Sinaida Hippius

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Sinaida Hippius. Portrait by Léon Bakst , 1906
Sinaida Hippius, photograph, around 1910

Zinaida Nikolaevna Hippius , and Zinaida Gippius ( Russian : Зинаида Николаевна Гиппиус . Scientific Translit .: Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius ; born November 8 . Jul / 20th November  1869 . Greg in Belyov at Tula; † 9. September 1945 in Paris ) was a Russian symbolist poet and author. She also published under the pseudonym Anton Krainy .

Life

She was born in 1869 as the child of the Baltic German lawyer Nikolai Romanowitsch Gippius (originally: von Hippius) and the Russian Anastasia Wassiljewna Stepanowa in Beljow, a small town in the Tula governorate . In 1888 she married the philosopher Dmitri Sergejewitsch Mereschkowski . Their marriage, although allegedly not physically consummated, lasted 52 years.

Hippius and Mereschkowski were opponents of tsarist rule and thus supporters of the Russian Revolution in 1905 and the February Revolution in 1917 , from which they hoped a democratic and liberal development of Russia. In political writings they supported the Social Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky , who took over the government in the summer of 1917 and announced fundamental reforms. But they rejected the October Revolution in November 1917 and hoped in vain for an intervention by the British fleet near St. Petersburg. Sinaida Hippius recorded this time in a diary that was published a little later in extracts.

When the defeats of the white associations under Alexander Kolchak (in Siberia) and Anton Denikin (in southern Russia) made it clear that a political development in the desired sense seemed hopeless, the couple decided to emigrate. On December 24, 1919, the couple left Petersburg with their friend, the publicist Dmitri Filosoffow , and their secretary Vladimir Slobin , allegedly to hold readings for soldiers of the Red Army in Gomel , while in reality they fled to Polish-occupied territory and spent a while settled in Minsk and Warsaw . Here they read to Russian emigrants and wrote political pamphlets.

In 1922 they moved to Paris. There they supported the young writers of Russki Montparnasse , who only began writing when they were emigrating, including Gaito Gasdanow and Boris Poplawski .

In the 1930s, Sinaida Hippius and Mereschkowski placed their political hopes on the Third Reich as an opponent of the Bolshevik regime, but, unlike her husband, she held back with publications. Her alleged sympathy for the German occupiers in World War II led to her isolating herself in the Parisian emigration.

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For a long time Hippius stood in the shadow of her husband, who at the beginning of the 20th century embodied the prototype of the Russian author in Western Europe and was even considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature . Like many other writer's wives, she set aside her own needs in order to support her husband. In the case of Hippius, however, the critics agreed that she was writing much more interesting and appealing than her husband.

Wherever the couple stayed longer, it opened a literary salon and soon became the focus of a circle of young talented writers.

Hippius was a contentious intellectual who did not shy away from decided aesthetic judgments. She signed her articles either with a pseudonym or with S. Hippius , so as not to name the author's gender - she didn't think much of the women's movement, the new person was her subject, not the new woman. She played with gender roles and staged and mythologized herself in such a way that no original could be discovered behind these images. In her life she was able to combine paradoxes: She was a traditional wife who encouraged and supported her husband, but rejected sensuality and sexuality.

The symbol of this new eroticism was the kiss, which does not exist in the animal world and therefore indicates the elevation above animal copulation. Most of the time, the couple lived in a ménage à trois , initially with the homosexual publicist Dmitrij Vladimirovich Filosofov , who did not follow them into exile in Paris and stayed in independent Poland. The young poet Vladimir Slobin later took on this role, although Hippius did not recognize it as equal. In 1898 Hippius began a lesbian relationship of several years in Taormina with the pianist and composer Agnes Elisabeth Overbeck , who followed her to St. Petersburg for several years.

One writer's tragedy of living and working in exile was a constant in Hippius' later work. In exile, she published various works that had already appeared in Russia. A collection of short stories published under the title Nebesnie slowa 1921 in Paris, a book of poems ( Стихи Дневникъ 1911-1921. , Translated . Poems Diary 1911-1921 ) in 1922 in Berlin and in Munich a tape appeared the four authors (Merejkowski , Hippius, Filosofow and Slobin) Tsarstwo Antichrista (The Kingdom of the Antichrist), in which the first two parts of the Petersburg Diaries were published for the first time, with an introductory article by Hippius on The History of My Diary .

literature

  • Temira Pachmuss: Zinaida Hippius. An Intellectual Profile. Southern Illinois University Press et al. et al., Carbondale IL et al. a. 1971, ISBN 0-8093-0409-0
  • Vladimir Zlobin: Zinaida Gippius. A difficult soul. Berkeley 1980. ISBN 0-520-03867-3
  • Ursula Keller , Natalja Sharandak: Sinaida Gippius: Madonna of Décadence. In: Ursula Keller, Natalja Sharandak: Evenings out of this world. St. Petersburg salon ladies and artists of the Silver Age. Grambin et al. a., Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-932338-18-9 , pp. 32-61, excerpt (PDF; 54 kB).
  • Christa Ebert: Sinaida Hippius. Strange closeness. A portrait. Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin a. a. 2004, ISBN 3-933314-80-1 .

Works

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Web links

Commons : Zinaida Gippius  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ГИППИУС, ЗИНАИДА НИКОЛАЕВНА | Энциклопедия Кругосвет. Retrieved December 4, 2018 (Russian).
  2. ↑ Zinaida Gippius in the Internet Movie Database (English)Template: IMDb / Maintenance / "imported from" is missing
  3. ^ Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. Izdat. Im. Čechova, New York 1956, p. 212.
  4. ↑ Vladimir Zlobin: Zinaida Gippius. A difficult soul. University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, ISBN 0-520-03867-3 , p. 180.
  5. ^ Sophie Fuller: "Devoted Attention": Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain , in: Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Eds.): Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity , University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago 2002 , ISBN 978-0-252-07578-0 , pp. 87f with additional information.
personal data
SURNAME Hippius, Sinaida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hippius, Sinaida Nikolaevna (full name); Gippius, Sinaida; Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna; Krainy, Anton (pseudonym); Гиппиус, Зинаида Николаевна (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian symbolist poet and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Belyov near Tula
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1945
Place of death Paris