 during a very simple religious ceremony in the Saint -Michel Archangel. She is nineteen years old. The young couple will play a determining role in the aesthetics of the Silver Age. At the beginning, they make a pact: she will write in prose and he in verse. Some time later, she translated Byron's "Manfred" in Crimea but without success and Merejkovsky himself broke the pact by deciding to write a novel inspired by the life of the Roman emperor Julian. From then on they write in prose or verse indifferently. They moved to Saint Petersburg and Merejkovsky introduced his wife to his many fashionable literary friends, including Jacob Polonsky, Apollon Maïkov, Dimitri Grigorovich, Alexis Pleshcheev, Pierre Weinberg, Vladimir Nemirovitch-Danchenko. She met the young poet Nicolas Minsky and the editorial staff of the literary magazine “Le Messager du Nord” in which Anne Evreinoff, Mikhaïl Albov, Lioubov Gourevitch collaborated. Zinaïda Hippius also became close to the young poet Nikolai Vilenkine and the critic Akim Volynski. The “Messenger of the North” is oriented towards the new movements of the time, which range from positivism to idealism. It hosts the first attempts of the young woman who attends a number of literary evenings, conferences, etc. She became close to the Davydov family, whose wife edited the monthly "The Divine World", listened to the participants of Spasowicz's Shakespearean circle, and became a member of the Russian Society of Literature. Two poems under the signature Z. H. appeared in 1888 in the "Messager du Nord", imbued with melancholy and pessimism of the late 1880s, under the influence of Sémion Nadson, a young poet who died in 1887. Zinaïda Hippius and Dimitry Merejkovsky the knowledge of the philosopher Vladimir Solovieff with whom they remained in contact until the latter's death in 1900. From 1901 to 1904 Zinaïda Hippius participated in philosophical and literary meetings and organized them herself. His poems are published in the magazine “La Voie Nouvelle” which becomes the official publication of these meetings. She made her prose debut in “Le Messager de l’Europe” in 1890 with “Une vie simple”. These and other magazines followed by short stories such as “Two Hearts”, “In Moscow” (1892), his novels “Without Talisman”, “Les Vainqueurs”, “Les Vaguelettes”, etc. Later, the Brockhaus Encyclopedia and Efron noted the influence of John Ruskin, Nietzsche and Maeterlinck. Zinaïda Hippius then collected the prose of her beginnings in two books, “New People” (Saint Petersburg, 1896) and “Mirrors” (Saint Petersburg, 1898).

The Merejkovsky couple made a trip in 1891-1892 to Southern Europe to care for the fragile health of Zinaïda Hippius. There they met Chekhov and Souvorin who accompanied them for a time, stopped in Paris with Pleshcheev and rested in Nice, where they met Dimitri Philosophoff who would later become their disciple and “protege”. Zinaïda Hippius recounts in her Memoirs the feeling of happiness that Italy gave her at the time. An intense period of poetic production followed, including “Les Initiations” with the famous stanza: “I love myself like God”. In the years 1899-1901, she became close to the circle of Serge de Diaghilev who grouped around the magazine "Le Monde de l'art - Mir Iskousstva" where she published her first articles of literary criticism under male pseudonyms (Anton Kraïny , Lev Pushchin, Comrade German, Roman Arensky, Anton Kircha, Nikita Vetcher, V. Vitovt). She preaches the aesthetics of symbolism and its philosophical ideas for which she lays the foundations. After "Le Monde de l'art", she became a critic at the magazine "La Nouvelle Voie" ("Новый путь"), of which she was in fact the editor, as well as in other magazines or newspapers, such as "La Balance", "The New Word", "The Instruction", "The New Life", "The Summits", "La Pensée russe", etc.

The shooting of January 9, 1905, which led to the revolution, disrupted the life and literary activities of Zinaïda, who until then considered that the socio-political questions of the moment were outside her sphere of interest. The couple resolutely put themselves in opposition and saw an anti-Christ origin in autocracy. They left in 1906 for Paris, where they rented an apartment, deciding to breathe a certain air of freedom for two and a half years. They published pamphlets denouncing the Russian autocratic system, wrote articles in French to the same effect, and approached certain SRs in exile, including Ilya Fondaminski and Boris Savinkov. Zinaïda Hippius “has her day”, that is to say she receives on a fixed day on Saturday. Old friends come like Nikolai Minsky and Constantin Balmont and many others. These Parisian years were years of intense work for the couple. Merejkovsky works on a historical work, his wife writes articles and poems, while sending articles to Russia. She published in 1906 in Paris "The Purple Sword" and in 1908 in Paris and Saint Petersburg a dramatic play "The Color of the Poppy", whose heroes are Russian revolutionaries from the different movements that she was able to study at Paris. Between 1910 and 1914, she also published in daily newspapers, such as Morning of Russia, Le Discours, La Parole, etc. She collected her best critical articles in a book entitled "Literary Journal", published in 1908. Overall, Zinaïda Hippius considered the situation of Russian artistic culture of her time from a negative point of view, which she linked to the crisis of the foundations of life caused by the departure from religious criteria and the collapse of the societal ideals of the previous century. For her, the artist’s vocation is to “re-Christianize” life. His spiritual and literary ideal is found in art and literature which lead to prayer, to the understanding of God. This concept goes against writers close to Maxim Gorki and his magazine "Knowledge" and in general against literature based on the traditions of classical realism.

Zinaïda's health deteriorates, forcing her to make regular, short stays in France. In 1911, during one of these stays in Paris, they bought a small apartment at 11 rue du Colonel-Bonnet in Passy. They revived the meetings of the Philosophico-Religious Society from 1908 in Saint Petersburg, but there were almost no clerics left to participate and disputes were frequent. With the writer Dimitri Philosophoff, they formed a ménage à trois which caused a scandal at the time and wrote numerous essays. In 1910 the poet published a second book which brings together her poems from 1903-1909. At this time his poems were translated into French and German. She also published in French "The Tsar and the Revolution" (1909) with Merejkovsky and Philosophoff which appeared in Paris and Saint Petersburg and articles on Russian poetry in the Mercure de France, then her last collection of prose stories " The Lunar Ants" (1912), as well as an unfinished novel trilogy "The Devil's Puppet" (volume I) and "Roman the Tsarevich" (volume III) which received a poor reception from left-wing intellectuals. At the end of 1916, the Merejkovskys rested in the Caucasian spa town of Kislovodsk and returned to Petrograd in January. Like her husband, Zinaïda welcomed the fall of the imperial regime (the Revolution of February 1917), believing that it would put an end to the war and make it possible to realize the ideas of freedom proclaimed by them in the works devoted to the Third Gospel. Their new apartment on Sergievskaya Street became the focus of intense political discussions, where they commented on the decisions of the Duma, the revolution of February 1917. The Provisional Government was close to them and they received Kerensky. However, their opinion changes.

The October Revolution horrified them: they perceived it as the reign of the “Kingdom of the Antichrist”, the triumph of “supernatural evil”. In his diary, Hippius recounts the hunger ("there are no hunger riots - people can barely stand on their feet, you cannot rebel..." - February 23), the atrocities of the Cheka ("...in Kiev, 1200 officers were killed, the legs of the corpses were cut off, to recover the boots. In Rostov, they killed children, cadets, thinking that they were "forbidden cadets" (Members of the Constitutional Democratic Party were called cadets, from the abbreviation KD of the party's name in Russian (Конституционно-демократическая партия)— March 17.) Hippius even broke off relations with Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Andrei Belyi. At the beginning of 1920, the Merejkovskys, Dimitry Philosophoff and Hippius' secretary Vladimir Zlobin illegally crossed the Russian-Polish border. After a short stay in Poland, the Merejkovskys emigrated forever to France and settled in Paris to live on rue du Colonel- Bonnet until the end of their days.Zinaida's two younger sisters remained in the Soviet Union where they were arrested and imprisoned. They were then deported to a German concentration camp and after their release worked at the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum as art restorers.

Zinaïda continues to write her Diary and corresponds with Merejkovsky's readers and editors. Nina Berberova remembers them in her Memoirs and their dialogue: -"Zina, what is more dear to you: Russia without freedom or freedom without Russia? - She thought for a minute - Freedom without Russia...because I am here and not there. - I am also here and not there, because Russia without freedom is impossible for me, but... And she remains pensive without looking at anyone - Why do I really need freedom if there is no Russia? What should I do with this freedom without Russia? She founded the Society of the Green Lamp, a philosophical-literary circle which met in their apartment on Sundays between 1927 and 1939 and which included authors such as Ivan Bunin, and Marc Aldanoff, Nicolas Berdiaeff and Georges Ivanoff, Youri Terapiano, Gueorgui Adamovitch and Vladislav Khodesevich. They deal with philosophical, literary and social subjects, discuss the mission of literature in exile and the “neo-Christian” concepts developed in his poems by Merejkovsky.

​In September 1928, the Merejkovskys were invited by King Alexander I of Yugoslavia to the first assembly of Russian emigrant writers held in Belgrade. They participate in conferences and public readings organized by the Academy of Yugoslavia. They also gave a series of conferences in Italy in 1932 about Leonardo da Vinci, which were very successful. They stayed there for three years (with brief returns to Paris), because the atmosphere in Paris was of a certain Russophobia after the attack on Paul Doumer. It is a period of great pessimism for the poet. His metaphysical idealism does not seem to fit with the materialist pragmatism of this pre-war era. She describes the non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939 between Germany's Third Reich and the USSR as "a fire in a madhouse." She decided to publish The Literary Review (“Литературный смотр”) which appeared a few months later in particular in order to warn the young generation of Russian emigration sometimes too influenced by these new ideas, which she underlines in her article " The experience of freedom".

Dimitry Merejkovsky died in 1941. Hippius was very hard hit by the loss of her husband. In the last years of her life, she worked on memoirs, the biography of her late spouse, as well as on the great poem “The Last Circle”, which appeared much later — in 1972. On September 1, 1945, the poet received communion from the hands of Father Vassily Zenkovsky, and died on September 9 of the same year.