A DIFFICULT SOUL: ZINAIDA GIPPIUS

by Vladimir Zlobin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1980

Difficult? ""Impossible"" would be more like it, Gippius (1869-1945) was an important Russian Symbolist poet who led a life so soulful, mystical, and tortured it might have been scripted by Dostoevsky--with help from Woody Allen. (""Since my childhood,"" she wrote in 1922, ""I have been wounded by death and love."") Translator-editor Karlinsky (Berkeley) opens the book with a clear, cogent summary of her career, which is fortunate--because Zlobin, an intimate friend of both Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, takes the reader through some foggy biographical territory. There is, for instance, the matter of Gippius' sexual orientation. It seems that she and Merezhkovsky never consummated their marriage, though they lived harmoniously together for over 50 years. She was attracted to male homosexuals, such as Dmitry Filosofov, a dazzlingly handsome litterateur and critic with whom she had a long and understandably frustrating ""affair."" Noting that Gippius projected most of her poetry through a masculine persona, Karlinsky labels her an androgyne and suggests that she was, in one way or another, a physical hermaphrodite. All this sounds fairly intriguing, but Zlobin is of little use here. He quotes copiously from the (not very enlightening) Gippius-Filosofov correspondence, and by way of explanation makes comments like, ""Her love was noumenal and transcendantal, and his lack of love was also noumenal and transcendental."" Uh-huh. Zlobin stresses Gippius' continual obsession with the Devil, claiming that she ""looked deeper into hell than Dante,"" but again he gives no coherent interpretation. By the time he gets around to his vivid and often moving final chapter, on Gippius' old age and death, Zlobin will probably have lost most of his readers. This artless personal study may well be indispensable to students of Gippius, but newcomers to the poet will find it an eccentric and baffling fragment.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of California Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION