THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

помнит,/Что эта ночь—твоя, твоя! 124
Similarly, "Рождение" points beyond the
traditional Christmas story. While the poem clearly acknowledges the birth of Christ,
naming him by means of the capitalized masculine pronoun in line five (Нему) and
referring to the newborn in line seven (новорожденного), it does not center on him.
Christ, in fact, is presented solely as an object who receives tenderness and warmth. The
active subjects providing this love are all feminine (вода, звезда, ночь, солома). It is
not the birth of Christ, or the Son of God, which is announced in the final lines of the
poem, but the birth of a wholly feminine "three-crowned Freedom."
The significance of the trinity to Gippius's worldview is well-known. In her
memoir of Merezhkovsky, she describes the summer of 1905 when she first realized what
was to become her idée fixe—the seemingly obvious "trichotomous structure of the
world" (тройственное устройство мира). Within this system, one represents the
individual, two the merging of two individuals in love, and three the plurality or
community in which neither one nor two is lost. 125
Merezhkovsky later developed this
idea into the religious dialectic that would occupy him throughout his life. For him, the
first stage of the Trinity was the realm of God the Father, the Old Testament and the past;
the second stage the realm of God the Son, the New Testament and the present; the third
and final stage, to be disclosed in the future, would entail the Third Testament and be
embodied by the Holy Spirit in the form of an Eternal Woman-Mother. 126
For Gippius,
this new church required a new degree of human freedom. While the path of salvation,
124 December 24th was an important date in Gippius's life as well. In her diary, Серый блокнот, she notes
it as the actual day in 1919 when she and Merezhkovsky left Petrograd and headed toward their new life in
emigration. Gippius, Dnevniki, vol. 2, 279.
125 Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951), 137-9.
126 Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1971), 104. Temira Pachmuss, Merezhkovsky in Exile: the Master of the Genre
of Biographie Romancée (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 189-90.
100